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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75200 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  THE
+  MAN OF IRON
+
+
+  BY
+
+  RICHARD DEHAN
+
+
+  AUTHOR OF
+  BETWEEN TWO THIEVES, ONE BRAVER THING,
+  (THE DOP DOCTOR), ETC.
+
+
+
+  NEW YORK
+  GROSSET & DUNLAP
+  PUBLISHERS
+
+
+
+
+  _Copyright, 1915, by_
+  FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
+
+  _All rights reserved, including that of translation
+  into foreign languages_
+
+  _February, 1915_
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+_For the second time, since this book's beginning, the rose of July
+had flamed into splendid bloom.  I drew breath, for my task
+approached its ending, and looked up from the yellowed newspaper
+records of a great War waged forty-four years ago._
+
+_Perhaps I had grown negligent of modern signs and portents, or the
+web of Diplomacy had veiled them from all but privileged eyes....
+Now I saw, looming on the eastern horizon, a cloud in the shape of a
+man's clenched fist in a gauntleted glove of mail._
+
+_For days previously the frames of the open windows that look across
+the garden seaward, had leaped and rattled in answer to the incessant
+thud-thudding of big naval guns at sea.  One opal dawn showed the
+grim shapes of super-Dreadnoughts, Dreadnoughts, pre-Dreadnoughts and
+war-cruisers, strung out in battle-line along the glittering-green
+line of the horizon, escorted by a flotilla of destroyers and a
+school of submarines.  Night fell, and sea, land, and sky alternately
+whitened and blotted in the wheeling ray of the searchlights.
+Electric balls dumbly gibbered in Admiralty Secret Code.  Gulls
+cradled on the glassy waters of the Channel must have been roused by
+outbursts of full-throated British cheering, and the crash of the
+Fleet bands striking into the National Anthem, as the sealed orders
+of the Supreme Admiral were signalled from the Flagship commanding
+the Southern Fleet.  No sound reached us ashore but the hush of the
+waves, the whisper of the night-wind, and the plaintive ululation of
+the mousing owls on Muttersmoor.  Yet what we saw that night was the
+awakening of Great Britain to the knowledge that her greatness is not
+past and gone._
+
+_Since then, the menacing cloud in the east has assumed solidity.
+The mailed fist has fallen, imprinting Ruin on the soil of a neutral
+country, demolishing the matchless heirlooms of Art and the priceless
+treasures of Literature, bringing down in gray fragments the glories
+of Gothic architecture, everywhere destroying the Temple of God and
+shattering the House of Life.  The galleries and cabinets of noble
+and burgher, the treasure-houses of a nation are plundered._
+
+_We have lived to see the War of Nations.  We are in it: fighting as
+our Allies of Belgium, France, and Russia are fighting; for racial
+name, national existence, social independence, and freedom of bodies
+and souls.  And this being so, I see no cause to blot a line that I
+have written.  For the Germany of 1870 was not the Germany of 1914.
+The New Spirit of Teutonism had not shown itself in those dead days I
+have tried to vivify._
+
+_The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was waged sternly and mercilessly,
+but not in defiance of the Rules that govern the Great Game.
+Treaties were held as something more sacred than scraps of paper.
+Blood was lavishly poured out, gold relentlessly wrung from the
+coffers of a vanquished and impoverished State.  Things were done--as
+in the instances of Bazeilles and Châteaudun that made the world
+shudder, but not with the sickness of mortal loathing.  Kings and
+nobles made War like noblemen and Kings._
+
+_Yet that great Minister whose prodigious labor reared up stone by
+stone the German Empire was, unless biographers have lied, haunted
+and obsessed in his declining days by remorse of conscience and
+terrors of the soul.  "_But for me,_" he is reported to have said,
+"_three great wars would not have been made, nor would eight hundred
+thousand of my fellow men have died by violence.  Now, for all that I
+have to answer before Almighty God!_" ... Could the relentless
+exponent of the fierce gospel of blood and iron have foreseen the
+imminent, approaching disintegration of his colossal life-work, under
+the hands of his successors--might he have known what Dead Sea fruit
+of ashes and bitterness his fatal creed, grafted upon the oak of
+Germany, was fated to bring forth--he would have drunk ere death of
+the crimson lees of the Cup of Judgment; he would have seen in the
+shape of his pupil the grotesque, distorted image of himself._
+
+RICHARD DEHAN.
+
+SOUTH DEVON, November, 1914.
+
+
+
+
+THE MAN OF IRON
+
+
+I
+
+When Patrick Carolan Breagh attained the age of six years, the boy
+being tall enough to view his own topknot of scarlet curls and
+freckled snub nose in the big shining mirror of his stepmother's
+toilet-table, without standing on the tin bonnet-box that was kept
+under the chintz cover, or climbing on a chair,--he was fated to
+acquire, during one brief half-hour's concealment under a Pembroke
+table, more knowledge of Life, Death, and the value of Money, than
+would otherwise have come to him in the course of half a dozen more
+years.
+
+Upon this unforgetable third of January, his plaid frock had been
+taken off and, to his infinite delight, replaced by a little pair of
+blue cloth breeches and a roundabout jacket.  Amateurish as to cut,
+the nether garments displaying so little difference fore and aft that
+it did not matter in the least which way you faced when you stepped
+into them, they were yet splendid,--not only in Carolan's eyes.
+Alan, his junior by three years, bellowed with envy on beholding
+them; and four-year-old Monica sucked her finger and stared with all
+her might.
+
+It was plain to Carolan that, having once assumed the manly garments,
+no boy could be expected to put on those hateful petticoats again.
+In vain Nurse Povah,--who had been Carolan's foster-mother,--and Miss
+Josey, the governess, explained to him that the breeches were not
+completed, and directed his eyes to the mute evidence of pins,
+chalk-marks, and yellow basting-threads.  Their arguments were vain,
+their entreaties addressed to deaf ears.  An attempt to remove the
+cause of contention by force resulted in Nurse's being butted, though
+not hard! and Miss Josey kicked with viciousness.  In the confusion
+that ensued, the rebel effected an escape from the scene of combat.
+And the door of the sitting-room being open, Carolan trotted across
+the Government cocoanut matting of the landing with the intention of
+confessing his own misdeeds, since Miss Josey was quite certain to
+report him at headquarters, had not this often-tested method of
+blunting the edge of retributory justice failed, through his own
+fault.
+
+For upon entering the large, shabbily furnished room, situated on the
+second floor of a gaunt, gray stone building known as Block D,
+Married Officers' Quarters--the room that served Captain Breagh and
+his second wife as sitting-room, dining-room, smoking-room and
+boudoir--Carolan became aware that his stepmother, quite unconscious
+of his intrusion, was dusting the china vases on the mantel-shelf,
+and was instantly possessed by the conviction that it would be huge
+fun to hide under the large round table that occupied the middle of
+the worn Brussels carpet, and bounce out upon the poor lady when she
+turned, making her say "Owh!"
+
+So the boy noiselessly dived under the deep, hanging, silk-fringed
+border of the Indian shawl that covered the circular Pembroke table,
+upon which were ranged, about a central basket of wax fruit and
+flowers, gilt frames with spotty daguerrotypes, albums of scraps,
+Books of Beauty containing the loveliest specimens of Early Victorian
+female aristocracy, and Garlands of Poetry reeking with the
+sentimental effusions of Eliza Cook and L.E.L., interspersed with
+certain card-cases and paper-knives of Indian carved ivory and
+sandal-wood, and other trifles of brass and filigree ware.
+
+The big, shabbily furnished second-floor room had three windows
+looking out upon the graveled expanse of the Parade-ground, and
+commanding a view of the flower-bedded patch of sacred green turf,
+inclosed by posts and chains, that graced the front of the pillared,
+pedimented, and porticoed building that housed the Officers' Mess.
+And when the regiment got the route for another garrison town, nearly
+everything the room contained--from the Pembroke center-table and
+chintz-covered sofa, to the secrétaire at which Captain Breagh penned
+his letters, the big leather-covered arm-chair in which he sat, and
+the Bengal tiger-skin hearthrug,--would be packed,--with the picture
+of the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Vimiera, and the
+chimney-glass over which it always hung--into wooden cases, with the
+before-mentioned chimney-glass, curtains and carpets, beds, baths,
+uniform-cases and a great number of other things; and then after a
+period of rumbling confusion there would be a new sitting-room
+looking on another barrack-square, other bedrooms and a fresh
+nursery,--and Carolan would forget the old ones in something under a
+week.  As a matter of fact, the regiment had been shifted four times
+since its return from India, when Carolan was little more than a
+baby, and Monica and Alan and Baba were nowhere at all.
+
+Now either Mrs. Breagh occupied an unconscionable time in dusting the
+vases and making up the fire for her Captain, who by reason of long
+service with the regiment in the East was susceptible to chill; or
+Carolan, with the mental instability shared by the child and the
+savage, lost interest in his new project and abandoned it.  He was
+squatting silently in his hiding-place when Miss Josey entered; he
+heard her complaint, noted down two spiteful exaggerations and one
+malicious falsehood, and witnessed the exhibition of a bulgy ankle in
+a badly-gartered white cotton stocking surmounting an elastic-sided
+cloth boot.  When the governess withdrew, consoled by Mrs. Breagh's
+sympathy, Nurse Povah was summoned from the other side of the landing
+by a tinkle of the hand-bell, and bore stout witness on the culprit's
+side.
+
+"Did ye see her leg, I'd make so bould as ask, or did ye take her
+worrud for ut?  And--av there was anythin' to show barrin' a
+flaybite, is ut natheral a boy wud parrut wid his furrst breches
+widout a kick?  Sure, they're the apple av his eye, and the joy av
+his harrut!  And her--wid her talk av bendin' his will and breakin'
+his temper!  is ut like ye wud lay a finger on the Captain's eldest
+son, to plaze the likes of her?"
+
+"The Captain has said himself--over and over--that a sound thrashing
+would be a capital thing for Carry," Mrs. Breagh returned.
+
+"He praiches--ay, bedad!--but does he ever practuss?" demanded Nurse,
+smoothing her apron with stout, matronly hands, and getting very red
+in the cheeks.  "Niver fear but he'd be too wise to bring a curse
+upon himself by ill-thrating a motherless child!"
+
+"_Motherless!_"  What did the word mean?  Carolan wondered, recalling
+how Nurse would describe some particularly down-hearted person as
+being as long in the jaw as a motherless calf.  And now Mrs. Breagh
+was saying, in the kind of voice some good people use for the purpose
+of Scriptural quotation, and which is not in the least like their
+accents of every day...
+
+"Solomon said, 'He that spareth the rod'--but you Catholics never
+seem to read the Bible.  And I always treat Carolan as if he were my
+own child--and you know I do!  'Ssh!  Here comes the Captain--and I
+_think_ I hear Baba crying...."
+
+And Nurse, with the honors of war, retired to the nursery on the
+other side of the landing, as Captain Breagh's hasty footsteps and
+the jingle of his scabbard were heard on the stone stair.  A minute
+later he entered the room.  But during the minute's interval Carolan
+had had time to ponder, mentally digest and form a conclusion from
+what he had just heard.
+
+It had never previously occurred to him that the stout, dark,
+beady-eyed, brightly dressed lady whom he had been taught to call
+Mamma was not really his mother, but he knew it now.  It was revealed
+to him in one lightning-flash of comprehension that this was the
+reason why her hands felt so like hands of wood whenever they touched
+him, and why her kiss,--religiously administered night and
+morning--was a thing he would much sooner have gone without.  He
+knew,--and something inside him was glad to know--that it was not
+wicked of him not to love her as he loved Nurse, or Monica, or Ponto
+the brown retriever.  And then his heart dropped like a leaden
+plummet to the pit of his infant stomach.  This was to be a day of
+discoveries.  He had discovered that by kicking out lustily it had
+been possible to resist the forcible removal of his new breeches.  He
+had discovered that "Mamma" was not his real, real mother!  Would
+Daddy turn out to be Monica's and Alan's and Baba's Daddy, and not
+Carolan's, after all?
+
+A sob rose in his throat, and his hot, dry eyes began to smart and
+water.  But the manly trampling and clanking came nearer.  The door
+opened--his father was in the room.  He could only see his shiny
+Wellington boots, and the bottoms of the red-striped dark blue
+breeches that were strapped over them.  But familiar knowledge built
+from the boots the handsome manly figure in the light brick-red coat
+with the Royal blue facings, the China and Punjab war-medals, the
+crimson sash and the other martial accouterments topped by the stiff
+leather stock, and the head whose wealth of jet-black curls and
+luxuriant bushy whiskers might have been the glory of a fashionable
+hairdresser's window; in combination with the well-cut features,
+light blue eyes, and fine rosy complexion, as yet scarcely
+deteriorated by Mess port, whisky punch, and late hours.
+
+Captain Breagh kissed Mrs. Breagh with a hearty smack that made
+Carolan start in his hiding-place, and said the wind was enough to
+cut you in two, and that the fire looked tempting; as he laid down
+his pipeclayed gloves and dress-schako with the gilt grenade and
+white ball-tuft on the aged and dilapidated sideboard, and permitted
+his lady to relieve him of his sword.  Then he rubbed his hands and
+thrust them to the blaze enjoyingly, and threw himself into the
+creaking leathern arm-chair.  This, it suddenly occurred to Carolan,
+would be a favorable moment for emerging from concealment.  He had
+got on all-fours, ready to appear in the character of a bear or
+tiger, when Mrs. Breagh stopped him by beginning to tell tales.  The
+child was beyond control, she declared--there was no end to his
+naughtiness.  For the sake of his immortal soul, something would have
+to be done....
+
+"What's he been doing?  For my own part,--I wouldn't give a brass
+farthing for a pup that wouldn't bite, or a boy that wouldn't show
+fight when he was put to it!"  The arm-chair creaked suggestively as
+the Captain stretched out his legs, and the firelight danced in the
+polish of his boots, hardly dimmed by the dry gravel of the
+Parade-ground.  "And it's in the blood, that high spirit.  Don't
+suppose I'm bragging that the Breaghs are any great shakes in the way
+of family!--though the name's as decent a one as you'll meet in a
+long day's march.  But Carolan's a Fermeroy on the mother's side--and
+they're a hot-headed, high-handed breed," the Captain added, taking
+the newspaper from the Pembroke table, "and have been ever since the
+year One--if you take the trouble to look 'em up in Irish History.
+Not that I've ever read any, but my poor Milly used to say----"
+
+His wife's eyes snapped with irrepressible jealousy at the reference
+to her predecessor.
+
+"And everything that came from her you took for Gospel, I suppose?"
+
+"Pretty near!" said Captain Breagh, and began to unfold his newspaper.
+
+"I get little enough time for reading things that are useful," said
+Mrs. Breagh, as the Captain dipped into the crackling sheets.  "It
+was my bounden duty to speak, and I've done it!  And if you think you
+are doing your duty by the child--let alone his mother----"
+
+She broke off, for the Captain bounced in his chair, and dashed down
+the newspaper.
+
+"Haven't I told you I won't have poor Milly's name dragged into these
+discussions!  She's dead!--and so let her be!"
+
+If a lady can be said to snort, Mrs. Breagh gave utterance to a sound
+of that nature.
+
+"I'm willing, Alexander, I'm sure!  But all things considered, I must
+say I think it's a pity her ladyship died and left you a widower!"
+
+"And you're right there, begad you are!  And how many times have I
+told you she was merely an Honorable, and not her ladyship!"  He left
+the newspaper sprawling on the hearthrug, and mechanically reaching
+down his pipe and tobacco-pouch from the corner of the mantelshelf,
+proceeded to fill the well-browned meerschaum, and when his wife
+lighted a spill and held it to him as an olive-branch, he thanked her
+in an absent way.  What did the Captain see as he pulled at the
+gnawed, amber mouthpiece and stared into the red-hot heart of the
+fire, communing with that other self that dwells within every man?
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+I think he saw young Alex Breagh, a junior Lieutenant of the
+Grenadier company of the Royal Ennis Regiment of Infantry, winning
+his spurs of manhood under Gough and Hardinge and Gilbert on the
+plain beside the Sutlej, where stands Ferozshahr.
+
+"For I don't pretend to be a hero or anything of that sort, but I've
+never shirked my share of fighting," said the silent voice within
+him, and the Captain exhaled a spirt of smoke and mumbled: "I believe
+you!"  And the other Breagh went on:
+
+"Fair play and no favor won us our honors, mind you! though the
+chance didn't come until later on.  True, we helped Sir Harry Smith
+to pound the Sikhs at Ferozshahr and at Aliwal, when the cavalry of
+his Right had driven the Khâlsas back across the Red Ford.  Waiting
+for the elephants with the heavy siege-guns and the ammunition and
+stores to come up from Delhi, took a hell of a time.  Seven long
+weeks of broiling by day and freezing o' nights, while Tij Sinh and
+his thirty-five thousand Khâlsas entrenched themselves, mounted their
+heavy artillery--made their bridge of boats, and encamped their
+cavalry up the river.  But the day came--our day!--and I don't forget
+that foggy tenth of February while I'm breathing."
+
+Captain Breagh sucked at his pipe and reflectively pulled a whisker.
+And the silent voice went on:
+
+"We were with the Left Division under General Dick, and led the
+assault, while Gilbert and Smith feigned to attack on the enemy's
+left and center.  And in that charge,--when the General got his
+death-wound from a swivel-ball,--I was the second red-coat to cross
+the ditch, and scramble over the big mud rampart, and saber a Sikh
+gunner with his linstock in his hand!..."
+
+Mrs. Breagh, chagrined at remaining so long the object of her
+husband's inattention, picked up his fallen newspaper and almost
+timidly laid it on his knee.  And the child under the table kept as
+quiet as a mouse, almost...
+
+"Thank ye, my dear!" said the Captain, while the other Breagh went on:
+
+"And when the Treaty was signed and the rumpus all over--for the
+time!--because Dalhousie's bungling brought the hornets about our
+ears again!--we marched from Lahore to Calcutta with Britain's
+victorious army--barring the force we'd left with Lawrence at Mian
+Mir."
+
+The silence continuing, Mrs. Breagh drew her work-table toward her,
+and began to look over a basket of little toeless and heel-less
+stockings.  As she did this she sighed.  The Captain smoked
+thoughtfully.  And the inward voice went on:
+
+"The Governor-General and his staff rode with Sir Harry Smith and the
+Advance--and between the Cavalry Brigade that came after 'em--for Sir
+Harry swore he'd be damned but since we'd seen the hottest of the
+fighting, we should have the post of honor!--between the Cavalry and
+Ours came the spoils of war, drawn by the Government elephants--two
+hundred and fifty Sikh guns we'd taken at Sobraon.  Hah!"
+
+The Captain's eyes were fixed on the fire.  He smoked in quick, short
+puffs.
+
+"Standards waving, bands blowing their heads off, and a bit o' loot
+in most men's knapsacks.  Glory for the dead, and praise and
+promotion for the living--begad! it was worth while--just then!--to
+be a British soldier!  And I'd been wounded just enough to look
+interesting, and got a Special Mention in Despatches--and the women
+were pulling caps for me,--devil a lie in that!  And I danced with
+Milly at the Welcome Back Ball at Government House, in March, 1846.
+And whether it was Fate--or that way she had of looking up under her
+eyelashes, and showing a laughing mouth full of tiny pearly-white
+teeth over the top of her fan, I've never been quite clear.  But even
+before the steward introduced Lieutenant Breagh to the Hon. Millicent
+Fermeroy, I'd fallen head over ears in love with Milly, and she was
+as mad for me!"
+
+Still silence reigned in the room, only broken by the cinders falling
+on the hearth, and the breathing of three people.  Mrs. Breagh still
+bent over her basket of little worn socks, of which those in most
+crying need of darning belonged to Carolan.  Her lips were tightly
+closed, but as the man within her husband talked to the man, the
+woman within the woman talked to his wife.
+
+"I wonder whether he knows I know he's thinking of her again?  I
+wonder whether she'd have liked to sit and toil and moil for a child
+of mine, and know that the other woman held the first place in his
+heart?  Ah, dear me!"
+
+She glanced at her husband.  He did not see her.  He was living in
+the Past.
+
+"Nobody noticed how often we danced together....  It had gone pretty
+far with us before Her Ladyship scented what was in the wind, and
+sent an _aide-de-camp_ to remind Miss Fermeroy that the doctor had
+set down his foot against her overheating herself with waltzing,--and
+I found myself staring after her with her bouquet in my hand....  And
+I took it home to quarters--and I've got it now, stowed away with her
+letters and a lot of other things in a tin uniform-case....  Fanny
+hasn't an idea of that!"
+
+The smoke-puffs came more slowly, and the darning-needle now worked
+busily.  The voice of a sergeant who was drilling a squad of recruits
+came in gruff barks from the Parade.
+
+"The Fermeroys were great folks....  Colonel Lord Augustus
+Fermeroy--Milly's uncle, was a tremendous Light Cavalry swell on the
+Commander-in-Chief's Staff.  Of course, I knew that he would never
+hear of an engagement between his brother's orphan daughter--(to do
+the old man justice, he loved her as his own!)--and a Lieutenant of a
+marching regiment of infantry who'd nothing but his pay.  So--as
+Milly and me had made up our minds we couldn't live without each
+other,--we were married secretly--first at a Protestant Mission
+Church, and then by a French Franciscan _padre_--and _he_ made bones
+about splicing us--because I wasn't a Catholic,--and if I hadn't told
+a white lie or two about my intention of turning Papist, I don't
+believe he'd have tied the knot.  But all's fair in love!--and we
+were in love with a vengeance.  I suppose I was a selfish beggar to
+coax Milly into deceiving her people, but----"
+
+A long ray of chilly January sunshine, full of dancing dust-motes,
+came in at the window.  Mrs. Breagh sneezed as it fell across her
+face.
+
+"A time came when I knew I had been as selfish as she never would
+have called me.  People had to be told!--so we enlightened 'em by
+shooting the moon.  The condition of my war-chest wasn't over and
+above flourishing, but I got a month's leave for the Mofussil and
+secured a twenty-rupee furnished bungalow at Titteghur--and next
+morning--before the hue and cry had well begun, Lady Augustus got a
+_chit_ from Milly by _harkára_--I remember every word of it.
+'_Dearest Aunt,--I hope you have not been alarmed, supposing me to
+have been murdered or carried off by wicked persons.  I am safe and
+happy with my own dear husband, from whom, I shall never be parted
+now._'"
+
+The pipe was nearly smoked out, but the Captain did not appear aware
+of that.
+
+"'_Never be parted_,' and before three months were over our heads..."
+
+Clash!  Mrs. Breagh had let her scissors fall.  Her husband made a
+long arm, picked them up, and gave them back to her.
+
+"Thank you, Alex, love!" said Mrs. Breagh effusively.  But he went on
+sucking at the now empty pipe, and staring at the waning fire.  And
+the silent voice went on:
+
+"The Fermeroys were furious.  But there was no use in making a fuss
+and a scandal, and I must say they took the blow awfully well.  Good
+haters both--declared that under no conceivable circumstances would
+they ever admit within their doors an officer who had acted so
+dishonorably, but they'd receive Milly whenever she liked to come.
+Nor would they--though her uncle was her guardian and
+trustee--deprive her of her fortune--seven thousand pounds in East
+India Stock, Home Rails, and Government Three Per Cents.  But they
+tied it up tight for the benefit of the child that was coming, and
+others that might come--in what they called a Post-Matrimonial
+Settlement, and I was agreeable; though, mind you!--I had the law on
+my side if I'd chosen to make a fuss.  And I was too much in love to
+bother over money--or to care a cowrie about being cut by the
+Fermeroys' friends."
+
+Nothing but gray ashes remained in the pipe-bowl.
+
+"I don't know whether it wasn't to get me out of the way that the
+regiment was ordered to Sikandarabad.  There'd been a Sepoy rising at
+Haidarabad, six miles north of the Subsidiary Force's
+cantonments--and as the big Mussulman city was swarming with all the
+blackguards and _budmashes_ in the Dekkan--and bazar-_gup_ had it
+that another Rohilla riot was threatening--Ours got the route to go.
+And Milly--God bless her! wouldn't hear of being left behind.  And we
+steamed down coast to Masulipatam, and marched the two hundred miles;
+and though it was early in January, the roads were confoundedly
+squashy and the heat was like a vapor-bath--there being no winter to
+speak of in the South."
+
+"He's in a regular brown study," said her unseen gossip and
+confidante to the Captain's second wife.  "Perhaps his tailor has
+been dunning him, or he's been losing at cards.  When men are out of
+spirits, money's generally at the bottom of it!  Better get him to
+tell what's the matter by-and-by--not now!"
+
+"And the long road ran like a brown snake between mangrove-swamps and
+paddy-fields, where it wasn't coffee-plantations and cotton-ground.
+And there were black-buck and partridge for the shooting when you
+could get away from the columns; and duck and snipe when we were hung
+up at the river-fords waiting for the elephants that were to take
+over the baggage and guns."
+
+The shouts of the drill-sergeant came more faintly from the
+Parade-ground.  The Captain seemed to doze as he sucked at the empty
+pipe, but Memory's voice went on:
+
+"The women and children of the rank and file were carried on the
+baggage-wagons, and the officers' wives traveled by bullock-_tonga_
+or _palki-dak_, under an escort of good-conduct men of the Subsidiary
+Force the Brigadier had sent down from cantonments.  Milly laughed at
+their oilskin-covered wickerwork chimney-pot hats and little old red
+coatees, and black unmentionables and bare sandaled feet.  But they
+couldn't keep the beggars of bearers from turning out of the road and
+taking short-cuts through jungle-paths.  Then they'd dump the
+_palkis_ down in the shade, and light a fire of sticks, and squat
+round and smoke their hubble-bubbles or chew betel....  And Milly's
+blackguards had gone out of sight behind some trees, and she was
+scared at finding herself alone and unprotected.  And she tried to be
+calm and plucky, thinking of--what she and me were looking for....
+But something trotted out of a cane-brake and snuffed at the _palki_
+curtains--and she went off in a dead faint and small blame to her!
+For there were the prints of a full-grown tiger's pugs in the soft
+ground round the palanquin--and the place where his hind-claws had
+torn up the grass when he bounded off...."
+
+The forgotten pipe was upside down in the smoker's mouth now.  A
+pinch of ashes had fallen upon the breast of the unhooked scarlet
+coat.
+
+"When I came up I made those coolie-brutes eat plenty stick.  But
+Milly--poor girl! had got her death-blow.  And the boy was born that
+night under canvas by the roadside.  An old Murderer--Surgeon-Major
+Murdoch of Ours--did all man could do to save her.  But--just at
+dawn--with the eastern sky all lemon-yellow and pink and madder
+behind a mango-tope, with a Hindu temple near it, and a clump of mud
+huts--and some old saint's shrine under a sacred peepul-tree--the boy
+was born and the mother went out like a blown waxlight.  Oh, my
+darling! ... And the Catholic chaplain--who'd been fetched to give
+Milly the Last Sacraments--baptized the boy, for Milly had made me
+swear all the children should be of her faith.  And the boy would
+have died, too, but that my company Sergeant's wife--she that is
+nurse to my youngest child to-day--happened to be able and willing to
+suckle him.  And we struck camp and set out on the last march,
+carrying a corpse and a new-born baby.  And that night we buried my
+girl by torchlight in the cemetery belonging to the European
+infantry-barracks.  And it's six years ago to-day--and here I am
+married to another woman!  Are you happy with her, Alex Breagh?
+She's as unlike the other as chalk's different from cheese--and poor
+Milly 'ud have called her a vulgar person!  I know she would!  And
+yet--Milly never gave me a decent meal, and the servants did as they
+liked! and Fanny's a rare housekeeper.  I've been more comfortable
+since I married her than I ever was in my life before.  Yes, I'm a
+happy man!..."
+
+He told himself this continually.  And yet the knowledge of material
+comfort could not long silence the crying of his heart.
+
+He took the smoked-out pipe from his mouth, and turned to look at the
+plump, high-colored, personable woman who was sitting darning his
+children's stockings with his wedding-ring shining on her finger, and
+the present had its value for him, and he ceased to company with the
+dead.  His regard, at first chill and gloomy, warmed: his
+good-humored smile curled his full red lips again....
+
+"Why, how you look, love!" said Mrs. Breagh, and she rose and came to
+his side.  Then she sat on his knee and smoothed his hair from his
+forehead.  And the Captain returned her kiss, and told himself that
+true wisdom lay in making the best of one's luck generally, and being
+grateful for whatever good the gods chose to grant.
+
+"No use crying over spilt milk! ... Beg pardon, my dear!--but what
+were you asking me?"
+
+"I was asking--supposing Carolan had never been born--or had
+died--whether you would have come into his mother's money?"
+
+"Would I have inherited Milly's seven thousand pounds?  Not a
+halfpenny of it, my dear!  In the event of her decease without issue
+it would have gone back to her family.  And even during Milly's
+lifetime she only had the half-yearly interest.  Couldn't sell out
+stock, or raise a lump sum for--ahem!--for the benefit of any person
+she'd a mind to help.  And husband and wife are one flesh, so the
+Bible tells you!"
+
+"The poor thing that's gone ought to have had more spirit than to let
+you be treated so!" said the second wife, who had possessed no
+fortune beyond a hundred pounds or so, bestowed as dowry on his
+younger daughter by the hard-worked apothecary of an English country
+town; and was conscious that in marrying her the Captain had not
+aspired to a union above his social rank.
+
+"Begad! my dear!  I don't mind owning that Lord Augustus hated me,
+from the top hair of my head to the last peg in my boot-sole.
+And--when he died--and he did go over to the majority not long after
+the Fermeroys had sailed for England with Lord Hardinge--when he died
+it didn't make a pin's difference, for under that settlement I've
+told you of, the co-trustee, a solicitor--Mr. Mustey, of Furnival's
+Inn, Holborn, London--took his son,--who'd been made partner in his
+business--as his partner in the trusteeship.  And, of course, the
+money's the boy's!--though the two-hundred-and-twenty-odd annual
+interest is paid to me--the whole of it!--until Carry's old enough to
+go to school and college--and when he reaches twenty-three the whole
+lump of the principal will be his--seven thousand golden
+sovereigns--to play ducks and drakes with if he likes!"
+
+"And my poor darlings will have nothing," Mrs. Breagh bleated,
+"unless,---because I've treated Carolan in all respects--and
+more!--as if he were my own child, and that I would declare with my
+head upon my dying pillow!--unless he has the gratitude and the
+decent feeling to do something for Alan,--if it's only giving him a
+few hundreds to start him properly in life...."
+
+"Don't count your chickens before they're hatched," advised her lord.
+"My dear, if you'll get me the materials from the sideboard, I'll wet
+my whistle.  Talking's dry work!"
+
+With wifely compliance Mrs. Breagh placed the whisky-decanter and the
+Delhi clay-bottle of drinking-water near her Alexander's elbow.  You
+are to imagine the Captain mixing a jorum on half-and-half
+principles, nodding to his Fanny, and taking a refreshing swig of the
+cooling draft.  And at this juncture a head of scarlet curls was
+poked out from the covert of the Indian shawl tablecloth, and the
+clear treble of his eldest son piped out:
+
+"Dada, how much money is seven fousand golding sovereigns?  And how
+long will it be before I get them to make ducks and drakes?"
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+You are to suppose Captain Breagh, startled by the unexpected
+apparition of his eldest son, swallowing the whole jorum of whisky
+and water at a gulp, and his wife dropping her darning into her lap
+with the very exclamation Carolan had previously promised himself.
+Still as a mouse, he had lain in ambush beneath the Pembroke table,
+with the portrait of the Duke of Wellington on a gray charger in the
+foreground of the highly varnished oil-painting--representing the
+Royal Ennis Regiment in the performance of prodigies of gallantry in
+conflict with the French at Vimiera--staring with bolting blue eyes,
+and pointing at him with a Field-Marshal's _bâton_ whenever he had
+peeped out.
+
+Now, conscious of having made an impression, and with a curious
+mixture of sensations, emotions, impulses, fermenting in a brain of
+six years, the boy stood upright before his elders, his well-knit
+shoulders thrown back, his sturdy legs, arrayed in their virile
+coverings of blue cloth adorned with cat-stitches of yellow
+basting-thread, planted wide apart upon the tiger-skin hearthrug, and
+his stomach thrust forward with the arrogance characteristic of the
+newly made capitalist.
+
+"Why the devil were you hiding there?  Eh, you young Turk, you?"
+blustered the Captain.
+
+"Eavesdroppers," said Mrs. Breagh acidly, "never go to Heaven."
+
+"Farver Haygarty----" Carolan began.
+
+"We don't want to know what Father Haygarty says!" snapped Mrs.
+Breagh, whose Protestant gorge rose at the Papistical teachings of
+the regimental chaplain.  And then she remembered that in a few years
+the worldly prospects of her three children might depend on the
+good-will of this chubby-faced, red-haired urchin who stood silently
+before her, contemplating her with a new expression in a very round
+pair of oddly amber-flecked gray eyes.  And being a weak,
+ill-balanced, underbred woman, and a mother into the bargain, she
+truckled, as such women will, to the latent potentialities vested in
+the stubborn wearer of the unfinished suit of clothes.
+
+"Not but what Father Haygarty is a good man and much respected--and I
+dare say you're sorry for having kicked poor Josey.  So, since it's
+your birthday we won't say any more about it--and Nurse shall pull
+out those basting-threads and sew on the brace-buttons when you're in
+bed to-night----"
+
+"There! you hear!  Stop, you young rascal!  Come back and kiss your
+mother, and thank her, and run away to Mrs. Povah!" bade the Captain,
+for Carolan, driving a pair of grubby fists deep into the pockets of
+the new breeches, had swung contemptuously upon his heel, and made
+for the door.
+
+"She's not my muvver!" said the son, pausing in his struggle with the
+door-handle to turn a flushed and frowning face upon his sire.  "She
+said so just now and so did you!"
+
+"Then shut the door!" thundered the Captain, but it had slammed
+before the words were fairly out.  And Carolan stamped across the
+landing whistling defiantly, and burst into the nursery, where
+Baba--for the moment its sole occupant--was asleep in her bassinette,
+Alan and Monica having gone out to walk with Miss Josey, and Nurse
+being busy in the adjoining room.
+
+Carolan's head was hot, and his heart felt big and swollen.  He was a
+person of consequence, and at the same time a thing of no account.
+Thus the pride that flamed in his gray eyes was presently quenched by
+scalding salt drops of resentful indignation.  He was sorrowful,
+elated, angry, and complacent, all at once, as he stood by Baba's
+crib.
+
+He had never until now suspected Mrs. Breagh was not his mother.  He
+had called her "Mamma" ever since he could speak.  No question had
+ever risen in his mind as to the existence of some secret reason for
+her dislike of him.
+
+When she had seemed most hateful in his eyes, by reason of her
+lacking reticence and absent sense of honor--for she couldn't keep a
+secret if she promised you ever so, and was always telling tales of
+you to Dada!--Carolan had frequently relieved his feelings by going
+into corners and calling her "that woman" under his breath.  The
+appalling sense of crime, involved with the relief this process
+brought--for to call your real mother names would be a sin of the
+first magnitude--bad invested it with a dreadful fascination.  Now
+the glamour had vanished, together with the wickedness.  Mrs. Breagh
+was nothing to Carolan.  He was the son of another woman--and she was
+dead in India.  Her name was Milly--a gentle, prettily sounding name.
+
+Only the day before, Carolan had found out what the thing grown-up
+people called "death" and "dying" meant.  He had given a shiny
+sixpence that had lain hidden for weeks at the bottom of the pocket
+in his old plaid frock to Bugler Finnerty for a thrush he had limed,
+a beautiful brown thrush with a splendidly dappled breast.  Only the
+bird's eyes looked like beads of dull jet glass instead of round
+black blobs of diamond-bright bramble-dew.  And it had squatted on
+the foul floor of the little wood and wire cage in which Finnerty had
+been keeping it, panting, with ruffled feathers and open beak.
+
+
+Finnerty had said that the bird would thrive on snails and worms, and
+Carolan had promised it plenty of these luxuries.  He had meant to
+range for them through all the soldiers' vegetable-allotments, and
+ransack the Parade-ground flower-beds.  But all at once the thrush
+had fallen over on its side, fluttering and struggling--and Carolan
+had been so sorry for it that he had thrust his pudgy hand into the
+cage, and taken the poor sufferer out with the intention of nursing
+it in his pinafore for a little, and then letting it go free, since
+it was so unhappy in captivity.
+
+But when he had bidden it fly away it had had no strength to do so.
+It had lain helpless in his hands, and the strange quivering thrills
+that had passed through its slender body had communicated themselves
+to the child.  Something was taking place--some change was coming.
+Without previous knowledge he had been sure of that.
+
+And the change had come, with the drawing of the thin gray membrane
+from the corners next the beak, over the round yellow-rimmed eyes.
+Then the upper and underlids had sealed themselves over the veiled
+eyeballs--the quick panting had changed to long gasps, the head had
+rolled to one side helplessly--and with a long shuddering convulsion
+the thing had taken place.  The slender body had stiffened in
+Carolan's hand, the glossy wings had closed down tightly against its
+dappled sides, its scaly legs had stretched out rigidly and not been
+drawn back again.  And a voice that seemed to speak inside Carolan
+had said to him: "This is death!"
+
+
+Now broke in upon his immature brain a flash of blinding brilliancy.
+Milly, who had been his mother, was dead, like the thrush.  He shut
+his eyes, and saw her lying, very pale and pretty and helpless, with
+ruffled brown hair the exact color of the bird's feathers, and
+beautiful brown eyes--why was he so certain that they had been
+brown?--all dim and filmy, and her slender body and long graceful
+limbs now quivering and convulsed, and now growing rigid and stiff.
+And a lump rose in his throat, and a tear splashed on the front of
+the brand-new blue jacket, and another that would have fallen was
+dried by a glow of inspiration.  For he had dug a grave with a sherd
+of broken flower-pot in the angle of one of the official flower-beds
+that decorated the oblong patch of lawn before the Mess House, and
+buried the dead thrush in the shelter of a clump of daffodils, and
+said a "Hail Mary!" for it, because, though Miss Josey and Mrs.
+Breagh--whom he would never call "Mamma" again!--termed it a Popish
+practice,--Father Haygarty said that one ought to pray for the
+dead....
+
+Surely one ought to pray for the soul of Milly.  She would
+understand, it was to be hoped! why one had never done it before.
+Somebody would tell her Carolan hadn't known!  Poor, poor Milly!  He
+wished he had been there with his new tin sword when that snuffing
+Thing came out of the jungle and frightened her so that she had
+died....
+
+He looked about the nursery.  There stood Monica's Indian-cane cot,
+and Alan's green-painted iron crib on either side of Nurse's wooden
+four-poster.  At the bed-head above Nurse's pillow was nailed a
+little plaster Calvary, and a miniature holy-water stoup, and over
+Carolan's little folding camp-bedstead hung a noble crucifix of ebony
+and carved ivory, so large and so massive that two iron staples held
+it in its place.
+
+The Face of the pendent, tortured Figure--there was death in that
+also.  It seemed to the child that the breast beneath the drooped,
+thorn-encircled Head, heaved with long sighs, that the lips gasped
+for breath--that long shuddering spasms rippled through the tortured
+Body, bringing home, as nothing ever had before, the meaning of the
+lines that the boy had learned as a parrot might....
+
+"_He was crucified also for us ... suffered ... and was buried...._"
+
+And that was why we prayed to Him for the dead and buried people,
+because He had suffered death and gone down into the dark grave, and
+He knew how to help souls....  Carolan nailed his resolution to say a
+nightly "Our Father" for poor Milly to the masthead of determination,
+unaware that Father Haygarty had incurred the displeasure of Mrs.
+Breagh by urging the necessary discharge of this filial duty as a
+reason why the boy should be told about his mother who was dead.
+
+We may guess that the influence of the second wife had inspired the
+Captain to insist that the hour of enlightenment should be deferred
+indefinitely.  And if any one had suggested to Mrs..  Breagh that she
+had been prompted by a belated jealousy of her predecessor, she would
+have been genuinely horrified at the idea.
+
+Nurse came in as Carolan decided on his course of future loyalty, and
+started at the sight of the sturdy little figure standing, with legs
+planted wide apart, on the shabby nursery drugget, its childish brows
+puckered with profound thought.
+
+"Now may the Saints stand between you and the mischief I know you're
+plannin'!" said Nurse, who prided herself on reading thoughts in
+faces.  "Is ut playin' acreybats on the windy-sill, or shavin' wid
+the Captain's razor?  Spake ut out!"
+
+Carolan spoke.
+
+"Mamma is not my muvver, an' I shall call her Mrs. Breagh _always_!"
+
+"God be good to me!" said Nurse, quite pale, and putting her hand to
+her side.  "An' who tould ye that, an' set the two eyes of ye blazin'
+like coals of fire?"
+
+"You saided it!--and she saided it--and Dada saided it--when I was
+playin' robber's cave under the sittin'-woom table," Carolan
+proclaimed.  "And I'm goin' to pray for Milly--that's my weal
+muvver--because she's dead--even if they say I shan't!"
+
+"There'll none durst," said Nurse rather awfully, "wid Bridget Povah
+to the fore!  And what else?"
+
+Slightly damped by the prospect of being permitted to carry out his
+shining new intention without interruption, Carolan reflected.
+
+"Nuffing," he said at last, "'cept that I want to know how much is
+seven fousand golding sovereigns?  For I am going to have them when I
+grow up."
+
+"Sure!" said Nurse, slightly bewildered, "a sovereign is the same as
+a wan-pound note!  Ye have seen thim things, have ye not?"
+
+Carolan had seen the soiled rags of Bank paper changing hands on
+market-days, and the recollection wrinkled his nose.
+
+"'Tis quare talk ye have," said Nurse, "about the sivin thousand
+wan-pound notes.  'Tis a little haystack av them ye would be gettin'
+from the gintleman at the Bank.  Where arr ye goin' now, ye onaisy
+wandherer?  Wid your hoop for a rowl in the Barrack-square?  Take
+your cap--an' remember that wheniver ye're clane out av sight, Biddy
+Povah has her eye on you!"
+
+But Carolan was already out of the room and half-way down the stairs.
+
+
+Outside under the blue sky, with its flocks of fleecy white clouds
+all hurrying southward, it was easy to forget the things that had
+hurt.  The crackle of the sandy gravel underfoot, the purr of the
+iron hoop in the metal driving-hook soothed and stimulated; the
+ringing clatter when one got upon the cobblestones, and the echo when
+one came under the archway of the Barrack-gate--were familiar,
+pleasant things.
+
+Familiar, too, was the sentry on guard, great-coated--for at all
+times and seasons of the year a nipping wind howled through the stony
+tunnel that ended in the arch of the Barrack-gateway--and pacing his
+official strip of pavement, that began at the yellow-painted
+sentry-box with the blunt lamp-post near it, and ended at the big
+spiked gate.  And the peep into the guardroom, with unbuttoned
+privates in the familiar red coats with Royal blue facings sprawling
+on plank beds reading thumbed newspapers, and the sergeant sitting on
+his cot stiffly stocked and fully accoutered--that had the charm of a
+well-known, never too familiar sight.  To other senses besides the
+eyes and ears appealed the figure of Mary Daa, the apple, cake and
+ginger-pop woman, sitting under a vast and oddly-patched blue gingham
+umbrella at her stall, made of a short plank mounted on two barrels,
+against the great bare wall on the left of the Barrack-entrance,
+exercising a privilege permitted to no other, because Mary's stone
+ginger-pop bottles might be relied upon as containing nothing else....
+
+
+It was market-day, and the great cobblestoned place, bordered by a
+line of shops and houses, broken by the bridge, under which flowed a
+famous salmon-river, was seething with people out to buy and sell and
+enjoy themselves.  On the right hand was the Catholic Church, a
+modern building of no great design, animated bundles of rags
+containing female penitents performing the devotions of the Stations
+round it.  While upreared upon the summit of an isolated rock beyond
+the rushing river, perched the ivy-mantled remnant of the ancient
+castle from which the town derived its name; once held against the
+Commonwealth by King James, and with Ireton's round-shot yet bedded
+in the massive masonry.
+
+The distracting grind-organ accompaniment of a round-about blared on
+the ear from a field where some caravans of strolling show-people had
+encamped themselves.  Rows of empty jaunting-cars, shafts down,
+waited their squireen owners in the bleakest angle of the
+market-place; and in the farm-carts with feather-beds in them,
+covered with gay patchwork counterpanes, the strapping matrons and
+buxom maids of the hill-farms or mountain-villages had jolted and
+joggled from their distant homes, and--the last bargain made--would
+jolt and joggle back again.
+
+Booths and stalls, presided over by them, exhibited cheese, butter,
+and other dairy-produce.  Crates were crammed with quacking ducks and
+loudly cackling fowls.  Strings of shaggy-footed horses and knots of
+isolated cows were ranged along the curbs to tempt the would-be
+purchaser; hurdled pens of sheep waited to change owners; but the
+staple article of commerce, in the active and the passive mood, alive
+and squealing or dead and smoked, was pig.  In reeking basements
+below the shops--cellars where potatoes, cabbages, and onions were
+peddled to the poorest, and turf and firewood were sold in
+ha'p'orths--piles of pigs-tails, fresh and dried, rivaled the salted
+herring in popularity, and were borne home, wrapped in red-spotted
+handkerchiefs, and stowed away in the crowns of hats, to be frizzled
+over turf-embers for supper.
+
+A jig was being danced to the music of a fiddle and a clarionet on a
+square of smooth flagstones in the middle of the market-place.
+And--for this was the West of Ireland in the early fifties--the
+bright red or dark blue cloaks and white frilled caps of the matrons,
+the short stuff petticoats, chintz jacket-bodices and bright
+handkerchief-shawls of the unwedded women; the corduroy breeches,
+blue yarn stockings and buckled brogues of the men, their long-tailed
+gray or blue coats and high-crowned, narrow-brimmed
+chimney-pots--gave charm and variety to the shifting scene.
+
+Not for the first time observed, the half-dozen of coarse, strapping,
+red-faced women who daily patroled the square in the neighborhood of
+the Barracks; whisky-hardened viragoes whose uncovered heads of
+greasy hair, thrust into sagging nets of black chenille-velvet, and
+uniform attire of clean starched cotton print, worn over a
+multiplicity of whaleboned petticoats, bespoke them,--as did their
+coarse speech and loud laughter,--members of the ancient sisterhood
+of Rahab and Delilah, followers of the most ancient profession in the
+world.
+
+Prone at all times to hunt in pack or couples, the wearers of the
+greasy hair-nets flauntingly displayed a pair of captive red-coats.
+One of them was fairly sober, and sulky at being thus paraded under
+the eyes of his countrymen.  The other, a raw young recruit,
+half-fuddled with libations of porter and whisky, staggeringly
+promenaded the pavement with a siren on either elbow; and, being in
+the pugnacious stage of liquor, was stung by some sarcastic comment
+from the crowd into shaking off the women who supported,--while they
+feigned to lean on him,--and challenging the critic of morals, in
+broad Yorkshire, to a bout at fisticuffs.
+
+"Leggo o' me, tha----!" he hiccoughed to the Paphians.  "Cannowt a
+chap walk wi'out women-fowk hangin' on, an' armin' him?  As for
+tha!"--he addressed the critic--"Ah'll teach tha to meddle wi' thy
+betters.  If tha'rt a mon--coom on!"
+
+"Fight, is ut?  Och, ye poor craythur, the wind av a fist wud level
+ye," commented the censor, turning on his heel contemptuously.  Upon
+which, the belligerent, taking the act as a confession of recreancy,
+wrenched himself from the women, and, staggering forward, came into
+violent contact with Mary Daa's plank-and-barrel stall; with the
+result that certain apples, oranges, and cakes, displayed to tempt
+customers, were scattered on the flagged sidewalk, or rolled gaily
+down the gutter; pursued with yells of joy by certain ragged urchins
+who usually were to be found in the vicinity of Mary's stall.
+
+Carolan clapped his hands with a child's delight in the upset and the
+subsequent fray, as Mary, vociferating maledictions on the soldier's
+drunken clumsiness and the predatory activity of the raiders, shook
+her fists at their flying heels.
+
+"Ah nivir meant t' dommage tha!  Wull sixpence neet maak guid thy
+loss t' tha?" stammered the Yorkshireman, thrusting a hand into his
+trousers-pocket in search of the coin.  Then his flaming face
+darkened heavily, and he said, withdrawing the hand, empty, "Ah
+havena a brass farden t' pitch at dog or devil, let alone sixpence.
+Mak't oop to her, Noorah lass, an' Ah'll gie't thee back agean!"
+
+And the woman he had called Norah said, linking her arm in the
+soldier's and affectionately ogling him:
+
+"Sure, I'll give the ould craythur a shillin', asthore, and a kiss av
+the handsome boy you are will pay me!"
+
+Then happened what Carolan, with a child's intuitive sense of things
+that are incomprehensible, saw with a strange shock and thrill that
+never quite passed away.
+
+The bright new shilling tendered to Mary by the plump clean fingers
+with the twinkling glass-and-pinchbeck rings on them was dashed to
+the flags by a fierce blow of the old, bony, wrinkled hand....
+
+"Take up yer money, ye livin' disgrace!" Mary had said sternly to the
+staring woman, "and thrapse upon your way!"
+
+And under the regard of many eyes, for nearly all the faces in the
+crowded market-place seemed to be looking that way, the woman had
+picked up the coin; and as her comrades hurried on, had slunk after
+them, leaving the tipsy soldier standing there.
+
+"Had ye no modher, ye fool-man?" Mary asked him, "that ye are hastin'
+quick to hell, arrum-in-arrum wid Thim Wans?"
+
+And the tipsy young soldier had given a thick grunt that might have
+meant anything, and hung his head sulkily, and gone staggering upon
+his way, but in an opposite direction to that taken by the women.
+And Mary Daa looked after him long and sorrowfully.
+
+"Please tell me," asked Carolan, edging up to the apple-woman, for
+Mary and he had struck up a friendship over divers ha'p'orths of nuts
+and pink peppermint-candy sticks, "what are they, and why are they
+wicked?"
+
+Mary brought round the weather-stained brown tunnel of her huge and
+venerable bonnet, and became aware of a small boy with a scarlet
+topknot and a pair of honest gray eyes.
+
+"Who arr ye talkin' of?" she demanded, and there were shining drops
+of water on her wrinkled cheeks, and the cracked glasses of her huge
+iron-framed spectacles were foggy.  She took them off, and wiped them
+on her old green plaid shawl, as Carolan explained that he had been
+referring to Thim Wans.
+
+"What arr they?  Wandherin' waves av the say, poisonous planets;
+thraps for the feet, fiery dhragons that ate up the bodies an' souls
+av men!  Look me in the face wid your child's eyes, ye that will be a
+man wan day, an' get by harrut the worruds I'm spakin' to you!  An'
+when the pith is set widin your bones, and the hair is thick upon
+your lip, and the blood is hot widin the veins av you--kape them
+worruds in mind!"
+
+Carolan thanked Mary Daa, and, having a stray half-penny, purchased a
+cocked-hat of brown peppermint rock, and went home crunching.  He had
+learned a good deal that day.  The mystery of Death and the power of
+Money had been revealed to him.  Also, he had gained some slight
+preliminary inkling of the forces that are arrayed against the human
+soul in its march through this strange world of ours, and of the
+strange and foul and ugly things that lie hidden beneath the shining
+surface of Life.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Furnival's Inn, Holborn, with its parallelogram of dusty or
+rain-washed cobblestones unrelieved by any patch of railed-in grass
+plot, where sooty lilacs and rusty hawthorns make a show of putting
+forth green leaves in Spring, and plane-trees shed their bark, as
+boa-constrictors doff their skins, at the approach of
+Winter--Furnival's Inn, even in the year of stress of 1870, impressed
+itself upon the casual visitor as a dismal spot in wet weather and a
+dusty one in dry.  But that an immortal genius wrote a deathless work
+of humor in its cheerless precincts, one would have said that nothing
+young or gay or natural could ever flourish there.
+
+At nine o'clock upon the morning of a day heavily fraught with Fate
+for the protagonist of this unpretending life-drama, recent puddles
+testified to overnight's rain, and gray clouds rushing north-westward
+across a monochromatic parallelogram of sky, framed in by the
+bilious-hued, grimy-windowed, decrepit-looking Inn buildings,
+predicted more presently.
+
+Punctually upon the stroke of the hour you might have seen a shaggy
+young man in a red-hot hurry plunge under the round-topped carriage
+archway, eschewing the smaller side-entrance intended for
+pedestrians.  Whereat the upper half of a porter, crowned with a
+tarred chimney-pot hat, and wearing a brown livery with copper-gilt
+buttons, appeared at the wicket of his lodge-door, and the
+fresh-faced, shaggy-haired boy in the battered felt wideawake and
+well-worn frieze overcoat, had felt an eye boring hard into his back,
+as, after one doubtful glance about him, he dived between the gouty
+Corinthian columns of the fourth portico on the left-hand side, and
+rang the first-floor bell.
+
+"I'd ring if I was you!" the porter had soliloquized, noting the
+masterful tug given by the early visitor to the dingy brass
+bell-handle--third of a row of six sticking out like organ-stops on
+the right of the heavy, low-browed outer door.  "And again! ... Don't
+be shy!" said the porter, who was something of a cynic: "Break the
+bell-wire, and then you won't have done no good to
+yourself!--supposing you to be a client or a creditor of Mustey and
+Son--though you're over-young to be the first and over-cheerful to be
+the second, it strikes me!  Good-day, Mr. Chown!"  And the porter
+touched his hat to a lean, mild-looking, elderly man in black, who
+turned in at that moment beneath the smaller archway.  "You're not
+the first this morning, early as you are.  There's a young chap who
+don't seem in the mind to take no answer--has been ringing ten
+minutes without stopping at Mr. Mustey's bell."
+
+"Pressing business, I suppose, to bring him out so early!" said the
+person addressed.
+
+A glance of intelligence may have been exchanged between Mr. Chown
+and the porter, but there were no further words.  Mr. Chown passed
+on, and joined the younger man on the doorstep under the fourth
+portico on the left side, as he prepared to fulfill the porter's
+prophecy about breaking the bell-wire; and said, shifting his
+umbrella to the hand that held a shiny bag of legal appearance, and
+drawing a shabby latchkey from the pocket of his vest:
+
+"Excuse me, but if it is a business appointment with Mr. Mustey
+Junior,"--he tapped the key upon the tarnished brass door-handle as
+though to knock some grains of dust out of the words, and went on,
+punctuating his utterances with more tapping--"I happen to
+know"--_tap-tap-tap_--"that he won't be here to-day."  He added, as
+he took a brief, comprehensive survey of the healthy,
+square-shouldered, well-built youngster of some five feet eight (with
+a hopeful promise of more inches in the breadth of the shoulders, and
+the depth of the chest), buttoned up in the rough frieze garment that
+had seen hard wear.  "But possibly it is the head of the Firm"
+(_tap-tap_) "you want, and not Son? ... In which case I'm afraid
+you'll have to wait some time, as the old gentleman stayed very late
+at work yesterday.  I should mention that I am employed in the
+capacity of head-clerk by" (_tap_) "a firm of solicitors who have
+offices on the ground-floor immediately underneath Mustey and Son"
+(_tap_), "and----"
+
+Mr. Chown, still industriously tapping, nodded at the lowest of a
+series of legends in letters of black paint, flanking the right-hand
+row of bells, and setting forth the titles of "Wotherspoon and
+Cadderby, Attorneys and Commissioners of Oaths."  He continued: "And
+though I was detained myself, and did not leave till eight-thirty, I
+noticed particularly--when I shut the front-door behind me, that the
+gas in Mr. Mustey Senior's private room was burning still."
+
+"For the matter of that, it's burning now!" said the strange young
+man, whose head was plentifully covered with a crop of decidedly red
+and obstinately curly hair, crowned with the battered gray felt
+wideawake previously mentioned; and whose square, blunt-featured,
+fresh-colored, rather freckled face was illuminated with a pair of
+very clear and intelligent eyes of a good gray, curiously flecked
+with yellow.  He indicated with a knotty vine-stick he carried two
+dingy, wire-blinded windows on the first floor, and Messrs.
+Wotherspoon and Cadderby's head-clerk, with an irrepressible start of
+consternation, saw that the darkness of the room behind them was
+thrown into relief by a greenish patch of radiance that indicated the
+position of a paper-shaded gas reading-lamp which to his knowledge
+hung over the heavy writing-table that occupied the middle of the
+elder Mustey's private room.
+
+"God bless my soul, so it is!"
+
+The speaker, with a tallowy change in his complexion, stepped
+backward from the doorstep to the pavement, conveyed himself in the
+same crab-like fashion to the center of the quadrangle of ancient
+buildings constituting the Inn, and so stood, staring up at the
+window with the yellow-green flare behind the dusty brown
+wire-blinds, and tapping his latchkey on his chin as he had tapped it
+on the door-knob.  Then he rejoined the other to say, with rather a
+perturbed and dubious air:
+
+"If your business could wait half an hour or so, and you--being a
+stranger, as I take it?--and new to the sights of London--were to
+indulge in a little walk along Holborn--say as far as Bloomsbury
+Street--and drop in at the British Museum, and have a look at the
+Elgin Marbles or the Assyrian Bulls,--or the--the Mummies in the
+Egyptian Department,--and then come back again,--you might stand a
+better chance of getting the bell answered."  The speaker added,
+meeting a look of decided obstinacy, quite in keeping with the
+pouting, deeply-cut lips and the square chin with a cleft in it:
+"Unless you can suggest a better idea, you know...."
+
+"My idea is to stop here and ring until the bell _is_ answered.  But
+I am obliged to you all the same!" said the young man.
+
+"You've waited long enough, you think?" hesitated Messrs. Wotherspoon
+and Cadderby's head-clerk.
+
+The answer came with a flash of strong white teeth in the
+fresh-colored countenance that was dusted with dark brown freckles.
+
+"Just twenty-three years," said the shaggy-haired young man.
+
+"Lord bless me!" said Mr. Chown, "you must have begun waiting in your
+cradle!  But time flies and business presses, and----"
+
+"My view exactly!" returned the freckled young man, as the head-clerk
+inserted his latchkey into the heavy door and it swung slowly
+backward, revealing a bare and gloomy hall wainscoted with grimy oak
+and hung with mildewed flock-paper.  "_Donnerwetter!_ how you smell
+here!" he commented, having taken in a chestful of the medium that
+served the inhabitants of the Inn buildings for air.  "But I suppose
+you're used to it!"
+
+"Comparing our atmosphere with that of other London offices, I should
+be inclined to call us rather fresh than otherwise," said Mr. Chown,
+who had dropped his latchkey and was groping for it on the dirty
+floor by the oblong of daylight admitted by the open hall-door.  "But
+I suppose--as some of the gentlemen who rent chambers here are still
+away on their vacations--the place might seem--to a stranger from the
+country--a trifle close."
+
+"Stuffy!" corrected the young man, whose expression of disgust was
+highly uncomplimentary.  "Drainy, black-beetly, mousey, dusty,
+cellary.  With a tinge of escaped gas and a something else that
+I----"  He sniffed and said, puckering a sagacious nose: "Why, it's
+gunpowder!  The place is chock-full of the fumes of burnt
+gunpowder....  Here!  Hallo!  What the devil are you trying to do?
+What do you mean?"
+
+For the other, who had risen to his feet with a reversion to the
+sallow change of countenance previously observed in him, had caught
+him by the arm, as his eager foot had touched a dilapidated mat that
+lay as a snare for the unwary at the foot of the uncarpeted
+staircase, and with unexpected strength and quickness had swung him
+to the hall-door, and was endeavoring to push him over the threshold.
+
+"I mean----"  Mr. Chown was of middle age and evidently quite unused
+to wrestling: and as he strove with the shaggy young man upon the
+threshold of the dingy hall, it was evident that he would very soon
+give in.  "I mean..." he panted, "... that you ... can't you be
+sensible?"
+
+"I should be a fool if I couldn't see that you're hiding something.
+Let go!" said the red-haired young man, not at all malevolently, "or
+I shall have to hurt you!  I'm going upstairs, and you can't stop me!
+What harm do you think I am going to do to the white-haired old man
+who's lying fast asleep across his table?  I shan't go in without
+knocking, if that's what you're thinking of!  And what harm do you
+suppose he's going to do to me?"
+
+A sullen bang answered, for Mr. Chown had reached out a wary hand
+behind his own respectable back, and grabbed at the dim brass knob
+and slammed the heavy door upon himself and his antagonist.  There
+were circles round his eyes, and he puffed and panted heavily.
+
+"You young--_puff_--idiot!" he gasped, "I'm
+not--_whoof!_--considering you--for--a--_whuff!_--moment.  It's
+him,"--he pulled out a colored handkerchief and mopped his face--"him
+that I've known since I was first articled, and had many a kindly
+word from, and many a liberal present.  And now that this has
+happened--I may say I've seen it coming, and many a night I've stayed
+here--knowing him busy over his accounts above, and many a time I've
+been on the point of going up and knocking and offering a word of
+sympathy.  But--it wasn't to be done!  ... You could never take a
+liberty with him, alive--and no one shall if I can stop 'em--now that
+he isn't!"
+
+"Now that he--why, man!--you don't mean to say----"
+
+They confronted each other on the doorstep, and the shaggy, obstinate
+young man had now flushed to ripe tomato-color as he stammered:
+
+"You don't mean he's dead?  It isn't possible!"
+
+"I say nothing and I mean nothing.  There's no third party present,"
+asserted Mr. Chown, with professional caution, "to testify to what I
+said or didn't say.  But his son has to be looked for, and brought
+here if they can find him--and if Mr. William can't be found--and
+without prejudice I think that's more than likely!--some one he knew
+and trusted must be the first to go into that room.  His housekeeper
+I've heard is a good creature.  He's often dropped a word in praise
+of her to me, I know....  We'll telegraph--I know his address!
+Number Three----"
+
+The young man interrupted: "Addington Square, Camberwell."
+
+"Send her a wire!  I'll pay!"  Mr. Chown plucked a shilling from his
+waistcoat pocket and agitatedly pressed it on the stranger.  "There's
+a telegraph office at Snow Hill!"
+
+"Where is Snow Hill?  I'm a stranger in London.  As it happens, I
+came from Schwärz-Brettingen--it's a University town in North
+Germany--to keep a business appointment with Messrs. Mustey and Son."
+The shaggy-haired young man pointed to those first-floor windows....
+adding: "The elder gentleman is chief trustee of my mother's
+fortune--his son, who you say's missing, is the other--that is, he
+has been since the death of a great-uncle of mine....  For I didn't
+come of age, according to my mother's settlement, until my
+twenty-third birthday.  And as it happens, I'm twenty-three to-day!"
+
+"I see!  He was to have paid the money over! ... Good Lord!  Good
+Lord!" groaned the head-clerk, "what a world it is!--what a world it
+is!"
+
+"And all this while we're swopping talk, the old fellow upstairs may
+be dying for help that we could give him!" snarled the younger man,
+and caught the head-clerk by the shoulder in a grip that struck him
+as unpleasantly powerful.  "Look here!--where is your key?"
+
+"Just inside in the hall there....  I'd dropped it, don't you
+remember--I was looking for it when you--when you--said you smelt
+gunpowder," explained the attorney's clerk, "and then it all rushed
+on me."
+
+"You did on me!--and I thought you'd gone crazy.  Look here----" the
+other began.
+
+"To be at all effective I had to take you suddenly," said Mr. Chown,
+adding, with a mild gleam of pride, "and you must add--I was
+effective!  And if you've got it into your head that there's life in
+the poor old man yet--put it out again!  For he shot himself last
+night just on the stroke of nine--and I could take my oath of it!  I
+heard what must have been the--the noise--as I passed out at the
+gate, and the porter he said to me: 'A gas explosion somewhere in the
+neighborhood, Mr. Chown, or else it was a thunderclap.'  And I
+thought it might have been thunder--for the weather observations in
+the newspapers had mentioned storms as prevailing in South and
+South-Eastern England--and the winds have been blowing from south and
+south-east.  And my wife has headaches when electricity's in the
+atmosphere--and she has been bad three days past."
+
+"But let's do something--not stand here with our hands in our
+pockets!" urged the red-haired young man with eagerness.  "I'm a
+surgeon--not diplomaed, worse luck! but enough of a one to give aid
+in such a case as you've hinted at."
+
+"My key's inside the house--as I've told you!" retorted Mr. Chown,
+"and unless we were to break down the door--which would bring the
+police upon us before they're wanted--or one of us could climb like a
+cat--so as to look in at that window and make certain----"
+
+"_Donnerwetter_!  Good idea!" said the shaggy young man, in whose
+conversation mingled interjectional scraps and snatches of a language
+not comprehended by Mr. Chown, but dimly conjectured to be German.
+In the same instant he had pulled off his frieze overcoat, revealing
+the unsuspected fact that he wore no jacket under it--had thrown it
+upon the area-railings close to the row of bells that resembled
+organ-stops, and mounted upon it, shirt-sleeved, vigorous, ready and
+purposeful.  An iron torch-extinguisher, a rusted relic of the days
+when respectable citizens went forth o' nights attended by linkmen,
+jutted from the wall immediately above his head.  He made a long arm
+and grasped it--and to the dazzled observation of the head-clerk
+appeared to walk up the wall like a housefly.  But in reality he had
+wedged a toe in an ornamental border of sooty masonry of the
+brick-in-and-brick-out description, that outlined the doors and
+windows of the Inn buildings; and with a degree of skill and
+suppleness that testified to no small degree of practice, hoisted
+himself up.  Directly afterward he was observed to be in the act of
+getting over the sooty balustrading that edged a narrow ledge of
+stone running before those first-floor windows, and the head-clerk,
+holding his breath, saw him stoop and peer in over a wire blind.
+
+Directly afterward, as it seemed, he withdrew his head and looked
+down into Mr. Chown's pale face, and his own had lost its ruddy
+color.  Then, coming down as he had gone up, much to the astonishment
+and curiosity of Mr. Chown's two juniors and several legal-looking
+personages who had arrived upon the scene and gathered in quite a
+little crowd upon the cobblestones--he said in a low tone, as he drew
+the former gentleman apart:
+
+"You were right.  Whether it was done last night or more recently, it
+has been done, and thoroughly.  With a new-looking revolver.  He has
+it in his hand!"
+
+"Poor old gentleman, I could swear that what he did he has been
+driven to do, through despair and debt and misery....  'Mr. William
+will be my ruin, Chown!' he said to me only three days ago.  And he
+has been his ruin, sir!" said Mr. Chown, blowing his nose with a
+flourish, and wiping his eyes furtively.  "His ruin, Mr. William has
+been....  You may depend upon that!"
+
+Said the young man from North Germany, pulling on his shabby overcoat:
+
+"The table is covered with papers, and the safe facing the window is
+open....  Do you think----"
+
+"I don't think--I know!  He had a kind of swooning fit a week back,
+when the crash came, and a Receiving Order in Bankruptcy was made
+against him on the petition of his creditors.  He was a long time
+coming round--and I stayed by him while the caretaker went to fetch a
+hackney-cab--for I'd been called, being a sort of favorite with him,
+and having known him for years.  He'd been robbed and plundered then,
+because he groaned it out to me; and he pointed to that safe, and
+told me that it had been gutted by means of false keys--the Bramah he
+always wore on his watch-riband having been got at and copied.  'All
+the cash I had left in the world, Chown, besides seven thousand in
+Trust Securities! ... It's my punishment for having been near and
+hard to others that I might be generous to him!'  Are you going!"
+
+The shaggy young man, crimson to the lining-edge of the old gray
+wideawake he had pulled over his brows after buttoning his overcoat,
+made an incoherent sound in his throat, and swung abruptly round upon
+his heel.  The reflection had occurred to him: "He'd have been
+generous to me if he'd waited to have seen me--and blown out my
+brains before scattering his own; _pfui!_--over that table and all
+the papers!"  But he did not voice it aloud.
+
+"Leave me your address," said the kindly-hearted Mr. Chown,
+"and--it's not business to say you may trust me!--but I'll undertake
+to bring your name before the Official Receiver--for you're one of
+the principal creditors--provided what you've told me can be
+proved...."
+
+"I suppose you know that--dead man's writing when you see it?" said
+the other, swinging round on Mr. Chown with no very pleasant look.
+
+"As well as I know my own!" retorted Mr. Chown, nodding back.
+
+"If so--and not because I admit you've any right!--but because I
+choose to show it you--you may read this!" went on the late Mr.
+Mustey's chief creditor, pulling a rather worn and crumpled oblong
+envelope out of his pocket and exhibiting the direction written on it
+in a flowing, old-fashioned, legal hand.
+
+"'P. C. Breagh, Esq., care of Frau Busch, Jaeger Strasse,
+Schwärz-Brettingen, N. Germany.' ... But I really shouldn't have
+dreamed--" began Mr. Chown.
+
+"Read it!" said the owner of the letter, savagely thrusting it upon
+him, and the head-clerk with another protest, nipped in mid-utterance
+by another order to read it, mastered the contents.
+
+The writer acknowledged the receipt of Mr. P. C. Breagh's letter, and
+begged to remind him that he was quite well acquainted with the terms
+of his late mother's Marriage Settlement.  He congratulated his young
+friend on having so nearly attained the age of discretion decided
+under the provisions of the instrument referred to; and appointed the
+hour of nine o'clock upon the morning of the 3d of January, to
+discharge his trust and hand over the cash, deposit-notes, and
+securities....
+
+"While all the time he knew--none better, except his precious
+partner!--that I should leave his office as poor as I'd come there.
+It would have been decent," snarled Patrick Carolan Breagh, "to have
+owned the truth."
+
+"And accused his own son!--And now I look at the date of this it was
+written on the day before that affair of the false Bramah....  Do him
+justice, Mr. Breagh! ... Try to think he meant fair by you.  Wherever
+he's gone..."  Mr. Chown looked vaguely up at the monochromatic
+sky--now darkening as though it meant to rain in earnest--and then
+down at the cobblestones, "he'll be no worse for that, and you'll be
+the better here, I dare to say!  You'll give me your address, sir?  I
+don't know but that as you were the first to discover the body,
+you'll be expected to give evidence before the Coroner."
+
+"Damn the Coroner!" said P. C. Breagh.  "Whether he wants it or not I
+haven't an address to give.  I paid my bill at a thundering beastly
+cheap hotel in the Euston Road by handing over my trunks of clothes,
+and books and instruments to the landlord....  He promised to keep
+them for three weeks--to give me a chance to redeem them!--and he
+grunted when I said I'd be back with money enough to buy his
+bug-ridden lodging-house before two days were over his head.  And I
+pawned my coat for dinner yesterday and a coffee-house bed last
+night....  That's why you saw shirt-sleeves when I pulled off this
+old wrap-rascal....  But I'll look in here again to-morrow--unless
+I--change my mind!"
+
+He had passed under the archway and was gone before Mr. Chown had
+recovered himself sufficiently to call after him.  To follow would
+have been no use.  So the head-clerk went sorrowfully back to write
+and dispatch those urgent telegraphic messages.
+
+And Carolan, shouldering through the double torrent of pedestrian
+humanity rolling east and west along the worn pavements of Holborn,
+plunged through the roaring traffic of the cobblestoned roadway, and
+with his chin well down upon his chest, and his hands rammed deep
+into his pockets, turned down Fetter Lane, knowing that he, who had
+been heir to a goodly sum in thousands, was, by this sudden turn of
+Fortune's wheel, a beggar.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+As a dog will skulk dejectedly from the spot where a bone previously
+buried has failed to reward the snuffing nose and the digging paw, so
+P. C. Breagh, on the long-expected twenty-third birthday that was to
+have made him master of dead Milly's fortune, slouched down Fetter
+Lane, humming and vibrant with the vicinity of great printing-works,
+and redolent of glue and treacle, tar, printers' ink, engine-oil, and
+size.
+
+A double stream of carts and trucks, heavily laden with five-mile
+rollers of yellow-white paper for the revolving vertical
+type-cylinders of the Applegarth steam printing-machine--then in its
+heyday--bales of tow, forms of type and piles of wood-blocks, choked
+the narrow thoroughfare.  The smells from the cheaper
+eating-houses--where sausages frizzled in metal trays, and tea and
+coffee steamed in huge tapped boilers, and piles of doubtful-looking
+eggs, and curly rashers of streaky bacon were to be had by people
+with money to pay for breakfast--even the sight of compositors in
+clean shirt-sleeves and machine-men steeped in ink and oil to the
+eyebrows eating snacks of bread and cheese and saveloy, and drinking
+porter out of pewter on the doorsteps of great buildings roaring with
+machinery--sickened P. C. Breagh with vain desire.
+
+His world was all in ruins about him.  He was conscious of a painful
+sense of stricture in the throat, and a tight pain as though a
+knotted rope were bound about his temples.  His hand did not shake,
+though, when he thrust it out under his eyes and looked at it
+curiously.  But he shouldered his way so clumsily along the narrow,
+crowded sidewalk that he found himself every now and then in
+collision with some more or less incensed pedestrian, such as the
+printer's devil, who cried, "Now then, Snobby, where are yer a-comin'
+to?" or the stout red-faced matron in black, displaying a row of
+bootlaces and a paper of small-tooth combs for sale--who emerged from
+the swing-doors of a public-house as P. C. Breagh charged past them,
+and wanted to know whether he called himself a young man or a mad
+bull?  A well-dressed, elderly gentleman, carrying a calf-skin bag
+and a gold-mounted umbrella, confounded him for a bungling,
+blundering, blackguardly! ... and was left reveling in alliteratives
+as the provoker of his wrath swung out of the Lane and found himself
+upon the reported Tom Tiddler's ground of Fleet Street.  And then a
+curious swirling giddiness overtook him, and he dropped down upon
+some stone steps under the Gothic doorway of a church with a lofty
+tower, and sat there with hunched shoulders and drooped head, staring
+dully at the pavement between his muddy boots.
+
+He was conscious of a dull resentment at his lot, but no base hatred
+of that old man with the shattered skull, lying prone among the
+bloody litter of his office-table, mingled with it.  All his life,
+since that sixth birthday when he had learned the meaning of Death,
+and the potential value of Money, the attainment of his twenty-third
+year had been the goal toward which he had striven; and every third
+of January crossed off the almanac "_brings me nearer,_" he had said
+to himself, "_to the money that will be mine to spend as I shall
+choose!_"
+
+And now ... without a profession--for he had failed to obtain his
+degrees in Medicine and Surgery--without funds, for a reason that did
+him no dishonor--without books or belongings of any kind except the
+clothes upon his back; without hope--for who can be hopeful on an
+empty and craving stomach?--without work to occupy those strong young
+hands and the sound, capable brain behind those gray, amber-flecked
+eyes, the unlucky young man who had been reared on expectations sat
+under St. Dunstan's Tower; and heard St. Dunstan's clock and St.
+Paul's, and all the other City churches answer the boom of Big Ben of
+Westminster, solemnly striking the hour of ten.
+
+His prospects had been blighted and ruined, his young hopes lay dead:
+he felt bruised and battered by the experiences and discoveries of
+that birthday morning, as though the pair of wooden clock-giants that
+some forty years back had figured among the City sights from their
+vantage in the ancient steeple of St. Dunstan's, had beaten out the
+hour with their mallets on his head.
+
+
+His stepmother had always resented the monetary independence of her
+husband's son by Milly Fermeroy.  Well! she and her vulgarities, her
+resentments and jealousies, had long been laid to rest, poor soul!
+
+In that bloody June of the Mutiny of '57 she and her two youngest
+children had perished at Cawnpore.  A fortnight later Major Breagh,
+previously wounded in the head by a shell-splinter in the defense of
+the entrenchments, was bayoneted by a Sepoy infantryman during a
+desperate sortie.
+
+Carolan had remained as a boarder at the Preparatory School of the
+Marist Fathers at Rockhampton where he had previously been placed,
+thanks to the "interference," as Mrs. Breagh had phrased it, of the
+regimental chaplain.  Father Haygarty.  And, owing to the same
+influence, Monica, Carolan's junior by two years, had--after the
+double stroke of Fate that left the children orphaned--been sent to
+the Sisters of the Annunciation in London, the charges of her support
+and education being defrayed out of the interest of Carolan's seven
+thousand, and the compassionate allowance of twenty-five pounds
+granted her by Government as the orphan daughter of an officer killed
+in war.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+To-day, as P. C. Breagh sat paupered on the doorstep of St.
+Dunstan's, he realized that, from childhood to this hour, dead
+Milly's money had been his bane.
+
+"When I was quite a little shaver I expected to be knocked under to,
+and given the best of everything, because I was going to be rich one
+day....  I knew my money kept my stepmother from grumbling and
+nagging at me.  And--my first thrashing at Rockhampton was because
+I'd bragged about it to a bigger boy.  He said when he let me get
+up--that I should be obliged to him one day, if I wasn't at the
+moment!  And my first fight--no, my second--because the first was
+over my Irish brogue!--my second fight came off because I'd forgotten
+my lesson, and talked about being able to drive four-in-hand, and
+live up to a Commission in the Household Cavalry when I should come
+of age....  Silly young idiot!  And when I was old enough for a
+public school--and passed--I wonder, with my luck, how I managed to
+pass?--into Bradenbury College--I had mills, no end! with the fellows
+there, because I couldn't keep mum about my expectations."
+
+He leaned his dusty elbows on his knees and went on thinking, as a
+regular procession of legs of all sexes, ages, and colors went past,
+and the muddy river of Fleet Street traffic roared over the
+cobblestones, boiled in swirling eddies where it received the stream
+flowing down Chancery Lane, and choked and gurgled in and out of the
+squat archways of Temple Bar.
+
+"I'd talked of Oxford as a preliminary to Sandhurst and a Cavalry
+Commission--and I went in for an Exhibition Entrance--but my classics
+queered me for the University.  Knock Number One!  The Head put it on
+the Italianate Latin I'd learned from the Marist Fathers--and why old
+Virgil, and Ovid, Horace, Cæsar, and Livy, and the rest of 'em,
+should be supposed to have pronounced their language with a British
+accent I've never been able to understand! ... When I went up for the
+Woolwich Open Competitive--having altered my views about the
+Household Cavalry!--my plane trigonometry dished me for the Royal
+Horse Artillery....  Knock Number Two!  So I told myself that it
+wasn't as easy getting into a Queen's uniform as it was in my
+father's time....  You were given the Commission--or you bought
+it--and if you could drill, and march, and fight, no more was asked
+of you....  And I tried for the Royal Engineering College of
+India--and failed in dynamics--and had a shot for the I.C.S.--and
+missed again!  Oh, damn!  And do I owe every one of the whole string
+of failures to the belief that money makes up for everything and buys
+anything?  I'm half beginning to believe I do!  Even the kindness I
+have had from people I'd no claim on--and who is there alive I have a
+claim on?  Have I been cad enough--ape enough--worm enough--to put it
+down to----Grrh!--how I loathe myself!"
+
+He covered his reddened face with his hands and shuddered.  It is
+horrible to have to go on living inside a fellow you have begun to
+hate.
+
+"Even Father Haygarty's untiring kindness, his interest in all I did
+and thought and hoped for....  Weren't there times when I suspected
+that my--in some degree representing property--accounted for--oh,
+Lord!  And when he was dying and his housekeeper sent for me--for
+he'd given up being an army chaplain and got a little living in
+Gloucestershire--did I realize even then what a friend and father I
+was losing?  I hope to God I did, but I'm hardly sure of myself!"
+
+He stubbed with the toe of his muddy boot the jutting corner of a
+paving-stone, and scowled at the image of himself that was growing
+more and more distinct.  He had always thought P. C. Breagh rather a
+fine young fellow.  Now he knew him for what he had always been.
+
+"When Father Haygarty was gone--it wasn't long before Mustey and Son
+began to send explanations and apologies, instead of the whole of the
+quarter's interest-money.  There had been a drop in securities of
+this kind and the other, and Consols were down--and at first I was as
+pleased as a prize poodle at being made excuses to.....  But the fact
+remained that where I'd been getting two hundred and forty, I was
+only getting one hundred and seventy-three....  And that--if I really
+meant to go in for my Degree in Surgery and Medicine, for I'd made up
+my mind to be a medical swell--I had--if Monica was to go on staying
+with the Sisters!--I'd got to give up the idea of Edinburgh, or the
+London University, and matriculate somewhere abroad.  So I went to
+Schwärz-Brettingen, and shared rooms with another English chap....
+It was admitted I had solid abilities--the Professors whose lectures
+I attended thought well of me.  And I failed!--Failed for the fourth
+time!  Have I the accursed money to thank for that last blow?"
+
+He perspired as though he had been running, and, indeed, nothing
+takes it out of you like a spruit over the course of the past with
+your conscience as pacer.
+
+"I'd thought myself rather a fine fellow when, with my student-card
+in my pocket and my _Anmeldungsbuch_ in my hand I called--in company
+with a squad of other candidates--on the Rector Magnificus.  We had a
+punch afterwards, and a drive and coffee at the Plesse--and made a
+night of it at Fritz's.  I woke with a first-class student's headache
+in the morning, and a hazy recollection that I'd told one or two of
+the British colony--in confidence--and several Germans--about the
+money I was coming into by-and-by...."
+
+He ground his teeth and squeezed his eyelids together, trying to shut
+out the picture of P. C. Breagh in the character of a howling cad.
+
+"But if I bragged--and I did brag!--I worked....  The Marist Fathers
+had grounded me in French and German in spite of myself, and my pride
+had been nicely stung up by that failure for Sandhurst and the
+others....  Men told me what I'd got to grind at, and I ground;
+filling piles of lecture-pads with notes on all sorts of subjects.
+Anatomy, physiology, physics, chemistry, botany, and zoology....  My
+brain was a salad of 'em--but I passed the _Abiturienteti-Examen_ at
+a classical gymnasium with a better certificate than a lot of other
+Freshmen--thanks to the Marist Fathers, who'd pounded Latin and Greek
+into me!--and then--after two years of walking hospitals, attending
+demonstrations and lectures, and doing laboratory-work--varied by
+beers and _schläger_--and more beers and more _schläger_!--and
+perhaps I took to sword-play all the more kindly because of the
+soldier-blood in me!--came the first regular examination.  And I
+don't forget that third of November--not while I'm breathing!"
+
+
+_Donnerwetter_!  P. C. Breagh could see the cocked-hatted and
+scarlet-gowned University beadle ushering a pale young man, with
+saucers round his eyes, into the awful presence of the Dean, and
+Examiners in the Faculties of Surgery and Medicine....
+
+The neophyte--arrayed in the swallow-tail coat, low-cut vest, black
+cloth inexpressibles, white cravat, and kid gloves inseparable from
+an English dinner-party, or the ordeal of examination at a German
+university, found his inquisitors also in formal full dress, seated
+in a semicircle facing the door, and looking singularly cheerful.
+
+A solitary chair marked the middle of the chord of the arc formed by
+the chairs of the examiners.  Upon this stool of judgment--after
+bowing and shaking hands all round and being bowed to and shaken--the
+victim had been invited to seat himself.  The Dean opened the ball
+with the Early Theorists.  And he had seemed quite to cotton to P. C.
+Breagh's ideas on the subject of Egyptian Sacerdotal Colleges, the
+preparation of Soma in the Vedas, the therapeutical formulas of
+Zoroaster, Chinese sympathetic medicine--the dietetic method of
+Hippocrates--who invented barley-water!--the observations of Diocles
+and Chrysippus and the criticisms of Galen.  At the expiration of
+half an hour, when the Hofrath delivered him over to the next
+examiner, P. C. Breagh had felt that, if the others were no worse
+than the Dean, all might yet be well.
+
+Professor Barselius, who followed the Dean, and was reported to be a
+terror, when correctly replied to upon an interrogation as to the
+chemical composition of the fatty acids, vouchsafed a grunt of
+approbation.
+
+Professor Troppenritt, who succeeded Barselius, was a person with a
+reputation for amiability, and a mobility of mental constitution
+which enabled him to flit like the butterfly or leap like the
+grasshopper from subject to subject, harking back to Number One,
+perhaps, when you felt quite sure he had done with it for good.  But
+on that fateful third of November a tricksy demon seemed to possess
+Troppenritt.  He no longer flitted like the butterfly, or hopped like
+the grasshopper--he sported with the seven great departments of
+Structural Anatomy, Physiology, Pathological Anatomy, General
+Pathology, Ophthalmology, Medicine, Hygiene and Midwifery--as a
+fountain might toss up glass balls, or a conjurer juggle with
+daggers....  His victim after a while found himself breathlessly
+watching the hugh knobby rampart of forehead, behind which the
+Professor's intentions were hiding, in the vain hope that the next
+question might be foreshadowed on its shining surface.  A hope
+destined never to be fulfilled....
+
+The fact remains that P. C. Breagh, after some really creditable
+answers, was beginning to recover the use of his mental faculties,
+when the Dean--prompted by the candidate's evil genius--suggested a
+little pause for cake and wine.  It was awful to see how Hofrath and
+Professors--there were three of them besides the conjurer
+Troppenritt--enjoyed themselves at this sacrificial banquet, which
+had been arranged upon a little table in a corner, waiting the
+five-minute interval.  And P. C. Breagh rejected cake, which was of
+the gingerbread variety, garnished with blanched almonds and
+sugar-plums.  But the single glass of Rüdesheimer he accepted might
+have been the Brobdingnagian silver-mounted horn that hung within a
+garland of frequently-renewed laurel leaves upon the walls of a
+famous students' beer-hall--or have been filled with raw spirits
+above proof,--the contents mounted so unerringly to his head, and
+wreaked such havoc therein.
+
+The three remaining Professors were almost tender with the sufferer,
+but what Troppenritt had begun, the wine had completed.  The _nicht
+wahr's_ had been succeeding one another at marked intervals,--like
+distress-signals or funereal minute-guns, when the traditional three
+hours expired.
+
+P. C. Breagh--removed to cold storage in the anteroom--was detained
+but five minutes longer....  His nervous shiverings had reached a
+crescendo, when the beadle opened the door....  And the Dean,
+stepping forward, in staccato accents delivered himself:
+
+"Candidate, from the quality of the dissertations in writing
+previously submitted, we, the Faculty of Surgery and Medicine of the
+University of Schwärz-Brettingen--would a more satisfaction-imparting
+result have anticipated as the result of the just-concluded oral
+examination undergone by you....  But although lacking in
+_Gedächtniss_--has been manifested on your part a so-remarkable
+degree of _Einbildung_ and _Begriff_ that the Faculty
+of-hesitation-none-whatever have in the
+following-advice-to-you-imparting;--Yourself another semester give,
+or better still, another twelvemonth! and try again, young man!--try
+again!"
+
+Not bad advice, if the young man had chosen to follow it.  But
+January drew near, and the inheritor-expectant of seven thousand
+pounds scorned to toil and moil over intellectual ground already
+traversed.  He had tried for honors, and he had failed, thanks to the
+hypnotizing methods of the too-agile Troppenritt.
+
+So P. C. Breagh spent the money that would have kept him, with
+economy, for six months, in giving a farewell banquet to his friends;
+called--in his best attire, with kid gloves and a buttonhole
+bouquet--on his favorite lecturers; left cards on the wives of those
+who possessed them; paid his landlady--who had faithfully labored to
+convert his formal, class-room German into a malleable, useful
+tongue,--kissed her round cheek--tipped the civil servant-maid five
+dollars,--and turned his back for ever on Schwärz-Brettingen, its
+_Aula, Collegien-Haus, Theatrum Anatomicum_, Botanical Garden,
+Library and Career--(a correctional edifice the interior
+accommodations of which were only known to him by hearsay),--its
+restaurants, beer-saloons, coffee-gardens, and fencing-halls; its
+chilly wood-stoves, its glowing enthusiasms; its pleasant
+companionships, its passing flirtations with _schoppen_-bearing
+Hebes, and nymphs of the coffee-garden, restaurant, or ninepin alley.
+One cannot say its love-affairs, because in the esteem of P. C.
+Breagh--though Passion might bloom red by the wayside at every mile
+of a man's journey--Love was a rare blossom found once in a lifetime,
+too often never found at all.
+
+P. C. Breagh's idea of Love was that it should be spelt with a
+capital, and spoken of in whispers.  Nor, let us hint, was the ideal
+Woman at whose feet, he promised himself, he would one day pour forth
+all the gold and jewels of his heart and intellect, a being to be
+lightly trifled with.
+
+
+To commence with, she would have to be six feet high or
+thereabouts....  Blue-eyed, blonde-haired, of classical features,
+cream-and-rose complexion, powerful intellect and thews matching, the
+ideal woman of P. C. Breagh must have weighed about fourteen stone.
+He imagined her a kind of Britomart-Krimhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde--with
+a dash of Mary Queen of Scots, Kingsley's Hypatia, and a spice of
+Edith Dombey and the beautiful shrewish Roman Princess out of "The
+Cloister and the Hearth"--though these heroines were jetty-locked,
+and for this reason fell short of P. C. Breagh's ideal of female
+loveliness.  Fair and colossal, he had seen her over and over
+again,--though a little too roseate and pulpy in texture to come up
+to his ideal--in the vast canvases of Kaulbach and in the
+overwhelming frescoes of the Bavarian Spiess.  But he had never yet
+encountered her in the flesh.  One day they would meet--and she would
+be scornful of the young, obscure, unknown man who looked at her--she
+felt it from the first, and that made her quite furious!--with the
+eye of a consciously superior being--a master in posse.
+
+All the masculine world would bow down before the intellect combined
+with the beauty--of Britomart-Kriemhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde--and so on,
+for he amalgamated new heroines with the others, in the course of his
+reading.  But one man lived who would not bow down.  She would taunt
+him with this stiff-necked pride of his, in the course of an
+interview on the terrace of a castle, whose moat he had swum and
+whose guarded ramparts he had scaled in order to be discovered,
+scorning her, and communing with the moon.  And he would quell her
+tempestuous wrath, and silence her reproaches, by telling her that it
+was for her to pay homage and court smiles.  Then she would summon
+her vassals and lovers, and half a dozen of them would set upon P. C.
+Breagh, who would strangle one with his naked hands, run another
+through with his own sword--and provide materials, broadly speaking,
+for half a dozen first-class funerals--before he leapt into the moat,
+carrying a rose that she had dropped between his teeth---and "_gained
+the distant bank in safety,_" or "_dripping and bloody, emerged from
+the dark water, gripped an iron chain, eaten with the rust of
+centuries, and, painfully scaling the frowning masonry, disappeared
+into the..._" etc.
+
+Absurd, if you will, and bombastic and impossibly high-flown.  Yet
+such boyish dreams keep the soul clean and the body from grosser
+stain.  Walking with your head erect you may stub your toe, and come
+a cropper on the stones occasionally.  But you pick yourself up again
+and proceed more warily--none the less rejoicing, seeing the splendor
+of the sunset, or braving the blaze of noonday, or drinking in the
+delicate spring-like hues of dawn....
+
+One does not know how long P. C. Breagh might have remained upon the
+steps of St. Dunstan's, had not the hour of twelve sounded from the
+new clock--a youngster barely forty years old--that had replaced the
+gong-hammering wooden giants, now on view outside the Marquis of
+Hertford's villa in Regent's Park.  A constable civilly asked him to
+move on.  He got up, heavily, and mechanically felt for his watch
+that was in keeping of the landlord of the fourth-rate hostelry in
+the Euston Road.  And it occurred to him--as a pin-prick among
+innumerable stiletto strokes--that the watch alone, being a heavy
+silver one attached to a slender gold snake-chain once the property
+of dead Milly--would have satisfied the man's claim, which,
+exorbitant as it was for the accommodation afforded, was considerably
+under three pounds.  You are to understand that P. C. Breagh had been
+so certain of returning in a few hours, heavy with ready money, that
+he had treated the landlord's detention of his luggage as a joke.
+
+The present situation was no joke.  But Youth preserves above all the
+property of rising unbruised and elastic from a tumble, and of
+healing readily when it has sustained mental or physical wounds!
+
+The blood in the veins of P. C. Breagh was mingled with the finer
+strain that came from the breed of Fermeroy.  He had no idea of
+finding a craven's refuge in suicide.  The single shilling remaining
+to him might purchase sufficient strychnine for a painful, unheroic
+exit, but P. C. Breagh was not disposed to invest his remaining
+capital in that unpleasant alkaloid.  And neither did it occur to him
+then to test the depth and drowning-capacity of the muddy liquid
+running under any one of London's bridges, from Westminster to the
+Tower.  For by the contradictory law of Nature, reversing scientific
+fact, a helpless weight that hung about his strong young neck kept
+his moral head above the turbid waters of Despondency.
+
+
+He was not alone in the world.  There was Monica.  With the
+remembrance of that frail link, binding him to the rest of humanity,
+awakened in him the desire to see her.  He turned his face Westward
+and stepped into the moving throng.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+The Great Class fermented in irrepressible excitement.  Subsequently
+to the arrival of a foreign mail, Juliette Bayard had been summoned
+by an attendant lay-sister to the presence of Mère M. Catherine-Rose.
+
+She had remained nearly half an hour in the Parlor of Cold Feet--so
+called in recognition of the fact that the apartment contained no
+fireplace, and that even in the hottest weather cool draughts played
+hide-and-seek across the polished parquet from circular brazen
+gratings inserted in the wainscot, which ancient legend connected
+with the presence of a French _calorifère_.
+
+When the door opened and Juliette emerged, somewhere about the middle
+of the noon recreation, an advance-patrol in the shape of a pupil of
+the Little Class, by name Laura Foljambe--happened to be buttoning a
+shoe-strap at the end of the corridor.  The apoplectic attitude
+inseparable from this particular employment would have rendered
+observation impossible--in the case of an adult.  But Laura, under
+the cover of a luxuriant head of yellow ringlets, unconfined by any
+comb or ribbon, observed, firstly, that Juliette had been crying, and
+secondly, that Mère M. Catherine-Rose had tears in her own eyes.
+More, she had called Juliette back, embraced her affectionately, and
+said: "We shall miss you, my dear!"  "You will be brave, I know!" and
+"Remember to write!"  Packed with news, Laura rushed into the Lesser
+Hall, where the seniors were gathered round the stove, the raw chill
+of the January weather rendering the garden a place of penitence, and
+emptied her budget of intelligence upon the spot.
+
+Juliette must be going away!  The forty girls of the Great Class had
+unanimously arrived at this conclusion when Juliette herself arrived
+upon the scene.  It needed but a glance to assure her of the
+treachery of Laura; it needed but a moment, and the spy, blubbering
+and protesting, was seized, shaken, and forced upon her knees.
+
+You are to understand that when Juliette Bayard was angry, she was so
+with a vengeance.  Heroic by temperament, her wrath smacked of the
+superhuman.  A demi-goddess enraged might have manifested as
+semi-divine a frenzy.  Ordinary prose seemed too poor a vehicle to
+convey such indignation.  You expected hexameters or Alexandrines....
+
+"That you listened I would stake my honor!--I would pledge my
+life!--I would put the hand in the fire!  Mean!  Base!  Despicable!
+Ah, you look simple, little thing, but you are cunning as a
+mouse--fine as amber!  No!  I do not pinch, I would scorn it--you
+know that perfectly!  Yes!  I will permit you to go when you confess
+who set you on!"
+
+Laura, unwilling to incur the resentment of forty grown-ups,
+undesirous of forfeiting the saccharine reward of treachery, boohooed
+in a whisper, for class-hour was approaching.  The wrathful goddess
+towered over her, eyed with blue lightning, crowned with dusky clouds
+of thunder, flushed like the sunset that comes after the day of storm.
+
+Had Arthur Hughes or Fred Walker been privileged to peep--one painter
+at least would have armed her uplifted hand with a bulrush-spear,
+helmeted her with a curled water-lily leaf, and given the smiling
+world Titania in the character of Pallas Athene, or Queen Mab as an
+Amazon.  And Juliette would never have pardoned the painter.
+For--despite the testimony of her tale of inches--she would have it
+that she was tall, even above the average height of woman.
+
+"I shall not be beautiful, no! but I shall be commanding!" she had
+assured those favored girls on whom she deigned to bestow her
+imperial confidence.  This select number in turn possessing a circle
+of confidantes, the drop of a secret meant a series of widening
+rings, extending to the circle of the day scholars, reaching the
+Orphanage by-and-by, and trickling at length into the basement, where
+the Poor School assembled on Wednesdays and Fridays, to gather up the
+crumbs of knowledge that fell from the tables of the daughters of the
+great and rich.
+
+You may imagine the scene in Lesser Hall upon this chilly day in
+January.  Excitement was much more warming than crowding round the
+smoky stoves.  Of the semi-circle of great girls in their black
+school-dresses, enlivened only by the red or white class-rosettes, or
+the pale blue ribbons of the Children of Mary, all the heads, adorned
+with every shade of feminine tresses,--all the eyes of all colors,
+set in faces plain or pretty--were turned toward the tragic figure of
+Juliette.
+
+Once kindled, such violet fires of wrath blazed in those implacable
+eyes, one would have supposed nothing could ever quench them.  But
+when she was sorrowful, they were bottomless lakes of misery.
+Despair lay drowned and wan amid the long black sedges drooping at
+their borders.  Under the dark, hollowed precipices that shadowed
+them it seemed as though no sun could ever shine.  But when the laugh
+was born, it leaped to the surface with a quiver that caught the
+light and flashed it back pure sapphire or loveliest Persian
+turquoise.  No face ever framed of earthly clay had more of the mirth
+of Heaven in it, then.  Her long upper lip, the elastic, mobile
+feature that could draw out to so portentous a length, would be
+haunted by flying smiles, and the deep-cut corners of her short
+scarlet under lip would quiver.  To inventory the beauties of a young
+lady and omit the nose would suggest cause for reticence on the
+writer's part.  Juliette's nose was not of Greek or Roman type, but
+neither was it snubbed or tip-tilted.  It had a rounded end, and
+deep, curved, passionate nostrils.  It pertained to no known order of
+nasal architecture.  It was Juliette's nose, and could never have
+belonged to anybody else.
+
+If you would more of her,--and after the first encounter you either
+sought or shunned--loved or loathed--as she would have had you do who
+was in all things sincere and candid, you are to understand that her
+cloud of dusky hair framed a small oval face that made no show of
+carnation or vaunt of rose.  Her clear fine skin was almost always
+pale.  She would have laughed you to scorn had you likened those
+colorless cheeks of hers to lilies.  She prided herself upon a frame
+of mind eminently commonplace, antipodean to the romantic.  "I am
+sensible, me!" you often heard her say.
+
+In form--though as you know she believed herself to be a
+giantess--she was small and slight, and not at all remarkable.  A
+framework of slender bones, frugally covered with tender, healthful
+flesh.  Her shoulders sloped so much that in her loose-bodied,
+full-sleeved, black merino school uniform she seemed about to vanish.
+Her hips were narrow, without the voluptuous curves that belong to
+heroines.  But a Divine jest had added to her little high-arched head
+a tiny pair of rosy shells for hearing, and the palms and nails and
+finger-tips of her narrow hands,--and feet I have heard it said by
+some who loved her--were roseate also.  The younger children liked to
+pretend that this was a judgment on Juliette for stealing
+strawberries in the early June season, but she only joined in that
+one raid on the Sisters' kitchen-garden "To be a good comrade!" ...
+and as it happened, all the strawberries were slug-eaten.  And where
+are there strawberries worth the stealing, unless it be in France?
+
+For next to God and Our Lady, and her father M. le Colonel, Juliette
+Bayard loved her country.  Paradise was but an improvement on France,
+to hear her describe it to the little ones.  Further, though she had
+a perfect taste in dress, when released from the school uniform;
+though an ordinary hat under her deft transforming fingers would
+become a miracle of exquisite millinery; her groups of flowers, and
+landscapes, in water-color, her crayon dog's heads, were mercifully
+hidden from the drawing-master's eye.  She sang out of tune, but in
+time; played correctly, but hated the piano; danced like an
+air-wafted tuft of dandelion-down or a gnat upon a summer
+evening,--and had a Heaven-born gift for housekeeping and cookery.
+
+Of this last gift more anon.  Meanwhile Laura writhed, or seemed to
+writhe, under the torrent of passionate reproaches, culminating in
+another shake, and a slap which might have damaged a kitten
+newly-born.  Laura fell prone, moaning and gurgling.  And Juliette,
+pierced by remorse at her own ruthlessness, sank, pale as ashes,
+beside the victim's corse.
+
+"Darling Laura! sweetest Laura!--tell me I have not hurt you!  Just
+Heaven! how could I strike you?--I, who am so strong!  Indeed, I
+might have killed you! ...  Pray for me, my little angel!  It will
+need a miracle to cure my temper, as Mother Veronica constantly says.
+Cannot you get up?  Do try, to please me!  Tell me where you feel
+most injured?  Quick, or I know I shall be angry again! ... Show me
+the bruise!  Pouf! that is a mere nothing!  I will kiss it and make
+it well, and you shall have the blue bead Rosary."
+
+The mention of the blue beads palpably restored vitality.  The
+sufferer was understood to intimate that a chocolate elephant would
+absolutely complete the cure.
+
+"The elephant to-morrow when the Great Class return from the
+promenade.  The Rosary before Benediction.  Away with you!"
+
+Laura scuttled.  Juliette blew her a parting kiss, and said, with a
+comprehensive glance of scorn at the faces of her classmates:
+
+"It was not she who deserved the----  I have not the expression! ...
+It is one of your English words that mean many things together ... a
+kiss ... a blow ... the boat of a sailor who catches fishes and
+crabs....  I have seen such boats at Havre and Weymouth, and they are
+very pretty....  Ah!  Now I remember.  You call them fishing-spanks!"
+
+The Class shrieked.  Juliette stood calmly while the tumult of
+laughter and exclamations raged about her.  Her long upper lip shut
+down upon its scarlet neighbor, her brows frowned a little; her
+slender arms, lost in their loose sleeves, hung straightly by her
+narrow sides.  Millais would, seeing her, have painted a maiden
+martyr.  Watts might have limned her as Persephone new-loosed from
+the dark embrace of Dis, her wooer, taking her first timid steps upon
+the glowing floor of Hell.
+
+"When you have finished making so much noise--_peu importe_--but I
+have a piece of news to tell you.  You are none of you
+inquisitive--that goes without saying!--or you would not have
+dispatched that poor infant to play the spy outside the parlor door.
+Bridget-Mary and Alethea Bawne, I do not mean you--you are souls of
+honor--incapable of curiosity! ... Also, Monica Breagh, _c'est là son
+moindre defaut_!  But there are others--yet my friends--who are not
+so delicate,--and to these I address myself.  You do not deserve to
+hear--and yet I cannot be unkind to you; I, who have such joy of the
+heart in the knowledge that I am to return to my dear father!--such
+grief--ah! but such grief of the soul in bidding adieu to the School!"
+
+"Not for good?"
+
+"You are going to leave the School?"
+
+"Dear, darling Juliette, say you're only joking!"
+
+"She is in earnest.  Look at her upper lip!"
+
+"_Vous moquez-vous du monde de parler ainsi!_"
+
+Throbbed out a Spanish voice, husky and passionate:
+
+"_Qué vergüenza!  No, no, es imposible!_"
+
+"Sure, dear, you'd not be so cruel as to make game of us?"
+
+She stood her ground, firm, but no longer frowning.  Her heart
+swelled, her eyes were heavy with the promise of rain.  Her slender
+arms went out as though she would have embraced them all.
+
+"My dears, it is true!  I go to Versailles to rejoin my father.  He
+says to me also--I have his letter here!" ...
+
+Silence fell upon the turbulent crowd as she laid a slender hand on
+the place where her heart could be seen throbbing.  The paper
+rustled, but she did not draw it forth.
+
+"He says, in this--I am to be married ... soon,--very quickly!"
+
+A Babel of cries, ejaculations, and exclamations broke out about her.
+A girl's voice, more strident than the rest, shrieked:
+
+"I hate your father!  Beast!" and broke down in hysterical sobbing.
+Juliette replied, those about her hushed to hear; and in the oasis of
+silence her tender, silvery voice rose like a fountain springing from
+the heart of purity.
+
+"My father is not what you say, but the Emperor's brave soldier and a
+noble gentleman.  I am proud to obey when he commands!  He has said
+to me that I am to be married, and does he not know what is best for
+me?  Would he wish to bring unhappiness upon his Juliette?"
+
+She was not so much loyal as Loyalty personified, standing there
+defending him; with her little hand keeping down her bursting heart
+of anguish, and salt lakes of unshed tears pent up behind her
+sorrowful sapphire eyes....  Her voice broke as she said "his
+Juliette," and one of the Bawnes, a stately, black-browed girl,
+answered, speaking in French:
+
+"He would not if he is--what you have described him! ... But--unless
+you knew of this before--it is so sudden....  It would seem to argue
+that M. le Colonel was thinking more--you will not be offended!--of
+the happiness of his future son-in-law than of his daughter's----"
+
+"_Non, non, non!_"  She made an emphatic gesture with her little
+hand, and shook her head so that a tear fell from her lashes on the
+bosom of her black school-dress, "Dear Lady Biddy--you are mistaken.
+For--comprehend you?--my happiness is in obeying that beloved father,
+always.  For me, there is no greater joy....  And his letter bears
+date of the New Year--three days since--behold the postmark.  It is
+the custom to give young people étrennes at that season--my father
+bestows on me a husband, and I am--content!  See you well?"
+
+It was faulty English, yet Juliette's "See you well?" haunted the
+music-loving ear.
+
+And now even the reserved began to question, while the frankly
+curious waxed importunate concerning the date of Mademoiselle
+Bayard's impending departure, the name, rank and personal appearance
+of the mysterious husband-elect, the number and uniform of his
+regiment.  For, of course, he was certain to be an officer of
+Cavalry, Dragoons, Lancers, or Cuirassiers.  That he must be handsome
+went without saying; but were his eyes dark or light, and did he wear
+a moustache only, or sport the hirsute ornament in conjunction with
+an imperial?  Beset from all quarters, Juliette was beginning to lose
+command of herself, when the hour of two struck from the great clock
+in the corridor.
+
+The clang-clang of an iron bell succeeded, the double doors at the
+upper end of the Hall rolled backward, uniting the Great and the
+Middle Classes in the religious exercise that opened afternoon
+School.  The hymn sung, the brief litany chanted to an accompaniment
+played on the harmonium by a mistress in the purple habit and creamy
+veil of the choir-sisters, another nun approached Juliette and
+whispered in her ear.
+
+She was to go to the dormitory and pack her trunk, which would
+presently be brought her by one of the lay-sisters.  And this done,
+she was free to spend the half-hour previous to Benediction in the
+parlor with----
+
+The name was lost in Juliette's embrace and kiss of gratitude.  She
+was usually chary of caresses, perhaps she wished to hide her eyes.
+
+They were fairly overflowing, poor eyes! when their owner gained the
+solitude of her white-draped cubicle in the Greats' dormitory.  Once
+the curtains fell behind her she was free to fall upon her knees
+beside the bed and sob there, to call upon Our Lady for succor and
+pity, to rock herself and hug her bleeding heart.  And all these
+things Juliette did, until the dull thump of felt shoes upon the
+shining boards betokened the arrival of the lay-sister, bearing the
+oilskin-covered dress-basket, disinterred from some below-stairs
+repository, which had to be filled from the locker, dress-hooks, and
+drawers.
+
+Ten minutes had been devoured in grief, forty yet remained for
+packing.  A lover of method in all things, frugal and prudent in the
+expenditure of resources ("_I am sensible, me!_"), Juliette was
+economical of time.  Ten minutes might be spared to re-perusal of the
+letter that had set her faith in that dearest father rocking like a
+palm in tempest, and wrung such tears of anguish from the heart that
+worshiped him.
+
+She drew the bulky envelope from its pure hiding-place, kissed it,
+and moaned a little.  There were three sheets of thin foreign note,
+flourished over in a big, bold, soldierly hand.  The date bore
+evidence that the letter had been penned on the Eve of Saint
+Sylvestre, answering to our New Year's Eve.  The address was:
+
+
+  "_Barracks of the 777th Regiment,_
+    "_Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard,_
+      "_Versailles._
+
+"_My Daughter,_
+
+"_Of news thy father has not much to tell thee that thou wouldst find
+of the most interesting, save that of the fashions prevailing in
+Paris at the moment, the most daring and eccentric is the little hat
+or miniature bonnet, tilted forward upon the forehead by the chignon,
+and spangled with beetles, dragon-flies, and other brilliant insects.
+Jeweled birds, yachts in full sail, or baskets of flowers, dangle
+from the ears of all the feminine world!_
+
+"_The Empress is as beautiful as even she could wish to be.  I saw
+her driving a pair of little thoroughbred mares in the low
+park-phœton yesterday in the Bois, near the Rond des Cascades.
+She was so gracious as to recognize me--though I was in civilian
+riding-dress--and beckoned me with her parasol-whip from the line of
+equestrians respectfully mustered on the left side of the road.  She
+patted the gray Mustapha--thou wilt be glad thy horse was so
+honored!--and asked if I was quite recovered of the wound I received
+at Solferino,--proving that an Imperial memory can be conferred with
+the hand that raises to Imperial rank.  Later on I met Dumas, and--at
+the corner of the Rue Laffitte--Baron Rothschild and Cham, the
+caricaturist--and there thou hast a résumé of the encounters of the
+day._
+
+"_Do political matters really interest thee?  Learn, then, a new
+Ministry is in formation by M. Emile Ollivier--a 'homogeneous
+cabinet,' is to be drawn chiefly from the Left Center in the Corps
+Législatif.  My father's friend, M. le Général Lebœuf, Minister of
+War, retains the post he held in the expired Administration.  M. le
+Maréchal Vaillant continues as Minister of the Emperor's Household.
+Haussmann has fallen! his ten thousand hands will no longer scatter
+gold from the Imperial Treasury.  The last announcement emanating
+from the Prefecture of the Seine gave notice that the cemeteries of
+Mont-Parnasse, Montmartre, Ivry, and others are to be seized by the
+municipality in 1871.  All the private monuments are to be withdrawn
+before the first of April....  With what sorrow of heart these tragic
+removals will be effected thou wilt realize, who hast so often
+accompanied thy father, bearing wreaths to lay upon thy grandmother's
+tomb at Père Lachaise.  Pray that the necessity to find a home for
+those sacred, beloved ashes may not devolve upon us._
+
+"_Thou must know that in October, during the maneuvers at the camp of
+Châlons, a new and terrible weapon was placed in the hands of the
+Imperial army of France.  It is the _Mitrailleuse_, conceived by the
+brain of De Reffye--an invention worthy to rank with that of the
+Chassepôt rifle, which fulfilled such great expectations the first
+time the weapon was used in action, at Mentana, against the
+Garibaldians.  How shall I describe it?  I will say, briefly, that it
+is a rifled, breech-loading gun of from fourteen to twenty-nine
+barrels; that it has as many locks as barrels; that it can be
+transported from place to place by two men, and fired by one, who
+manipulates a lever, sitting upon a saddle attached to the
+gun-carriage.  And that it is a mill that grinds--a machine that
+hails--death upon an enemy.  Armed with batteries of these invincible
+weapons, the march of an invading army would be irresistible!_
+
+"_Two of these marvelous guns have been by the Imperial favor
+bestowed upon our regiment.  The men baptized them in wine by the
+names of Didi and Bibi.  They are treated as regimental infants, and
+thrive exceedingly well._
+
+"_My child, whether this news will make thee sad or joyful it must be
+that Juliette joins her father here at Versailles not later than on
+the twentieth of the month of January.  Madame la Supérieure will
+supply thee with funds in exchange for the enclosed note of credit
+furnished me by my bankers.  Purchase thyself--on arriving in
+Paris--for certainly the modes of London will never content a taste
+so fastidious--some fresh and charming toilettes of the evening,
+costumes for the house, theater or promenade, and suitable lingerie.
+Last, but not least, bring a marriage-robe, crown and veil.  I am not
+joking, I assure thee!  For my daughter I have found a husband.  A
+young man, sincere, upright, honorable, and a good Catholic, whom I
+have known from boyhood, whom my child will love as a wife should;
+and by whom she will be adored and cherished.  Thou knowest Charles
+Tessier, the son of my mother's widowed friend, the estimable Madame
+Tessier, whom we have visited in the Rue de Provence, Versailles!
+Charles has succeeded to his father's large businesses at Paris,
+Lyons, and in Belgium, as a manufacturer of woolen dress-materials,
+the pattern Écossais, so much in favor with S.M. the Empress and the
+belles of the Imperial Court, having been imported, woven and
+supplied by this wise, enterprising and energetic young man.
+Who--but it will be for his wife to perceive and praise his many
+excellencies.  I leave thee to the pleasant task of discovering them._
+
+"_My Juliette, if so much of thy father mingles in thy nature that of
+all careers this of a soldier seems to thee the noblest--if the
+pursuit and attainment of military glory--distinctions won upon the
+field of War, appeal to thee--as Heaven knows they have to me!--since
+my blood first learned to thrill at the roll of the drum--and leap at
+the sound of the trumpet--if thou hast pictured in thy innocent
+mind--loved in thy spotless dreams--some brave and noble officer
+chosen for thee by him who now writes--tear the picture!--forget the
+dream!  For when such dreams become realities they are--how often
+rudely shattered by the rush and shock of armies meeting in the
+blood-stained field of War!_
+
+"_My dear, War is a monster composed of flesh, and iron, and steel,
+that like the dragon or chimera of classical mythology--devours the
+hopes of virgins and the happiness of matrons, and leaves children
+orphans and homes heaps of dust.  Thou rememberest thy grandmother?
+She had been married just five years when my father reddened with his
+heart's blood the soil of Algeria.  Yet when I wished to follow the
+profession of arms she did not endeavor to dissuade me.  She hid her
+anguish as only mothers can, but her beloved life was shortened by
+anxiety undergone during the terrible war of the Crimea; that war so
+protracted, so disastrous to our brave ally of England--so fraught
+with loss and suffering to the more fortunate army of France.  And
+that was not the only blow Fate dealt me while I served as
+_aide-de-camp_ upon the staff of M. le Maréchal Grandguerrier.  Thou
+dost not know as yet!--one day I may find courage to tell thee....
+Even a soldier may shrink from baring wounds that are of the soul._
+
+"_My daughter, I have never spoken to thee of thy mother....  The
+time has arrived when----_"
+
+The sixteen words were lined out by a heavy stroke of the quill.  The
+closing sentences were----
+
+"_In the event of War abroad--taking thy father from thee--perhaps to
+lay his bones in a trench hastily dug by peasants in some foreign
+province!--or in the event of War at home,--sudden,
+unexpected--sweeping as a cataclysm over thy native soil, thou wilt
+believe me, my Juliette, when I tell thee this marriage would be
+absolutely for the best!  Living or dead, for me to know thee safe
+and cherished, here at Versailles with thy husband Charles and his
+estimable mother, would be happiness....  Wilt thou consent to the
+union?  Wilt thou obey thy father, who loves thee as his soul?  One
+finds this a scrawl which will prove difficult to decipher.  As thou
+knowest, I am a better artist with the sword than with the pen._
+
+"_Written here at my new quarters, which comprise a sleeping chamber
+and boudoir elegantly furnished, suitable for a young lady of
+refinement; and a little kitchen, full of pots and bright pans._
+
+  "_Thy father,_
+    "_HENRI-ANTOINE-ALBERT DE BAYARD,_
+      "_Colonel Commandant._"
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Will it not be admitted that a letter such as this was calculated to
+cause a flutter of agitation in the meekest feminine bosom?  To be
+recalled from School before the completion of the tiresome process
+technically known as "finishing," that was matter for rejoicing.  The
+little bedroom-boudoir in the Colonel's quarters at the Cavalry
+Barracks, "elegantly furnished, suitable for a young lady of
+refinement," presented an alluring picture, the tiny kitchen, "full
+of pots and bright pans," charmed....
+
+For Mademoiselle de Bayard, going back to her Colonel after two
+years' absence, laden as the working-bee with the honey of
+accomplishments and the well-kneaded wax of useful knowledge,
+promised herself that it should not be long before her idol should be
+convinced by practical demonstration that his Juliette had not
+forgotten how to cook.  Irish stew, saddle-of-mutton with
+onion-sauce, pancakes, Scotch collops, English plum-pudding and
+mince-pies had been added to her lengthy list of recipes, by grace of
+the Convent cook, Sister Boniface, who had permitted the ardent
+amateur to experiment in a second kitchen, used in hot weather,
+abutting on the garden, and not regarded as a portion of the nuns'
+enclosure.
+
+To return, and resume the old dear life of companionship, how sweetly
+welcome had been the summons.  But nothing could disguise the taste
+of the powder that came after the jam.
+
+You are to conceive the struggle in Juliette's faithful heart between
+obedience and anger.  Marry, my faith! yes!  Every sensible young
+girl naturally expected to be married; but a husband approved of by
+oneself, if selected by one's father--that was what one had had
+reason to expect.
+
+And this Charles, eulogized as wise, sensible, far-seeing, and
+business-like.  Were these qualities, though naturally desirable in
+the estimation of a father-in-law, attributes that weighed down the
+scale in the opinion of a bride?  Had one ever beheld him?  She shut
+her eyes and summoned up all the masculine faces in her gallery of
+mental portraits, dismissing one after the other with no's, and no's,
+and no's! ... Was it not horrible to have to admit even to oneself
+that one had not the faintest recollection of ever having seen or
+spoken to him?  Madame Tessier she remembered well as a little,
+stout, very _gentille_ and amiable, elderly lady, whom she had
+visited with M. le Colonel, who had embraced one cordially, and
+insisted on one's partaking--immediately and at great length--of a
+collation of sandwiches, fruit, cakes, and syrups; excellent--and to
+a hungry school-girl, welcome at any hour of the day.  What more? ...
+Ah, yes!  Madame had much deplored Charles's absence, possibly at
+Lyons or in Belgium.  Further, Madame had remarked to M. le Colonel:
+
+"My friend, your Juliette is the image of her beloved grandmother!"
+
+"Will nobody ever say that I am like my mother?" Juliette had gaily
+cried.  And with a strange stiff smile, the Colonel had answered for
+Madame Tessier,--who at that juncture had opportunely upset a dish of
+little sugar-cakes.
+
+"There have been moments, my child, when I have"--he coughed rather
+awkwardly for M. le Colonel--"anticipated that a resemblance might
+exist."
+
+Could he have been on the verge of saying "feared," and substituted
+the other word at the last moment?  Such an idea was ridiculous, yet
+it had occurred to Juliette.
+
+To questions on the subject of the faintly remembered mother the
+grandmother had been impervious.  The Colonel had always
+answered--yet with palpable reticence....
+
+"You have no mother, my little Juliette; she was taken from us, my
+child, while I was absent with the Army in the Crimea," or "She left
+us, while yet I was detained in Eastern Russia, serving as aide upon
+the staff of M. le Maréchal Grandguerrier....  It is true, she was
+both good and beautiful when I married her!  Now run and play!"  Or,
+in later years: "Now come and read to me!" or "Walk with me," or
+"Ride with me," or "Now tell me how and where thou didst learn to
+turn out such savory dishes with those tiny _pattes de mouche_ of
+thine?  Nowhere is there a _chef_ whose choicest efforts can com-pare
+with my Juliette's.  And I have dined with the Emperor--and with
+Milord Hertford at Bagatelle--and with Consul-General Baron
+Rothschild--and--_parole d'honneur!_--I have told them so!"
+
+And all the time M. le Colonel had been keeping back something....
+Was it not strange, thought Juliette, that, while upon the
+anniversary of the _Jour des Mort_ Mass had invariably been offered
+for all deceased relatives of the De Bayard family, the actual date
+of the death of one so young and beautiful had never been marked with
+special solemnity.
+
+Could it be that the lost mother was not dead, but living!  Oh, but
+impossible! ... And yet--once awakened, the doubt would never sleep
+again....
+
+
+Did ever a girl receive such a letter?  It was fuller of darts than
+even the fabled porcupine.  It awakened stinging doubts of the
+kindness of the gentlest and tenderest of fathers.  "_Tear the
+picture!--forget the dream!_" he had said.  Ah, my Heaven! what young
+girl cherishes not such images--such visions! ... Juliette wondered
+sorrowfully.  Sitting on her school locker, lost in thought, her
+elbows on her knees, her little pointed chin cupped in the slender
+hands, you saw her as a haggard, weary little creature.  For while
+joy made of Juliette a living rainbow, grief transformed her to the
+wan and rigid nymph that droops above a classic urn upon a mourning
+cameo; and anxiety or suspense or remorse of soul set a changeling in
+her place, wizened her, pinched her, struck her prematurely old.
+
+She might--to employ hyperbole--have been sitting on her locker until
+the present hour, had not her sad eyes lighted upon a colored
+photograph of M. le Colonel in full military harness and equipment,
+contained in a little ivory frame fastened by a safety-pin to one of
+the starched white dimity curtains that imparted an air of select
+privacy to the little white-covered dormitory bed.
+
+You are to behold Juliette's father--_per_ medium of this
+pen-portrait--and would that you might have heard his cordial voice,
+and pressed his living hand....  Conceive him as a little man; and
+somewhat stout and paunchy; you would never have dared to term him so
+in the presence of Juliette.  And yet so manly, soldierlike and
+ingratiating was the boldly-featured face, with its brave eyes,
+curled moustache and imperial; the fur talpack with the green and
+scarlet plume and the red Hussar bag, was worn with such an air; the
+dolman of fine green cloth, laced and corded with heavy _galons_ of
+silver and faced with the brilliant red of his silver-striped
+pantaloons, fitted his compact round person with such creaseless
+tightness; his silver-striped _ceinture_, belts and buckles were so
+_point-device_; his spurred Hessian boots graced such neat small
+feet; his right hand rested on his hip, his left upon the hilt of his
+long saber, with so pleasant a grace, that you could not but warm to
+this picture of a cavalry commander.
+
+His daughter melted even as she gazed.  The generous soul, once
+wrought to the pitch of heroism, piles sacrifice on sacrifice.  She
+had meant to temporize, but she would not do so now.  She began to
+comprehend, as stray sentences of the father's letter floated back,
+that his mood had been sorrowful when he wrote it; and that those
+wounds of the soul he spoke of had been bleeding, though hidden from
+his daughter, many a year....  He was never sentimental; that
+sentence about laying his bones in a trench hastily dug by peasants
+in a foreign province had been struck from the steel of his nature by
+some flint hurled from the sling of Fate.  The words that followed,
+picturing War,--sudden, unexpected, sweeping as a cataclysm over the
+country,--had the solemnity of deep organ-notes.  And the rushing
+tenderness in the words, "_Living or dead, to know thee safe and
+cherished!_" thrilled, and the dignity of the entreaty touched and
+conquered: "_Wilt thou obey thy father, who loves thee as his soul?
+..._"
+
+You saw light and warmth and youth and loveliness visibly flowing
+back into her as she looked at the picture.  The witches' changeling
+fled, a christened maiden remained in her place.  Words came to the
+lips that had been dumb, dews of tenderness bathed the eyes that had
+been dry as those of a sandstone statue in the Theban desert....
+
+"Dearest--beloved--best! ... Oh! shame that I should have dreamed of
+doubting you! ... There is some great reason for this
+decision--something terrible behind this haste of yours.  What, I may
+not know now!--one day all will be explained to me! ... Until
+then"--she rose and kissed the portrait--"until then I will trust
+you--who have never deceived me....  I will write to you as you would
+wish me to this very night.  Now I must pack, and then go down to
+Monica....  How to answer if she should question! ... but no, she
+never will!"
+
+Dismissing the phantom of Charles, faceless and bodiless, but none
+the less terrible, she flew at the locker--pulled out the three
+drawers--stripped the row of regulation dress-pegs.  Brushing,
+smoothing, and folding, she even sang as she worked....  Presently a
+bell rang twice.  It was yet vibrating where it hung, on the
+passage-landing at the dormitory stair-head, when Juliette passed on
+her way to the guest-parlor.  Monica was waiting there.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+A tall slight figure in the plain black, tight-fitting gown of a
+novice, made with a little cape covering the upper arm.  A sweet
+plain face with eyes of hazel brown, framed in a close white cap with
+three rows of gophered frills, and there you have Monica, the chosen
+friend of the fiery Juliette.
+
+"She has not three ideas!  How can you think so much of her?" a
+jealous rival is reported to have said.
+
+Juliette retorted with a lightning riposte:
+
+"Possibly no more than three, but they are good ones!"  She marked
+them off on her tiny fingers.  "First, to serve God....  Again,--to
+serve her friends....  Once more--to help her enemies! ... If not,
+how is it that she spent two hours yesterday, working with you at
+that F major fugue in Bach's Book of Forty-eight? ... Has not that
+stopped you the whistle? ... I have eyes in my head, see you well?
+_Pour tout dire_--you are an ingrate, you!"
+
+"See you well!" could be a slogan on occasion, a blood-chilling note
+heralding the shock of battle.  But it came now in the softest of
+dove-notes, as they hurried to meet each other, clasped hands, and
+kissed.
+
+"Dear one, I am so glad!  See you well, we have a whole half-hour to
+spend together....  And there is so much to tell you that I know not
+where to begin." ... She drew back frowning a little, vexed that
+Monica was not alone.  "I entreat your pardon! ... I did not know you
+entertained a visitor....  It is best that I retire....  I fear I
+am.... how do you say? ... very much in the road!"
+
+Monica explained, holding the big red hand of an awkward young man in
+a shaggy greatcoat.
+
+"You are not in the way, dear--and this is not a visitor!  Let me
+introduce my brother, of whom you have heard.  Caro, this is my
+friend, Mademoiselle de Bayard."
+
+The shaggy young man, blushing savagely to the tips of his ears and
+the roots of his flaming hair, made a clumsy inclination, and offered
+the large red paw to Mademoiselle, who gravely inspected it, drawing
+down her upper lip, folding her own infinitesimal hands before her
+narrow waist, but made no movement to take it.
+
+"He has angry eyes, with curious amber _taches_ in them, ..." she
+thought.  "And he looks dusty as a voyager after a long travel....
+Not _bien tenu_ as a gentleman should be....  Living with Germans in
+Germany--he has become indifferent to the _petits soins_ of the
+toilet.  I would put the hand in the fire rather than tell
+Monica!--but, for me, I find him horrible.  What is he saying?  One
+would expect from a being so clumsy and so shaggy, not merely speech,
+but a roar!"
+
+Yet the voice was fresh and rather pleasant, as he replied to
+Monica's interested questions.  Had he had a good journey? ... How
+long had he been in London? ... Three days, and never let her know?
+... Why not? ... Had he dined early, or lunched, and if not--he had
+been understood to mumble a negative,--would he not have something
+now?  Tea and sandwiches--Sister Boniface would cut the latter in a
+minute.  It was only three o'clock.  Benediction wasn't until
+four--there would be heaps of time....
+
+The mumbled refusals grew faint.  Monica smiled her triumph.  Intent
+on hospitality she hurried out of the parlor, saying with a backward
+glance, and a smile halved between sulky Carolan and somber Juliette:
+"Sit down!--talk to each other ... I'll soon be back again!..."
+
+But the sound of the closing door smote the shaggy youth with a dumb
+palsy and transformed Mademoiselle de Bayard into the semblance of a
+large mechanical doll in black merino.
+
+"Stiff, pale, proud little creature!" Carolan mentally termed her.
+It occurred to him that, attired in a brocade Court dress over a
+hooped farthingale, crowned with a wig of stiffened ringlets adorned
+with lace and ribbons and diamond powder, with a fan in one of those
+rigid little hands, she might have sat to Velasquez as a child
+Infanta.  Or, upholstered and decked in Moorish finery, posed as one
+of the female midgets in the royal group of the Familia.  Whatever
+Velasquez might have thought, she was priggish, prudish, dull,
+doltish....  Obstinate, too, with that long, deeply-channeled upper
+lip.  And how persistently she kept those long, thick, uncurling
+lashes down.  One wondered rather what might be the color of the eyes
+so concealed?  Black or brown?  Or--one had had a gleam of blue when
+for an instant she had looked at one.  Nobody cared--but perhaps they
+were blue?
+
+She made no movement to sit down, nor did she indicate a desire that
+he should seat himself.  She flickered her somber eyelids for an
+instant, and the eyes seemed inky-black.  Burnt holes in a blanket,
+the observer brutally termed them, lifting his mental gaze to the
+china-blue orbs of his ideal, the colossal
+Britomart-Kriemhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde.
+
+In contempt of the prim puppet in the black merino he found himself
+adding inches to his loved one's height.  Or perhaps it was to keep
+himself from madly shouting to Monica to tell them to hurry up with
+that tray....
+
+When you have pawned your jacket and waistcoat for two-and-eightpence
+early on Wednesday, and have dined on a sausage and mashed for
+threepence, supped on a drink of water from a pump in a livery-stable
+yard....  When the bed at a coffee-house has cost you a shilling,
+breakfast of burned-bread coffee and roll, threepence, and you have
+spent twopence on a paper collar, your remaining capital stands at a
+shilling, and by three o'clock on Thursday, if you have not ventured
+to break into this, you are beginning to return to the savage of the
+Earlier Stone Age.  Who, supposing his neighbor to be gnawing a lump
+of gristle when his own stomach was clamorous, dropped in upon the
+banquet armed with a flint axe, and possessed himself of the coveted
+_bonne-bouche_.
+
+P. C. Breagh was frankly astonished at the savage voracity of his own
+impulses.  It did not occur to him that his nerves--he had always
+jeered at men who had talked of their nerves--had sustained a
+tremendous shock, and that this was the inevitable reaction.  His
+laboriously crammed scientific knowledge had never yet been called
+upon to account for his own bodily sensations--unless in the case of
+a jammer headache--diagnosed as the result of too many beers
+overnight.  At any rate he was not hungry now,--and the room with its
+stiff row of chairs, its high-molded ceiling, its dingy blue
+distempered walls, hung with engravings of Popes and Cardinals, Roman
+views, and Scriptural oil-paintings, began to heave and surge like
+the decks of the evil-smelling, second-rate passenger-steamer that
+had brought him third-class from Ostend.  He thought of that old man
+with the shattered skull sprawling among his bloody papers, and knew
+that in another moment he should--horror of horrors! despite the
+presence of yonder speechless Immobility in the fiddle-bodied black
+frock and medaled blue neck ribbon--either faint or be violently sick.
+
+He chose the first alternative, for the whole room, with its faded
+gilt mirrors, its album-laden tables, its formal rows of chairs
+skirting the wainscot, the little mats in front of them, and the
+beeswaxed floor on which with growing difficulty he maintained a
+perpendicular position, melted away from about and from under him,
+letting him sink down, down ... into bottomless, boundless abysses of
+intangible gray mist....
+
+Out of which, after an interval of a hundred years or three minutes,
+he emerged sufficiently to say in a husky whisper:
+
+"It's nothing!  I'm all----"
+
+And then be swallowed up again.  Coming to the surface in another æon
+or so to ask, with a wince of pain:
+
+"Did the old fellow shoot me in the head?  It--hurts like the
+dickens!"
+
+And to receive the answer in a cool little silvery voice like the
+playing of a fountain in a mossy basin at the end of a green alley,
+or the trickle of a brook through lush grasses and forget-me-not beds.
+
+"You knocked the floor with it when you made to fall so suddenly!"
+Something cool and light touched his aching forehead, and the voice
+went on again: "It does not bleed, no! but there will certainly be
+one big bump there!"
+
+"One bump....  Feels like one-and-twenty!" P. C. Breagh muttered,
+adding, with a heave and struggle that brought him into a sitting
+posture: "Help me up, whoever you are! ... Not all at once....
+_Donnerwetter!_ how giddy I am!  Try again in a minute! ... Here!
+... Give me hold of your fist!"
+
+The silvery voice said, with a liquid tremble in it that might have
+been laughter or shyness:
+
+"But I do not comprehend--_feesth_!  Permit that I offer you the
+hand....  I am so very strong, me!"
+
+"Strong, eh?" P. C. Breagh said vacantly, being still absorbed in the
+effort to remember where he was.  He was certainly sitting up on a
+shiny, cold and slippery floor, leaning back against something warm
+and fragrant and soft, but he had not the least notion as to the
+nature of the support afforded him, nor did he associate the
+ownership of the voice with any person previously met.
+
+"Strong!..." he repeated, and yawned, and could not leave off
+yawning.  "_Physical exhaustion, fatigue, and lack of food,_" he
+mentally diagnosed, and found that, when his eyes had left off
+blinking and watering, the room was coming back.  There were the
+Popes, Cardinals, and views of Roman Basilicas; there the
+oil-paintings of sacred subjects--there the dingy gilt mirrors, the
+round center-table with books upon it, the oval one with an inkstand
+and nothing more,--the formal rows of chairs, instantly reviving the
+impression of a Convent parlor ... and stimulating him to rise, after
+some slips and sprawls and flounders, and stand upright on the
+beeswaxed boards, smiling rather stupidly and clutching something
+small and soft and sentient, for it fluttered in his big inclosing
+palm as a captive titmouse or robin might have done....
+_Donnerwetter!_ it was the hand whose aid he had asked a moment
+before in his extremity....  A child's....  No!--a girl's....  Who
+was the girl? ...
+
+The truth burst on him then that it was to the mechanical doll, the
+stiff, pale, proud, absurd little creature, the Infanta of the
+drooping eyelids, the Moorish pigmy, he owed the help the little hand
+had given.  The silvery, sweet voice was hers, and against her he had
+leaned as he sat on the floor gathering in his scattered
+faculties....  The light touch that had visited his aching forehead,
+when she had said it did not bleed, had soothed him like the contact
+of a flower.  The sweetness of the voice was in his ears again....
+
+"Will you not sit down?  You are not strong, and should manage your
+forces.  A gentleman to faint like that I have never before seen!
+Your sister will be grieved that you----"
+
+"You are not to tell her!"  He dropped heavily into the chair she had
+brought, and made a feebly-emphatic blow at the table near which she
+had set it.  "Promise me! ... I--I must ask you to be good enough....
+Who has gone and unbuttoned my coat?"
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+The pitiable secret the shaggy garment had concealed, the absence of
+jacket and waistcoat, bringing his hidden poverty into horrible
+relief, the dinginess of the shirt of two days' wear, the deceptive
+nature of the paper collar purchased at an outlay of twopence, had
+been revealed by some traitorous hand during his unguarded weakness
+of a moment back.  The color rushed back to his haggard young face in
+flood, as with shaky fingers he wedded the big horn buttons to their
+buttonholes, and felt about his neck to find it wet....  Juliette had
+said to herself that he had angry eyes.  They were tigerish as they
+flamed at her.  Then the yellow flame died out of them and they were
+nothing but gray and miserable.  He said brokenly:
+
+"I--beg your pardon!  I must seem the last thing out in the way of a
+brute to you.  I had--fainted or something!--I've been through a lot
+of late!  And you meant to--be kind, I'm sure...."
+
+He had thought her a mere child in size, but her personal dignity
+lent her height and presence.  Her great eyes met his full, and they
+were deeply blue as scillas in May, with great black pupils and
+velvety-black bands about the irises.  She said in an icy little
+voice:
+
+"Sir, it is customary in these days to instruct young ladies in the
+knowledge of imparting medical aid to the sick or wounded.  A moment
+since I saw you fall to the floor!  I lanced myself to your side!--I
+debuttoned your paletot--sprinkled on your forehead water from that
+vase upon the table,"--she indicated the ornament with an
+infinitesimal forefinger,--"and in a few minutes I have the relief to
+behold you sufficiently recovered to demand if a man has shooted you?
+... Naturally, I do not mean to be unkind!  But the promise not to
+speak of this to Mademoiselle, your sister, see you well?--I cannot
+give it!  Young ladies"--there was an appalling stateliness about the
+tone and manner of this delivery, worthy of a mistress of
+deportment--"young _ladies_ do not have secrets with strange young
+gentlemen!  And Monica is my dear friend, not you!"
+
+"Then if she is so much a friend of yours, you would wish to spare
+her knowledge of things certain to shock and grieve her.  You would
+not like to have her anxious and worried about what she couldn't
+help, would you?"  His eyes constrained and besought.  His voice was
+humbly entreating....
+
+Juliette recognized the cunning in this appeal.  She lowered her
+little pointed chin and leveled her thick straight eyelashes at the
+speaker.  "Yes!" the chin said: "No!" the eyelashes replied.  Thus
+encouraged, P. C. Breagh had an inspiration.
+
+"But if I trust you!--you look as if you could be trusted...."
+
+From her little neck in its plain white frill to the cloud of dusky
+hair that crowned her, she flushed rosy as Alpine snows at sunset.
+Did he mean to insult, or ingratiate, this overbearing, shaggy youth?
+She said, with delicate reproof, completely lost upon his bluntness:
+
+"My father has honored me with his confidence, as long as I can
+remember, sir."
+
+"Then I'll risk mine with you!" said P. C. Breagh.
+
+"Not risk!"  She had lost her glow, the sapphires of her eyes were
+shadowed by the blackness of the lowered lashes.  "Do not say risk,
+for that is to gamble.  See you--I will be trusted absolutely, or I
+will not be trusted at all!"
+
+He understood, in part, that he had wounded, and awkwardly begged her
+pardon, ending: "And show that you forgive me by letting me tell you
+that I wouldn't have my sister know, for the world!"  He got up and
+went to one of the white-curtained, ground-glass-filled windows, that
+masked the outlook upon Kensington Square, and said still more
+awkwardly:
+
+"You see--you must have already seen from my togs--that I am a
+beggar.  I came back from Germany three days ago to find myself one.
+I was to receive a fortune from the hands of trustees, and I found
+that their firm had gone bankrupt.  The elder partner had committed
+suicide--the younger had shot the moon.  My thousands in his
+pockets!"  He ground his teeth.  "And if I live--and ever meet that
+fellow!--he'll pay me in inches of skin!"
+
+She said, and the silvern voice had the sweetness of Cordelia's:
+
+"I am so very sorry!  Could you not prevail upon this dishonest
+gentleman to restore to you your property?"
+
+P. C. Breagh said, with a flash of white teeth in his blunt-featured
+freckled face:
+
+"I might, if he had been considerate enough to mention where I could
+find him! ... Meanwhile..."  He shrugged his strong young shoulders
+in rather a despondent way.
+
+"Meanwhile you are without a home ... and without money?"
+
+He nodded, biting fiercely on his jutting underlip.  "Just now!  But
+by-and-by----"
+
+She persisted.
+
+"Without money and--starving!  Surely, starving! and that was why you
+fainted! ... And I, _mon Dieu!_--I have been blind and stupid....
+_Je ne me doutais de rien_!  Forgive me, I beg of you!"
+
+Her small face was all white and pinched and working.  Sobs choked
+her voice; she struck her little bosom--she wrung the tiny hands in
+anguish....  And it was all real.  You could not doubt Juliette's
+sincerity.  And though his manhood was sufficiently new to revolt at
+commiseration, still, it was not unpleasant to know that one's
+misfortunes had pierced the bucklered pride of the little Infanta,
+and wrung tears from the most wonderful eyes he had ever seen.  And
+what was she saying?
+
+"Monsieur Breagh, it is a misfortune of the most grand that you are a
+man and I a woman!  Otherwise it would be so easy to say to you
+this....  Me, I am for the moment rich.  I could--if you would accord
+me the permission?--relieve these pressing necessities....  Let me
+know where a letter will readily find you....  Do not, I entreat you,
+be angry that I ask this!"
+
+But he was angry.  His broad stripe of meeting red eyebrows came
+loweringly down over eyes that had the tigerish flame in them.  His
+face burned and he clenched his hands until the knuckles showed out
+white upon their sunburned backs.  He tried to speak and could not,
+so choking was his indignation.  To be asked to borrow from a
+girl--his sister's schoolmate, added one last dash of wormwood to the
+brimming cup of bitterness.  Unlucky P. C.  Breagh!
+
+"I'm uncommonly obliged, but decent men--in this country--don't do
+that sort of thing!  Even Frenchmen might call it caddish!" he choked
+out at last.
+
+Her eyes blazed murderously, a savage dusky crimson dyed the small
+white face that had looked at him with such pitiful entreaty.  She
+did not tower, she contracted--she crouched like a savage little cat
+ready to spring and rend him; her muscles grew visibly tense under
+her transparent skin.  He could hear the sharp hiss of her intaken
+breath, and see her lips writhe in the struggle to control utterance
+that seemed on the point of breaking from them.  When she spoke, it
+was in a low clear whisper, more piercing, it seemed to her unlucky
+auditor, than any shriek.
+
+"Sir, when you say to me that even a Frenchman might find despicable
+the deed an Englishman would shrink from as a stain upon his
+honor,--you insult my country of France, and my brave father; and the
+noble gentleman who will be my husband soon! ... It is fortunate for
+you that M. Charles is not here, see you well?  Brave as a lion, he
+is a master of the sword.  But enough!--I was mistaken and I have
+been justly humiliated....  Permit that I wish you a very good
+afternoon!"
+
+She curtsied to the miserable P. C. Breagh with crushing ceremony,
+turned, and had swept from the room before he could even reach the
+door.  It shut in his face with a deliberate gentleness that was more
+final than a slam would have been....
+
+"I've done it, by golly!" said P. C. Breagh.
+
+Just after this lofty, dignified fashion had
+Britomart-Krimhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde quitted the scene of many an
+imaginary interview.  That a being so small and frail should assume
+the airs of these heroines tickled even while it angered him.  A
+moment more he glowered and fumed, cursing the Fate that had dealt
+him another set-back, and then ... the tinkle of crockery heralded
+the return of Monica with Sister Boniface and a tray, satisfactorily
+laden with a stout brown teapot, bread and butter, home-made
+preserves, and a dish of somewhat solid ham-sandwiches, the welcome
+sight of which drove away the dark blue devils and restored his
+cheeriness again.  He could go a long time on one full meal, he told
+himself, as he perpetrated a surprising onslaught on the eatables and
+thirstily swallowed cup after cup of convent tea.
+
+Replete at length, he leaned back in his chair, conscious--so
+overwhelming was the sensation of fullness after his protracted
+fast--of feeling like a boa-constrictor who had swallowed his
+blanket.  He longed to sleep, the continual battle with recurrent
+yawns was becoming painful; and yet you are mistaken if you suppose
+that this young man did not love his gentle step-sister, and was not
+glad at heart to be once more in Monica's company.  But Brother Ass,
+the body, ridden fast and far by the turbulent spirit and the eager
+mind, belabored by the cudgel of Fate until his solid ribs were
+cracking within his shaggy hide, wanted repose more than social
+converse.  Carolan's eyelids were closing under the stream of
+Monica's eager talk.  His head was nodding--his mouth had fallen
+ajar--a faint snore was on the point of issuing from the organ
+immediately above it--when he started as broad awake as though a wasp
+had stung him....  Monica was speaking of Juliette....
+
+"I am so glad that you have met her!--yet sorry, too, because she is
+leaving us so soon now.  Is she not sweet?--with those grave airs,
+and those angelic eyes under determined eyebrows, and that shy wild
+smile..." thus Monica prattled on.  To stop her--or to prevent
+himself from giving her his candid opinion of her lauded idol, he
+inquired whether she did not find him handsome, and had her reply:
+
+"Not a bit! rather ugly than otherwise; but I love your face, and
+always shall, Caro!  Why, you have a mustache already!" she cried.
+
+He blushed as Monica jumped up for a nearer inspection, to discover
+that the close sprinkling of dark-brown freckles on the egg-smooth
+young surface of his upper lip had deceived the sisterly observation.
+
+"The mustache will come," Monica said with a smile, "and then you
+will begin to be more of a dandy."
+
+He fancied that her look betrayed a shade of disappointment.  "No
+wonder! such a beast as I must look!" he thought.  But he said with
+rather a clumsy air of indifference:
+
+"I daresay my clothes are a bit shabby, perhaps more than a bit!
+But, you see, I've been knocking about on the rail--and aboard
+steamers--and so on."
+
+"Still, you could be--what Juliette would call more _soigné_."  There
+was a little accent of sisterly rebuke in the words.  "And I have
+talked to her so much about you----"
+
+"That you're afraid she'll chaff you, now she has beheld the wonder!
+If she did I shouldn't be surprised! ... And if I'd known you wanted
+me to turn up a thundering swell, I'd have polished myself up a bit.
+My hair is too long, of course....  But--most British fellows run
+shaggy after a year or two at a German University."
+
+He spoke as easily and naturally as was possible, with a lump in the
+throat embraced by the paper collar, and a savage pain tearing at his
+heart.
+
+She said:
+
+"It is a bargain then, and I shall see my old Caro looking as he
+ought to look, next time he comes here! ... Tell me, when will next
+time be?"
+
+He stuttered, inwardly writhing:
+
+"I had no idea you'd mind the sort of--togs a fellow went about in!
+You, who are going--you told me in your last letter! to take a vow of
+poverty and all the rest!..."
+
+She laughed and patted the brown hand.
+
+"But you aren't going to take a vow of poverty....  You will be
+independent....  You will have everything--I hope you will have
+everything; that goes to make Life pleasant, and all the other things
+that make it--precious....  I am very ambitious for you, Carolan!"
+
+He laughed rather roughly.
+
+"Ambition in the cap and cape of a postulant!  What would the
+Mistress of the Novices say to that?"
+
+The face framed in the triple row of white frills was very pure and
+tender.
+
+"She would say that there are more kinds of ambition, than one.  I am
+ambitious that my brother should be spoken of among men--as a man who
+in the whole course of his career was never once ashamed to own
+himself a Catholic, and to prove not only in words, but in deeds--his
+loyalty to his Master in the face of the world!  You understand me,
+don't you?"
+
+He answered her in an embarrassed, awkward way, and with a look that
+evaded hers.
+
+"Of course!  You mean--you'd like me to be the kind of fellow who
+goes regularly to Mass, and receives the Blessed Sacrament on all the
+Feasts of Obligation!  Well, I can't boast of being quite as
+scrupulous as that!  But at any rate I have--ringed in with the
+late-comers--at Christmas and Easter and Whitsuntide...."  He added,
+"Not that I should have been thought priggish if I'd gone oftener....
+Of course the bulk of the students at Schwärz-Brettingen were
+Lutheran Protesants.  But about one-third were Catholics, I should
+think."
+
+"And were all of them late-comers--ringing in at the last minute?"
+
+"I can't say that.  When one did turn out for early Mass one found
+the churches--there were three of 'em--packed full."
+
+"Ah! ... Where are you staying?" she asked him in a changed tone.
+
+He faltered, sick at heart at having to lie to her.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+"I--I haven't got the address on me just now!  By George, that's just
+... Ha, ha, ha!"
+
+"What is the joke?  Do tell me!" she urged, puzzled by the mirthless
+bark of laughter.
+
+He could not have explained.  His Irish sense of humor had been
+tickled to realize that in actual fact he did carry his address about
+him.  Did not the shabby old frieze greatcoat constitute his hotel,
+chambers and club?  To change the subject he began to question her
+experiences in the Novitiate.  She looked happy, he admitted.  He did
+not hide that her decision to take the Veil had been a surprise.
+
+"You see, you'd always been such a jolly girl," he told her.  "Such a
+stunning companion--I'd never have expected it of you."
+
+Her bright laugh rang through the room.
+
+"Dear boy, do you suppose that nuns are dismal things, or indifferent
+to pleasant companionship?  You should hear us laugh and chatter at
+Recreation.  Perhaps because the time for fun is limited, as the time
+for other things--we enjoy that half-hour's freedom all the more.
+Not"--her smile did not leave her, but it changed in
+expression,--"not that I did not have my miserable hours.  For the
+matter of that I have them still!"
+
+He got up and went over to the hearth-side, where a tiny gas-fire
+made pretense of cheerfulness.
+
+"I never thought it was all jam in the Novitiate.  A fellow I knew
+who had wanted to be a Carthusian monk--and found it impossible to
+stick out the preliminaries!--hinted as much to me."
+
+"I suppose," she said calmly, "that he could not submit to
+the--necessary experiences that lead to the final breaking of the
+will."
+
+"Breaking of the will!"  He kicked the old-fashioned fender savagely.
+"What do they do to break yours, in Heaven's name?"
+
+"What is done is done in Heaven's name," she said, "and that is why
+one can submit cheerfully.  But my first weeks in the noviceship were
+cloudlessly happy."  She laughed a little.  "I thought it was always
+going to be like that!"
+
+"I see! ... I twig! ... They made much of you in the beginning...."
+He gritted his teeth and turned his face away.
+
+"Perhaps they did! ... I remember I had all the nicest things to do,
+and nobody minded....  I was allowed to dust the High Altar, change
+the flowers in the vases, and help the Sister-Sacristan brush and
+fold the vestments away.  And one day I was permitted to wash the
+lunette of the monstrance.  It was a wonderful experience.  One could
+understand how the Magdalene must have felt when she wiped the Sacred
+Feet."
+
+He was silent, for she had soared to heights beyond him.
+
+"Perhaps it made me proud, for next day I was set to tidy the
+linen-room presses.  I worked for some weeks there, darning and
+mending and folding.  Then I was sent to the Refectory."  The smile
+was only in her eyes now.  "I liked laying the long tables, but I
+hated washing dirty plates and dishes, and I simply loathed cleaning
+knives and forks."
+
+"I should think so!  Housemaid's duty!  I understand now what you
+meant a minute back! ... By George! ...  'Miserable hours!' ..."
+
+Her deep eyes rested on him calmly:
+
+"And after I am clothed--after I have received the habit--I shall
+most likely go on having them!  I daresay I shall have them after I
+have taken the Veil."
+
+He kicked the fender again, his hands shoved deep into his empty
+pockets, and felt the shilling, sole coin remaining to him, burn
+against his aching ribs.  He would have given ten years of life to
+have been able to tell her that a home with him was ready and
+waiting,--in case she shrank from the final plunge.  He made a great
+effort and groaned out:
+
+"But that won't be for two years to come.  And things may happen--who
+knows!"
+
+"Oh!  I pray," she said with a sudden flush, "that I need not wait
+two years!"
+
+Her eagerness lifted a load that had been crushing him.  In sheer
+relief he began to stammer:
+
+"What a blessed idiot I am!  I didn't understand ... I thought you
+... I believed you....  Of course you don't do the dirty work now.
+That was only for a time, at the beginning.  Well, I'm glad!  I'd
+hate to think of my sister tackling servants' duties, anyway!  All
+right!  Well, what are you on to now, eh?  Back at dusting the Altar
+and doing the flowers?"
+
+"No.  That is for others.--There are many others, and each of them
+must have a turn at the pleasant things.  When you have lived in the
+community only a short time, you begin to understand that....  And
+when you have lived in it only a little longer you learn that between
+the pleasant duties and the unpleasant duties there is no difference,
+whatever.  Nothing being done that is not done for God.  When I was
+scrubbing the desks in the Little Class to-day,--there are seventy
+children, and the tiny ones come in with muddy boots from the garden
+in wet weather, and splash the ink over everything,--I was dusting
+the Altar....  When I was washing the slates I was washing the Feet
+of Christ.  It is no matter what we do as long as it is nothing to be
+ashamed of--and is done with a right intention! ... The lowest
+service counts as the highest in the sight of Almighty God.  It is
+one of the great mysteries of Faith that this should be so.  But it
+is so! ...  There's the first bell for Benediction!"
+
+It was too late now.  But even as she rose with that wonderful look
+in the calm face framed in by the triple row of little starched
+frills, and took his hand and led him to the door, P. C. Breagh
+realized that he ought from the first to have told the truth to her.
+
+The parlor door led them into the corridor upon the boarders' side.
+She guided him along it, left him at the entrance of the chapel,
+pressed his hand, whispered "Good-bye for now!" and vanished through
+a curtained archway on the right hand, communicating with the
+cloister, possibly.
+
+He entered the chapel.  A small portion of the nave, near the west
+door, was open to the public.  Some dozen worshipers, chiefly elderly
+ladies, knelt or sat upon the rush-bottomed chairs.  Beyond, a high,
+wrought-iron grille partitioned off the capacious choir, separated
+from the cloisters upon either hand by the tall carved screen that
+backed the rows of stalls.  And the dying daylight of the January
+afternoon shone through high windows, stained in hues tender as
+flower-petals or brilliant as jewels, depicting the various scenes in
+the life of the Virgin Mother of Christ.
+
+The second bell had not yet rung for Benediction as Carolan bent the
+knee and slipped into a chair near the central gate of the grille.
+The place was full of the presence and perfume of flowers, and the
+spice of incense burned at the morning Mass.  Tapers tall and short
+blazed on the High Altar, and a nun in purple habit and creamy veil
+knelt at a faldstool, absorbed in adoration of the Throned Mystery of
+Faith.  Within the space of a Paternoster the second bell rang.  The
+choir-sister rose, knelt in adoration, moved her stool carefully
+aside, and went out by a side-door in the sanctuary.  And a sound as
+of many moving waters began to grow upon the ear.  A curtain was
+drawn that masked an archway upon the farther side of the grille upon
+the right side: there was the invariable convent signal of a
+hand-clap, and two girlish shapes, in long white muslin veils over
+dark uniform dresses, entered together; and went to the bottom of the
+broad aisle between the rows of benches, moving sedately side by
+side.  One wore a pale blue, the other a crimson ribbon supporting a
+silver medal.  One was of solid Teutonic build, with magnificent
+plaits of golden hair, vivid red and white coloring, and rather
+stiff, if dignified, bearing.  The other--a slender creature of
+stature almost childlike, yet with womanly coils of duskiness shot
+through with a tortoiseshell arrow, seemed insignificant as she
+walked beside her stately white-veiled mate.  And yet, it was not
+walking, but gliding, hovering, floating ... such airy grace of
+movement as P. C. Breagh had never dreamed
+of,--Britomart-Krimhilde-Brünhilde having covered the ground with the
+magnificent indolence of a glacier, or traversed it with the
+overwhelming rush of an avalanche, when the exigencies of some
+imaginary scene of passion had compelled her to "fly from her
+conqueror's presence," or "impetuously gain his side."  Now for the
+first time her inventor found himself wavering....  Was his heroic
+ideal too Titanic, too colossal, too big and too clumsy?  Would it
+not be just as well to shorten her by half a dozen superfluous
+inches--reduce her superabundant flesh?  And if at the same time one
+were to darken her dandelion tresses?--tone down the staring
+china-blue of her eyes into----
+
+
+What was the color?  The blue of the spring flower or the blue of the
+sapphire? ... You never knew until she looked at you ... and then you
+weren't certain ... you kept wanting her to look again!  Meek or
+tigress-like, in whatever mood you found her, you would always be
+wanting Juliette to look, and look again.
+
+
+The revelation of his monstrous folly, the knowledge of his
+faithlessness came in the instant of recognition, hit him like a
+seventh wave and bowled him off his mental legs.
+
+Before he had recovered, the white-veiled hovering figure had
+vanished.  The aisle had noiselessly filled with a great procession
+of similar figures, standing motionless, waiting, two by two.  There
+was a second clap of hands,--and the white-veiled column knelt in
+adoration.  At a third signal they rose and slowly filed into their
+seats.  And a second double line of younger girls, the Middle Class,
+also white-veiled and white-gloved, formed in the place of them, and
+the orderly, impressive maneuver was repeated by these.  Little
+children took their places, and did as their seniors.  A noble
+voluntary burst from the organ in the high-placed loft, and the
+purple-habited, creamy-veiled choir-sisters poured in and took their
+stalls, and the lay-sisters and novices followed, filling the great
+choir to overflowing, as the door of the vestry was opened by a
+sweet-faced child in a red cassock and white cotta, and the vested
+priest, a scholarly-looking, gray-haired man, came in and went to his
+place.  And the strains from the organ changed, and a voice fresh and
+sweet as a thrush's, passionless-pure as an angel's, began to chant
+_O Salutaris_,--and something like a sob broke from P. C. Breagh's
+throat, and hot tears came crowding, and one at least fell.
+
+He had been shipwrecked, and here was a little green-palmed islet of
+peace to rest on--his only for a moment, but a moment in which to
+gather strength, and breath to face the raging seas again.  His mood
+changed.  He was glad he had not told Monica that he was homeless,
+half-clothed, and all but penniless in big, black, brutal, noisy
+London, and would have to water cab-horses, or sweep a crossing, or
+clean boots to keep alive.
+
+Ah, what was it Monica had said?  Without her knowing it those words
+had been somehow meant for Carolan.  Let's see--how did they go? ...
+Something this way....
+
+"_It is no matter what we do, as long as it is nothing to be ashamed
+of, and is done with a right intention.  The lowest service counts as
+the highest in the sight of Almighty God.  It is one of the great
+mysteries of Faith that this should be so.  But it is so!_"
+
+"I--see!"
+
+He had sheltered his shamed and burning face in his big hands.  But
+with that ray of inward light had come courage and resourcefulness.
+He lifted his head bravely now and drew in a deep chestful of the
+sweet, warm, pleasant air.
+
+"Perhaps the money was spoiling me!--making me look to it instead of
+to myself--and I've been stripped and pitched into deep water as the
+big fellows used to do to us little chaps, when we funked.  Perhaps
+this is for the best--and I'll find it so one day.  Perhaps I can
+make up for some of the caddish things I've done--refusing that
+girl's offered help so savagely among 'em--by taking this thing well!
+Facing what there is to face--and putting up with what I've got to.
+Well, I'll have a shot at it!" said P. C. Breagh to P. C. Breagh.
+"I'll do nothing that I'm ashamed of--and be ashamed of nothing
+that's honest; I'll labor for my daily bread--and for my nightly
+bed,--with these hands and shoulders,--if nobody will pay me for my
+brains!--And what I do I'll do cheerfully.  Shall I kick at sweeping
+a crossing, when He was a carpenter?"
+
+It seemed to him that he had not prayed, and yet he had without
+knowing it.  The Benediction seemed to fall on him like dew.  He went
+out by the west door with the small congregation, and found himself
+in the foggy London square within sound of the roaring traffic of the
+London streets, with a return of the old hideous shrinking.  A
+sensation paralleled by that of the shipwrecked castaway who has
+found brief resting-place upon the tiny coral atoll and must perforce
+commit himself, upon his crazy raft of planks and hencoops, to the
+shark-infested, treacherous Pacific seas again.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+He strolled up a short street, and looked for and found a roomy,
+double bow-fronted house of warm old red brick, with huge capacious
+areas.  "Vanity Fair" had been written there, he knew, perhaps
+"Esmond" too, though he was not sure.  He took off his hat to the
+memory of the magician, and wondered where his other idol, the still
+living author of the "Cloister and the Hearth," and "Never Too Late
+to Mend" might be run to earth, and made up his mind to see Dickens's
+grave in Westminster Abbey on the morrow, whether it cost sixpence,
+or whether it did not....  And then he wavered, sixpence, as we know,
+being the moiety of his capital; and then he remembered that
+to-morrow could only be reached by the bridge of to-night.  He walked
+very fast for some distance, trying to exorcise the demons that this
+thought evoked, and,--blinded by their buzzing and stinging--was in
+Piccadilly before he knew.  The high railings of the Green Park, and
+the foggy solitude of the gravel-walks between the wintry lawns,
+tempted him to turn in and rest upon a seat a while, for he was still
+somewhat giddy and shaky, and the bump so confidently prophesied by
+the Infanta had appeared upon his brow.
+
+He took off the old felt wideawake and stared at Piccadilly,
+brilliant with the paroquet-colors of passing omnibuses, green and
+royal blue, chocolate and white-and-gold.  Behind the shining windows
+of the great Clubs, the members' heads, gleamingly bald, or affluent
+of hair and whiskers, alternately appeared and vanished.  He caught
+brief passing glimpses of white-bosomed waiters, ... the twinkle of
+gilt buttons on livery coats....  Beer-drays, driven by burly
+red-faced men, frequently in shirt-sleeves, went by with a whiff of
+malt, and the thunder of heavy hoofs.  Vans of business-houses passed
+with a clang of bells.  Victorias and landaus with muffled, and
+furred, and veiled ladies in them; shut-up broughams, madly-daring
+velocipedists on the machine of the era, a giant wheel followed by a
+pigmy one, made fleeting pictures on the retina of P. C. Breagh.  And
+the double river of traffic, and the eastward and westward-flowing
+stream of pedestrians went by without a break in them.  Gas-lamps
+began to make islands of yellow light upon the fog, but showed no
+dwindling in their numbers.  He wondered if they would go on like
+this all night?  And then some one came up and sat down on the other
+end of the seat rather heavily, and the slight resultant shock and
+jar brought round P. C. Breagh's head.
+
+He saw the thick-set, rather lax and round-shouldered figure of a man
+of middle age, dressed in a suit of tweeds patterned in giant checks
+of black and white and gray, the _dernier cri_ in masculine
+morning-wear, had the observer but known it.  His hat, a low-crowned
+chimney-pot in hard gray felt, was tilted backward, his hair, of a
+pale tow-color, tufted out from beneath the hat in a way that cried
+for the attention of the barber; his whiskers, and mustache, of the
+same shade as the hair, were raggedly in need of the shears.  He wore
+a buttonhole-bouquet composed of a pink camellia with Neapolitan
+violets, and pale lemon kid gloves, and sucked the carved ivory knob
+of an ebony stick he carried, until,--upon his neighbor's looking
+round as above recorded,--he took it from a somewhat lax and swollen
+mouth, and observed that it was a nice afternoon.  Adding, as P. C.
+Breagh made a sound which might have been assent or denial:
+
+"If it is affernoon?  Without my fellow to post me, I'm apt to be
+wrong about time.  Not that that's remarable.  Lots of people the
+same, don't you know?  Nothing extra--nothing ex--oh, damn!"
+
+A covert anxiety--and a very visible tremulousness were combined in
+the speaker's manner.  His large watery blue eyes were painfully
+vague and blurred, with distended pupils that looked uneven; his
+gestures were uncertain, and his words, well chosen enough, and
+uttered with the tone and accent usually distinctive of a gentleman,
+came haltingly from a tongue that seemed to be too large for its
+owner's mouth:
+
+"You don't regard it as extra ... Stop a minute!"  A pause ensued,
+during which the vague-eyed gentleman waited, clutching his stick
+with both hands, and holding his swollen mouth ajar.  And when he
+shut the mouth to shake his head, and looked at P. C. Breagh in the
+act of doing this, the perspiration shone upon his puffy cheeks and
+stood in beads upon his reddened forehead, as though it had been July
+instead of a foggy afternoon in January, and the pink-bordered
+cambric handkerchief with which he wiped his worried face became,
+after this usage, a very rag.  And a queer, unwillingly-yielded-to
+sense of commiseration prompted Carolan to suggest:
+
+"'Extraordinary' was the word you wanted, wasn't it?"
+
+"Much obliged!  The word, unnoutedly!  'Stror'nary how words do dodge
+one on occasion!" returned the uncertain gentleman in the
+large-patterned tweeds.  He added, pulling at the ragged light
+mustache, with a gloved hand that was decidedly shaky: "I don't know
+that it matters parricurarly--but I'd prefer you to know that I'm not
+runk!"
+
+"Not--what?..."
+
+"Not runk!" repeated the vague-eyed gentleman emphatically.  "Not
+cut, foozled, miffed, fizzed, screwed!  Not that it's oblig--that's
+another of the words that perretually queer me!--or incumment on me
+to isplain, but I regard it as due to myself, by Gad! that you should
+clearly unnerstand the case.  As I said to the manuscript upon the
+Bench when the bobby ran me in on Thursday--or was it Friray? ...
+Appearances are sally against me, but I have never been a rinking
+man!  The doctors have a crajjaw name for my connition, which under
+the exissing circ--and that's another of the words that play the
+deuce and all with me! ... Look at my westick, buttoned all wrong!"
+
+He slewed round upon the seat, and throwing back the large-patterned,
+fashionably cut-away coat, exhibited the garment mentioned, every
+buttonhole of which afforded hospitality to a button not its own.
+His necktie, the ample, sailor-knotted necktie of the period, was
+under his left ear, and his shirt had come unstudded.  Being appealed
+to, P. C. Breagh admitted that the existing condition of things left
+something to be desired!
+
+"When a man entirely ripends on valets and domessicks," explained his
+incoherent neighbor, "a man is apt to be neglected and so on.  As a
+marrer of fact I live in that little joppa cottisit!"  He waveringly
+pointed to a large, handsome private dwelling with an ornate portico,
+situated nearly opposite, and sandwiched between two Clubs.  "An' as
+a narrural conquicense of my temorrary irrability to pronounce words
+of the most orinary nature, I am----"  He drew an aimless figure in
+the muddy gravel with his ivory-topped, ebony stick, and went on with
+a weak laugh, "I am absoluly neglected by my own househol'.  My own
+children seem ashamed or afray of me--all but Little
+Foxhall--splendid little chap is Little Foxhall!  But his mother--my
+wife----"  He broke off to say--"You will escuse my touching on these
+priva' matters in conversation with a perfec' stranger.  I am quite
+conscience I trepsass against the orinary usages of propriety,
+especially in speaking of my wife! ... But--the fact is, sir!  I am
+most desperately wretched.  Six people imagine me runk--out of every
+half-dozen.  While the other six--the irriots whisser it when they
+think I'm out of earshock--suppose me to be suffrig from Sofrig of
+the Bray!"
+
+He began to tremble and shake, and put his stick between his knees to
+hold on to the edge of the seat with his lemon-kidded hands--and
+couldn't hold the stick in that position, and it fell, and P. C.
+Breagh picked it up and put it back.
+
+"I am murrabliged," said the owner of the stick, "by your kind
+attention!"  Something struggled and fought in the vague blue eyes
+that he turned upon Carolan,--it seemed as though in another moment
+Fear and Terror might have leaped glaring into sight.  "And while I
+am boun' to ajopolize for thrussing my privarrafairs upon a
+stranger--I feel bound to put the quession; Why should thissorathing
+happen to ME?  Goolor'!  I've been no worse than lossa urra fellers!"
+He rose up shaking, and shakily sat down again, nearly missing the
+bench.
+
+"Bessaran loss of 'em--if you come to that!"  He turned to Carolan,
+and the vague eyes were piteous and desperate....  "You see the sort
+of chap my luck--my damble luck--has made o' me!  Yet I used to be
+envied--envied ... you unnerstand!  I have belonged to the best
+regiment in the Brigade of Guards--the devil another!  I have played
+the bes' cards, driven the bes' turnouts, smoked the bes' cigars and
+had the most stunnin' women!  Do you unnerstand me?--Have!"  He
+brought down the uncertain hand in an attempt to strike his knee
+emphatically, and missed it; and tried to look as though he had not,
+and went on: "And I have belonged to the best gloves, by Gad! an' put
+on the clubs with the most celebrarred li'-weights!  And I rode my
+steeplechase at York, and romped in first, and they toasted and
+speechified me at the Gimcrack dinner.  And I won my Oaks and my
+Derby--and led in the winner, with all the cheeple reering;--the
+seeple peering--the--Goolor'!  Goolor'!  And the horse was
+Gladianor--and the victory was a popular one--and my name was a
+household word through the Unirred Kingom.  A household word!..."  He
+broke off, trembling and sweating, as the horse might have done after
+the race, and put the wavering hand to his head, and turned his empty
+blue eyes from Carolan's as though they hurt.  "What was my name?" he
+asked himself in a dull, thick, shaky whisper, "Goolor'!  Goolor'!
+What was my name? ... That you, Murchison?"
+
+For a decent figure in the irreproachable dark clothing of a servant
+out of livery had passed and turned back, and now approached the
+bench, eyeing Carolan suspiciously even in the act of uncovering its
+well-brushed head, and saying in the smooth accents of servility:
+
+"It is Murchison, your Grace.  It's cold, your Grace, and you've not
+got on an overcoat.  Your Grace had best come home now, before your
+Grace is missed!..."
+
+"Home?"  His Grace looked mildly from the authoritative Murchison to
+the stately "cottage opposite," and one of the uncertain hands in the
+pale lemon kid gloves, making as though to pluck at an untrimmed
+whisker, found itself imprisoned in a deferential but vigorous grip.
+
+"Home, your Grace!" said Murchison, applying muscular leverage to
+raise the inert figure.
+
+"All right.  Prass I better, Murchison!"  He rose to the
+perpendicular....  "Wish you a very good evening, sir!"  With a faded
+reminiscence of what might have been a courtly manner, he touched his
+hat to P. C. Breagh, who returned the farewell greeting, avoiding the
+sharp glance of Murchison.  Then valet and master moved off, leaving
+a little trail of dialogue behind them:
+
+"You give us the fair slip that time, your Grace!..."
+
+"Perhass I did, Murchison--now you happen to mention it."
+
+"Might have been killed crossing Piccadilly, your Grace, and none of
+us the wiser."
+
+"Goolor'!  I'd wish I had, Murchison--if it wasn't for Little
+Foxhall!" ... Then in a high, quavering note of eagerness, the plea,
+pitiable and ridiculous and pathetic: "I--I say! ... Tell me the
+boy'd have minded, Murchison--whass a lie to you, you dam'
+smoo'-ranged Ananias!--and I'll give you my nex' week's
+sovereign--I'm dead broke now!"
+
+And Murchison and His Grace went away together, the man steering,
+with deft guiding touches of the master's elbow, the latter stepping
+high and bringing his feet down with a peculiar thump that threw a
+light upon the situation in the eyes of P. C. Breagh.  Not softening
+of the brain....  _Donnerwetter!_ what were the London doctors
+thinking of?  Had none of them read the "Dissertation on Tabes
+Dorsalis" of the Herr Doctor Max Baumgarten, published in Berlin only
+a twelvemonth previously, and dealing fully with that rare and
+curious disease of the nervous system? ... Fibrous degeneration of
+the posterior columns of the spinal cord, affecting the patient's
+sight, gait, and--in isolated cases--speech and memory.
+
+"I'd like to have got him to let me rap his shins!  Bet you anything
+there'd have been total absence of reflex action!  Remember that
+peddler in the Nervous Ward of the Augusta Hospital at
+Schwärz-Brettingen! ... They cured that chap with spinal injections
+and regular massage.  And this man--being a thundering swell and
+having the best advice possible--is naturally being treated all
+wrong!  Hang it!--how cold I am!  Better be moving!"  He got up and
+stamped some warmth into his cold feet and flailed his cold ribs with
+his elbows until they tingled again.  He had learned something of the
+wretchedness that may sometimes dwell in princely homes, yet be
+homeless; and fare delicately from plate of gold and silver, and yet
+go hungry,--and lie down to toss and stare through dreadful sleepless
+nights on soft luxurious beds.  Therefore the bright reflections of
+great fires dancing on the plate-glass windows of the "cottage
+opposite" stung him to no comparisons.  "Is it base in me that the
+knowledge of the misery of this wealthy nobleman makes me more
+contented with my own obscure poverty?" he asked himself, and the
+answer was: "_Not if your content does not make you callous to his
+woe!_"
+
+"I hope that Little Foxhall would have minded!" he found himself
+saying; "and I wish to Heaven Baumgarten could get a chance of doing
+something for his father!  I've half a mind to drop a postcard to
+him--or write a line to the Herr Professor! ... Stop, though!"
+
+He remembered that he must break into his last remaining shilling to
+buy the postcard and pay for the stamps.  Then he swung out through
+the Park side-gates, and now he was one of the crowd rolling
+Circus-wards, and all the street gas-lamps had been lighted by
+certain officials with poles, furnished with hooks for keying the gas
+on, and perforated iron sockets filled with blazing tow that had been
+soaked in naphtha; thus every shop or restaurant became an Aladdin's
+cave of brilliancy, and the down-drawn blinds of the houses and clubs
+hid splendor unspeakable--if only one had been able to pull them
+up....
+
+Alas! to us who live in these pushful days of Electrical Power
+Supply, the glories of the illuminated capital in the year of grace
+1870 would appear murky enough.  We should sneer at the stumpy iron
+lamp-posts and the chandeliers yet adorned with Early Victorian
+crystal glass lusters.  The wood pavement, an invention _de luxe_
+economically confined to the West End, and upon the greasy surface of
+which bus-horses broke legs as easily as the most aristocratic
+thoroughbreds--the loose iron gratings covering basement-lights, and
+incidentally presenting man-traps for unwary pedestrians, as
+receptacles for stray umbrellas, dead cats, wisps of packing straw,
+discarded newspapers and orange-peel--the untrapped gutter-drains and
+sewer-vents would awaken our ridicule and evoke our indignation, even
+as the displays in the shop windows, especially those of _modistes_,
+_couturières_, and tailors, would provoke us to mirth.
+
+The extraordinary little hats, pot-shaped or plate-shaped, worn upon
+huge chignons, surmounting cascades of ringlets, _couleur
+Impératrice_.  The preposterous frilled _paniers_, the bustles, the
+_jupes_ of velvet or plush, flounced to the waist or
+kilted--sometimes to mid-leg, displaying boots--such as are worn to
+this hour by Principal Boys in Christmas Pantomimes and serio-comic
+ladies of the Varsity Stage, who are, we know, Principal Boys in the
+pupa, or chrysalis-state.  All these things compel us to hold our
+sides when we review them in the illustrated papers of the _Ladies'
+Mentor_,--which illuminating periodical, in the dearth of Fashionable
+Intelligence from Paris, the hub and center of the modish world, came
+to a sudden end in the October of that year, and has defied all
+efforts at resuscitation.
+
+Though it is possible that the wearers of these long-vanished
+modes--surveying the belles of Belgravia, with their humbler
+followers of Brompton and Bayswater,--in the present year of
+progress, might be moved to laughter or provoked to wrath.  To-day,
+when the ambition of every properly constituted woman is to be shaped
+like a golliwog and dressed like a pen-wiper, or to acquire the
+sinuosities of a Bayadere and drape the same in cobwebs calculated to
+conceal nothing and suggest everything--can we honestly enlarge upon
+the bygone improprieties of our aunts, and moan over our mothers'
+taste in toilettes?
+
+It was just six when P. C. Breagh crossed Piccadilly Circus and
+turned down toward the Haymarket.  Why hurry, he asked himself, when
+you have nowhere to go?  The restaurants were filling with diners who
+were going to the theaters, the smell of cooked meats made savory the
+fogginess.  He shrugged his shoulders, dug his hands deep into his
+empty pockets, and tried to whistle as he loafed along.
+
+Misery stalked these West End streets, rampant and clamorous.  A
+burly man devoid of legs, shuffling along with his hands in a pair of
+woman's clogs, entreated P. C. Breagh in stentorian tones to buy a
+tin nutmeg-grater.  A miserable creature, whose sole garment appeared
+to be the upper portion of an adult pair of trousers, begged him, in
+the professional whine, to spare a penny for the pore orphan boy!  A
+dank female, in rusty weeds, stationary by the curb, displaying a
+baby and a row of ballads, besought of him, for the love of Gawd! to
+pity the unfortunate widow and her starving orphans.
+
+"Buy a ballad, kind genl'man!  On'y a penny--goes to a lovelly
+choone!"
+
+
+  "Ho!  Dermot, you look 'ealthy now,
+    Your does is neat an' clean,
+  Hi never sees you drunk about,
+    W'erehever 'ave you been?"
+
+
+The stave chanted as an appetizer for the music-lover, she wiped the
+baby's nose with her ostentatiously white apron, and protested it to
+be the image of its father--blowed up in a Mind.
+
+"You mean a mine, don't you?" P. C. Breagh was beginning, when the
+widow once more burst into song.
+
+  "Your wife and Fam'ly--Har they well?
+    You once did use them strynge!
+  Ho!  Har you kinder to them now?
+    And wence this 'appy chynge?"
+
+
+Reverting to prose, as P. C. Breagh lounged listlessly on, she
+demanded why, if he wasn't going to buy, he had stopped and given a
+respectable female Tongue.
+
+"And not even fork out a copper, you blistered swindler!  You
+blindin', blazin'----"
+
+"Come now, Chanting Poll, what's all this here row about?"
+
+The gruff, not unkindly voice of a policeman broke in upon the rusty
+widow's eloquence.  P. C. Breagh, yielding to a sudden impulse,
+wheeled and swung back again.
+
+"It's all right, constable, the lady was only having a bit of chaff
+with me!"
+
+"I know her!" said P. C. 999, C. Division, removing a heavy but not
+brutal hand from the lady in question, "and the kind o' chaff she
+slings.  Done Time for it, too, she 'as--before now!"
+
+But he moved on, huge in his belted greatcoat, walking with the
+elephantine, clumping step begotten of boots with iron toe-caps, and
+iron-nailed soles at least two inches in thickness; and the dank
+widow cocked a knowing eye at his retreating back, and the other at
+her unexpected champion.
+
+"Good for you, my dear!  Stand us a drain for luck, since you're so
+civil!"
+
+He returned:
+
+"I would if I'd got the tin!  I believe I'm poorer than you are!"
+
+"S'welp me bob! wot 'ave we 'ere?  A haristocrat in distress, har
+yer?" she demanded.
+
+"Not quite," he told her, as she turned the ponderous batteries of
+her raillery upon him.  "I've seen an aristocrat in distress to-day,
+and he was worse than me.  I'd not change!"
+
+"Fer ten thousand jimmies hannual hincome, an' a 'ouse at Number One
+'Yde Park Corner!" she jeered.  "'Ow did yer lose the
+I'm-so-funny?--for if you 'aven't it now, you 'ave 'ad it, I'll tyke
+me Davy!"
+
+"It's--a long story!  Good-bye!"
+
+He nodded and was moving on, when she shot out a gaunt hand and
+clutched him by the sleeve, crying:
+
+"'Old 'ard, Mister!  'Ang on till I give this 'ere squealer to its
+mammy.  About due now, she ought to be!"
+
+"Isn't it..."  His surprised look tickled the relict of the blown-up
+husband into a chuckle.
+
+"Mine?  Not by 'arf!  A tizzy per workin'-day is wot I pays for the
+loan of 'er.  Nothin' like a babby--specially in narsty weather like
+this 'ere--to touch the people's 'arts!  Lil's mine, though, ain't
+you, deary?"
+
+A preternaturally bright-eyed, white-faced, wizened little creature
+peeped out from the shelter of the ostentatiously clean apron, making
+a sound as of assent.
+
+"Is she ill?" asked P. C. Breagh commiseratingly.
+
+"Not 'er, that's her color!"
+
+"Hungry, perhaps?" he asked.
+
+"Why should she be? ... Wot did yer 'ave fer dinner, Lil?  Speak up
+like a good gal an' tell the gen'lman!"
+
+The small, grimy finger came out of the wide mouth.  She lisped
+confidingly:
+
+"Ay'po'rth o' gin 'ot, an' a stit o' totlit!"
+
+"My God!" gasped P. C. Breagh in horror, "does that baby drink hot
+gin?"
+
+"When she can get it! an' so does Hi!" explained the lady of the
+ballads, whom a short female in a plaid shawl and a battered brown
+bonnet had now relieved of the baby.  She added hospitably: "Come an'
+'ave two-pennorth o' comfort along o' me now!  It's meat and drink
+both! as you'll find afore long!  I'll stand treat--no blarney!"
+
+But he groaned and fled from the tragic pair, seeing the blazing eyes
+of the drunkard, set in the small white childish face, staring at him
+from the gas-lamps and the hoardings, from the paving-stones beneath
+his hurrying feet, and from under the hats of passing strangers; and
+peering between the slowly-moving shoals of sooty smoke and muddy
+vapor, streaking the livid grayness overhead.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+Pall Mall was some relief.  He looked for the Junior United Service
+Club, and found it; for the Rag,--and for a time walked up and down
+in the vicinity of both of these stately institutions, heartened by
+the memory that his father had been a member of the former--listening
+with eager ears to scraps of conversation between soldierly,
+well-groomed, clear-voiced men in evening dress, lingering on the
+wide doorsteps to finish some animated discussion, or waiting for
+cabs and hansoms, the common hack, or the smart private vehicle, low
+on the wheels at that date, and more heavily built than the later S.
+and T.
+
+Certain bald, mustached, and red-faced veterans, scrupulously attired
+for the evening--delighted him extremely.
+
+"By George, General!" he heard one of them say, as he went by, his
+slouch forgotten, his shoulders squared, his head held up, "look at
+that seedy-looking chap there!  Twelve to one in sixpences he's one
+of the 'supererogatory useless infantrymen,' kicked out by Cardwell,
+after twelve years' Service.  D'ye take the bet or no?"
+
+The reference to the unpopular War Secretary under whose effacing
+hand infantry regiments had not only lost their numbers, but in many
+cases vanished from the rolls of the Army, swallowed up in the New
+System of Amalgamation--had, as was intended, the effect of the red
+rag on the bull.  The General bellowed:
+
+"Confound me if I don't!  Pay the cabman, McIntosh, while I put the
+fellow through his paces!  Hi!  Hi!  Come here, you, sir!"
+
+Then, as P. C. Breagh, summoned by an imperious wave of the umbrella,
+stepped out of the fogginess into the mellow circle of light
+streaming through the glass doors of the brilliant vestibule:
+
+"What's your regiment? ... Give me the old designation!  ... I know
+nothing of new-fangled names; ... All my eye and Betty Martin! and I
+don't care a dee who hears me say it! ... What is your rank, name and
+battalion-number?  When were you discharged? ... Where's your
+small-book and certificate? ... Got 'em about you?  ... Every soldier
+has 'em about him!  And why don't you answer, dee you!--why don't you
+answer, man?"
+
+The volley of interrogations left no room for reply.  A second might
+have followed had not the General's crony, in unconcealed ecstasies
+at the sulky embarrassment of the victim and the determined attitude
+of the inquisitor, intervened:
+
+"Dashed sorry!  My mistake!  Believe you've landed a civilian, after
+all, General!"
+
+"Be dee'd! and so I have!" the General, after a raking stare,
+admitted.  Then he took his crony's arm, they wheeled, and marched
+into the Club together.  From whence issued, a moment later, a small
+boy in buttons, who, after a look up and a look down the street,
+pursued the retreating figure of the stalwart young man in the gray
+felt wide-awake and shaggy greatcoat, and arrested it with the words:
+
+"'Arf a jiff, my covey!" He added, as the retreating figure wheeled
+and surveyed him in hard-eyed silence: "Wasn't it you what Old
+Fireworks went for just now on the 'Rag and Famish' steps?"
+
+"The General called to me--mistaking me for----"
+
+"I know!"  The boy in buttons winked.  "He's always a-pitching into
+somebody in mistake for somebody else!  Catch hold!  This is for you!"
+
+This was a warm half-crown, thrust upon P. C. Breagh, without further
+ceremony.  He flushed a murky, savage red, and shouted:
+
+"What is this for? ... Who had the infernal insolence----"
+
+He choked.  Buttons, plainly regarding the tramp who could be
+insulted by half-a-crown as a new species, stared at him with
+circular orbs of astonishment, retorting:
+
+"What's it for?  How do I know, stoopid?  He told me to catch you and
+give it you....  Cool that!  Well, blow me!..."
+
+These expressions being evoked by the swift, supple movement of arm
+and wrist that had sent the half-crown flying into the midst of the
+Pall Mall traffic.  A sharp ring on the wood-pavement, a yell, and a
+flourish of naked heels, and a street Arab had seized the treasure.
+As the fog swallowed the wealthy imp, said Buttons icily:
+
+"That's your game, is it?--pavin' Pall Mall with 'arf bulls for
+gutter-pads to pick up.  Better ha' tipped it to me!--or sent it back
+to Old Fireworks.  He ain't got too many of 'em.  Signs too many
+toast-and-water tickets to be flush!"
+
+Perhaps P. C. Breagh, scalding with wrath as he was, would have dived
+in among the traffic to recover the coin had it been recoverable.
+But the snows of yester-year were not more irretrievably gone.  He
+realized it, hung his head and hunched his shoulders, and moved away
+from the region of clubs, where officers of the twin Services talked
+shop in sublime indifference to other subjects, as white-chokered
+attendants supplied them with savory meats and cheering drinks.
+
+
+Be sorry for the boy with the gaunt wolf Hunger at his heels, and the
+black demon of Despair sitting on his shoulders.  That determination
+of his to face what might come, and take his luck in a cheerful
+spirit, was to be put to a yet fiercer test before the dawn of a new
+day.
+
+He was hungry and thirsty, and sorely tempted to break into his
+solitary shilling.  But that silver barrier between himself and
+pennilessness was not to be lightly changed.  He wondered, as he
+recalled to mind the many occasions upon which he had wantonly
+squandered and wasted money, whether an experience such as this,
+previously undergone, would not have been a valuable lesson in thrift?
+
+He presently came by a well-known theater.  It was too early for the
+frequenters of the Stalls and Boxes and Grand Circle.  But playgoers
+of the humbler kind were pouring in to fill the unnumbered seats in
+the upper tiers, and a crowd composed of the usual elements had
+gathered at the doors of the Pit and Gallery, and filled the narrow
+side-alley in which these were situated, and overflowed into the
+Strand.
+
+Queues not being officially recognized and regulated, there was a
+good deal of obstruction and pushing and persiflage.  Pausing a
+moment under the gas-jet bordered, glazed shelter ornamenting the
+box-office entrance, his unseasoned eyes winced as they took in a
+sad, sad sight.
+
+You saw her as a woman not past early middle-age, nobly proportioned,
+and even in her dreadful degradation, imperially beautiful.  An old
+velvet mantle covered her, from which the torn and moth-eaten
+fur-trimming hung in draggled festoons.  A trained silk gown, stained
+and torn and flounced with mud of many thicknesses, trailed upon the
+slushy Strand pavement; a broken bonnet perched on a palpably false
+and inconceivably dirty chignon, the false curls that cascaded from
+beneath it, hid a workhouse-crop of rusty gray....  And she lifted
+her skirts aside, disclosing muddy bare feet shod with a
+trodden-down, elastic-sided boot and a ragged slipper; and stepped
+across the threshold of the gilt and mirrored vestibule with a
+graceful, royal air....
+
+"Now then, missus!  Out of this, will you!"
+
+A uniformed theater-attendant had advanced toward the intruder.  But
+she did not retreat in terror at his truculence.  She drew herself
+up, and folded her arms upon her bosom, and confronted the menial
+with a haughty, quelling stare.
+
+"Man! who are you to drive me from this threshold?  Out of the way!
+Clear!--and let me look at her.  Do you ask whom?  She! that woman
+who stands behind you smiling, with the white dove perched upon her
+whiter hand.  Times have changed, my girl, since you and I last saw
+each other!  Well, well!  You are the same, whatever I may be!"
+
+She laughed, a deep, melodious ha, ha, ha! not at all like the
+laughter of everyday people.  Even P. C. Breagh, inexperienced as he
+was in such matters, recognized it as the artificial laughter of the
+stage.  And, profiting by the momentary confusion of the functionary,
+she swept in her silken rags toward the person indicated; who looked
+back at her with beautiful stagey eyes from a life-sized canvas,
+wearing a stage costume; standing in a pose of the theater; fondling
+the bird that was palpably a property of the scene.
+
+A long gilt-framed mirror hung beside the portrait, and to this she
+pointed with the tattered remnants of her theatrical manner,
+exclaiming with another of the stage laughs:
+
+"Look upon this picture and on that!  Ye gods!..."  Adding, as the
+guardian of the vestibule, now wroth, advanced upon her: "No!  Don't
+you hustle me.  I'm off, governor!  Farewell.  Ta-ta!--until we meet
+again!"
+
+She was gone, but she must have noted the boy who stared, fascinated
+by her haggard beauty and her dreadful misery.  In fact, P. C.
+Breagh, passing on, had barely traversed a dozen yards of slushy
+pavement, before, with a bound and rush, a supple movement, predatory
+and feline, the woman emerged from an alley, and was by his side.
+
+"Who are you?  A waif, like me?  Where do you come from?  I saw you
+looking at me with all your eyes and your heart in them!--I played
+that scene with the picture and the mirror for you!  You know----"
+She took P. C. Breagh's reluctant arm and leaned to his ear, being
+taller than he was, "There's always one person in the house you play
+to--and when that person's not there--the inspiration doesn't come.
+When it won't, you--shall I tell you what you do if God hasn't made
+you able to say 'No' to them?--you send out the devils to fetch you
+brandy and champagne!"
+
+She laughed wildly and looked round suspiciously.
+
+"Walk fast!  A policeman's behind us, shadowing us.  I'll tell you my
+story as we go.  Did you ever hear of Anabel Foltringham?  You must
+have!  Everybody has!  I drew crowds to that theater you've seen me
+kicked out of!--I was beautiful--great--famous!  Men gloated over my
+beauty--they hung upon my every word.  That made the devils
+jealous--the smooth, servile, obsequious devils in white aprons, that
+you find behind the scenes at every theater.  They call them
+dressers, but I know better, you can't deceive me!  You boy, I like
+your face!  You look at me as if I were a Christian, and a man I knew
+had eyes like yours! ... Don't leave me!  I'll make it worth your
+while to stay, only listen! ... I'll teach you all I know, make you a
+greater artist than any of them.  For the things that you shall learn
+from me--I learned myself--in Hell!"
+
+She hung upon the boy's wincing arm, her terrible breath scorched
+him, her burned-out eyes appalled--her greedy, long-nailed clutch
+found his flesh through his sleeve like the talons of a beast of
+prey.  And he wrenched himself free, and fled, sick at heart;
+fancying that the old boot and shoe were running after him, and that
+the mud-trimmed silk gown flapped at his hurrying heels like leathery
+wings.
+
+He broke into his shilling to pass the turnstile of Waterloo Bridge,
+stowed himself in a corner of one of the seated niches, and found
+relief in the presence of a stray kitten, sore-footed, hungry-eyed,
+ginger-haired, that rubbed against his legs and responded with
+appreciative purrs to his tentative back-strokings and ear-rubbings,
+administered half-unconsciously, as he wondered why human
+beings--under certain given circumstances, should be so much more
+beastly than the brutes?
+
+The kitten jumped on his knee.  He saw that its fur had been
+torn--probably by a dog--and shuddered at the remembrance of having
+more than once set a rough-haired terrier--a companion of his early
+boyhood--to worry stray cats--and enjoyed the carnage resulting.  Why
+did he shudder now?  Because by a feat of imagination only possible
+to one who was beginning to learn what it is to be homeless and
+hunted and desperate, he had got inside the ginger kitten's ragged
+skin, and established between himself and what we are content to call
+inferior creatures a bond of brotherhood.
+
+"Don't you go, Kitty! though I can't make it much worth your while to
+stop," he muttered.  "If I'd got the things--a scrap of lint and a
+saucer of clean water, a needleful of silk and a dab of carbolic
+ointment--I could patch up that tear--you'd be as good as new inside
+of a week."
+
+He yawned, and the tramp of booted feet and the shuffle of naked ones
+grew faint in his ears; and presently the rush and roar of the Bridge
+roadway-traffic dulled to a hum--and he was deadly sleepy.  With
+blundering fingers he undid two buttons of the frieze greatcoat and
+tucked the kitten inside--and after turning round three times, and
+making a great parade of clawing the surface soft enough for comfort,
+it curled up and fell asleep, and its host not only slept, but snored.
+
+Even in sleep he was dogged and haunted by those three tragic
+figures;--the broken-down _viveur_, the child dying on gin, the lost
+creature who had once been Anabel Foltringham--they cropped up in his
+troubled dreams, over and over again.  And he woke up, and it was
+dark, and a sleety rain was stinging him, and even the kitten in his
+breast was cold and cried.
+
+He got up, aching and stiff, hungry and thirsty, realizing that he
+must have slept for hours.  Big Ben boomed twelve.  A midnight
+express from Charing Cross dragged its chain of yellow lights across
+the railway bridge with a hollow roar and rattle.  One or two shapes
+passed, vaguely human in the wintry darkness; a Post Office van or
+so, with an official inside sorting bags by the light of a swinging
+lantern, three or four crawling cabs, a trolley with a formless mass
+upon it, pushed by two indistinct, slow-moving figures, coming from
+the Surrey side.
+
+Toward the Strandward end of the Bridge there was a light, with murky
+figures moving about it.  Revealed by its two flaring naphtha-lamps,
+the characteristic hostelry of the London gutters, with its gaudy
+paint and patriotic decorations, its clean shelves piled up with
+homely food, and hung with common crockery, its steaming urns of hot
+and comforting drink,--proved a Godsend to one more hungry and
+homeless vagrant.
+
+The shipwrecked mariner of his analogy might have known the same
+sense of relief, seeing his signal answered and some stout vessel,
+flying the red ensign of the British Mercantile Marine, bearing down
+upon his tiny, wave-washed raft....  P. C. Breagh was guilty of
+prodigality at that coffee-stall.  A penny cup of coffee, weak, but
+hot, and a twopenny sandwich, consisting of two slices of bread
+smeared with mustard and inclosing something by courtesy called ham,
+but really pertaining to that less stylish part of the pig known as
+"gammon," took the edge off his savage appetite.  A ha'porth of milk
+for the kitten, and another ha'porth of ham-trimmings, left him lord
+of seven-pence halfpenny cash.
+
+Thus, warmed and cheered, he went back to his seat in the niche
+again, noting that every stone bench he passed had now its seated
+group, or prone extended figures.  His recently vacated place had its
+occupant, a thin, barefooted young man, indescribably ragged; who
+slept with his famished face--sharp and yellow as a wedge of
+cheese--turned to the sky, and the Adam's apple of his lean throat
+jerking, as though something alive, swallowed inadvertently, was
+madly struggling to get out.
+
+And as he leaned upon the eastward parapet of the Bridge with the
+ginger kitten, now replete and happy, purring on his shoulder, and
+watched the wild welter of black water, pale-patched with foam and
+spume, rushing away beneath him, to plunge growling through the
+arches of Blackfriars Bridge, and speed away under Southwark and
+London Bridges, past the Custom House, Traitor's Gate and the Docks,
+between Wapping and Rotherhithe on its way to Greenwich and Poplar
+and Blackwell; and thence, by the verdant heights of Charlton to
+Woolwich, widening to a mile here; and so on past Gravesend and the
+Nore Light to where it flows between Whitstable and Foulness
+Point--eighteen miles broad; a kingly river, carrying on its back the
+commerce of the world.
+
+The wind blew bitter cold from the heights of Hampstead.  A livid
+moon blinked through rifts in ink-black cloud-wrack above the Shot
+Towers and a huge mass of brewery-buildings on the right.  On the
+left, revealed in glimpses and suggestions by stray moonbeams and
+wind-blown lamp-flares, was a great confusion of trucks and trolleys;
+huge cranes rearing skeleton arms aloft, colossal cauldrons, heaps of
+clay beside yawning trenches, winking red eyes of warning for belated
+wanderers.  All this beyond a banking-face of stone masonry with
+completed piers, showed where the Victoria Embankment would be
+by-and-by.  Meanwhile chaos reigned; the area would have been an
+appropriate playground for the inhabitants of Bethlem Hospital, in
+hours of relaxation, or on national holidays.
+
+P. C. Breagh laughed gallantly at his own conceit, and his chapped
+lips cracked and hurt him.  He staunched the bleeding with his
+handkerchief, conscious that a day might come when he should cease to
+have any use for such an article.  Habits die hard with us, but the
+cleanly ones go first, being acquired.  We continue to desire food
+and drink long after we have left off caring about the color of our
+linen--nay! long after we have become indifferent to the fact that we
+wear no linen at all.
+
+He was bone-weary; his thigh-bones seemed wearing through their
+sockets.  His knees ached, his feet were heavy as solid lumps of
+lead.  It occurred to him that the two things most desirable on earth
+were an arm-chair and a roasting fire to toast before.  Failing that,
+a seat on a stone bench, with a north wind gnawing you was better
+than nothing....  He thought that by now one of the sleepers in the
+niches would have wakened up and moved on.
+
+Vain hope.  Where one had withdrawn, his place had been filled by
+three newcomers.  Misery, Dirt, Drunkenness, Disease, and
+Wretchedness herded in those stony refuges, mercifully winked at by
+the patroling policeman with the unsavory-smelling bull's-eye.  And
+strange beings perambulated or crept the pavement; 2 a.m. is the time
+when you may see them!--emerging from the foul hiding-places where
+they pass the daylight hours, to wander forth unseen....
+
+Such goblin forms, such Gorgon faces, revealed by some fitful ray of
+watery moonlight, or the lamp of a languid, belated cab....  It was a
+waking nightmare, a Dantesque vision realized, inconceivably hideous
+to nerves already weakening.  The Celtic strain derived from his
+father, in conjunction with the sensitive romantic nature bequeathed
+by Milly Fermeroy, might have urged their son to end things that
+bleak January night, with a leap from the parapet and a plunge into
+the wild black welter tumbling under the Bridge arches.  But P. C.
+Breagh was not fated to join the procession of grim, unconscious
+voyagers, that wallow in the tides and circle in the eddies, flounder
+under the sides of barges, beat upon the piles and bridge-piers, and
+sink to slumber in the river-sludge a while, before they rise, more
+dreadful than before, to journey on again....
+
+His mother's faith plucked him as before, from the desperate brink of
+the temptation; and--he had worked in the dissecting-rooms and walked
+the hospitals, toward that end of failure previously recorded,--and
+the hardening did yeoman's service now.  But it went badly with
+him--at one period of that week-long night particularly....  He never
+liked to speak of that experience....  But long, long afterward he
+said to one who loved him:
+
+"I held on to my reason, and prayed Our Lord for daylight.  And--I
+don't know how I managed--but somehow, I got through!"
+
+He found a seat at length, not knowing by whom or how it had been
+vacated, and dropped into it and slept like the dead.  And he awoke
+in a windless lull,--to a strange bluish-yellow radiance in the sky
+beyond the great squat dome of St. Paul's and the crowding chimneys
+of the City: and felt the stir and thrill and quiver that is the sign
+of this sad world's waking to yet another day.
+
+Three homeless women shared the seat with him.  Two were awake,
+watching him not unkindly.  A third slept, leaning forward in a
+huddled attitude, propped by the handle of a basket she held upon her
+knees.  She breathed in whistling squeals,--a night on Waterloo
+Bridge in January encourages bronchitis....  He listened for a
+moment, then with a prodigal impulse, dropped twopence of his
+eightpence into the basket on her lap.  And she woke, and said with
+an Irish accent:
+
+"May the heavens be yer bed!" and slept again, heavily.
+
+The second woman snuffled out in the accents of the East End:
+
+"Gawd bless you, good gen'leman!"
+
+The third lifted a tattered scarlet head-shawl, and flashed a pair of
+jet-black Oriental eyes upon him:
+
+"Fortune and Life!"
+
+To her he said, with a creditable effort at cheeriness:
+
+"I've lost the fortune, mother! the life's about all I've got that's
+left to me!"
+
+"And a good thing too, my gorgious!  Don't yer complain of it!  Come,
+tip us yer vast!"  She added, as he stared uncomprehending--"Eight or
+left-hand dook--whichever the Line's brightest in.  Have yer a--No!
+I'll give yer of my jinnepen for naught!"
+
+He held out the broad, strong palm, grimy enough by dawn-light.  She
+peered, spat on the chilly gray pavement and said:
+
+"You keep up heart--there's a change a-coming soon!"
+
+"Can't come too soon for me!"  His smile was rueful.
+
+"Keep up heart, I tell yer!" she bade him.  "Yer'll travel a long
+road and a bloody road, and yer'll tramp it with the one yer love,
+and never know it.  Until the end, that is, when tute is jasing.  And
+there's a finer fortune than I meant yer to get o' me!  Shake her up,
+Bet!"  She explained, as the other woman turned to rouse the sleeper,
+"Taken a great cold, she has!  We're fetching her to the Hospital.
+'Tholomewses in Smithell, for the gorgio doctors to make her well.
+Though that's not where I would lie, my rye, and my pipes playing the
+death-tune.  Shoon tu, dilya!  Better shake her again!"
+
+"Wake up, deer!  There's a good soul!"
+
+They stood up, supporting the bronchial Irishwoman between them,
+shaking and straightening their frowsy garments--tidying themselves
+as the poorest women will.  Then with, a farewell word they moved on,
+northward.  And P. C. Breagh, following them with reddened,
+night-weary eyes, saw his Fate coming, though he did not know it, in
+the person of a small and shabbily-attired elderly man.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+He came striding from the Strand side, in a red-hot hurry, making as
+much noise with his boots as three ordinary pedestrians.  He wore no
+overcoat, but was buttoned up in a decent black serge frock, having
+his throat protected by a large white cashmere wrapper.  Also he wore
+gray mixture trousers, rather baggy at the knees, and shiny, and was
+crowned with a well-worn silk top-hat.
+
+He walked at a great pace, swinging his arms, which were inordinately
+lengthy, and finished with hands of extra size, encased in white
+knitted woolen bags not distantly resembling boxing-gloves.  When he
+reached the middle of the Bridge, he stopped and backed against the
+west parapet, folded his arms, and,--or so it seemed to P. C. Breagh,
+who was watching him for the sole reason that he happened to be the
+only cheerful-looking, decently-clad human being within his range of
+vision--snuffed the breeze, and considered the prospect with a
+consciously-possessive air.  In moving his head sideways, so as to
+extend his view, his sharp black glance encountered that of his
+neighbor, and he nodded, and thus their acquaintance began.
+
+"I'm glad to see, young gentleman," said the little man--and "_My
+eye!  Do I still look like anything of that sort?_" was the young
+gentleman's unvoiced aside: "I'm glad to see that you don't number
+one among the many thousands--if I was to say Millions I shouldn't be
+guilty of exaggeration--who under-estimate the value of fresh morning
+air.  For my part, without boasting, I may call myself a walking
+Monument to its healthiness, or as you can't put up a monument to a
+live man--I'll say, a Living Testimonial."
+
+He had a yellow, tight-drawn, wearied skin, with a patch of rather
+hectic red on either cheekbone, and his bright black eyes twinkled at
+the bottom of hollow orbits, overshadowed by shaggy eyebrows of the
+deepest black.  When he took off his hat to cool his head, from which
+quite a cloud of steam arose, you could perceive that he was baldish,
+and that his bristly hair and large mutton-chop side-whiskers owed,
+like his shaggy eyebrows, their intense and aggressive blackness to a
+conscientious but unskillful dyer, for by the cold and searching
+light of morning, delicate nuances of green and purple were seen to
+mingle with their youthful sable, and here and there the roots showed
+grayish-white.
+
+"I was given up by the Doctors at the age of twenty," said the little
+man, "as I had been previously give up by 'em at eleven and fifteen.
+'The boy's in Rapid Decline,' says one, 'keep him out o' drafts and
+give him boiled snails and asses' milk.'  My poor mother did her
+best, stopping up window-cracks with paste and paper, and stuffing
+chimneys with old carpets.  And living as we was at Hampstead
+Village, and the Heath being productive in snails and donkeys, the
+rest o' the prescription was easy to carry out.  Still I got lankier
+and went on coughing o' nights.  Says Doctor Number Two, 'It's a case
+of Galloping Consumption.  Feed him up, clothe him warmly, encourage
+him to take gentle exercise, and avoid chills whatever you do!'  So
+my mother swadged me up in flannel, made me eat a mutton chop every
+two hours, and trot up and down the front-garden for exercise between
+chops; and she'd pour half-a-pint o' porter down me whenever I stood
+still.  And in spite of all her affectionate solicitude," said the
+little man with a twinkle, "I kep' on wasting, and coughing and
+spitting, and doing everything that a young fellow in a galloping
+consumption could do, short of galloping out o' this world into
+another.  And Doctor Number Three says,--being called in when I was
+twenty: 'It's _phthisis pulmonalis_ in the advanced and incurable
+stage.  You can do nothing at all for this young man but get him into
+an Institute for Incurables.  Codliver Oil, Care, and Kindness,' so
+says he, 'may prolong his miserable existence a month or two.  For
+the rest, there's nothing to be done!'  If you'll believe me, that
+news was the death of my poor mother.  She'd expected nothing else
+for years--and yet it killed her at the end!  And I acted as Chief
+Mourner at her funeral," ended the little man with a queer twist of
+his lean, sharp jaws and a momentary dimming of his keen black eyes,
+"in the pouring rain, and walked home without an overcoat--and got
+wet to the skin, and stripped, and rubbed myself dry, and made a
+rough supper of scalding oatmeal porridge, and went to bed and slep'
+with the windows open top and bottom.  And that was over thirty years
+ago, and I've never missed my morning sponge-over with cold water
+since; nor never shut a window night or day, nor never run up a
+doctor's bill, and don't mean to!  I left off coddling--once the
+blessed old soul was gone!  Got better--better still--always expected
+to die by those who'd knowed mother.  I traveled and saw Foreign
+Parts,--not specially going about to pick the 'ealthiest climates,
+knocked about abroad--came home and took to Business, and have taken
+to it ever since, as you may see.  My health is robust," he made a
+show of hitting his chest again, but thought better of it.  "I live
+plain, and make a point of getting Fresh Air into my system whenever
+possible.--This is the place I come to, as a rule, for the morning's
+supply.  I take it on Blackfriars Bridge after the dinner-hour, the
+eating-house I patronize being on Ludgate Hill," he added.  "And--I
+don't know whether you happen to be a student of old Bill
+Shakespeare, but there are some lines of his which might be twisted
+into applying to me."  He drew a deep breath and delivered himself as
+follows:
+
+"Some are born Tough, some achieve Toughness--others have Toughness
+thrust upon them."
+
+He smote his chest hard with a muffled hand, and coughed in that
+rather hollow fashion, adding: "Without vanity, I may consider myself
+as belonging to the latter class!  Eh?"
+
+P. C. Breagh agreed that the speaker might be considered as belonging
+to the latter class.
+
+"For at this moment I am as fresh as paint," said the little man
+proudly, "and as lively as a kitten, yet I have been up and about and
+on my legs all night!  I left our place of business at 3.20 a.m.,
+reached Charing Cross by 3.30, was on the platform when the Dover
+Boat Train steamed in--bringing mails and passengers that have
+crossed in the Night Boat from Cally--took over a shorthand report
+from a Special Correspondent--who has been to Paris to gather details
+of a political murder," he tapped the breast of his black frock-coat,
+which showed the bulging outline of a thick notebook.  "And in the
+absence of our News Editor--who's been sent to Brummagem to report
+Mr. Bright's speech on Popular Education, Irish Amelioration, and
+Free Trade,--Parliamentary affairs being at a standstill this holiday
+season,--I shall hand 'em to the Senior Sub., who'll distribute the
+stuff and have it set up by the time the Chief drops in from Putney
+at eleven.  It's for to-morrow's issue, following the ten-line
+telegram we publish this morning.  A column-and-a-half of Latest
+Intelligence!" the little man screwed up his eyes and licked his lips
+as though reveling in the flavor of some rare gastronomic delicacy.
+"And if I had the say as to the setting of it--which I haven't!--and
+was free to indulge my predilection for showy printing--which I never
+shall be!--it should be headed with caps an inch high--and spaced and
+leaded all the way down."
+
+His black eyes snapped: his hectic cheeks grew fiery.
+
+"Headed with inch-high caps, ah! and spaced and leaded from the top
+to the bottom.  Fancy how it 'ud lay siege to the Public Eye, and
+draw the Public's coppers!  When I shut my eyes I can fair see the
+editions running out."
+
+He recited, marking out the lines and spaces with a finger encased in
+white woolen:
+
+  A PRINCE MURDERS
+  ONE MAN AND
+  FIRES AT ANOTHER
+  IN HIS OWN
+  GILDED DRAWING-ROOM.
+  PARIS SENSATION.
+  COUSIN OF
+  THE FRENCH EMPEROR KILLS
+  A JOURNALIST
+  ON THE VERY DAY WHEN
+  THE FRENCH LEGISLATIVE
+  BODY
+  MEET TO INAUGURATE THE NEW ERA
+  OF CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT
+  UNDER NAPOLEON III.
+
+
+His eyes snapped, his hectic cheeks flamed, he was evidently launched
+on a subject that was near the heart beating beneath the bulgy
+pocket-book.  He talked fast; and as he talked he waved his arms, and
+gesticulated with the large hands encased in the woolly boxing-gloves.
+
+"I cherish ambitions, perhaps you'll say, above my calling, which I
+don't mind owning is that of Newspaper Publishers' Warehouseman.
+Perhaps I do--perhaps I don't!  My own opinion is I'm before my time,
+a kind of Anachronism the wrong way round," said the little man
+rather ruefully, "and rightly belong to--say forty years hence.  As
+the poet Shakespeare says, and if it wasn't him it ought to have
+been!  'Sweet are the uses of Advertisement.'  I'm a believer in
+Advertisement, always have been and always shall be!"
+
+His garrulity was an individual and not unpleasant trait, implying
+confidence in others' sympathy.  He went on:
+
+"Being Nobody in particular, my views have never been took up and
+acted on.  Though I enjoy a good deal of confidence and am--I hope I
+am!--respected in my place.  For as Solomon said, somewhere in
+Proverbs--'Designs are strengthened by counsels,' and our Chief
+himself hasn't been too proud to say, on occasion: 'Knewbit, what
+would you do in this or that case?'  Such as you see me, I am often
+at the 'Ouse of Commons, when sittings are late and speeches have to
+be jotted down in mouthfuls and carried away and set up in snacks....
+For my constitution is of that degree of toughness--sleep or no sleep
+matters little to me, and that I am as fresh at this moment as you
+are," he bit off the end of a yawn, "I wouldn't mind betting a
+sixpence now!"
+
+Said P. C. Breagh, at last getting in a word edgeways:
+
+"If you lost--and you would lose!--and paid--and I expect you'd
+pay!--my capital would be doubled.  I'm not a young swell who has got
+up early to look at London.  I'm a vagrant on the streets--and it
+strikes me I must look like it.  To-day I've got to find work of some
+kind.  Can you give me a job in your warehouse?  I'm strong and
+willing and honest--up to now!  But by G--! if stealing a bunch of
+turnips off a costermonger's barrow will get me a full belly and a
+clean bed in prison, I expect I shall have to do it before long, if I
+can't find work anywhere!"
+
+"Bless my soul!" said the garrulous little man excitedly.  "And I
+thought you were a Medical Student or an artist (some of 'em aren't
+over-given to clothes-brushes and soap-and-water), and here I stood
+a-jawing and you starving all the time! ... Work--of course you shall
+have work, though I can't promise it'll be the kind o' work that's
+fit for an educated young gentleman----"
+
+"Any work is fit for a gentleman," snarled P. C. Breagh, "that a
+decent man can do!  What I want is----"
+
+"What you want is--Breakfast and a wash and brush-up!" cried the
+little man excitedly.  "And that you must go to Miss Ling and get.
+Say Mr. Knewbit sent you--I'm Knewbit,--Christian name Solomon.  It's
+No. 288 Great Coram Street--second turn to your right above Russell
+Square.  Cross the Strand and go up Wellington Street and Bow Street,
+cross Long Acre and ... but you're too dead-beat to walk it.  Take a
+growler--it'll be eighteenpence from here unless the cabby's lost to
+every sense of decency.  Borrow the money from me--here it is!  I
+give you my word you shall be able to pay me back to-morrow.  Here is
+a cab!  Hi!  Phew'w!"  Mr. Knewbit whistled scientifically, and the
+preternaturally red-nosed driver of an old and jingling four-wheeler
+pulled up beside the curb as P. C. Breagh stammered out:
+
+"I--I can't thank! ... You're too confoundedly kind! ... and I'd
+begun to think that all men were thieves or scoundrels--except a
+poor, sick beggar of a swell I met yesterday, whose wife and children
+shun him and whose valet bullies him!  I can't refuse, you know! ...
+Things are too..."
+
+"The fare will be two shillings if you talk one minute longer!"
+warned Mr. Knewbit, opening the door of the straw-carpeted,
+moldy-smelling vehicle.  "I can see extortion in that man's eye.  I'm
+a judge of character, that's what I am.  Bless my soul!  Is that
+kitten yours?"
+
+For the ginger Tom, with arched back and erect tail, was walking
+round P. C. Breagh's legs, purring insinuatingly, and his companion
+of the night's vigil said hesitatingly, looking at the meager,
+homeless mite:
+
+"He seems to think so!  And--he helped me through last night.  Would
+you mind if I took him?  I'll pay for his keep as soon as ever I----"
+
+Mr. Knewbit shouted in a violent hurry:
+
+"In with you!  Cat and all!  Don't apologize!  Miss Ling adores 'em!
+Three in the house already--waste bits left on the dustbin for needy
+strangers.  Don't forget!  288 Great Coram Street, Russell Square.
+Drive on, cabby!"
+
+He added, dancing up and down excitedly on the pavement, as the
+jingling four-wheeler rolled on, with the pair of castaways:
+
+"Lord!  if I only had the setting up of that young fellow's story,
+how I would give it 'em in leaded capitals!"
+
+
+He closed his eyes in ecstasy and saw, in large black letters
+standing out across the clear horizon of the new day to which London
+was waking:
+
+  LONDON DRAMA.
+  BEGGARED HEIR TO WEALTH
+  ROBBED.
+  CAST ON THE STREETS!
+  SOLE COMPANION A KITTEN!
+  PATHETIC STORY.
+
+
+"Not that I know he is the heir to wealth, but it looks well,
+uncommon!  Uncommon well, it looks!" said Mr. Knewbit.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+When the Editorial Staff of the _Early Wire_ had gone home, or to the
+Club, by cab or private brougham or on foot, in the blackest hours of
+the night or the smallest hours of the morning; when the Printing
+Staff had filed out, pale and respectably attired, or thundered down
+the iron-shod staircases in grimy, inky, oily _déshabillé_, then the
+Publishing Staff trooped in and took possession.  And, as the lines
+of carts backed up to the curb, and were filled by brawny
+shirt-sleeved men, who tossed the huge bales of newspapers from hand
+to hand with the nonchalant skill of jugglers doing tricks with
+willow-pattern plates and oranges, the Business Department began to
+empty so much that you could see the eyebrows of clerks behind the
+iron-nailed unplaned deal counters; and Mr. Knewbit, slackening in
+his terrific energy, would cease keeping count, and tallying, and
+writing cabalistic signs on huge packages with the stump of blue
+pencil that never was used up.  And he would mop his face and say--in
+the same invariable formula:
+
+"Well! we've broke the back of the day's work, and lucky if no one
+can say no worse of us!"
+
+Later on, when the last newspaper-cart had been gorged and rattled
+away, and the last newspaper-boy had darted out with his armful, and
+his mouth open for the yell that would issue from it the moment his
+bare feet hit the pavement of Fleet Street, and the office of the
+_Early Wire_ and all the other offices that had got off the Morning
+Issue had an air of dozing with blinking eyes and mouths half
+open--when the Evening Papers were at the height of strenuous
+effort,--Mr. Knewbit would arrange the limited supply of hair
+remaining on his cranium with a pocket-comb, titivate his whiskers by
+the aid of a tiny scrap of looking-glass nailed inside his desk-lid,
+dust the blacks off his collar, straighten his cravat--which boasted
+a breastpin that was an oval plaque of china, painted with a
+miniature of a young lady with flowing ringlets, rosy cheeks, white
+arms and shoulders, pink legs and a diaphanous tutu, dancing, crowned
+with roses in front of a sylvan waterfall,--and betake himself out to
+dine.
+
+Sometimes he would patronize the "Old Cheshire Cheese" chop-house,
+where they gave you beefsteak puddings on Saturdays.  Or "The Cock"
+would have his custom, or he would drop in at an eating-house in St.
+Paul's Churchyard, where Irish stew, boiled beef with dumplings and
+carrots, or tripe and onions were the staple dishes in winter months.
+In summer you got roast mutton and green peas and gooseberry tart
+with custard; but whatever the season or the dish, it was always
+washed down with whisky-and-water, or gin-and-lemonade, or the
+strongest of strong beer.
+
+For this particular tavern was patronized by the penny-a-liners of
+Paternoster Row and the vicinity; out-at-elbows, and generally
+seedy-looking literary free-lances, who picked up a living by
+inditing touching tracts and poignant pamphlets for religious
+Societies bearing arresting titles, such as:
+
+"STOP!  YOU ARE OUT AT THE GATHERS!  Or, The Tale of a Skirt," and
+"DEAD LOCKS FOR LIVE HEADS!  By A Converted Hairdresser."  Or
+biographical accounts of the brief lives and protracted deaths of
+Little E----, aged seven, or Miss Madeline P---- of X----.
+
+Bearded men these, with bulbous noses, studded with ruby pimples;
+full of strange oaths, reveling in profane jest and scurrilous talk.
+Lanky youths with hollow eyes, uncut hair and crimson neckties, who
+boasted of having cast off all shackles, bonds and fetters, civil,
+social, moral and religious, and dreamed in their wilder moments of
+the inauguration of a second British Commonwealth, and the reign of a
+New Era of Socialism, and the planting of the Tree of Liberty in
+Buckingham Palace Courtyard....
+
+And over their strong meats, and the stronger liquors with which they
+moistened them, these would discuss the plots of tracts, and so
+forth, seasoning their discourse with highly-spiced pleasantries and
+salacious witticisms, jesting in ribald sort at all things upon earth
+and elsewhere; until--as Mr. Knewbit frequently said--you expected
+the ceiling to come down and strike 'em speechless, and fancied you
+saw wicked little hellish flames playing about the cutlery.
+
+"Not that I ever read any of their stuff, you know!" he explained to
+P. C. Breagh, "though I am a man that, to a certain extent, might be
+considered a reader.  You've seen my library on the shelf by my
+bed-head, and though three books might be held--in the opinion of
+some people--to constitute rather a limited library, they're the
+three best books that ever were written or ever will be.  Bar none!"
+
+He was a Christian believer himself; of the easy-going,
+undenominational, non-Church-going kind.  And when Sunday came round,
+Miss Ling, after seeing the beef and potatoes and Yorkshire-pudding
+safely into the oven, would charge him to watch over the same and
+guard them from burning; and put on her best bonnet and pop over to
+the Christian Mission Army Hall that used to be in Judd Street, W.C.,
+for a supply of red-hot doctrine sufficient to stand her in a week of
+working-days, while Mr. Knewbit smoked, kept an eye on the cooking,
+and occasionally dipped into his library.
+
+A popular edition of the Plays and Poems by one William Shakespeare,
+together with a stout and bulky volume, "Gallowglass's Encyclopaedia
+of Literary and Typographical Anecdote," and a worm-eaten,
+black-leather-bound copy of the Bible--as translated from the Latin
+Vulgate and published by the English College at Douay A.D. 1609,
+formed Mr. Knewbit's library.  In the pages of these, their owner
+frequently stated it as his opinion, might be found the finest
+literature in the world.  He always ended:
+
+"And I bought Gallowglass for half-a-crown off a barrow in
+Camberwell, and Shakespeare was give me by a young fellow who found
+him dullish reading--and the Book that beats 'em both I picked up in
+the fourpenny box at a second-hand bookseller's in Clement's Inn!"
+
+King Solomon and the son of Sirach of Jerusalem, with the Prophets
+Isaiah and Hosea, were Mr. Knewbit's favorite Old Testament authors.
+Of the Books of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus he never wearied.  One
+wonders how much he understood, but he quarried diligently in their
+pages, and sometimes emerged into the light figuratively laden with
+jewels.  Marvelous passages would drive home to the brain of the man
+in blinding flashes of illumination, and he would lose the place in
+his excitement,--being an unmethodical if omnivorous reader,--and
+never be able to find them again....  So he quoted his Prophets from
+memory and generally inaccurately, yet seldom without point or
+inappropriately.  At other times, wearied with their glorious
+obscurity, he reverted to the plainest and simplest of all the
+stories ever written, and the sweetest and the saddest too....
+
+He spoke of the Saviour as though he had known Him....
+
+"I never could forgive them fellers"--I conceive he meant the
+Disciples--"for cutting off and leaving Him to be pinched by that
+gang in the Garden.  It was mean, that's what I call it.  Mean!  But
+I will say they owned up their shabbiness in their writings
+afterward.  Though you notice they hurry over that part.  And I'm not
+surprised!  That young feller downstairs yet, Maria?"
+
+
+This was at eight o 'clock on the Sunday morning following Mr.
+Knewbit's meeting with Carolan on Waterloo Bridge.  Miss Ling,
+stepping nimbly about the big front kitchen in the basement, busy
+with her task of getting breakfast, returned that "Mr. Breagh had got
+up and gone out at half-past six."
+
+"For a shave?"
+
+Mr. Knewbit rubbed his own bristly chin rather dubiously as he asked
+the question.  Miss Ling, impaling a round of stale loaf upon a tin
+toasting-fork, shook her neat head and answered in the negative.  Mr.
+Breagh had mentioned that he was going to church.
+
+"To church....  We'll hope he has gone," said Mr. Knewbit still more
+dubiously, "though between me and you and the toasting-fork it sounds
+too good to be true....  And 'The Brunswick Arms' is handy round the
+corner.  If the young man don't rattle at the area-gate by the time
+you've finished your toasting, I shall made bold to go and look for
+him at the Bar.  Hulloa!  Here he is!  Now, that's what you might
+call a pleasant disappointment!"
+
+For he had glanced up at the strip of area-railings commanded by the
+upper panes of the kitchen window, and seen the legs of P. C. Breagh
+stride by at a great rate, stop, turn back, and descend the
+area-steps.
+
+You are to see Miss Ling receiving his morning greeting with the wide
+smile that revealed an unbroken row of sound white teeth ("every one
+her own," as Mr. Knewbit would say) and made her thin, triangular
+face so pleasant.  She was a staid spinster, owning to forty-nine,
+who would have died rather than confess to being fifty.  Her
+magnificent hair, genuinely black and shining like ebony, was coiled
+upon the top of her head too tightly for beauty.  Her well-marked
+eyebrows and candid brown eyes slanted a little upward at the
+temples, and her skin was rather yellowish than olive.  She was of a
+flat and bony figure, active and sound and tough, and, in a plain
+way, a first-rate cook and caterer.
+
+"Though when I left her Ladyship the Countess of Crowmarsh," said
+Miss Ling, "after fourteen years spent in the Castle nurseries,
+gradually rising from nursery-maid to under-nurse, and then becoming
+what his Lordship was pleased to call Head of the Bottle
+Department--a very humorous nobleman his Lordship was at times!--I
+had forgotten all I ever knew of my dear mother's
+kitchen-teaching--she was a cook, Mr. Breagh, who had lived with the
+first in the land! and when--being pensioned by the family--I decided
+to risk the step of taking this house, and letting it out to lodgers,
+preferring single gentlemen--I was forced to engage a widowed person
+to prepare their meals at first."
+
+"I remember her," said Mr. Knewbit, with his mouth full of poached
+eggs and bacon.  "She could under-boil a pertater and calcine a chop
+with any elderly female I ever yet come across.  Here, pussy! if you
+ain't too proud for rasher-rinds?  And not you!" He leaned to the
+hearth--he was sitting with his back to the glowing range, and
+dropped his offering under the nose of the ginger kitten, which,
+having already disposed of a saucer of bread-and-milk, instantly
+grabbed.
+
+"To-morrow," said P. C. Breagh, looking up from his rapidly-emptying
+plate with the smile which Miss Ling had already decided was
+pleasant, "I hope to prove to you that, like the kitten, I am not too
+proud for anything that comes in my way."
+
+"Presently, presently!" said Mr. Knewbit sharply.  "Everything in
+good time! ... I don't like to be hurried.  And--what did you say was
+the property you'd left with the--the Greedy Guts who runs that
+Euston Road hotel?"
+
+"There were three boxes of books--chiefly works on medicine and
+surgery."  Carolan reflected a moment, stirring his coffee with one
+of Miss Ling's Britannia-metal spoons.  "And two trunks, with clothes
+and all that.  Things I valued.  My student's cap and _schläger_, and
+the silver-mounted beer-horn the English Colony gave me, and--a
+Crucifix that was my mother's."  The speaker blinked and spoke a
+little huskily: "Used to hang over my bed when I was a little chap in
+frocks."
+
+"Don't be cast down.  Some wave o' luck may wash your property ashore
+at your feet one of these days.  What I will say is--I wish I had the
+setting-up of that story for the paper!" said Mr. Knewbit, handing in
+his plate for fried bread.  "Supposing you,"--he jerked his eyes at
+Carolan--"had any talent in the literary line, it 'ud be worth your
+while to throw off a quarter-col. of descriptive stuff."
+
+"Relating to my experiences in that fellow's bug-ridden
+lodging-house?  Why, I don't doubt I could--after a fashion," said P.
+C. Breagh.
+
+"After a fashion won't do.  Write it the best you know!  Sit down at
+the kitchen-table here, when Maria's gone to her prayer-meeting and
+I've got my pipe and Solomon to keep me quiet,--and blacken half a
+quire o' paper--there's plenty in the drawer there!--with the
+story--told short, crisp and plain, and with a dash o' humor, and
+within four hundred words.  It would space out lovely!" said Mr.
+Knewbit, arranging imaginary head-lines on the clean coarse
+tablecloth.
+
+  LONDON SHARK
+  VICTIMIZES STUDENT!
+  HE GRABS HIS GOODS
+  AND LETS HIM GO!
+
+"Ah, dear me!  If I had had your education.  But it's too late to
+alter that.  What were you saying, Maria?"
+
+Miss Ling was hoping that Mr. Breagh had passed a comfortable night?
+
+"First rate, ma'am, many thanks to you!" returned the object of her
+solicitude.
+
+"For," said Miss Ling, with a homely kind of dignity, "if anything
+was wanting, Mr. Breagh must make excuses.  The arrival being
+unlooked-for and the notice very short."
+
+"Dropped on you out of the skies, didn't he, Maria?" chuckled Mr.
+Knewbit.  "And you've put him, for the present, in Mr. Ticking's bed!"
+
+"In Mr. Ticking's bed!--Mr. Ticking," explained Miss Ling, turning to
+the new arrival, "who rents our third-floor front, being in the
+country for his holidays."
+
+P. C. Breagh expressed the hope that Mr. Ticking would not be
+offended.
+
+"Lord bless you, no!" responded Mr. Knewbit.  "Ticking's an agreeable
+feller.  He'd take you rather as a Boon than otherwise.  Contributes
+a column of cheerful, gossipy items weekly to half-a-dozen of the
+suburban and district newspapers that are springing up around us
+like--like mushrooms.  Always on the look-out for copy--Ticking is!
+Now Mounteney----"
+
+"Mr. Mounteney--who is also away on his vacation, and rents the front
+sitting-room on our ground-floor, and the bedroom behind it," said
+Miss Ling, "is a gentleman who--owing to the nature of his
+professional employment--is very refined and sensitive."
+
+"Edits the Health and Beauty column of the _Ladies' Mentor_," said
+Mr. Knewbit, crunching fried bread noisily, "and is altogether too
+ladylike a gentleman to take a liberty with.  For the rest, we are
+Full Up.  To begin with, I occupy a combined bed-and-sitting room
+behind this kitchen, and Miss Ling occupies the large front garret
+bedroom; the back one being partitioned off as a Box and Lumber room,
+and a bedroom for the servant gal, who is now having her breakfast in
+the scullery, as me and Miss Ling agreed would be more considerate
+toward you....  Coming down again to the first-floor, the front
+parlor and back bedroom are rented by a German gentleman, Mr. Van
+Something----"
+
+"Herr von Rosius," interpolated Miss Ling, "who is a teacher at the
+Institute of Languages in Berners Street....  Second-floor front,
+another combined bed-and-sitting ... Monsieur Meguet, a French
+gentleman who is studying Prints at the British Museum.  Second-floor
+back, Miss Kindell, who is a copier of Pictures at the National
+Gallery, and a sweet artist.  Third-floor, Mr. Ticking----"
+
+"You represent him for the present," said Mr. Knewbit, nodding at
+Carolan.
+
+"The trouble is, and I hope Mr. Breagh will forgive me for mentioning
+it," hesitated Miss Ling, "that Mr. Ticking comes back to-morrow
+night...."
+
+"And when does Miss Morency go? ... Miss Morency," explained Mr.
+Knewbit without waiting for an answer, "is a young person who don't
+give satisfaction,--regarded as a lodger,--and there you have the
+truth in a nutshell--Brazil for choice!  And Miss Ling's good-nature
+has led her, before now, to take in such people, and be taken in by
+'em too, I'm bound to say!"
+
+The little man broke off as Miss Ling, mindful of P. C. Breagh's
+flushed and uneasy countenance, coughed warningly.
+
+"Miss Morency has been brought up very well, and is--she has told
+me,--the daughter of a clergyman in Hertfordshire," she explained as
+Mr. Knewbit buried his confusion in his coffee-cup.  "I cannot but
+think it right--under the circumstances--to give Miss Morency a
+little time to turn round."
+
+"She's been turning round for eight weeks," said Mr. Knewbit, rubbing
+his nose irritably.  "And--if I was you, I'd have my latchkey back."
+
+"To ask it would be a want of confidence, which would wound Miss
+Morency, and upset her," returned Miss Ling, who had risen and was
+gathering the breakfast things together in rather an agitated way.
+She added: "And willfully to hurt a person's feelings is a thing I
+could not bring myself to do, Solomon.  And she goes out, evening
+after evening, poor thing, to call on relatives who live in distant
+parts of London, and is hardly ever back until very late indeed!"
+
+"She come in at two o'clock this morning," said Mr. Knewbit, screwing
+up his eyes meaningly at Carolan.  "And--being comparatively early
+myself on Saturdays--I heard her--just as I was getting between the
+sheets.  And being anxious to solve the problem as to Why a young
+creature like that should go out walking on two feet--and them
+remarkably small and pretty ones!--and come back with Four--and two
+of 'em uncommon big and heavy ones, I slipped up the kitchen-stairs
+and looked round the corner-post.  '_The seeing eye and the hearing
+ear,_' said my namesake, '_the Lord hath made them both_' ... and
+then, just as I was a-going to ring the garret-bell and bring you
+down out of bed in your curl-papers, Maria, I remembered, '_Lie not
+in wait for wickedness in the house of the just, nor spoil his
+rest,_' 'him' being understood as 'her,' for you're a just woman!
+But judgment must be executed upon the daughter of Rahab, whether
+it's Sunday or whether it ain't!"
+
+"When you begin quoting from the prophets, it takes a cleverer than
+me to understand you," said Miss Ling, flushed to the top of her high
+cheekbones.  "But as a woman that's her elder, I will stand up for
+that poor unprotected young creature against any man that tries to
+take her character away!"
+
+"It's nearly time for the Prayer Meeting at the Headquarters Branch
+Hall of your Christian Mission Army," said Mr. Knewbit, looking at an
+enormous silver watch he wore, and always set by the Tower clock at
+Westminster, and calmly taking the poker from the rail above the
+kitchen-range.  "If you'll put on your bonnet and go, what I have
+made up my mind to do will be comfortably over before the General, or
+the Colonel, or whichever of 'em is set down to give you Blood and
+Fire this morning, has fairly warmed to the fight.  But if you want
+to be upset and made uncomfortable in your mind for a week
+afterwards--you'll stop!  You will?  Very well, and why not in your
+own house?  Mr. Breagh, will you kindly follow with Miss Ling and act
+as Reserve Force in this emergency?  I thank you, young gentleman!"
+
+And armed with the poker, Mr. Knewbit left the kitchen, followed by
+Carolan and the landlady, closely attended by the ginger kitten, and
+mounted the stairs to the third-floor back.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+It was a sordid little scene that followed, but for the sake of the
+good woman whose unaffected charity and kindly feeling illumined its
+murky darkness, it shall be recorded here....
+
+
+Mr. Knewbit, arriving at Miss Morency's door, thumped on it,
+receiving no answer beyond the hurried shooting of the bolt, and the
+scuffling of slippered feet across the carpet.  Roused by the
+meaningful silence to indignation, he delivered himself in the
+following terms:
+
+"You inside there--and you're aware why I don't address you as a
+young lady!--I'm going to trouble you to unfasten that door!"
+
+"No, you ain't!" said a feminine voice from within, defiantly.  "Go
+downstairs and shave yourself, you silly old man!"
+
+A thickish masculine chuckle greeted this sally.
+
+"When we have got you and your companion out of this respectable
+house," quoth the wrathful Mr. Knewbit, "I may have time to attend to
+my Sunday twylett.  Not before!  Are you a-going to undo this door?
+Because, if you won't, I am a-going to bust it with the poker!
+Once!"  He applied the end of the weapon named to a panel with a
+crack in it.  "Twice!----"
+
+"Stop!" cried Miss Ling, and Mr. Knewbit lowered the poker.  "One
+moment, Solomon!--I want to speak to her!"
+
+Forgetful of her neat Sabbath attire, she went down upon her knees
+before the door, as Mr. Knewbit joined P. C. Breagh upon the
+staircase, and laid her work-worn hand as gently and persuasively
+upon the threatened panel, as if it had been a human bosom housing an
+obdurate heart.
+
+"Miss Morency!  Don't be afraid, my dear!  Maria Ling it is
+a-speaking to you!"  She waited an instant, and receiving no
+response, went on.
+
+"Mr. Knewbit has got it in his head--he best knows why!--that you're
+not Alone in that room, in a manner of speaking....  Open the door
+and prove to him he's wrong; or tell me on your solemn honor--before
+the God who made you and me both women!--that he's mistaken, and I'll
+believe you--and ask your pardon--and we'll all go downstairs again!"
+
+There was a silence within the room, and then a thick whispering
+voice and a thin whispering voice held indistinct colloquy.  P. C.
+Breagh and Mr. Knewbit exchanged looks, Miss Ling grew pale, rose,
+and withdrew from the door.  Her clean Sunday handkerchief was in her
+hand and the hand shook, and her mouth was shut tightly, as, with
+much shuffling, an obstacle--probably a chest of drawers--was removed
+from the other side, the key was turned, and the bolt withdrawn.
+
+The door opened.  The defiant figure and the angry painted face of a
+good-looking young woman were revealed beyond the threshold.  She
+wore a gaudy dressing-gown trimmed with cheap lace, and a butterfly
+cap in the prevailing mode was set upon her mound of dyed hair.  Her
+companion might have been the manager of a restaurant, or a West End
+shopwalker.  His face was sallow with debauch, and his eyes were red
+from liquor or sleeplessness.  With the rosebud of the previous night
+still drooping in the buttonhole of his fashionably cut frock-coat,
+and the mud of the previous night soiling his trouser-ends and his
+shiny boots and drab spats, and his silk hat fixed firmly on his head
+as though in anticipation of a scuffle, he stood behind the woman;
+maintaining a sulky silence, gripping his cane in a hand that was
+mottled and shaky.  And the roll of his eyes said "Two of 'em!" as
+his glance took in Mr. Knewbit and P. C. Breagh.
+
+Said the rouged, defiant young woman in the flyaway cap, turning a
+glare of defiance upon her landlady:
+
+"You see now whether that"--she employed a term reflecting on the
+moral character of her assailant--"was mistaken, or whether he
+wasn't, I hope?"
+
+Returned Miss Ling, looking mildly at the brazen countenance:
+
+"I see!  May the Lord forgive you, poor ruined young creature.  But
+for Him having given me a good, good mother, I might be standing
+where you are now!"
+
+"Never!" said Mr. Knewbit under his breath.  The kind soul went on
+without heeding him:
+
+"Were you led away? ... Was it the first time? ... Whether or no,
+it's not too late to change, and lead a life of decency.  As for
+this--man...."
+
+The young woman interrupted, with lowered eyes shunning her:
+
+"We're to be married!  He's promised me upon his oath!"
+
+Her companion purpled furiously, and broke out:
+
+"You're lying, you----!  I picked you up in the Haymarket!  Do you
+think I'm afraid of you and your bullies there?  Stand back!"
+
+Fulminating threats, he thrust roughly past Miss Ling, driving her,
+possibly not with intention, against the landing wall.  She gave a
+little cry, and the poker fell....  He bellowed:
+
+"---- you!  You've broken my arm, you--blackguard!  Where's the
+police?"
+
+A grip of steel shut upon his scruff, and the voice belonging to the
+grip said cheerfully:
+
+"In the street.  Come down and look for 'em, my man!"
+
+His protests were drowned in the rattling of his boot-heels on the
+oil-cloth-covered staircase, in the violence of his transit to the
+ground-floor.  There, as Mr. Knewbit, dodging past, opened the hall
+door, he was shot from its threshold as a human bullet from a
+spring-cannon, even then supplying a sensational turn at the Royal
+Alhambra Theater--rolled down the steps, gathering momentum, and
+colliding with a late milk-truck that happened to be passing,
+suffered abrasions and the ruin of his smart frock-coat.  Leaving the
+victim of righteous judgment to appease the justly-indignant milkman
+with some of the silver shed from his trousers-pockets in the
+transit, Mr. Knewbit slammed the door, and crowed, slapping P. C.
+Breagh heartily upon the back.
+
+"Neatly done!  You could get a well-paid job as pitcher-out at a West
+End bar, if you'd nothing better than your muscles to rely upon....
+Wait a bit!"  He vanished upstairs, walking as softly as a cat does,
+to return and explain:
+
+"The pumps are at work up there!  Both of 'em crying--Rahab's
+Daughter and Solomon's Virtuous Woman, I mean....  You remember the
+text?  '_Her price is above rubies._'  I remembered it when I saw her
+sitting dropping tears upon that trollop's head, that was a-lying in
+her lap.  Well, well!"  He led the way down into the kitchen,
+muttering, "'_As golden pillars upon bases of silver, so are the firm
+feet upon the soles of a steady woman...._' and '_Her husband's heart
+delighteth in her!_'  Sit down, you must want a breather ...
+'_Delighteth in her_'--or would have if she'd married one capable of
+appreciating a character like hers."
+
+Seeing that the mind of Mr. Knewbit was still running upon Miss Ling,
+P. C. Breagh ventured to ask:
+
+"And has she never entertained any intention of----"
+
+Mr. Knewbit nodded sagely.
+
+"Once.  You might say--there has been a Romance in her life, without
+exaggeration.  When in service with that family of Nobs you've heard
+her mention,--about twenty-four years ago, when she was a strapping
+young woman of twenty-six--she got engaged to an underbutler--a young
+man with an affectionate nature and a changeable disposition, in
+conjunction with weak lungs.  Weak lungs----"
+
+Mr. Knewbit opened the oven-door and looked in to ascertain how the
+mutton and Yorkshire pudding were getting on.  "I've had weak lungs
+myself, but never found 'em an excuse for villainy!  Mph! ... Don't
+smell like burning--pretty right, it seems to me!"
+
+He sat down in his Windsor arm-chair near the hearth, stretched out
+his carpet-slippered feet, and broke out:
+
+"So--in the interests o' them weak lungs of his, his master's son,
+Lord Wallingbrook--to whom he sometimes acted as valet, took him in
+that capacity on a steam-yacht-trip from Plymouth, via Trinidad to
+the Southern Seas.  And they cruised among the Islands of the Pacific
+for months--a gay party of bachelors amusing themselves!--and--in the
+Paumotu Group--this precious young man of Maria's up-stick and took
+French leave....  And that's all.  And whether his master knew more
+than he'd tell--that's uncertain.  Anyhow, a letter arrived six
+months after the steam-yacht dropped anchor at Plymouth, to say that
+he was safe and well and happy--but was never coming Home any more.
+And she believes ... 'Ssh!  Here she is!"
+
+It was Miss Ling, who had been crying, undoubtedly, for her Sunday
+bonnet-strings were spotted as with rain, and her clean handkerchief
+was reduced to a damp wad.  Said she:
+
+"I have talked to that poor thing upstairs, as a woman of my age is
+privileged to do.  And she has softened wonderful, Solomon, and from
+what she has owned--has seen the shame and wickedness of her life
+clear, and longed to be delivered from it--this many and many a day,
+I'm sure!  So if you'll kindly whistle up a four-wheeler, I'll make
+bold--being late for the speaking at the Judd Street Branch Hall!--to
+take her down to the Christian Mission Army Headquarters in the
+Whitechapel Road.  Where I shall find not only the General, as they
+call Mr. Booth, but Mrs. Booth, ready and willing, please Heaven! to
+help the poor soul to a better life!  And though Lilla has gone home
+to spend Sunday with her mother at Southampton Mews, I'll stop there
+passing and send a note in, and she'll come round and dish up
+dinner--and don't you, either of you, dream of waiting a minute for
+me!  Now, I'm going back to Miss Morency--though her real name is
+nothing like so grand as that, poor creature!"
+
+She turned at the door to nod and smile and say: "And her and me will
+carry down her box between us, so don't show yourselves to shame her
+poor swelled face before the cabman."
+
+
+"There's a woman!" said Mr. Knewbit exultantly, a few minutes later,
+as the hall-door shut and the cab-door banged, and the vehicle
+containing the Daughter of Rahab and the Woman Above Rubies rattled
+away in the direction of Holborn Circus.
+
+"I wonder you----" P. C. Breagh was beginning, when he stopped
+himself on the brink of an indiscretion.
+
+"Eh?..." interrogated Mr. Knewbit.  "What? ... Oh, but I did, though!"
+
+Mr. Knewbit rubbed his chin, which needed shaving, and shook his head
+in a despondent way.
+
+"I did.  She was thirty-one when the Earl and Countess pensioned
+her--thirty-one pound a year For Life they promised....  And it's
+been paid regularly, going on for nineteen year now.  And in the
+second year I came to lodge here early in January, and finding her a
+comfortable, cleanly, kindly creature, I stopped on--and all but
+asked her to marry me next time New Year came round.  On the
+following anniversary I took the plunge! after reading a passage of
+Solomon's peculiarly applicable to my case.  '_He that hath found a
+good wife hath found a good thing,_' it was.  Turned it up by
+accident, and showed it to her, and asked her.  And she said No!  And
+goes on saying it--though I ask her for the last time regularly every
+year.  Here's the gal coming down the area-steps.  Now that meat and
+pudding's off my conscience, I shall put on my boots for an airing
+before dinner.  And while I'm gone--try your hand at a neat article
+in moderate paragraphs describing the methods of that"--Mr. Knewbit
+cast about for a new term--"that Man-eating Alligator in the Euston
+Road.  What was the name of the place?  'Royal Copenhagen Hotel!' ...
+Why, it fairly smells of roguery!  'Royal Greenhorn' would be pretty
+well up to the mark."
+
+Mr. Knewbit returned, just as the little servant pronounced dinner to
+be in danger of spoiling--in a cab; and thereupon ensued much jolting
+and bumping, suggestive of the conveyance of heavy articles up the
+doorsteps into the hall.  Where, being summoned from the kitchen by a
+bellow, P. C. Breagh recognized his own trunks and book-boxes, and
+wrung the hand of his good genius with a grateful swelling of the
+heart, and an irrepressible watering of the eyes.
+
+"It was so kind!--and suppose I never am able to pay you--or keep you
+waiting a devil of a time?" he protested incoherently.
+
+"Young fellow," said Mr. Knewbit, scowling with his heavy brows and
+twinkling pleasantly from under them.  "You are a gentleman born and
+bred and taught.  You must have your Books to keep up your Latin and
+Greek and other learning--and to keep up your appearance you must
+have your clothes.  No man is so down in the world that he can afford
+to go downer.  This is my opinion, and also Miss Ling's!"
+
+"And to-morrow Mr. Breagh will find poor Miss Morency's room swept
+and scrubbed and got ready for him," said Miss Ling that evening,
+during Mr. Knewbit's absence.  "And the rent is--including Kitchen
+Board with myself and Mr. Knewbit, who likes homeliness, sixteen
+shillings per week.  And if I trust Mr. Breagh for a month--that will
+be a chance for him of getting work to do.  And that he will turn
+from nothing that will bring him in an honest living, I am certain;
+and that he will justify the confidence of Mr. Knewbit, I am equally
+sure!"
+
+Said P. C. Breagh, rather chokily:
+
+"I hope to God I may one day be able to thank you both as I should
+like to!  You don't know what you have done for me, either of you!
+But I will--will repay you, I swear!"
+
+She said in her quaint way:
+
+"What obligation there may be could be repaid now--with Mr. Breagh's
+permission.  He saw that most unhappy girl to-day....  He has seen
+a-many--many like her!  If he would promise me--never to bring about
+a fall like that, or help to drag a head so fallen, lower!  Perhaps I
+take a liberty," said Miss Ling, "and presume, being almost a
+stranger....  Yet I ask it of Mr. Breagh, I do indeed!"
+
+He gave the promise, in words that were broken and hurried, and with
+eyes that shunned her plain, kind, earnest face.  She said:
+
+"There will be a beautiful young lady, one of these days, all the
+happier for that promise Mr. Breagh has given.  And I hope he won't
+think me unjust--because I am a woman! and blind to the wreck and
+ruin that my sex can bring about.  I knew a young man, once; who was
+good, and honest, and worthy; and engaged to marry a young person of
+his own rank in life...."
+
+Carolan remembered Mr. Knewbit's story of the faithless underbutler.
+
+"He went Abroad to Foreign Countries," said Miss Ling, mildly,
+"sailing on a ship that voyaged for months at a time.  I am told that
+the women are very beautiful in the islands that he visited; and
+somehow or another, he was led away...."
+
+Though she looked at Carolan, her regard was curiously impersonal.
+It was as though she saw the wraith of some face once dear, and
+although changed, never to be forgotten, appear within the outlines
+of the face that looked back at her.
+
+"The ship sailed Home without him.  He wrote--by another vessel--to
+the young woman he was to have married, begging her forgiveness....
+He had loved her, he said, and looked to be happy with her.  But the
+sunshine and perfume and color of them foreign places, and the spell
+of the beauty of their wild brown foreign women was over him.  He
+could not come back....  He never may come back again....  But if it
+happened so--and he, being old and worn, and weary of strange ways
+and distant places, was looking for an honest roof to shelter him,
+and a loving heart to lean upon at the last...."
+
+"He would find both here, I know!" said Carolan, gently.
+
+She started and, recalling herself, said in a changed tone:
+
+"Mr. Breagh must excuse my having delayed him here a-talking.  To
+work and bustle is more natural to me!"
+
+He took her hand, and having learned in Germany to pay such pretty
+homage without looking foolish, he stooped above it and touched it
+with his lips.  She smiled her wise, kind smile, and said with a
+touching simplicity:
+
+"Mr. Breagh is good enough to honor a poor, hard, working hand!"
+
+He said, and the tone had the ring of sincerity:
+
+"I wish, with all my heart, I were worthier of touching it!"
+
+And so went upstairs to sleep in Mr. Ticking's bed.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+"My student-cap and _schläger_ and the silver-mounted beer-horn the
+English Colony gave me, and my mother's Crucifix" found their places
+on the walls of the clean and comfortable room, and upon cheap
+stained-deal shelves the books of which Mr. Knewbit had spoken so
+respectfully were ranged, waiting to refresh their owner's memory
+whenever he chose to dip into them.
+
+The sharkish manager of the "Royal Copenhagen Hotel" had been cowed
+into giving up the detained luggage by Mr. Knewbit's assurance that
+the story of his knavery was even then taking literary form under the
+skilled hand of a young and aspiring journalist of his (Knewbit's)
+own acquaintance, and might shortly appear in a newspaper to the
+confusion of the said manager, unless the property was surrendered
+upon payment of a corrected version of the bill.
+
+These terms being hastily accepted, the Rules of Fair Play, according
+to Mr. Knewbit, demanded that the written record of the manager's
+iniquity should be consigned to Miss Ling's kitchen-fire.
+
+"Not that it ain't a pity, for it ain't half bad for a beginner,
+though wanting in what I call snap and sparkle.  But honor is
+honor--and if Mr. Ticking reads this knowing you're not going to use
+it--you'll find the story cropping up presently in the _Camberwell
+Clarion_ or the _Islington Excelsior_....  Couldn't you do something
+else--just for a taster?  Or haven't you something finished and put
+away and forgot?"
+
+P. C. Breagh finally disinterred from the litter of manuscript notes
+at the bottom of a book-box, a scrawled description of a duel between
+two Freshmen at a well-known tavern and concert-room outside the
+walls of Schwürz-Brettingen.  The humors of the battle, waged in a
+low-ceiled room in the upper story, crowded with chaffing, drinking,
+smoking students; the marvelous nature of the defensive armor worn by
+the inexperienced _Füchse_, the blows that fell flat, the final
+entanglement of their swords, and abandonment of these unfamiliar
+weapons in favor of fisticuffs, made Mr. Knewbit chuckle, and won the
+suffrages of Mr. Ticking; who said the fight and the bit of
+knock-about at the end was nearly good enough to be put on at the
+Halls.
+
+Mr. Ticking was a journalist who possessed a knack of rhyme, penned
+comic ditties for Lion Comiques, when these gentlemen would sing
+them,--and lived in the hope of getting a Burlesque produced at a
+West-End Theater one day.  He had educated himself because you
+couldn't get on if you were not educated.  He could not have
+explained to you how the process had been carried out.  By
+dexterously angling matter for short paragraphs from the swirl of
+happenings about him, he contrived--between the _Camberwell Clarion_,
+the _Islington Excelsior_, and the _Afternoon_, a late daily
+published in Fleet Street--to net some three pounds at the end of
+each week.  Thirty shillings of this went to support an aged and
+invalid mother resident at Brixton; and if you had lauded Mr. Ticking
+as a heroic exemplar of filial virtues, he would have been
+excessively surprised.  Though if you had told him that he wrote
+Burlesque better than Byron, he would have believed you implicitly.
+
+Mr. Mounteney, Miss Ling's ladylike gentleman, proved to be a tall,
+stout, elderly, rather depressed individual, whose gold-rimmed
+glasses, attached to a broad black ribbon, sat a little crookedly
+upon a high, pink Roman nose.  His light blue eyes were over-tried
+and rather watery, his hair had come off at the top, leaving his
+crown bald and shiny; his customary attire was a rather seedy black
+frock-coat, a drab vest with pearl buttons, and rather baggy brown
+trousers, and he wore turned-down collars and black ribbon neckties,
+and displayed onyx studs and links in a carefully preserved shirt.
+Pieces of paper protected his cuffs, invariably covered with
+memoranda written in violet-ink-pencil, referring to the most
+delicate and confidential affairs.
+
+For Mr. Mounteney, under the _nom de guerre_ of "Araminta," edited
+the "Happiness, Health, and Beauty" column of that fashionable
+feminine monthly, the _Ladies' Mentor_, into whose bureau, according
+to Mr. Mounteney, a vast correspondence,--penned by the wives and
+daughters of what Mr. Mounteney termed the Flower of Britain's
+Nobility and Gentry, as by their governesses and maids, and the wives
+and daughters of their butchers, bakers, and
+candlestick-makers,--continually flowed.  Signing themselves by fancy
+names, these confiding ones would put questions concerning matters of
+the toilette and so forth, the Answers to which interrogations, with
+the pseudonyms prefixed, were inserted month by month.
+
+
+"_Little Fairy_.--A lady who weighs fourteen stone need not
+necessarily give up waltzing.
+
+"_Ruby_.--We should recommend you to powder it.
+
+"_Ravenlocks_.--To stand in the sun too soon after applying is
+prejudicial to a successful result.
+
+"_Peri_.--Try peppermint."
+
+
+Or the bosom of Araminta, guarded by the onyx studs and the black
+pince-nez ribbon, would be made, according to its owner, the
+receptacle of confidences calculated, if revealed, to convulse
+Society to its core.  Thus burdened with secrets, it weighed heavily
+on Mr. Mounteney.  When lachrymose with gin-and-water, to which
+cooling beverage he was rather addicted, he would with tears deplore
+the wreck of a once noble constitution, caused by reason of emotional
+strain.  But he never gave any of his correspondents away.  And being
+of a kindly disposition, he induced the Editor of the _Ladies'
+Mentor_ to read and accept a brief, mildly-humorous article,
+descriptive of a German ladies' cake-and-coffee party; the details
+having been long ago previously supplied by a fellow-student at
+Schwärz-Brettingen, and worked up by P. C. Breagh.
+
+Several other social paragraphs by the same hand found their way,
+thanks to Mr. Ticking's introduction, into the columns of the
+_Islington Excelsior_.  In recognition, P. C. Breagh, producing pairs
+of basket-hilted swords, pads, cravats and goggles from one of the
+cases rescued from the hotel manager, instructed Mr. Ticking in the
+noble art of fence.
+
+Their thrusts, lunges and stampings seriously threatening the
+stability of the third-floor landing, these combats were transferred
+to the back-yard in fine weather, and permitted in the kitchen when
+it was wet.  And Mr. Ticking, though he never mastered the science of
+the _schläger_, inducted P. C. Breagh into the mysteries of boating
+and velocipeding,--having a cutter-rigged Thames sailing-boat in
+housing near Chelsea Bridge Stairs, and a huge-wheeled bone-shaker of
+the prevailing type stowed away in a decrepit conservatory adjoining
+the bathroom on Miss Ling's second floor.
+
+Mr. Mounteney could not be prevailed upon to handle what he
+stigmatized as "deadly weapons," or to risk his person on the
+whirling wheel, while even fresh-water boating caused him to suffer
+from symptoms not distantly resembling those peculiar to the malady
+of the ocean.  But, flabby as the ladylike gentleman appeared, he was
+a vigorous and tireless pedestrian, able to reduce Mr. Ticking, who
+was not unhandy in the usage of his feet, into a human pulp, and walk
+Mr. Knewbit, who had reason to pride himself upon his powers of
+locomotion, completely off his legs.
+
+Expeditions were made to Addiscombe, in the green swelling Surrey
+country, where the once famous East India College was founded in
+1812, and sold and dismantled in 1858 upon the transfer of the
+Company to the Crown.  Of the 3,600 cadets who were trained here, the
+names of Lawrence, Napier, Durand, and Roberts are written upon the
+rolls in letters of undimming gold.  Or to Sydenham with its acres of
+glittering crystal, its matchless fountains, and the view from the
+North Tower, extending over six counties and compassing the whole
+course of the Thames.  Or to Ascot, with its stretches of sandy
+heathland, its noble racecourse and its woods of fir and birch, would
+the lady-like gentleman, accompanied by one or the other or both of
+his young friends, betake himself upon a highday or a holiday, when
+duchesses ceased from troubling and milliners were at rest.  Or they
+would make for Hampton Court or Bushey Park, or the ancient manor of
+Cheshunt, or to Chigwell, immortalized by Dickens, where in the
+oak-wainscoted dining-room of the King's Head, such rare refreshment
+of cold beef and salad, apple pie and Stilton cheese could be had,
+and washed down by the soundest and brightest of ales; then even
+"Araminta" was tempted to forget the crushing responsibilities
+inseparable from the delicate position of adviser upon Health,
+Happiness, and Beauty to the feminine flower of England's nobility
+and gentry, and eat and drink like a navvy free from care.
+
+And upon the return of the three wearied pedestrians from these
+excursions, there would be a cheery supper in Mr. Ticking's room, or
+in Mr. Mounteney's, or, best of all, in Miss Ling's clean and
+comfortable kitchen, with more beer and more tobacco,--though by
+reason of a digestion impaired by the continual wear and tear of his
+fair clients' confidences, or by excessive indulgence in tea, Mr.
+Mounteney restricted himself to the mildest of Turkish cigarettes.
+
+Mr. Knewbit, who reveled in the growing popularity of his _protégé_,
+though he might in secret have shaken his head over the articles and
+paragraphs published in the _Ladies' Mentor_ and the _Islington
+Excelsior_, learned very willingly to whistle a beer-waltz, knocking
+the bottom of his tumbler on the table in time to the tune; to say
+"_Prosit_" when he drank, and vocally unite in the final melodic
+outburst of: "_O jerum, jerum, jerum, jerum, la la la!_"  In which
+historic and legendary burden Miss Ling would also join, and laugh
+until the tears ran down.
+
+
+Of the junior-staff room of the _Early Wire_, a bare, gaunt place,
+lighted by three seldom-washed windows looking on a sooty yard, or by
+six flaring gas-jets by night or in foggy weather, Carolan was, by
+the interest of Mr. Ticking, one day made free.  Names of power were
+cut with penknives on the ink-splashed deal tables, and the bottoms
+of the cane-seated chairs had given way under the weight of
+personalities now famous, men who were paid for a single article as
+much as Ticking earned in a year.
+
+And thus P. C. Breagh joined the gallant company of the Free Lances
+of Fleet Street, and very soon had its offices and eating-houses, its
+haunts and traditions by heart.  What demi-gods walked upon those
+historic flags and cobblestones!  Russell, the pioneer and King of
+War Correspondents, and Simpson of Crimean fame, whose war-sketches
+for the _Illustrated London News_ had set England ablaze in '54-5,
+and George Augustus Sala, and Macready--long since retired from the
+stage in 1870,--the veteran Charles Mathews and Byron of burlesque
+fame, and Bulwer Lytton, and Tennyson and Browning, and Planche and
+Edmund Yates, and genial, handsome Tom Robertson, who was to die,
+with his laurels green upon him, in another year.  All these were
+pointed out to the young man, with certain places rendered for ever
+sacred by the footsteps of Dickens and Thackeray, and other of the
+Immortals who have passed beyond these voices into peace.
+
+And into the world of Music and the Drama, our fortunate youth, by
+virtue of his initiation into the cheery brotherhood of Pressmen, was
+now admitted.  There were free admissions for Popular Concerts where
+one could hear Professor Burnett and Signor Piatti play the piano and
+violoncello, and Santley most gloriously sing, and Sims Reeves
+deliver Beethoven's incomparable "Adelaida" with that splendor of
+voice and style that will never be surpassed.  The Christy Minstrels
+of St. James's Hall beguiled our hero of a stealthy tear or two, and
+made him roar with laughter; and Blanchard's Drury Lane Pantomime of
+"Beauty and the Beast," with Kate Santley as Azalea, the Peri, and
+Miss Vokes as the lovely Zemira, was an eye-opener to a youth who had
+witnessed only provincial productions in his native country, and half
+a dozen performances of Schiller's "Robbers," "Don Carlos," and "The
+Stranger" of Kotzebu as given by a stock-company of Bavarian actors
+at the Theater of Schwärz-Brettingen.
+
+Also our hero was privileged to witness the performances of Mrs. Wood
+as Miss Hardcastle in "She Stoops to Conquer," and afterwards in the
+extravaganza of "La Belle Sauvage," at the St. James's Theater, and
+J. S. Clarke, then drawing the town with "Amongst the Breakers" at
+the Strand.
+
+At the Olympic, Patti Josephs was touching the hearts of the British
+Public as Little Em'ly, Rowe was tickling people to laughter with the
+unctuosities and impecuniosities of Micawber, a certain Mr. Henry
+Irving was holding his audiences spellbound with the sardonic slyness
+and hypocritical cunning displayed in his performance of Uriah Heep,
+and beautiful Mrs. Rousby was breaking hearts at the Queen's Theater.
+And evenings spent with these, or with Professor Pepper at the
+Polytechnic, or the German Reeds, who were playing Gilbert and
+Sullivan's little operas, and "Cox and Box" at the Gallery of
+Illustration,--were crowned by suppers in the grill-room of "The
+Albion" in Drury Lane, or at Evan's at the north-west corner of
+Covent Garden.  And these were merry times and merry mimes, my
+masters, and we shall not look upon their like again.
+
+And in the environment I have endeavored to depict, and with the
+associates I have tried to delineate, and with the pleasant hum and
+swirl of this new life setting the tune for his young pulses and
+mingling with his blood, Carolan's temperament recovered its
+elasticity, and his character developed apace.  The magic gift of
+sympathy found in the gutter on that night of homeless, hungry
+wandering was his now, never to be lost or alienated.  He had learned
+much when he had discovered how to fit himself inside the ginger
+kitten's ragged skin.
+
+The bond of brotherhood, established between a shaggy-haired boy and
+all other created beings capable of joy and susceptible to suffering,
+would hold unbroken through all the years to come.  We are aware that
+the confidence of Mr. Knewbit had been won that morning on Waterloo
+Bridge, and we have heard Miss Ling (not ordinarily given to broach
+the subject of the faithless underbutler) tell him in her simple way
+of the desertion that had left her kind heart empty and sore.  We may
+know also that Mr. Ticking revealed, with the fact of the existence
+of the invalid mother resident at Brixton, the secret that he was
+beloved by a certain Annie, the orphan daughter of a deceased
+relative, who lived with the old lady as housekeeper and nurse.
+Annie, it seemed, had a little fortune of her own, and was so kind,
+so clever and so charming, that only the indiscreetly-evident anxiety
+of Ticking's mother to bring about a match, and the too plainly
+manifested willingness of Annie to accept the hand of Mr. Ticking,
+were it offered--held him back from becoming an engaged man.  As it
+was, he spoke, in somber whispers, of an amatory entanglement with a
+splendid creature, not good as Annie was good, but possessing the
+beauty in whose baleful luster honest prettiness pales, and the charm
+whose sorcery kills the conscience, and wakens the scorching desires
+of man.
+
+"Passion!--there's no going against that, you know!" he would say,
+wagging his head dismally, "and if ever you see Leah, you'll
+understand."
+
+But when P. C. Breagh did see Leah, who presided over the gaudy
+necktie and imitation gold cuff-link department at an East Strand
+hosier's, he failed to understand at all.  She had big burnt-out
+dusky-brown eyes and loops of coarse black hair, and a big bust and a
+tiny waist with a gilt dog-collar belt about it.  Ticking had paid
+for the belt when he had taken her to the Crystal Palace, and she had
+admired the trinket on one of the fancy stalls in the French Court
+next the Great Concert Hall.  And there had been a display of
+fireworks on the Terrace, and in the dark interval between two
+set-pieces there had been a mutual declaration; and the moth Ticking
+had singed his wings in the flame of illicit passion, and would
+return to flutter about the candle, he supposed, until he met his
+doom.
+
+Mr. Mounteney spoke of Passion as well as Mr. Ticking, but in the
+exhausted accents of a world-weary cynic who had drunk of the cup to
+satiety.  He knew so much of women, thanks to "Araminta," that he had
+nothing more to learn.  Yet when a pert and pretty waitress, who
+served the table at which he commonly lunched at a Fleet Street
+chop-house, proved ungrateful after six months of extra tips, trips
+to Kew and Rosherville Gardens and innumerable theater tickets, and
+told Mr. Mounteney in the plainest terms that he was "too bow-windowy
+in figure for a beau," and that she preferred young swells on the
+Stock Exchange to elderly newspaper gents, Mounteney--the expressed
+preference having been illustrated by demonstration,--was tragically
+comic in his manifestations of wounded vanity, quite funnily touching
+in his display of jealousy and despair.  For a whole week following
+the betrayal his pale blue eyes were suffused with tears, his Roman
+nose was red, and his light hair stood up on end, where his
+despairing fingers had rumpled it.  His black ribbon necktie
+straggled untied over a limp shirt-front, the violet-ink-pencil
+memoranda on his paper cuffs had merged into blotches and blurs.
+
+Then suddenly his dismal countenance recovered its mild placidity,
+his necktie was tied, his hair lay once more in smoothly brushed
+streaks across his shining crown.  His nose paled, his eyes reverted
+to their purely normal wateriness.  It seemed that nestling amid the
+grasses at the feet of one who had plucked the fairest flowers that
+bloom in the garden of Passion and sickened of their cloying perfume
+and dazzling hues, the disillusioned Mounteney had discovered a
+simple violet, and that the humble sweetness and modest beauty of
+this shrinking blossom had refreshed his jaded senses and solaced his
+wearied mind.
+
+In terms less obscure, Mr. Ticking explained that the humble violet
+was a certain Miss Rooper, who for a monthly salary attended at the
+office of the _Ladies' Mentor_ thrice a week to assist in the
+Herculean task of opening the letters addressed to "Araminta"--take
+down in shorthand her representative's replies to the interrogations
+therein contained--make notes of queries impossible to answer on the
+spot, and ferret out the answers by application at such leading
+centers of information as the Reading-room of the British Museum,
+Heralds' College, the Zoological Gardens, the Doctors' Commons Will
+Office, Marshall and Snelgrove's, Whiteley's, Parkins and Gotto's,
+Twinings', the Burlington Arcade, Scotland Yard, and the Coöperative
+Stores.  Ticking added that for years Miss Rooper had brought her
+luncheon-sandwiches to the office in a velvet reticule, and consumed
+them under cover of the lid of her desk, but that now, the lady being
+regularly engaged to Mr. Mounteney, he supposed the couple would go
+out to "Araminta's" usual ordinary arm-in-arm.  It would be a jolly
+lark, he added, if Mounteney took his betrothed to his customary
+table, as Flossie had already been thrown over by the young jobber
+from Capel Court.
+
+And when P. C. Breagh saw Flossie, who owned a turned-up nose (I
+quote Mr. Ticking) that you might have hung your hat on, and when he
+was introduced to Miss Rooper, who was on the shady side of
+thirty-five and had a long sagacious equine face, and boasted a
+fringe and chignon and waterfall of black hair as coarse as the mane
+of a Shetland pony, and was bridled with bands of red velvet, as the
+pony might have been,--and caparisoned with leather belts and
+strappings garnished with steel rivets, and tossed her head when she
+was coquettish, and whinnied when she laughed, and looked less like a
+modest violet than anything else you could have imagined, he wondered
+very much.  For Mr. Mounteney had spoken of Passion in connection
+with the faithless Flossie, and by the latest bulletins his sentiment
+for Miss Rooper had developed into Passion of the strictly honorable
+kind.
+
+Could the passion on which Shakespeare had strung the pearls and
+rubies of Romeo and Juliet, and to which the lyre of Keats throbbed
+out the deathless music of "Endymion" have anything in common with
+the loves of Ticking and Leah, or the emotion wakened in the bosom of
+Mr. Mounteney by Flossie and Miss Rooper?
+
+Could the emotion of which Carolan himself was conscious, the sudden,
+fierce, stinging temptation born of the bold glance of a pair of
+painted eyes, ogling and laughing from under a clipped fringe and a
+tilted hat, partake of the nature, be worthy of the designation?  For
+Sin beckoned sometimes, and the boy would tug at his chain, forged of
+links of instilled religion and honor, instinctive cleanliness and a
+sensitive, secret shrinking from the purchase of something that was
+never meant to be bartered or sold.
+
+
+But there were times when, sitting at the rickety but useful and
+capacious old davenport in the room from tenancy of which Miss
+Morency had been ejected, the pen would hang idle between the fingers
+of P. C. Breagh, and the article commissioned by the benevolent
+editor of the Camberwell Clarion or the _Islington Excelsior_, or the
+more ambitious magazine-story that was being written as a bait to
+catch a literary reputation,--and would return as surely as the
+swallow of the previous summer, from the editorial offices of
+Blackwood's, or the _Cornhill_, or even _Tinsley's_--would hang fire.
+
+With his elbows on the blotting-pad, exposing to view the shiny
+places on the right-hand cuff of the old serge jacket, and his eyes
+vaguely staring at the strip of London sky seen above the
+chimney-pots of Bernard Street, P. C. Breagh would fall into a brown
+study, a dreamy reverie of the kind to which hopeful Youth is prone.
+
+The outer angles of the eyebrows would lift, giving an eager, wistful
+look to the gray eyes that had specks of brown and golden dust in
+them, the nostrils of the short, determined nose would expand as
+though in imagination they were inhaling some rare, strange, delicate
+fragrance,--the upper lip would lift at the corners, showing the
+canines of the upper jaw--a mouth of this kind can be fierce, and yet
+you have an example of it in the Laughing Faun.
+
+A delicate, rushing sweetness would envelop, enter and possess him,
+body and brain and mind and soul, and his heart would beat fiercely
+for a minute or so, and then not seem to beat at all; and he would
+scarcely be able to breathe for the strange new joy, and the subtle,
+mysterious sense of being drawn to and mingled with the being of
+another, some one wholly and unutterably beloved and dear....
+
+A touch, light as a flower, would visit his forehead, and a voice,
+small and silvery-clear, and with a liquid tremble in it that might
+have been mirth or shyness, would sound in his ears again.  He would
+sigh and lean back, shutting his eyes, and feel the slight yet firm
+support of the delicate limbs and slender body, and the small soft
+hand would stir and flutter in his palm like a captured bird, and he
+would find himself painting in the choicest colors of his mental
+palette upon the background of London sky or neutral-tinted
+wall-paper--a face that was not in the least like
+Krimhilde-Brünhilde's.  And then he would frown, and shake himself as
+a red setter might have done, plunging back out of dripping sedges at
+the sound of its master's whistle, and hurl himself savagely upon the
+pile of blank pages before him, and never pause again until the daily
+task was done.  Or--supposing this retrospective mood to have seized
+him at the ending of his stint of labor, he would set his teeth,
+summon up the image of his colossal beloved, and savagely add to her
+inches all that she had lost since his meeting with the frozen
+Infanta at the Convent, Kensington Square.  For the truth must be
+told, and the painful fact faced,--that since that day the heroic
+Ideal of P. C. Breagh had been steadily shrinking; and the hour was
+coming when her golden tresses were to darken to the black-brown hue
+of rain-soaked oak leaves in Winter,--when her roseate cheeks were to
+blanch to the hue of old ivory, when her towering stature and robust
+limbs were to dwindle to the slender shape and delicate extremities
+of an elfin maiden's, and her late worshiper was shamelessly to dote
+upon the change.
+
+But had this been foretold to P. C. Breagh, he would have scouted the
+prophet as an impostor, and laughed the prophecy to scorn.  Came a
+day, when, fastidiously groomed, and dressed in well-cut, carefully
+chosen clothes, he called upon Monica at the Convent, this time to
+apprize her of the loss of his inheritance, and to assure her of his
+present well-being, despite the change in his prospects brought about
+by the defalcations of Mustey and Son.
+
+He had not intended to ask after the Infanta; the query slipped out
+quite accidentally.  But when Monica returned that by the latest
+advice received from France, the health of Mademoiselle Bayard might
+be pronounced excellent, the querist was conscious of a tightness
+within his collar, and a sudden rush of blood reddened him to the
+hair as his sister added:
+
+"She may be 'Madame' and not 'Mademoiselle' to-day, since what date
+is uncertain.  For her marriage was to take place almost instantly on
+her return to Paris, she told us.  Her father--he is Colonel of the
+777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard--had set his heart on
+this--she worships him--she would consent to any sacrifice--would let
+herself be cut to pieces if he but wished it.  Dear Juliette!"
+
+P. C. Breagh got out, with difficulty, "Then--but--look here, doesn't
+she love the fellow?"
+
+The word last but three got out with difficulty.  His throat was hurt
+by its passage.  He gulped as he stared at Monica, moistening his dry
+lips.
+
+"The fellow."  Her eyes widened.  "You don't call the
+Colonel--that?..."
+
+"Of course not.  I referred to the young lady's husband.  Actual or
+yet expectant."  He boggled horribly in the attempt to seem natural
+and at ease.  "Why should it be a sacrifice to obey her father--what
+has the--the affair got in common with cutting to pieces if she--if
+she----"
+
+He stuck there.  Monica, of all Juliette's friends alone held worthy
+to share the aching secret, had not been told, for her own peace of
+mind.  Yet, loving much, she had seen much.  Now she sat silent.  But
+a little line of distress came between her placid eyebrows, and tears
+were gathering behind the beautiful, tender eyes, in readiness to
+fall when next they might unseen.  Carolan went on, not looking at
+her:
+
+"She said he was a noble gentleman,--master of the sword, and brave
+as a lion.  That doesn't suggest that she--would think herself
+sacrificed in marrying him?"
+
+A sigh heaved Monica's breast and exhaled unnoticed.  He mumbled with
+a hangdog grace:
+
+"Could you, when you happen to write, just give her a message?  Don't
+ask what it means--it has to do with something we spoke of here the
+other day when you were out of the room."
+
+His eyes sought one particular square in the center of the beeswaxed
+parquet, where he had sat leaning against the Infanta's knees.
+
+"Tell her that the man--a fellow-student of mine at
+Schwärz-Brettingen--realized not long after the--the girl--she will
+remember the girl's name!--after the girl had made the offer--she
+will not have forgotten what that was!--from how kind and generous a
+heart it came.  And she will believe--she must believe!--that he has
+loathed himself heartily for the brutal way in which he answered her.
+And he entreats her to forgive, and he thanks her with all----"
+
+Something splashed upon the clenched hand with which he had
+unconsciously emphasized his utterance.  He wiped off the drop
+furtively, and said, still not looking at Monica, but scowling at
+that particular square in the middle of the parquet:
+
+"With all his heart!  You won't forget?"
+
+He made her promise it, and left her wondering.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+Being a daughter of France, and a Parisienne to the finger-tips, it
+could not be that the return to Paris, delightful capital where all
+the brilliancy, _esprit_, good taste, and refinement of modern life
+were concentrated, should fail to rejoice the heart of Mademoiselle
+de Bayard.  Her characteristic quality of humor, a trait not derived
+from the paternal strain, made her omit three items from the list of
+purchases commanded by M. le Colonel.  To supply oneself beforehand
+with a complete bridal costume in the view of immediate union with a
+husband never to one's knowledge previously beheld, could anything be
+more outrageously impossible!  Juliette knew that she would titter
+hysterically behind the stately backs of the powdered and
+frock-coated gentlemen who parade Departments, and probably laugh to
+madness in the faces of the powdered and frizzled young ladies who
+should seek to minister to her needs.
+
+And so, though the fresh and charming toilettes of the evening, the
+promenade and the theater, with the suitable lingerie, were added to
+Juliette's wardrobe, the nuptial robe, crown, and veil remained
+unbought.
+
+Paris, a seething pot since the Auteuil assassination early in that
+January, was in a state of ebullition upon Juliette's return.
+Passing in a _fiacre_ along the Champs Élysées, the progress of
+Mademoiselle's hired vehicle was stopped.  A regiment of mounted
+Chasseurs and a detachment of the Guides blocked the Avenue to stem
+the black torrents of people rolling toward Neuilly, to attend the
+funeral of the murdered journalist Victor Noir.  The National Guards
+occupied the Place de la Concorde, and in front of the Corps
+Législatif was a battalion of infantry, besides a force of _sergents
+de ville_.  Yet by other thoroughfares inky streams of men and women
+poured steadily nor'-west, and a vast concourse packed the Passage
+Massena, where the dead man had lived, and when his coffin was
+brought out, weeping friends unharnessed the bony black horses from
+the shabby hearse, and six of them, hugging the pole, drew it to the
+Cemetery.
+
+But no speeches were made, though an instant previous to the lowering
+of the coffin a disheveled, red-eyed woman leaped upon the plinth of
+a memorial column that neighbored the grave dug in the Jewish quarter
+of the Cemetery, and shrieked:
+
+"He was only twenty-two, and was to have been married in a few days!
+Vengeance upon the nephew of the Corsican wild boar!  Death to the
+murderer Bonaparte and all his bloody race!..."
+
+The rest was lost in the strangled whoopings of hysteria.  But upon
+the ten thousand faces that had turned her way a crimson glow was
+thrown, as though, the sun of Imperial glory were indeed about to
+set, and a yell went up that might have reached the ears of the
+princely homicide lodged in the Conciergerie by order of his Imperial
+relative, pending that extravagant farce of the Tribunal of Tours.
+There was a rush of police, and the woman was pulled down and
+spirited away, it is said, by Revolutionists!  But the _Marseillaise_
+had already cried more loudly than the red-eyed woman, and had been
+heard to greater effect.  Indeed, upon the previous day M. Rochefort
+had attended the tribune of the Corps Législatif, and protested in
+the name of the people against the decree ordering for the trial of
+the noble criminal a Special High Court of Justice composed of Judges
+notoriously amenable to Imperial influence;--proceeding to draw
+between Bonapartes and Borgias some extremely uncomplimentary
+parallels.
+
+The newspaper was seized upon the morning of the interment at
+Neuilly, and its editor and proprietor served on behalf of the Crown
+with a writ of prosecution for libel, by the special authorization of
+the Corps Législatif.  Thus M. Rochefort was rendered too late for
+the ceremony.  But one of the huge crowds of assistant mourners,
+rolling back upon Paris, encountered him, in a hackney cab on one of
+the boulevards, and the human torrent surging and eddying about the
+vehicle, turned it round; and so rolled and roared with it and its
+occupant in triumph to his home.
+
+The savage faces, the sinister cries, the significant tokens of
+popular disaffection and incipient revolt affected Mademoiselle
+Bayard but little, it must be owned.  Her dear Parisians were for
+some reason boiling over.  How many times had she not beheld them in
+a state of ebullition?  French blood is easily heated, see you well!
+A little patience and the people would quiet down.
+
+In the eyes of Juliette and how many other daughters of the Empire,
+the personality of the stoutish little gentleman with the heavy
+sallow face, dull regard, spiky mustache and dyed brown chin-tuft was
+invested with an aureole of semi-divinity.  To her as to her sisters,
+the Emperor stood for France.
+
+Born nineteen years before in the very month of the Coup d'État of
+1851, what should she know of the betrayals, treacheries, crimes that
+had been so many steps in the ladder leading the man on to success.
+A tidal wave of human blood had set him upon the throne of St. Louis;
+the Church, first duped, afterward to be shorn by him of power, had
+poured her hallowed oils upon his head; titles, dignities, gold, had
+streamed from his open hands upon his supporters; the tradition of
+the Army that had throned him was devotion to his name.
+
+And Juliette was a soldier's daughter.  How, then, not reverence the
+Emperor, from whose ermined purples Field-Marshal's bâtons, Grand
+Crosses of the Legion of Honor, coveted commands, desired steps,
+constantly dropped.  That the blind, unreasoning support hitherto
+accorded to him by the Army was weakening,--that 50,000 private
+soldiers' votes would be recorded against him in the forthcoming
+_plebiscitum_,--how was a mere girl to conceive of this?
+
+That her beloved Paris, transformed by him into the gayest and most
+splendid of European capitals, was tottering on the verge of
+bankruptcy, she would not have believed.  Had she been told that High
+Finance is too often synonymous with knavish trickery, that those who
+carry out great civic works may drain treasuries of the national
+millions--it would have conveyed nothing to her.  You cannot talk to
+a school-girl in the shibboleth of the Bourse.
+
+But one sign of the trend of popular resentment etched itself as by a
+biting acid on her memory.  When the sulky driver of the ramshackle
+vehicle pulled up in the Avenue of the Champs Élysées, in obedience
+to the upraised sword-arm and authoritative voice of a lieutenant of
+mounted Chasseurs, Juliette, thrilling with girlish delight at the
+sight of the dear, familiar uniform, let down the window and thrust
+forth her charming head.  And at that moment a party of four
+equestrians, followed by two grooms in the Imperial livery, came
+galloping westward, from the direction of the Pont Royal.
+
+Pray picture to yourself the congested condition of this part of the
+Avenue, the squadron blocking its throat, the halted cab, and the
+lengthy queue of phaetons, Americaines, britzkas, dogcarts, and
+Victorias, forming up on the left hand of the road to rear of it,
+containing ladies old and young, pretty or plain, accompanied by the
+males of their species; while nursemaids pushing babies in
+perambulators, elderly gentlemen out for constitutionals, and other
+harmless pedestrians, were marshaled on the right, under the
+surveillance of imperious policemen, who meddled not at all with
+certain isolated clumps of somber-looking persons dressed in black;
+broken links of one of the huge processions of mourners, checked upon
+their way to the Cemetery at Neuilly.
+
+There was a stir of interest, and every eye was drawn to the little
+cavalcade, previously mentioned, whose leaders, seeing the barrier of
+humanity, horseflesh and steel drawn across the thoroughfare, checked
+their horses and came forward at a walk.  Military Governor was
+written large upon a double-chinned, stiff-necked, gray-mustached and
+imperialed personage who bestrode a high-actioned brown charger, and
+wore the undress uniform of a General of Division of the Service of
+Engineers.  When he leaned to speak in the ear of the slender,
+brown-haired, blue-eyed boy who rode upon his right hand, you saw in
+the wearer of the glossy silk topper, the accurately cut,
+single-breasted black coat and dark gray-strapped trousers--ending in
+the daintiest of little polished boots, with gold spurs--the heir of
+the Imperial throne of France.
+
+A cocked-hatted, white-plumed Imperial _aide-de-camp_ in
+blue-and-gold, and a green-and-silver Palace equerry followed in
+attendance, succeeded at a respectful distance by two grooms in the
+livery of the Tuileries; and a troop of the glorious beings known as
+Cent Gardes came clattering after, balanced to a hair on their shiny,
+prancing black horses, the long white horse-tails streaming from
+their polished steel helmets, with tricolored side-plumes and eagled
+brass plates, their brass-nutted steel cuirasses reflecting their
+lacquered mustaches and the adoring glances of enamored femininity,
+their sky-blue tunics with the scarlet and golden collars, their
+golden epaulettes and aiguillettes, their gauntleted gloves of white
+leather, their skin-tight breeches of snowy buckskin, their
+brilliantly polished boots with huge brass roweled, steel-spiked
+spurs, glancing and dancing, clinking and twinkling in the sun.
+
+Ah me!  Their morals were doubtful, those mustached and chin-tufted
+Antinouses of the Guard, as not only giddy work-girls and milliners,
+but fast variety actresses and frisky ladies of fashion were
+perfectly aware.  But they were splendid, stately, expensive
+creatures, and so worthy to clatter at Imperial heels.
+
+And so gallant was the youthful figure they attended and guarded; so
+well-graced the seat upon the spirited English chestnut, so light the
+boyish hand upon the mare's snaffle-rein, so frank and debonair the
+smile with which he acknowledged the scanty salutations of a few of
+the bystanders; that Juliette's heart flew to him with her eyes, and
+there broke from her in a voice so clear and thrilling that the
+object of her homage started in his saddle:
+
+"_Vive le Prince!  Vive le Prince Impérial!_"
+
+
+The French are tender to youth and beauty, accessible to sentiment,
+lovers of Romance.  Other voices joined in the cry, hats not
+ominously furbished with crape were lifted in salutation; a charming
+dignity was manifested in the boy's reception of these tokens of
+good-will.
+
+You can conceive the picture, set in the beautiful scenery of the
+Champs Élysées, to the roll of carriages in the great avenues, the
+glint of wintry sunshine on still or leaping water, the nip of keen
+sweet air, perfumed with the scent of damp grass and dead leaves and
+wood-smoke.  Delicate tracery of branches as yet bare, interspersed
+with the hardy green of pines, laurels, and larches against a sky
+pale blue as harebell, streaked with broad floating scarves of
+gray-white vapor, made a background for the green-jacketed,
+red-breeched Chasseurs on their bony, brown horses,--for the knots of
+strollers, curious or contemptuous,--for the broken masses of the
+crowd of would-be demonstrators, arrested in their progress by the
+blocking of the way.  In the right foreground suppose the slim young
+Napoleon sitting easily on the fidgety, fretful chestnut,--the
+Military General balanced on his big champing charger,--the
+blue-and-gold aide and the green-and-silver equerry, the grooms and
+the escort of Cent Gardes looking decorously between the ears of
+their well-trained, shining beasts.  To the left place the
+debilitated _fiacre_ with its weary Rosinante and red-nosed sulky
+Jehu, and leaning from the open window of the vehicle--Juliette.
+
+Perhaps you can see her, a little toque of Persian lambskin, with a
+blue wing in it, on her high-piled hair,--with a coquettish jacket of
+corduroy-velvet of the shade known in the spring of that year as
+Bismarck gray,--trimmed with the lambskin, fitting close to her
+slender shape.  She wore a plain black silk skirt looped high over a
+vivid red cloth petticoat--it was a fashionable style of costume that
+year--and very much worn.  A bright rose bloomed in each cheek, pale
+as she was ordinarily; and her black brows were spread and lifted
+joyously, and her eyes shone blue as sapphires in contrast with a
+little knot of violets at her breast and the big bunch held in her
+little gray-gloved hand.  And with a very fair aim she threw the
+latter so that the bundle of wet fragrance lightly hit the saddleflap
+close to the knee of the Imperial stripling, and behind the shoulder
+of the swerving chestnut, as she cried again:
+
+"_Vive le Prince Impérial!_"
+
+The boy bowed to her, blushing at her beauty and her loyal
+enthusiasm,--the equerry, slimmest of the officers in attendance,
+dismounted and picked up the flowers.  A trumpet sounded, a short,
+sharp order was given, there was a trampling of hoofs and a clinking
+of bridles as the files wheeled right and left, leaving a broad road
+open between a double rank of saluting troopers, and the Prince with
+his Governor and following rode down this open vista and cantered
+away by route of the Avenue de l'Impératrice, in the direction of the
+Bois de Boulogne.
+
+The boy held in his whip-hand the bunch of violets handed him by the
+equerry.  Only a little grayish sand clung to some of the dark,
+shining leaves.  He sniffed their fragrance and glanced back as the
+trumpet rang out behind them, and the Avenue was once more blocked
+with mounted Chasseurs.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+He was fourteen, delicate and rather backward for his age, owing to
+the inevitable drawbacks of his environment.  Since the salvo of a
+hundred-and-one guns announcing the birth of a Prince Imperial had
+crashed from the battery of the Esplanade of the Invalides, to be
+echoed from every fortress throughout the Empire; and bells had
+pealed from every steeple, flags had broached from every staff-head,
+and dusk-fall had seen every city, town, or village, ablaze with
+illumination,--had he not been environed with precautions, lapped in
+luxury?  Where another baby would have slumbered in a wicker
+bassinette, the child of France cried in a cradle of artistic
+goldsmithery.  And the three great official bodies of the State, the
+Delegates from all the constituted Authorities paid homage.  And they
+enrolled him in the First Regiment of Grenadiers of the Imperial
+Guard on the day of his birth, and pinned the Grand Cross of the
+Legion of Honor on his bib when he was forty-eight hours old.
+
+To gratify the paternal ambition of a father who had dreaded the
+stigma of childlessness, this graft of his race was to be forced into
+precocious maturity.  You might have seen the little creature at six
+months of age strapped in a cane chair-saddle upon the back of a
+Shetland pony.  At five he could ride a military charger.  Dressed in
+the white-faced blue uniform of the First Grenadiers of the Guard,
+his tiny face hidden in a huge fur shako with a white plume and
+_galons_ and a huge brass-eagled fore-plate, you saw him with the
+Emperor at Imperial Reviews.
+
+It is uncertain whether he was ever soothed to sleep with the French
+equivalent of the rhyme of Baby Bunting, whether he ever learned of
+the Archer who shot at a frog, or was thrilled by the adventures of
+Jack the Giant Killer.  We know that the Napoleonic tradition was his
+ABC, the Third Empire his primer.  At the time of the war with Italy,
+he being then some three years of age, his utterances on the subject
+were quoted in the daily papers as miracles of wisdom--marvels of
+acumen.  His seventh birthday had been celebrated by the production
+of a Military Spectacle, in the course of which real cannon were
+fired and real military evolutions performed upon the stage.  His
+great-uncle on a white horse, in the little cocked hat and gray
+capote of History, was the hero, you may be sure; and three hundred
+soldiers' sons of his own age filled the dress circle, stalls and
+upper tiers.  One likes the pretty story of the fair-haired child
+going down among these little comrades to distribute smiles and
+bonbons.  One can understand the father's pride in the laborious
+pot-hooks and hangers that compliment him upon the taking of
+Mexico--word of ill omen in Imperialist ears!--and the scrawled
+postscript that tells how his horse kicked at exercise that morning,
+but that he sat tight and did not fall.  It was not for a long, long
+time to dawn upon the expanding mind behind the beautiful, bright
+blue eyes, that the Throne Imperial of France was a saddle insecurely
+girthed upon a kicking charger, and that the paternal horsemanship
+had been, and frequently was severely taxed in the effort to stick on.
+
+You may imagine the query, Why?--forming in the mind of seven years.
+Perhaps you see him in his lace-collared, belted blouse and wide
+Breton breeches of black velvet, scarlet silk stockings and buckled
+shoes, curled up upon the blue-and-golden cushion of the gilded chair
+of State upon the three-step daïs in the Throne Boom of the
+Tuileries, where, while their Imperial Majesties dined, he loved to
+play hide-and-seek with his tutor and an _aide-de-camp_ or so; and
+wearied with play, conceive him dreaming under the gorgeous crimson
+velvet canopy powdered with golden N's and symbolical bees, edged
+with laurel leaves of beaten gold, and surmounted by a great golden
+eagle, perched with outstretched wings upon a laurel Crown.
+
+Under the brooding wings of the Eagle on the Crown this child of the
+Empire wondered about many things....  Did any discovery connected
+with the peculiar duties devolving upon the Cent Gardes and the
+Tuileries Police ever make the bright young head toss restlessly on
+its pillow of down?  For he must one day have learned that noiseless
+footsteps patroled the corridors, that observant eyes twinkled at
+every keyhole--that sharp ears were listening at every chink for
+suspicious sounds not only by night, for the terror that walketh in
+the noonday is the peculiar bugbear of Emperors and Kings and
+Presidents.
+
+One may be very sure that long ere another seven years had browned
+the fair hair, he was familiar with the fact that the guardian angels
+of M. Hyrvoix and M. Legrange kept unsleeping watch over the personal
+safety of his father, his mother, and himself.  That officials,
+functionaries, ladies of the Court, and lackeys, male and female,
+were maintained under constant and vigilant surveillance.  That there
+were even Police to watch the Police who kept the Police under
+observation.  That precautions of a peculiarly special and delicate
+nature were observed with regard to the food prepared in the Imperial
+Kitchens and the wine that came from the Imperial Cellars, lest
+deadly poison should be mingled therein by those who did not love the
+name of Bonaparte.
+
+He learned, next,--perhaps the knowledge floated in the air he
+breathed like some strange pollen, or was realized from certain
+experiences garnered during Imperial Progresses, Distributions of
+Awards, Opening Ceremonies, and other public Functions,--that there
+were many of these naughty people, who, while the soldiers and
+certain of the townsfolk in the streets cried "_Vive l'Empereur!_"
+"_Vive l'Impératrice!_" and "_Vive le Prince Impérial!_" remained
+silent even though they uncovered, and a vast number who not only did
+not cheer, but kept their hats on, and sometimes hissed.  Following,
+came the shocking discovery that there existed a party of extremists
+who were not content with being rude and making ugly noises, but had
+even tried--and tried more than once--to kill the Emperor....
+
+"_To kill papa, who is so good to me! ..._"
+
+
+In a glass case in the Empress's cabinet were preserved the crush-hat
+and the cloak worn by the Emperor on the night of Orsini's attempt
+outside the Opera, and damaged by a splinter from one of the
+exploding bombs.  Perhaps that glass case now yielded up its sinister
+secret to the curious questionings of a child.
+
+The discovery that this father, so indulgent, so tender, and so much
+beloved, should be the object of such destroying hate as was
+cherished by these nameless men was terrible.  You may go farther
+into the thing, and suppose its breaking in upon him presently that
+many thousands of his father's subjects, not criminals or murderers,
+but rather estimable persons than otherwise, thrilled with something
+else than tenderness at the mention of the paternal name, and that
+the Empire, which had hitherto signified for him the adamantine hub
+on which rests the pivot of this spinning world of ours--was not as
+solidly founded as his pedagogues had taught him.  That the Army, the
+Peasantry, certain of the Nobility--not of the Ancient Régime--and a
+section of the Bourgeoisie supported it; but that by the educated
+middle-class, and by the intellectual, professional and
+working-classes it was held in abomination--execrated and detested;
+hated with a bitterness that intensified from day to day.
+
+The cat came out of the bag a full-grown tiger.  Revelations,
+discoveries, succeeded one another.  Disillusions came crowding thick
+and fast.  When it was discovered that he was backward for his age,
+and the question of a new private tutor was being discussed, he had
+asked his Governor:
+
+"Could I not go to a day-school like Corvisart and Fleury and the
+Labédoyère boys?"
+
+"Impossible, Monseigneur!" was the answer.
+
+He urged:
+
+"But, _mon cher Général_, you answer that to so many questions.
+Pray, this time explain why?"
+
+Horribly nonplussed, the military governor stammered:
+
+"The heir to an Imperial Throne could not be sent twice daily to a
+day-school.  Not to be dreamed of!  Such an innovation would be the
+signal for fresh insults, provocation of new perils....  Never could
+it be allowed!"
+
+The boy's were rather dreamy eyes, under the silken plume of hair,
+chestnut-brown like his beautiful mother's.  They were proud eyes,
+too, when they had flashed at the word "insult."  And brave, for
+mention of "perils" only made them smile.  He said thoughtfully that
+morning, leaning his elbow on an unfinished Latin exercise that lay
+on the table in the window of his study at the Château of St. Cloud:
+
+"An 'innovation' means something that is new.  But Primoli and
+Joachim Murat are being educated at a French College, and did not the
+late King send his sons to be boarders at the Lycée Henri IV.?  Could
+not I be a boarder at the Lycée Napoléon, or the Lycée Bonaparte, M.
+le Général?"
+
+With labored clearness and a great deal of circumlocution, M. le
+Général explained:
+
+"The heir of a Democratic Empire, Monseigneur, and the sons of a
+bourgeois Royalty cannot be regarded upon the same level, or educated
+upon identical principles.  But a plan has been devised for bringing
+your Imperial Highness into actual touch with the life of a public
+school...."
+
+"How?  Tell me quickly, M. le Général!"
+
+The child's delicate face flushed bright red.  His eyes shone.  He
+sat upright in his chair as though a vivifying breath had passed
+through him, waiting the reply.  It came....
+
+"One of the Professors of the Elementary Class has been engaged to
+take your Imperial Highness through the course prescribed for the
+other pupils.  He will attend daily here, or at the Tuileries."
+
+The child said, with a catching of the breath that was almost a sob,
+and a look of bitter disappointment:
+
+"The boys....  Then I shall not know the boys?"
+
+"No, Monseigneur, except by hearsay.  The Professor will tell you
+their names, ages, and--ah!--leading characteristics....  You will
+learn with them, and every week you will write a composition with
+them, recapitulating what you have learned.  And that they will hear
+of you goes without saying.  Frequently, Monseigneur, but frequently!"
+
+His pupil interrupted:
+
+"They will hear of me, but what is that?  They will never see me--I
+shall never see them!  Never join in their games--never be just
+another boy with them!  Never be friends or foes with them--never
+beat them or be----  No!  I should not like to be beaten at all!"
+
+M. le Général rejoined solemnly:
+
+"That degrading possibility, and graver dangers still, will be
+averted by the fact that their Imperial schoolfellow will not
+be--ah!--bodily present in their midst, my Prince.  Perhaps your
+Imperial Highness would like to see the Professor now?"
+
+And so the Professor came, and from him the boy eagerly gleaned
+information about his little schoolfellows of the Seventh Form.  He
+had friends of his own who came to him after High Mass on Sundays and
+on all holidays.  But except Espinasse, they had been chosen for him.
+The joy of selection and choice he was not to know.
+
+Thus, many men of mark from different Lycées succeeded one another in
+the work-room at the Château and successively occupied the arm-chair
+at the end of the leather-covered table in one of the three windows
+of his corner study on the third story of the Pavilion de Flore at
+the Tuileries--and when he had been attentive and pleased his
+Professor,--his reward would be to hear about the boys....  Some were
+noble, splendid fellows, full of cleverness, energy and spirits;
+others were funny by reason of sheer stupidity, or some quaint
+characteristic or absurd failing which had gained them nicknames
+among the rest.  A few were spoken of almost with reverence, as being
+dowered with the magical gift of genius: poets, dramatists,
+novelists, scientists in embryo, budding naval or military
+commanders, explorers who were to plant the Flag of France in virgin
+corners of the earth and proudly add them to the Empire that would
+one day be his own....
+
+He met his longed-for boys at last.  One likes to picture him--having
+once taken a First Place in the Arithmetic Class--as being permitted
+to join in the St. Charlemagne fête of the Lycée Bonaparte.  He sat
+in the center of one of the long tables, with long vistas of boys,
+boys, boys opening out before him whichever way he turned his head.
+And he was happy, but for this thing; that though most of the boys in
+whom he had been particularly interested were presented to him, he
+did not find--as secretly he hoped to find--the friend of whom he
+dreamed....
+
+He tried to be _bon camarade_; to combine--and he had a special gift
+in this--easy good-fellowship with graciousness.  But the boys did
+not respond as he would have liked.  They stood to attention, and
+looked him in the face, and answered, "Yes, Monseigneur!  No,
+Monseigneur!" boldly, or they shuffled and blinked, and answered,
+"No, Monseigneur!  Yes, Monseigneur!" mumblingly, and that was all.
+
+He wished, secretly yet ardently, for brave, proud eyes to meet his
+own, and strike out the sacred spark of chaste and mutual fire that
+kindles the pure, undying flame of Friendship's altar.  He longed for
+a grave, melodious voice to match the noble, youthful face and the
+fine form of his chosen friend.  He sought a nature to lean upon,
+which should be stronger, greater, than his own....  Superior
+talents, greater capacities, ambitions to share, successes to
+emulate.  And he found none.  Not a boy here was a patch upon the
+shoe of gay, gallant, lovable, merry Espinasse, who had never come up
+to his Prince's notion of a bosom-friend.  Could it be that the other
+self did not exist anywhere?  We turned from that thought, we who
+were lonely when we were young.  It made the world feel so big and
+cold.
+
+
+The Fête of St. Charlemagne having passed off without any untoward
+incident or disagreeable demonstration, an unhappy inspiration on the
+part of M. Victor Duruy prompted the suggestion that the Emperor's
+heir should preside at the distribution of prizes for the Concours
+Général, and thus be for the second time brought into sympathetic
+touch with the intellectual youth of France.
+
+You are to imagine the picture of the stately entry into the great
+Hall upon the first-floor of the Sorbonne upon an evening in
+mid-August; the reception by the Minister of Public Instruction,
+gowned and capped and hooded, and the Representatives of the
+Faculties; the ominously restricted and frigid applause of professors
+and students, greeting references made in the Rector's Latin speech
+to the presence of an Imperial Prince in the classic groves of
+Akademos.
+
+Hostility, hidden behind a mask of frigid indifference, was to dash
+down the brittle sham, and show the fierce eyes of scorn and the
+livid hue of hatred, and the writhed lips dumb with reproaches
+unutterable.  Contempt and mockery were to be conveyed in the small
+sibilant _s'ss_!  that rippled from parterre to gallery, and by the
+intolerable jeering titter that replied.
+
+Yet all might have passed off tolerably but for the beldam Fate, who
+had arranged that the second prize for Greek translation, a trio of
+calf-bound, gilt-backed volumes containing the Works of Thucydides,
+had--together with a laurel crown--fallen to Louis-Eugène Cavaignac.
+
+The young voice had not faltered in reading the name upon the
+illuminated scroll.  What did its owner know of the Revolutionary
+soldier, the dauntless foe of Abd-el-Kader?  The Governor-General of
+Algeria who had been recalled to Paris to assume the functions of
+Minister at War to the Republican Government of 1848.  The man who
+had upheld the office of Dictator during the period of terror that
+had followed the fatal days of June!  The candidate for the
+Presidency of the Republic who had scorned to bribe; who had calmly
+accepted his defeat, and taken his place in the National Assembly,
+when Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the good citizen, was elected
+to the arm-chair upon the tribune, and took the oath of fidelity to
+the Republic of France.  Who had been imprisoned in the Fortress of
+Ham, with other Representatives of the Left,--his gaoler a commandant
+named Baudot, whom he himself had appointed in '48,--his guards the
+40th Regiment of the Line, which had been subject to his orders so
+short a time before.
+
+Of his seven fellow-captives between those grim and oozing walls, one
+was paralyzed upon release, others were victims to chronic
+rheumatism.  Cavaignac had lived in retirement until the elections of
+June, 1857, when he was chosen as one of the Deputies for the Seine,
+in opposition to an Imperialist candidate.  A few weeks later he had
+died suddenly, leaving a wife and a son three years old.
+
+
+This son, who had half-risen from his place upon the bench at the
+sound of the voice that called upon him in the name that had been his
+father's, had all these memories in his flaming eyes.  He did not
+seem to hear the applause that greeted his triumph; he gazed steadily
+into the face of the young Bonaparte, and then looked toward his
+mother.  And Madame Cavaignac, seated, beautiful and stern as a
+matron of old Rome, relentless as Fate, in the front of the gallery
+opposite, signed to him with an imperious gesture to sit down.  He
+obeyed her.  And then round upon round of deafening plaudits made the
+walls and rafters of the ancient building shake; and brought the gray
+dust of six centuries drifting down upon the black or brown or golden
+locks of the hopeful youth of France.
+
+After that episode the heir of the Imperial dignities was not again
+brought in contact with the students of the lyceums.  He made no
+reference to the prize-winner who had refused the prize tendered by
+the son of his dead father's relentless enemy.  But the insult had
+gone to the quick.  Recalling it, he would clench his hands until the
+nails dug deep into the delicate flesh, crying inwardly:
+
+"Oh! to be a man full-grown, and avenge that day with blood!"
+
+At other times he would weep passionately in secret over the memory
+of the outrage; for, being of a sensitive, affectionate and generous
+nature, it sorely hurt to find himself the object of such hatred from
+one in whom,--it seemed to him, and perhaps indeed it was so!--he
+might have found the bosom-friend and _alter ego_, so keenly longed
+for and so eagerly sought.
+
+The bright dark eyes and clear-cut features, the well-set head and
+athletic form, the dignified, yet modest bearing of this boy, so
+superior to himself in everything but wealth and station, fitted the
+niche previously prepared.  And when he fell to dreaming, young
+Cavaignac's resolute face and calm, contemptuous bearing were
+invariably opposed to his own unslumbering resentment, and
+finally-conquering generosity.  For, varied as the plot might be, the
+_dénouement_ of each little drama would always be the same.
+
+They would meet, in manhood, upon some field of bloody battle, during
+the great war beginning with the French invasion of the Grand Duchy
+of Luxembourg, ending with the conquest of Germany and the annexation
+of the left bank of the Rhine.  A youth upon the verge of manhood,
+the dreamer would have performed such prodigies of valor in command
+of his regiment as to justify his appointment as Commander-in-Chief
+of the Imperial Army of Invasion.  He had not decided what would
+happen.  There would be a great charge of cavalry led against
+overwhelming odds, under a deadly fire of infantry and artillery, by
+himself.  He would cut down or shoot a gigantic Prussian trooper, who
+had wounded a French officer.  He would lightly leap from his own
+charger--the Arab "_Selim_" given him by Sultan Abdul Aziz--and aid
+the prostrate man to rise and mount.  Their looks would meet, the
+blue-gray and the fiery black eyes would strike out a spark of mutual
+recognition.  Oh! the joy of heaping coals of fire upon that
+beautiful, rebellious head!
+
+Or Cavaignac would not then recognize his saviour, but long
+afterward, the Prince having become Emperor, would head a conspiracy
+to dethrone him.  Moving, as would be the wont of the Fourth
+Napoleon, in disguise through the public places of his capital,
+mingling with every rank and class, a mystery to men, an enigma to
+women, worshiped by all, known by none; he would have discovered the
+plot and laid a counter-plot, which, of course, would be successful.
+The mine would explode harmlessly--the conspirators would be seized.
+Their leader,--lying under sentence of death in a military
+fortress--probably Mont Valérien--bedded upon damp straw, loaded with
+massive fetters, would be visited by a young officer.  He would
+recall the features of his deliverer of long ago, and fall upon his
+neck, crying: "Alas! my noble friend, long sought, unfound till now,
+thou comest late, but in time, for I am to die to-morrow!"  "Die!  Is
+it possible!  Of what art thou guilty, then?"  Cavaignac would answer
+coldly: "Of having conspired to dethrone the young Emperor!"  "Dost
+thou indeed hate him so?"  "Ay! we have been enemies since boyhood's
+days."  Choking with emotion, dissembled under a pale and resolute
+exterior, the visitor would return: "And he hates thee not!  Were he
+here he would say as much to thee!"  "Can it be possible?  How,
+then----?"  "I swear it upon the soul of my father!  Thy Emperor is
+thy truest friend!  Here is my sword.  Behold this undefended breast,
+cage of a heart that has ever loved thee!  Thrust, I command thee, if
+thou hast the power!"  "Sire, I am conquered; I have lived for a
+Republic--I die the Emperor's most loyal subject!"  "To my arms,
+then, Cavaignac!  Embrace me--thou art forgiven!"
+
+Impossible, beautiful dreams, grandiose and absurd, ridiculous and
+touching....
+
+He was mentally carrying on one of these endless duologues as he rode
+through the wintry avenues of the Bois, and dismounted at my Lord
+Hertford's exquisite villa of Bagatelle, set in beautiful, secluded
+grounds adjoining the park.
+
+Born of a whim of the Comte d'Artois, gay Monsieur, brother of the
+Sixteenth Louis, built in fifty-four days by the architect Bellanger,
+at a cost of six hundred thousand livres, Bagatelle had always served
+as a shelter for gallant adventures, not all of them set in what
+Republicans scornfully termed "the night of monarchy."
+
+Mademoiselle de Charolais, beautiful and haughty; Mademoiselle de
+Beauharnais, handsome, sensual, and unscrupulous; Madame Tallien,
+constant, noble, and courageous; the Duchesse de Berri, and how many
+other women, famous or infamous, had trodden its velvet lawns and
+swept over its floors of rare marquetry or its pavements of mosaic?
+The blood of the Beauharnais mingled in this boy's own veins, with
+the Corsican and Spanish tides and the dash of canny Scots derived
+from distant Kirkpatricks.  That Celtic strain was responsible, it
+may be, for his dreaminess and love of solitude.
+
+He was dreaming as he rode through the forest; the spell of his dream
+was still upon him as he turned his Arab in at the gilded gates of
+Bagatelle, and dismounted before its portico, in the shadow of the
+Gothic tower.
+
+From childhood many of the happiest hours of this son of the Empire
+had been spent at Bagatelle.  In its labyrinths of myrtle and
+oleander, laurel and syringa, he had hidden, bursting with childish
+laughter, when his playmates were seeking him; he had galloped his
+Shetland pony and raced with his dogs over its green lawns.  Upon its
+broad sheets of crystal water he had sailed his miniature
+yacht-squadrons.  At his entreaty, the Emperor, always an indulgent
+father, had endeavored to buy the place from its English owner.  In
+vain! my lord of Hertford was not to be tempted by gold, possessing
+so much of the stuff, or allured by rank, who was a premier English
+Marquess, Knight of the Garter, and so forth.  Yet he was a generous
+nobleman, and made the Imperial urchin free of his coveted fairyland
+whenever he, the owner of the place, should be from home.
+
+To-day's dream, for a wonder, was not the usual duologue between the
+friend and the unfriend.  Albeit innocently, it was tinged by sex, it
+assumed the shape of the triangle; and worked out, though, to the
+satisfaction of the dreamer, the eternal Rule of Three.  Louis and
+his dear enemy, men grown, madly loved one woman; a bewitching
+creature, with a sparkling rose-flushed face, eyes like blue jewels
+under a pile of black hair, crowned with a little cap of velvet and
+gray fur, with a blue wing set at the side.  She adored the Prince
+who had won her love in the disguise of a simple officer.  Fortified
+by this passion, she could hear Cavaignac plead unmoved.  He, driven
+to frenzy by jealousy, would conceal himself here, for the Imperial
+lover would have settled Bagatelle with all its treasures upon his
+lady-love!--and at midnight when a step echoed in the gallery of
+arms, and the fair one, reclining upon this very fauteuil in the
+window commanding the grass-plot centered by the Cellini
+fountain,--sprang up with a cry of joy to welcome her lover,--the
+rejected aspirant would leap from behind yonder trophy of
+sixteenth-century pageant-shields, topped with the magnificent
+embossed and damascened one bearing the monogram and insignia of
+Diane de Poitiers; and, seizing yonder rapier from its stand, would
+challenge his successful rival there and then, to a duel _à outrance_.
+
+Need it be said that the Prince's well-known mastery of the sword
+would enable him,--by a lightning _coup_, following a feint--to
+disarm his antagonist; upon whom he would finally bestow not only the
+lady, but the villa, with its treasures of paintings by ancient and
+modern masters, its marvelous miniatures and enamels, its rooms of
+porcelain, cabinets of priceless coins and gems, galleries of antique
+sculpture, its costly furniture, its matchless grounds and gardens,
+ending a great many nobly turned sentences with the dignified
+peroration:
+
+"Take her, Cavaignac, with all these riches!  I ask nothing in
+return, but your esteem!"
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+Could Juliette have known how she had been disposed of in a boy's
+imagination, perhaps the Spanish Infanta would have replaced the rosy
+nymph.  But while her Prince dreamed, her jingling vehicle had
+crossed the Port de St. Cloud, and so by Ville d'Avray up the long
+avenue between the breasting woods, stately and glorious still,
+though stripped by the blasts of January, to the clean white town
+that had sprung up, nearly three hundred years before (upon the site
+of a little village patronized by wagoners), where an ancient feudal
+castle stood on a plateau surrounded by lake, forest, and marsh.
+
+A touch of a King's scepter changed this ancient castle to a Royal
+Hunting-Lodge, a whim of his successor transformed the humbler
+dwelling to a Palace.  Courtiers, officials, functionaries, guards,
+valets, lackeys, pimps, cooks, barbers and innumerable hangers-on are
+necessary to the upkeep of State; and these must be housed in stately
+fashion.  Behold whole streets of buildings, with noble avenues,
+radiating like the sticks of a fan from the sunlike center, uprising
+like fungi from the swampy soil.  Behold, as the power and glory of
+the monarch redoubled,--no less than thirty thousand workmen engaged
+in enlarging and beautifying the residence of His Majesty, while a
+regiment of Swiss Guards dig out the lake.  And when pneumonia,
+fever, and ague carry off so many thousands of these hapless toilers
+that the dead have to be carted away by night, and secretly dumped
+into pits dug for the purpose, and the bottoms of the Royal coffers
+are seen through a thinning layer of gold, and the Building Accounts
+of the Crown Demesne show totals of unpaid debts sufficiently
+colossal to stagger a lightning-calculator, and Ministers grow dizzy,
+seeing a Kingdom on the brink of financial ruin, the sublime forehead
+beneath the bediamonded hat and the towering wig is illuminated by an
+inspiration.  "Ha!  We have it!  Quick! commence new works!  Pile on
+the national taxes, press a million unpaid laborers into the Royal
+service.  Let rivers of tears flow to swell the sources of our
+dwindling fountains.  Upon the uncounted corpses of vulgar toilers
+erect fresh monuments to all the glories of France!"
+
+No ghastly visions disturbed the royal dreams, no awful Finger wrote
+the dreadful sentence upon the marble friezes of his
+banqueting-halls.  The shadow of the little cocked hat that was to
+overtop his tallest wig by the whole height of a Crown Imperial was
+never shown him in Witch Montespan's magic mirror.  The bees that
+were to swarm over his lilies and drain their golden honey were not
+to be hatched for many years yet.  He deemed himself immortal in
+spite of the twinges of the gout, until it took him in the stomach
+and carried him off, at seventy-seven, leaving France to shudder in
+the embraces of a far worse man than himself.  Until, aphrodisiacs
+and apoplexy having made an end of the infamous Regent, and Louis the
+Well-Beloved having succumbed to vice and smallpox, and the Red Widow
+having hugged the heads off Louis the Locksmith and his fair young
+Queen, the Terror ushered in the Revolution, Era of Liberty,
+Equality, and Universal Phlebotomy; until men, wearied of serving
+many masters, looked about for one to lead them, and the Little
+Corporal with the pale hatchet-face and the inscrutable gray-blue
+eyes under the great marble forehead rose up and said, "Here am I!"
+
+The Court of his nephew was just now at the Tuileries.  You saw the
+town of Versailles in its winter slumber, undisturbed by the roll of
+innumerable carriages, luggage _fourgons_, pastrycooks' and
+tradesmen's vans, and other vehicles, over its historic and venerable
+cobblestones....  Fashionable people lived there all the year round;
+many of the crack regiments of the Imperial Guard were quartered in
+the innumerable barracks; there was no lack of society--not the cream
+of the cream, perhaps, but charming, lively and gay.
+
+The 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard were garrisoned in
+that antique quarter of barracks and churches, convents and Royal
+harems, once known as the Parc aux Cerfs.  South of the great central
+avenue leading from the Place d'Armes to Paris, you found its huge
+monumental entrance on the right of the Rue de l'Orangerie, once the
+Hotel of the Gardes du Corps du Roi.  It boasted a frontage at once
+chaste and imposing.  The high window of the mess-room, balconied and
+dominated by a lofty pediment, surmounted the great gates of
+wrought-iron rolling back upon a wide sanded courtyard.  If I do not
+err, the quarters of M. le Colonel were upon the second-floor upon
+the left-hand side of the gate, immediately above a confectioner's,
+whence rose delicious odors of baking pastry and simmering chocolate
+to titillate the nostrils of Mademoiselle.  The sleeping-chamber and
+boudoir, described in the Colonel's letter as hung with rosebud
+chintz, and elegantly furnished; the little kitchen on the same
+floor, full of pots and bright pans, scoured by the Colonel's
+soldier-servant into dazzling brilliancy, more than fulfilled the
+expectations provoked beforehand.  I rather think that the dinner--an
+inexpensive and savory little meal, consisting of vegetable soup with
+fillets of sole Normande, an infinitesimal steak _jardinière_, an
+omelette _soufflée_, Brie cheese (nowhere upon earth does one get
+such Brie as at Versailles), and dessert--had come from the
+pastrycook's on the street-floor.  After the cooking one got at the
+Convent and in default of the much better dinner Mademoiselle could
+have evolved out of similar materials, it was a meal for demi-gods.
+And you do not know Juliette if you imagine she did not dispose of
+her share.
+
+"I am _gourmande_, me," she would assure her confidantes in all
+sincerity, fitting the tip of a slender finger into a dint that would
+have needed slight persuasion to become a dimple.  "I love good
+dishes, or how should I be able to cook them?  One of these days it
+is possible that I may even grow fat.  Believe me, I am not joking.
+Already I perceive the beginning of a double chin!"
+
+M. le Colonel had excused himself from attendance at Mess that he
+might dine with his daughter.  Both Monsieur and Mademoiselle were
+prodigiously gay, you may conceive.  But even while Juliette laughed
+and clapped her little hands in delight at the paternal witticisms,
+while she leaned upon her Colonel's shoulder, or sat upon the arm of
+his chair; while her slender arm twined round his neck, and her
+cheek, no longer ivory-pale, but painted by the delicate brush of the
+artist Joy with the loveliest rose-flush, was tickled by the waxed
+end of his martial mustachio, the hateful shadow of the faceless
+Charles rose up and thrust itself between.  It blotted out the last
+rays of the red wintry sun, it sprawled across the shade of the
+Argand lamp.  It was heavy though impalpable, and diffused a numbing
+chill throughout the little apartment.
+
+Perhaps the father felt it, for as they sat together talking by the
+cheerful fire of crackling beech-billets that burned upon the open
+hearth, he gradually fell silent.
+
+You can see him in his undress uniform jacket of green cloth,
+braided, frogged, and with fur edging, unhooked at the neck and
+showing the white shirt, stiff linen collar, and scarlet tie.  His
+polished boots and bright spurs, buttons, buckles, and so forth,
+reflected the dancing firelight.  His forage-cap, a head-dress gaudy
+and bizarre enough to have come out of a Christmas cracker, crowned a
+porcelain bust of a young negress, chocolate-hued, with
+purplish-crimson lips, pink protruding tongue, and rolling onyx eyes
+(an art-object left behind as too fragile for transport by the
+previous occupant of the quarters)--while his long saber leaned
+against her wooden pedestal.
+
+His handsome face was very grave, almost somber, as he pulled his
+crisp imperial, and stared at the little dancing hearth-flames,
+forgetful of the excellent cigar burning itself away to ash between
+the first and second fingers of his well-kept right hand.  The other
+hand sometimes rested on his knee, sometimes touched his daughter's
+hair; for Juliette had slipped from her previous seat to the carpet,
+where she sat leaning against him.
+
+And all at once the chill barrier of reserve broke down.  It was when
+a heavy tear splashed upon the hand that rested on the knee of the
+crimson overall, a strong, brown, manly hand, rather hairy on the
+back.  It clenched as though the single drop had been of molten
+metal, and then Juliette caught it in both her own and spoke:
+
+"Oh, my father, why must this marriage take place?  We have not said
+one word, but I know well that what is in my mind is in yours also.
+Feel!"--she drew the prisoned hand closely to her--"here lies your
+letter over where my heart is beating so.  Much of it I comprehend,
+but the rest is anguish--mystery!  War is threatened--that at least
+is clear.  The regiment will sooner or later be ordered on active
+service.  And--were your daughter the wife of a gentleman of her
+father's profession, you fear that she might suffer as her
+grandmother--as her own beloved dead mother did.  But though my
+grandmother lost her husband, War spared her son.  You returned to
+her and to my mother, not even wounded, darling!  And if you
+apprehend for me a lot less fortunate, why need I marry any one?
+Take me with you or leave me behind, I am your obedient daughter
+always--always!  But I had rather you would take me, dear!"
+
+Not trusting himself to speak, the father took the little head
+between his palms and kissed the blue-veined temples and the clear
+space between the wide-arched eyebrows.  The candid eyes met his,
+that were cloudy and troubled.  He searched for phrases to disguise a
+truth that must stab.
+
+"If I met death upon the field, you by my side, you would be left
+alone and unprotected.  Were I to leave you behind even, in the care
+of Madame Tessier, you would none the less be alone.  There is safety
+in permanent ties; but only when her husband is by her side does the
+sacrament of marriage open a haven to a young girl where the
+libertine and the seducer dare not enter.  I speak with
+certainty--only when her husband is by her side!"
+
+So women were not to be trusted! ... His palms might have been burned
+had he not withdrawn them, so fiery the sudden blush that rose in the
+clear, pale cheeks.
+
+Barely comprehending his meaning, she faltered:
+
+"Yet my grandmother----"
+
+The Colonel broke in hastily:
+
+"My mother was a Saint!  What I have said does not apply to her!"
+
+"And my mother?"
+
+Something like a groan broke from the man.  She felt him wince and
+shudder as she leaned upon him, saw the strong square teeth of the
+upper-jaw nip the ruddy lower lip, noted the ashen grayness that
+replaced the ebbed color, and the points of moisture that broke out
+upon his temples where his rich black hair was frosted with white.
+And looking, she bleached and shuddered in sympathy.  His haunted
+eyes and haggard face bent over an upturned white mask, that had
+little of the grace of girlhood left in it.  The distended pupils
+encroached upon the blue until her eyes seemed inky-black.  He would
+have withdrawn the hand she held in both hers, but the soft little
+fingers turned to living steel, and he could not free himself.  And
+the blue-black eyes staring out of the pinched elfin face quested in
+search of something that his own eyes strove to hide.  As though his
+had been the weaker nature and hers the stronger (impossible, the
+creature being feminine), he felt his loathed secret being
+relentlessly drawn to light.  The clear, unshaken question:
+
+"Was not my mother good?" compelled him to truthful utterance.  He
+heard a voice unlike his own replying:
+
+"At the beginning--yes!  I would stake my soul upon it.  But during
+the war in the Crimea, when the Allies watered with the best blood of
+France and England that fatal soil, her loyalty to the absent husband
+weakened--her heart strayed!"  He struck himself upon the breast
+passionately.  "Yet here beat a heart that would have throbbed for
+love in death, had her lips kissed the shape of icy clay that housed
+it.  It burns now with shame that I must strip off the veil of
+secrecy that until this moment has hidden from thee thy mother's sin!"
+
+The head bent, a swift kiss touched his hand.  Her mouth felt very
+cold.  He went on, realizing that she demanded it:
+
+"She fled with her lover upon the very day of the re-entry of the
+Army into Paris.  After the triumph I hastened to Auteuil, where she
+and her child were living with my mother.  That sainted soul met me
+at the door--the first glimpse of her face told the terrible
+intelligence.  Had other lips than those beloved ones stabbed me with
+the truth, that night my revolver would have ended it!--I would not
+have lived to endure the pity in the faces of the friends who loved
+me--the curiosity in strangers' eyes."
+
+A deep sigh stirred her, quickening in him the knowledge that since
+she had kissed his hand she had listened without breathing.  She
+murmured now:
+
+"Poor, dearest, best father!  How old was I when she----"
+
+He said tenderly:
+
+"Let me see ... it was the August of 1856; thou hadst five years, and
+thy curls were as soft and as yellow as chicken-down.  Thy mother
+used to say, _Juliette will never be black like me!_"
+
+That disloyal mother had been the darkest of brunettes,
+ivory-skinned, and ebon-haired, with eyes of tawny wine-color, and
+the tall, lithe, exuberant form of a goddess of Grecian myth.  To
+question the man she had deserted with regard to his betrayer seemed
+hideous, and yet...  Juliette strung herself to the effort, faltering:
+
+"And for whom...? with whom...?  Do not tell me if it costs thee too
+much!"
+
+His comprehension was instant.  Very coldly the answer came:
+
+"He was a personage of rank in his own country.  A military attaché
+of the Prussian Embassy in Paris.  They had met at one of the
+Imperial receptions at the Tuileries."
+
+"_Is he alive?_"
+
+The whispered words might have been shrieked in his ear, such a leap
+of the heart and such a thrilling of the nerves responded.  He rose
+to his feet and said sternly, not looking at his daughter, but
+directly at the wall before him:
+
+"The man is dead!  But he did not fall in a duel.  He lived to meet
+his end during the Prusso-Austrian War.  He had left Paris _en route_
+for Berlin when my representative called at the Prussian Embassy.
+Strive as I would, I could gain no answer from him.  Nor might the
+utmost influence I could command obtain a response to my _cartel_.
+This being so, the disgrace is his--not mine!"
+
+He grew quite tall in saying this, so dignified was the little tubby
+man, so noble in his soldierly simplicity.  His daughter looked up at
+him, wondering at him, loving him, sorrowing over him; yet yearning
+to hear more of that beloved, faithless one who had dealt those
+bleeding wounds he now bared in the sight of the child she had
+deserted, and plowed such deep lines in his wrung and suffering face.
+The words would break out, though she nipped her lips to stop them:
+
+"And my mother ... did she repent and ask your pardon?  Did you not
+forgive her before she died?"
+
+"She did not die!"
+
+The little Colonel had a great voice.  His "_Garde à vous!_" roared
+down the files like a spherical mortar-shell, his "_Chargez!_" might
+have set dead men and horses up and galloping.  Indeed, his nickname
+among the troopers of his regiment was, I believe, nothing less than
+"_Bouche à feu!_"  When he thundered the answer to Juliette's
+question, not only did Mademoiselle Bayard leap to her feet,
+vibrating in every fiber of her slender, rigid body, but the crystal
+drops of the mantelshelf chandeliers left by the previous tenant
+danced and tinkled, and the panes of the windows rattled in their
+frames.  What more the Colonel might have said was drowned, as the
+customary fanfare of trumpets sounded from the Mess, heralding the
+loyal toast.  Then the "Vive l'Empereur!" rang out, and the
+regimental band crashed into "_Partant Pour La Syrie_," and very soon
+afterward, from the uncurtained window commanding the barrack-square,
+lights could be seen moving across the shadowy space as the
+dispersing officers returned to their quarters or went about their
+duty, attended by orderlies carrying stable-lanterns of the smoky,
+smelly, tallow-burning kind.  The Colonel's own duty called him
+elsewhere, and he was glad of it.  He muttered an inaudible word, his
+eyes averted from his daughter; took his cap, gloves, and
+riding-whip, and strode jingling from the room.
+
+Ah, it would need a great artist in words to depict the swift and
+changing emotions that swelled and wrung the heart of the poor girl
+he left behind him, and give some adequate idea of the storm that
+swept over her in that lonely hour.  Joy at the discovery that the
+adored mother of her childish memories yet lived was drowned in
+anguish at the piercing thought, "_She lives, but not for me!_"
+Shame burned her cheeks to crimson, grief washed them white again;
+her heart bounded in her bosom, or sank, heavy as lead.  Except
+Madame Suchard, the soldier's wife who had been engaged to wait upon
+Mademoiselle de Bayard, and who now might be heard washing up the
+dinner-plates and dishes in the little kitchen, there was no earthly
+woman near to whom she might turn for comfort in this her hour of
+need.
+
+But as she wept, not the freely-flowing tears of girlhood, but with
+the dry sobbings and painful convulsions that tortured women know,
+there chimed from the great cathedral Church of St. Louis close by,
+the first long triple of the Angelus, echoed by the thinner-sounding
+bells from the Convent of the Augustinian Sisters, from the Priory of
+the Bernardine Fathers, from the House of the Sœurs de
+l'Esperance, from the House of the Little Sisters of the Poor.
+Mechanically Juliette's hand went to her bosom, her pale lips moved,
+shaping the sacred words.  And then she went to her room and knelt at
+the little straw-bottomed _prie-Dieu_ that stood before her Crucifix,
+and prayed with passionate earnestness that He, Who when hanging upon
+His Cross of Agony gave His Mother to be our Mother, would hear Her
+pure prayer of intercession for that mother who had deserted her
+child.  Wherever she might be, however low she might have fallen,
+whatever the sins, vices, follies that yet environed her, held her
+back or dragged her down, the ray of Divine Grace had power to reach
+her, raise her up, and lead her back by the path of Penance into the
+Way of Peace.
+
+And pending the miracle, toward which end Masses should be offered
+and Communions given; obedience to that father so cruelly betrayed,
+so bitterly wronged, must, more than ever, be the watchword of
+Juliette.  For the conviction began to dawn in her that belief in the
+innate purity and truth of her sex having been destroyed in him by
+the unfaith of that most beloved, most unhappy one; he sought to
+safeguard her daughter's virtue by means of a husband, who, being the
+only son of a widow, and therefore exempt from the obligations of
+military service, must always be on the spot.  Sorrowfully she sought
+her bed, to remember, the moment her head touched the pillow, that
+although she had mustered courage to plead against the Colonel's
+sentence of marriage, provoking him thereby to reveal the long-hidden
+secret of his betrayal, she had never mentioned Charles except by
+inference.
+
+What was he like, this young man, pious, virtuous, devoted to his
+mother, energetic, frugal, a manufacturer of, and merchant in, the
+commodity of woolen cloth?  Could one build a husband out of such
+materials?  Was it possible?
+
+She tried once more.  The effort led to tossing and turning.
+Conscience is most active in the night-watches.  Juliette's
+bosom-monitor reproached her with having boasted to dear Monica's
+untidy brother of the faceless Charles's mastery of the art of fence.
+Other lapses from the strict line of veracity had preceded and
+followed.  She had told one curious girl that Charles owned the form
+of an athlete, and hair of ruddy chestnut; another had reaped the
+information that he possessed a profile resembling that of Edgar
+Ravenswood, with dark, melancholy eyes, and a jet-black mustache of
+the kind that is silky and sweeps.  Yet another eager inquirer had
+elicited the information that Charles was quite a duodecimo edition
+of a lover, slender, brilliantly fair, and not much taller than the
+bride-elect.  Should it occur to these girls to compare notes in some
+hour of recess or exercise, what would be the impression conveyed to
+the Great Class?
+
+One had left School, however, and one was glad of it.  To go back
+with that tragic secret locked in one's bosom, and mingle with
+fortunate girls whose mothers were good women, happily alive or
+safely in Paradise, how could one have borne that?
+
+A well-known footstep outside the door of her room, which opened from
+the little salon, and a gentle rustling sent a shiver through her.
+When the step moved away with its soldierly jingle of spurs
+accompanying it, De Bayard's daughter sat up in bed and kissed both
+hands to him, passionately; stretching out her arms with a wide
+gesture as though something of the maternal mingled with her love for
+him now....  When "Lights Out" sounded, and the gas was extinguished,
+and no line of yellow showed under the door, and the footsteps
+retreated and his door shut upon them, Juliette crept out of bed,
+lighted the candle, and picked up the scrap of paper that had been
+pushed across her threshold by the strong, beloved hand.
+
+It proved to be a note dated that day, and addressed from the
+Tessier's house in the Rue de Provence, in Madame's angular, spidery
+caligraphy.  Felicitations to her dear friend on the safe return of
+his cherished one were followed by regrets.  "My Charles, alas! will
+be detained in Belgium at least until the Mardigras.  The meeting of
+these dear young people must necessarily be deferred until that date.
+But to-morrow being the Feast of Saint Polycarpe, possibly M. le
+Colonel would bring Mademoiselle to visit a friend, old and most
+affectionate, punctually at the hour of one _midi_?"  With tender
+remembrances the note concluded.  Beneath the
+signature--Marie-Anastasie Tessier--M. le Colonel had scrawled in
+pencil the curt intimation: "Arranged.--H.A.A. de B."
+
+Knowing Charles safely bestowed in Belgium, Juliette sank back upon
+her pillow, and soon was calmly sleeping between her two great
+hair-plaits.  But slippered footsteps patroled the Colonel's room
+until gray dawn showed between the slits of the window-shutters, and
+the heavy sighs and muttered words that broke from him would have
+wrung his daughter's faithful heart.  Sleepless and haggard, the
+first pale beams of January daylight found him still pacing his
+brown-striped drugget, a letter--the cause of his own and another's
+misery,--crushed in his strong right hand:
+
+
+  "555, AVENUE DE L'ALMA, PARIS,
+      "_December_ 18, 1869.
+
+"MONSIEUR,
+
+"Acting upon instructions received from the senior partner of the
+Berlin branch of our firm, we beg to acknowledge your reply to his
+communication of the 7th instant, and must point out to you that the
+attitude you assume with regard to our client is equally unjust and
+indefensible.  No legal remedy was sought by you for the injuries you
+allege that you sustained through the infidelity of the lady who
+until the autumn of 1856 occupied--and without reproach--the position
+of your wife.
+
+"Further, during the years of her absence from your side, she has
+neither asked nor received from you any monetary payments toward her
+support and maintenance, facts which certainly appear to suggest
+consent and knowledge upon your part.  You may further be aware that
+His deceased Excellency, Count Maximilian von Schön-Valverden, late
+junior military _attaché_ to the Prussian General Staff, fully atoned
+for an indiscretion of his earlier years, by making an ample
+settlement upon Madame de Bayard; and that she is now in a position
+to render liberal assistance to relatives whom Fortune has not
+dowered with ample means.
+
+"Under the circumstances, we have advised our client, whose natural
+affection for her daughter strongly urges her to assert her maternal
+rights to the society of Mademoiselle de Bayard, to enforce her claim
+by the reëstablishment of personal influence.
+
+"The young lady in question is still unmarried, under age, and
+therefore subject to maternal authority; and our client does not
+disguise her hope that, by awakening the long silent chords of filial
+tenderness, she may gain a powerful advocate upon the side of
+reconciliation, reunion, and that unblemished and peaceful happiness
+which is only to be found by the domestic fireside.
+
+"Recollect, Monsieur, that no legal bar exists to this most virtuous
+and irreproachable aspiration.  And understand that unless a
+favorable answer is shortly received by our firm to the application
+now made by us to you on behalf of our client, her next appeal will
+be made to your daughter and hers.
+
+  "We remain, etc.,
+      "WIEGELT, NADIER AND BIDUQUET,
+          "_Solicitors_."
+
+
+By the chill light of the new day the Colonel for the twentieth time
+re-read the letter, and its cunning mixture of truth and falsehood,
+the venomed hint at knowledge and complicity, struck fangs once more
+into his quivering heart.
+
+A devout Catholic, he had never sought to divorce the wife who had
+betrayed him.  Thus a civil marriage with her paramour had been
+rendered impossible to Adelaide, even had the Count desired it.  Now,
+furnished with ample means by the generosity of her dead lover, did
+the false wife seek at the hands of the injured husband
+rehabilitation, in return for a heap of tainted gold?
+
+Horrible thought!  The walls of the room seemed to close upon De
+Bayard suffocatingly.  He opened the window and leaned out, drawing
+in deep drafts of the frosty morning air.  It cleared his brain; he
+realized, in the event of his contemptuous rejection of the hideous
+bargain, a menace to his daughter's peace of mind.
+
+Motherhood is of all earthly relationships the most sacred.  Yet
+there are mothers who in revenge for disappointed hopes and thwarted
+ambitions have not hesitated to strike, through their own offspring,
+at husbands abhorred.  More than ever the husband of Adelaide bent to
+his determination of placing Juliette, at the earliest moment, safe
+out of reach of that spotted maternal embrace.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+Upon the following afternoon the Colonel duly escorted Mademoiselle
+to the dwelling of Madame Tessier.  You may conceive that the portly
+little warrior, when panoplied in the full-skirted, black frock-coat,
+gray peg-top trousers, black cravat and vest, and curly-brimmed silk
+chimney-pot of private life, looked a very gallant gentleman; and
+that his daughter, attired in a new and charming costume of fine blue
+cloth, trimmed with velvet and loops of black silk cord, and wearing
+a sealskin coat and a minute bonnet, consisting of a knot or two of
+blue velvet, a froth of lace, and half-a-dozen richly-tinted
+oak-leaves on her coils of black hair, conveyed an effect of elegant
+simplicity and youthful grace, such as only a well-bred French girl
+knows how to combine perfectly.
+
+During the walk, which absorbed the best part of a quarter of an
+hour, Juliette occupied herself in the endeavor to glean a few meager
+items of information with regard to her destined husband.  To her
+timidly-cast bait the Colonel barely vouchsafed a rise.  One may
+imagine a dialogue of timid interrogations and baffling replies,
+running somewhat after this fashion:
+
+"Dear father, upon reflection, I find myself unable to recall the
+features of M. Charles Tessier with anything approaching clearness.
+I pray you be kind enough to describe him to me?"
+
+"My daughter, I myself experience--how shall I phrase it?--a
+difficulty in verbally portraying the form and features of that
+excellent young man.  But his mother carries his image in her heart,
+and doubtless has it on her walls and in her albums.  Look in the one
+before you search the others; it will be wise."
+
+"Assuredly.  But, my father----"
+
+"Chut!"  The Colonel twirled a waxed end of his magnificent mustache,
+and resumed presently: "M. Charles Tessier is a gentleman of honor,
+an excellent man of business, and a most desirable _parti_ for any
+young girl of good family and limited fortune.  Could the most
+exacting bride-elect demand more than this?  In addition, he has a
+fine hand----"
+
+"Indeed, dear father----"
+
+A fine hand was something tangible.  The owner of the commended
+extremity might in addition be possessor of a good figure, broad
+shoulders, a handsome nose....  And yet hunchbacks occasionally have
+neat hands, and the Colonel had only testified to one.  That idea
+might be dismissed as fanciful.  Of course, Charles had the proper
+complement of legs and arms.  Half-smiling at her own terrors,
+Juliette murmured:
+
+"Pray go on, dear father!  You said--a fine hand..."
+
+"Hah--aha! yes.  A fine hand for a stroke at billiards.  In addition,
+it cannot be denied that Charles has a magnificent head----"
+
+"I am listening, dear father!..."
+
+"A truly magnificent head for figures!  Book-keeping by double-entry
+is infant's play to this admirable young man.  He must teach thee the
+logarithms, my child, when thou art married....  Docile and
+intelligent as thou art, thou wouldst quickly learn to be his
+secretary and head-clerk.  It should be a true wife's ambition to
+help her husband in business, and this is alone possible when his
+avocations are of the strictly civil kind."
+
+It was tragic.  In her dreams Juliette Bayard had aided to put on the
+casque, and buckle the cuirass of a stately warrior.  Now she must
+perforce mend the gray goose-quill of a knight of the counting-house.
+You might have seen how her slender throat swelled against the
+encircling band of velvet.  Tears sprang to her eyes.  To keep them
+back she bit her lip, straightened her back, and shrugged,--one
+barely perceptible shrug.  The Colonel said,--was his kind glance a
+little troubled as it turned on her?--
+
+"The letter of Madame Tessier has made it clear to thee, that
+although thou wilt see thy future husband soon, the meeting will not
+take place upon the present occasion.  Since October M. Charles
+Tessier"--the Colonel twisted his mustache--"has been detained by
+affairs at Mons-sur-Trouille in Belgium.  I understand that at this
+country hamlet--near the town of Mons--is situated the manufactory of
+his partner, M.--the name for the moment escapes me.  He is a wealthy
+gentleman of excellent Flemish family.  The daughter, I remember, was
+called Clémence or Clémentine."
+
+The Colonel cleared his throat.  Juliette expressed a preference for
+the name of Clémentine.  The Colonel begged her pardon.  After all,
+it was Clémence.  That did not matter.  Mademoiselle liked the name
+of Clémence nearly as well as Clémentine.  The Colonel tugged at the
+other side of the fiercely-waxed mustache, and changed the subject.
+
+"The pavement rings beneath the heel; I prophesy frost to-night.
+Thou art cold, my child, I saw thee shiver.  Shall we walk more
+quickly?  It will be better so."
+
+She quickened her steps at the suggestion.  There had already been
+frost, and the air was keen and sparkling as champagne.  The young
+blood in her veins answered to the pleasant stimulus of exercise.
+Her cheeks were rose-tinted porcelain, her eyes blue stars, despite
+her wretchedness, by the time they reached Madame Tessier's door.
+
+The house of the Widow Tessier was in the Rue de Provence, which runs
+north from the Avenue de Saint Cloud, not far from above its junction
+with the Carrefour de Montreuil, and ends at the corner of the
+Boulevard de la Reine.
+
+A quiet, retiring street, its houses separated by ample gardens,
+hidden by high walls of brick faced with fine gray Caen stone,
+generally festooned with pretty creepers and overtopped by stately
+trees.  A noble pine shaded the green glass conservatory, large
+enough to be termed a winter-garden, which projected on the south
+side, from what was a solidly built villa plastered yellow, with a
+raised ground-floor, second story and attic story with Mansard
+windows; the short sloping roof, and these--indeed, the whole of the
+attic story to the floor-line, where a fine-worked cornice of stone
+ran round the building--being covered with grayish-blue slates.
+
+You rang at a gate of open ironwork, white-painted, in which was a
+smaller gate to admit pedestrians, and while you were waiting for
+someone to answer the bell, you had leisure to admire the heavy
+_porte cochère_ upon your left, of solid oak timbers, studded with
+iron bolts, surmounted with a fine arch of stone, centered with a
+blank lozenge; and the neat balcony railing topping the wall to your
+right, in which was a modest little iron-studded door leading to the
+kitchen and servants' offices, always secured by a huge lock, and
+opened with much groaning of inward bolts.
+
+You are to understand that the roof of the kitchen formed a leaden
+terrace upon which the bay of the drawing-room and other ground-floor
+windows opened; these, like the windows on the basement and upper
+stories, being furnished with outside shutters, the slatted wooden
+pattern with which Continental travelers are familiar, yellow-painted
+to match the plaster of the walls.  The terrace could be gained by a
+short flight of stone steps rising upon your right as you entered.
+But upon a visit of ceremony you went on to the main entrance, which
+was reached by a handsome ascent of five broad, shallow steps of the
+Caen stone, continued along the north and east sides of the house, so
+that from any of the ground-floor windows, which were all of antique
+French door-pattern, you could descend into the garden at will.  The
+hall-door commanded a view of the stables and the cottage attached to
+them, whose tenant combined the office of coachman with the duties of
+a gardener.  You could not call those buildings unpicturesque,
+covered as they were with the now leafless branches of a great vine
+and a magnificent wistaria.  Beyond there stretched a kitchen-garden,
+with beds of flowers and vegetables, under glass and in the open; and
+splendid espaliers, whence many a basket of luscious cherries, huge
+blue plums, brown Bon Chrétien pears, and melting nectarines, were
+gathered for the table in the season of such luscious fruits.  And
+behind and to the north side of the villa was the pleasance, which
+must have formed part of a nobleman's park at one time.  For winding
+walks bordered with ground-ivy led you in and out and among clumps of
+oak and chestnut, and stately limes and acacias stood upon the sunlit
+spaces of its velvet-lawns; while near its bounds shrubberies and
+thickets of Portugal laurel and lilac, bird-cherry and hawthorn,
+syringa and arbutus harbored thrush and blackbird, and in spring
+rejoiced the lover of beauty and perfume; and one great tulip tree
+opened its crimson-purple chalices beneath the rains and suns of
+early June.  From the eastern boundary-wall jutted a stone pipe,
+ending in a mask, from the mouth of which fell a jet of clear water,
+forming a tiny pond, and a brook that ran away between stones covered
+with moss and overgrown with ferns and water-plants.  But just now
+the pond was frozen, and a great icicle hung from the jaws of the
+grinning Satyr, and the blackened leaves of the water-loving plants
+and club-mosses were hidden under a thin covering of recently-fallen
+snow.  What strange uses this place was to serve before the terrible
+year of 1870 was ended!  How many letters signed "Charles" were to be
+drawn by the tiny hand of P. C. Breagh's Infanta from that grinning
+satyr-mouth.
+
+Entering the house--for you are to see it plainly, serving as it did
+for a theater upon whose table the life-blood of France was to flow;
+and her body, beneath the steady, skillful hands of a man well fitted
+to perform such operations, was fated to undergo a terrible
+mutilation--entering the house by the double glass-doors, you found
+yourself in a parqueted hall, furnished with Empire consoles and
+large mirrors in frames of tarnished gilding.  The chief staircase,
+covered with striped drugget in gray-and-red, you found immediately
+upon your right.  Under this was the opening to a servants' stairway
+leading down to the kitchen beneath the terrace.  Upon your left was
+a small door masking another servants' stairway leading to the
+attics; and beyond this two large folding-doors, covered with green
+baize, led into a medium-sized but lofty apartment, used as the
+dining-room, looking out on the garden, and hung with a crimson flock
+paper patterned with gilt palm-leaves, against which hung some large
+landscapes and antique hunting-scenes in oils.  There was a handsome
+white marble fireplace, with a high mantel-slab supported by terminal
+figures, one a nymph, wanton-lipped and languid-eyed, her full
+voluptuous bosom partly veiled by a leopard skin, her disheveled hair
+crowned with ivy, like that of her companion; a faun, and young,
+judging by his budding horns.
+
+A third pair of folding-doors facing the hall-entrance opened into
+the drawing-room; a fourth to the right of these gave entrance to the
+billiard-room, from which access might be gained by a low glass door
+into the winter-garden, a high-domed glass house full of palms and
+tree-ferns, boasting a little fountain, whose leaden dolphin,
+balanced almost perpendicularly on his tail in the center of a
+moss-stained basin, could spout high enough to wet the green roof
+when any charitable hand might set him going.  A door at the farther
+end of this winter-garden gave access to a small room lined with
+books, classical works by standard French authors for the most part,
+smelling moldy, and apt, when a curious hand strove to remove them
+from their shelves, to stick to their neighbors on either side.  And
+looking at the conservatory from outside, one perceived, running
+along the entire length of the rounded glass roof, a wrought-iron
+gangway, or double-sided balcony.  From which, according to the
+testimony of Madame, the late M. Tessier, from whose dressing-room
+this aerial promenade could be gained by a glass door had been,
+accustomed to enjoy the prospect and breathe the air.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+Madame, a discreet and sensible-looking person, with very little more
+mustache than is becoming to a Frenchwoman of sixty, embraced
+Juliette warmly on both cheeks, and graciously received the Colonel's
+salute upon her mittened left hand.  The mittens were invariably
+black in tribute to the memory of the late M. Tessier.  Madame's
+half-mourning, gray poplin gown, trimmed with black gimp upon the
+gores, round the bottom of the expansive skirt and upon the waist and
+shoulder-lappets, might have been the same she had always worn, in
+Juliette's memory.  Her cap had lavender ribbons, her front was bay,
+whereas it had been chestnut, and the net of black chenille-velvet,
+in which she confined her back hair, plentiful in quantity and iron
+gray like her mustache and eyebrows, had silver beads upon it here
+and there.
+
+Father and daughter were made welcome, were entertained with wine of
+Madeira, raspberry-vinegar--for which sweet, subacid beverage,
+diluted with water, young ladies were expected to express a
+preference--macaroons, ratafias, and little pink ice-cakes.  The
+Colonel, having accepted a glass of the good vintage and consumed a
+biscuit, expressed a desire to walk round the garden; Madame, who had
+suggested the excursion, and Juliette, who had gone goose-flesh all
+over--were left to a _tête-à-tête_.
+
+During the collation described above, Mademoiselle's blue eyes had
+discreetly raked the walls of the dining-room in search of portraits.
+Nothing rewarded her search but a highly varnished oil presentment of
+a simpering young woman in the vast flowery bonnet, the bunches of
+side-curls, and the high-waisted gown of 1830, in whom one must
+perforce discover Madame in her twentieth year.  A case of three
+miniatures hung beside the copper wood-tongs on the left of the
+fireplace.  When Madame affectionately leaned to her young guest,
+patted her hand, and bade her take her seat upon a green velvet
+fauteuil between Madame's own high-backed arm-chair and the
+carved-oak-framed, glass-covered embroidery picture of Dido on her
+funeral pyre that served as fire-screen, Juliette, in the act of
+transit, cast a rapid glance at this case.  In vain.  Only M.
+Tessier, in a high satin stock, gray curls and strips of
+side-whisker, Madame in a lace cap, fiddle-bodied brown silk gown,
+berthe, and cameo brooch, and a chubby infant of indeterminate sex,
+with sausage curls and tartan shoulder-knots, rewarded her anxious
+scrutiny.  She could not restrain a sigh.
+
+To be taken by the chin is not unpleasant to a young lady, under the
+right conditions and given certain circumstances.  But when the
+ringed and bony fingers enclosed in Madame's black mitten, turned the
+small, pale oval to the light, a choking lump rose in Juliette's
+throat, and the black lashes veiled the eyes her aged friend would
+have peered in.  She felt given over to harpies, abandoned and alone.
+Almost she could have rushed to one of the long French windows,
+wrenched it open, and fled to the shelter of her father.  I wonder
+whether the Colonel was as ill at ease as his daughter, as he paced
+the winding paths under the leafless trees, between the beds of
+snow-powdered ground ivy, already sprinkled with patches of aconite
+in partially thawed places, shining yellow as little suns against
+dark leaves and wet brown earth....
+
+She could see him from the nearer of the three long windows opening
+on the steps that led to the garden.  He walked among the trees
+bare-headed, holding his high silk hat and gold-topped Indian cane
+behind him, his handsome double chin bent upon his breast, his fine
+face full of care.  Even his boldly-curled mustaches seemed to droop
+under the weight of sorrows that were no longer hidden from his child.
+
+At the bottom of his heart he distrusted her, she was almost certain.
+And from the bottom of her own heart she forgave the cruel wrong.  He
+had come to believe, since the great betrayal, that every woman save
+the Mother of all mothers, and his own, had it in her to play the
+traitress, given the opportunity.  Thus the opportunity was not to be
+given to Juliette.
+
+Madame was speaking.  She no longer held the little chin, though the
+chill of her hard finger-tips still seemed to cling to it.  She
+smiled benevolently, making curves of parenthesis in her
+well-powdered cheeks, and sometimes punctuating her sentences by a
+rather disconcerting click of teeth that were too startlingly white
+and never seemed to fit properly.
+
+"One understands, my cherished" (_click_), "that this visit is a
+little _triste_ for thee....  One who should have been here to
+welcome thee does not appear.  To repress the feelings is
+_convenable_" (_click_) "in a young girl of good education, but
+nevertheless one cannot hide the oppression of the heart.  Rest
+assured, my little one, that my Charles--who is to be thy Charles so
+soon"--Madame's playfulness, emphasized by the click described, was
+more than a little grisly--"suffers as thou dost.  He is chagrined to
+the very soul, believe me! that he cannot be with thee here to-day.
+Detained in Belgium, at Mons-sur-Trouille (where he has a manufactory
+for the production of woolen fabrics)--by important business in
+connection with an immense order given by a Paris firm of" (_click_)
+"drapers, thou canst picture him counting the hours that must elapse
+before the happy moment of his return.  He is ardent, my
+Charles--noble, sincere, religious, and candid.  I, his mother, say
+to thee: Thou art happy" (_click_) "to have won the love of so
+estimable a young man!"
+
+And with this maternal peroration two gray poplin sleeves went out
+and enfolded Mademoiselle de Bayard, and two rapid touches of Madame
+Tessier's mustache visited first her left cheek and then her right
+one.  Fluttering like a caught robin, Juliette faltered:
+
+"You are so good, dear Madame, but when did I win it?"  She added,
+released from the imprisoning sleeves, and with a bright red rose of
+agitation blooming in the center of each pale cheek: "Alas!  I refer
+to the love of M. Charles Tessier....  If I might know where he has
+seen me? ... I cannot recollect his ever having been presented to me.
+In my mind, Madame, your son has no form, no features....  It is
+terrible, but there you have the fact!"
+
+The truth was out at last.  Now that the room had left off whirling,
+Madame's benevolent smile shone forth unchanged.  She clicked, and
+returned with archness that was labored.
+
+"My Juliette, I comprehend.  Thou wert just a little bewildered....
+Thy father has not made it quite clear....  Ah, naughty M. le
+Colonel, I shall scold him by-and-by!"
+
+"Pray, no!"  Juliette's little hands went out entreatingly.  "Only
+explain, dear, dearest Madame, for I am bewildered, as you say truly.
+My father's command that I should leave school, provide myself with a
+_trousseau_, and come here to be married--instantly--to M. Charles
+Tessier!--was so brusque--so sudden--that I might be pardoned for
+saying I have felt less like a young girl than a poor lamb, hurriedly
+taken from the fold and driven to the butcher's yard."
+
+"Poor little lamb!" drolled Madame, still portentously playful, and
+displaying a gleaming double row of teeth between the parenthesis.
+Juliette felt more than ever like the lamb of her analogy, as she
+strove to read the meaning of the smile.  Madame continued: "Too much
+boldness--an excessive display of _sangfroid_--my Charles has ever
+disliked in women.  When I tell him how _gentille_ thou art, how
+sensitive, and how _spirituelle_, he will say to me, 'My mother, thou
+hast chosen well! and when he sees thee...'"
+
+Something in the well-powdered elderly face of the speaker sent an
+electrical shock of comprehension through Juliette's being, evoking
+the cry:
+
+"Sees me....  But then ... he has never seen me?"
+
+It was necessary to hold on with one's own eyes to Madame's, they so
+spun and whirled in their rather small, round orbits.  Then they
+steadied, as though she had made her mind up.  She said, and though
+the treacly suavity had gone out of her voice, Juliette liked it
+better:
+
+"No, my child--Charles has never seen thee.  This is a
+betrothal--this will be a marriage exclusively arranged by the
+parents of the young people concerned.  Thy father, the son of my
+beloved friend Antoinette de Bayard, does not desire that the husband
+of his Juliette should be a member of the military profession,--I am
+averse to the idea of my son's bestowing his name upon the Protestant
+daughter of a Flemish woolen-manufacturer--for that that was
+originally my son's intention, I will not seek to deny.  Wounded in
+my tenderest and most susceptible spot by the announcement of
+Charles's infatuation, I might have estranged him for ever--even
+hurried on the catastrophe I feared, had not the advice of my
+director, Dom Clovis, of the Carmelite Fathers--fortified and
+sustained me in the trying hour!  I wrote to my son.  I poured out my
+maternal heart in pleadings the most earnest--the most tender.  I
+recalled to him the dispositions of his late father's will.  Under
+this document," Madame went on, drying a tear with a deep-hemmed
+cambric handkerchief, "I possess the power at pleasure to divert from
+Charles and his heirs a considerable portion of his sainted father's
+funded property.  And that power," said Madame, drying another tear,
+"I solemnly assured my child, would--in the event of his union with
+Mademoiselle Clémence Basselôt--unhesitatingly be used."
+
+Words might have come from the pale parted lips before her.  Madame
+tapped them to silence with a mittened finger and pursued her way.
+
+"Charles is profoundly reasonable--a quality he inherits from both
+parents.  He wrote to me a letter inexpressibly touching in its
+expressions of filial trust and confidence, over which, I assure
+thee, I have shed the most consoling tears."
+
+Something had previously crackled in the pocket of Madame's black
+silk apron, when she had smoothed it over her knees in seating
+herself.  Now she drew it out, and Juliette saw a blue envelope
+directed in a handwriting of the business-like, copper-plate
+description.  The sheet of white paper the envelope contained had an
+engraved picture-heading of a square building possessing many
+windows--no doubt the Belgian cloth manufactory possessed in
+partnership by MM. Basselôt and Tessier.  From the page, closely
+covered all down one side with regular lines of mercantile
+handwriting, Madame read:
+
+
+"Sentiments of the most profound agitated me as I read thy letter.
+These sentences penned by a mother's hand, have touched me to the
+quick.  Thy arguments, so delicate, yet so powerful, have convinced
+me of the impossibility of the union toward which--I will own!--my
+wishes urged me.  I abandon the idea henceforth!  Since Mademoiselle
+Clémence is not to be mine, choose then for me, best and noblest of
+women.  Let her who taught my infant lips to murmur the beloved name
+of mother select for me some virtuous young girl upon whom I may
+confer the equally sacred title of Wife.
+
+"THY CHARLES."
+
+
+And there, with a flourish like a double lasso, M. Tessier's letter
+ended, leaving Juliette swaying between the impulse to shriek with
+laughter and the urgent desire to melt away in tears.
+
+Madame came to her rescue by proposing a visit to the billiard-room,
+built and appointed by the late M. Tessier to afford his son
+wholesome recreation at home.  For otherwise, Madame explained, the
+young man might have been allured by the amusements to be found in
+the saloons of the Hôtel des Réservoirs and other brilliant and
+fashionable lounges, full of dissipated civilians and officers of
+every branch of the military and naval services.  Clubs Madame
+regarded as gateways to eternal perdition.  She dried another tear as
+she thanked Heaven that her beloved child did not belong to one.
+When possible, she added, Charles avoided restaurants.  A congenital
+delicacy of constitution rendered over-seasoned dishes little less
+than poison to him; he habitually suffered from nettle-rash after the
+consumption of shellfish.  Green salad was, upon this count,
+pernicious to his well-being.  Nor should he ever be permitted to
+sleep without a nightcap, having been subject to earache from his
+youth.
+
+The mental picture of Charles, suffering from an attack of
+nettle-rash and crowned with his protective nightcap, sent the
+listener's balance dipping toward hysteria.  They were in the
+billiard-room, a pleasant, longish salle, with two high windows
+opening on the frontward terrace.  The glass door stood open leading
+into the winter-garden: from whence came a smell of hot-water pipes,
+damp moss, and mold, with an added whiff of ferniness, and a
+suggestion of the cockroaches and mice that pervaded the place.
+
+And then: "Thou seest, my sweet Juliette"--pray imagine Madame,
+indicating with a lifted mitten a gilt-framed square of canvas
+hanging between the two French windows--"a speaking portrait, painted
+but two years ago, of my--I should say, of our beloved Charles."
+
+Obediently the eyes of Mademoiselle Bayard followed the direction of
+the pointing finger.  The painter or the evil genius of Charles
+Tessier had induced him to sit for his portrait in the habiliments of
+the chase; thus in sporting checks of the chessboard pattern, with
+the addition of yellow leather leggings, gun pads, and a game bag,
+and holding between his knees a weapon which obviously embarrassed
+him, he was presented for the first time to the gaze of his future
+bride.  Those eyes of Juliette's fastened on the canvas a single
+moment before their dusky lashes dropped.  But in that moment
+Mademoiselle had classified Charles as belonging to the Order of
+Invertebrates; comprehended his profound insignificance, and realized
+that from the owner of a head so commonplace, eyes so round, and a
+nose so blunt, a mouth so lax, and cheeks so pink and
+chubby--possibly the artist had been liberal of carmine--nothing more
+of originality, decision, manly force, or power of will might be
+expected than is commonly demanded of the child's whirligig of stick
+and cardboard, as seen gyrating madly or spinning feebly under the
+impetus of its owner's breath.
+
+It was impossible, Mademoiselle told herself, to detest a being so
+utterly devoid of character--a human pad of blotting paper--as
+uninteresting as a counting-house stool.  One could only pity him,
+and hope for his mother's sake that sound business capacities were
+concealed behind that characterless forehead, topped with brown hair
+cut very short and standing upon end--and wonder at or congratulate
+Mademoiselle Clémence.  Flamandes are generally big and muscular.
+One could only hope that she had taken Charles by his sloping
+shoulders and soundly shaken him when he had backed out of his
+proposal of marriage.  Though possibly he had never spoken to the
+girl at all.
+
+
+M. le Colonel found his daughter silent during their walk back to the
+Barracks.  After a questioning eyeshot or so at the dainty little
+figure that moved so demurely beside him--abandoning the vain
+endeavor to read her mood from the droop of the pure eyelids, the
+chiseled lines of the exquisite profile--the father relapsed into his
+own sad thoughts.  And then Juliette, stealing a glance at him,
+realized, with a pang, that his once luxuriant black curls were
+thinning in places, and already thickly sown with white hairs.  The
+upright martial carriage was marred by a rounding of the
+shoulders--the stoop of a man upon whose back sits perched Black
+Care.  The seams of the immaculately brushed frock-coat of civil
+ceremony were shiny in places--the rosette of red ribbon at the lapel
+was frayed and faded--the tiny medal tarnished and dull.  Perhaps the
+mood of the wearer, be it hopeful or despondent, can affect the
+apparel, as the chameleon's wrinkled skin changes from the hue of
+dead bark to the vivid green of young leaves when sunlight touches
+it, and fades back to the neutral tint when the golden ray is
+withdrawn.
+
+Juliette would not have thanked me for that analogy of the
+prehensile-tongued, long-tailed lizard.  Inconstancy as described by
+the poets is typified by the chameleon, and her faith in the
+sincerity and truth of her Colonel was founded upon the living rock.
+
+We know that she had, or thought she had, discovered why he dared not
+trust her to a husband whose career must lead him from her.  "My
+blood," she had murmured to herself sorrowfully, "it must" (she meant
+unfaith) "be in my blood!"  The reason for his desperate haste was
+all beyond her.  It must be cruel, because it hurt him so.
+
+That heart of hers was as great as she herself was tiny.  Titania at
+need could love like a Titaness.  And the blood of Antigone runs in
+the veins of living women even to this day, though the noble daughter
+of Œdipus died a virgin unspotted.  When the fairy hand in the
+perfectly fitting gray glove crept under the Colonel's elbow, it
+gave, with the smile that accompanied it, a silent pledge of fidelity
+to the death.  But oh, blind father, could you have seen her, in that
+inmost chamber of the heart where the most innocent maiden shrines
+the imaginary portrait of a lover--taking down the stately canvas
+bearing the presentment of a soldier-hero unknown, and hanging up in
+its place the picture of a mere Charles Tessier, your eyes, like
+those of the protagonist of the Greek drama, would have wept tears of
+blood.
+
+That night a letter was penned to Monica in the small, delicately
+pointed handwriting that seemed appropriate to Juliette.
+
+
+"To you, dear friend, who have exacted of me the pledge that I will
+write to you before all, a faithful description of the person of my
+future husband, I hasten to fulfill the vow.  M. Charles Tessier has
+a fine head and a fine hand, my father praises his capacity for
+business and his skill at the billiard-table with equal fervor.  Of
+his powers of conversation I have as yet not sufficient experience to
+afford you an opinion.  In the presence of his mother he has been
+silent and reserved.  His letters, however, are eloquently expressed
+and forcible.  When I mention his letters, it should be explained
+that affairs have entailed upon him the necessity of a journey to
+Belgium, where he remains for the present, at the house of his
+partner, M. Basselôt.  Thou wilt draw from this the correct
+conclusion that I am not yet married.  Do not forget to pray for thy
+faithful
+
+"JULIETTE."
+
+"See you well, I am happy--content--I dream not of impossibilities.
+_J'ai pris mon parti_.  I am sensible, me!"
+
+
+In answer to a second letter from Monica received upon the ending of
+the month there came:
+
+
+"Tell M. Breagh that I have received his message, so generously
+worded.  Alas! the poor young girl had no intention of wounding a
+heart at once so courageous and so proud.  His fellow-student is
+unjust to himself.  Why term that 'brutality' which was merely honest
+_brusquerie_?  Yet if he gave pain--and I do not deny it was so--he
+may rest assured he has been forgiven.  Tell this to thy brother, from
+
+"JULIETTE."
+
+
+"M. Charles Tessier is still delayed by affairs in Belgium.  I visit
+his mother nearly every day.  An excellent housekeeper and
+cuisinière, she is charmed with my skill in cooking.  For her and for
+my father, who dines with her frequently, I plan delightful little
+menus.  They eat, and praise the dishes and cry--at least, Madame
+cries: '_Ah, Heaven! if my Charles were only here!_'  In a letter
+which this morning's post brought me from the person mentioned, he
+dwells with that impassioned luxuriance of imagery, warmth of color
+and fullness of expression not denied to his sex, upon our
+approaching union.  One cannot deny that it is pleasant to be the
+sole object in life of a young man so worthy and so amiable, and--ah,
+my dearest! were the sacrifice of a personal wish demanded of me,
+could I, _knowing what I_" (_scratched out_) "refuse to gratify the
+cherished desire of my dear father's heart?  Each day that finds me
+by his side closes in deeper respect and love more ardent.  Our Lord,
+Whose will it was to leave me motherless, decreed that in him I
+should find the tenderness of a father and that of a mother too.
+
+"J. M. DE B."
+
+
+For the delectation of those readers who are anxious to sample the
+luxuriant imagery, glowing color and plenitude of expression ascribed
+to the epistolary communication received by Mademoiselle de Bayard
+from M. Charles Tessier I append the letter referred to as above:
+
+  "BASSELÔT AND TESSIER,
+  "WHOLESALE MERCHANTS.
+  "WEAVERS AND DYERS OF WOOLEN FABRICS.
+
+  "MONS-SUR-TROOTLLE.
+      "BELGIUM.
+          "--th _January_, 1870.
+
+"MADEMOISELLE,
+
+"That I have been tardy in personally assuring you of my profound
+regard and unfaltering devotion you will pardon, knowing me detained
+in a foreign country in the interests of my business affairs.
+
+"Assured that all that concerns my welfare will naturally possess for
+you the deepest interest, I hasten to inform you that jointly with my
+partner, M. Felix Basselôt, I have entered into a scheme to
+facilitate the manufacture of our woolen cloths and other textile
+fabrics by the purchase and installation of the most recently
+invented machines.  Raw cloths are now subjected to perching,
+knotting, milling, washing, hydro-extracting, gigging, cutting,
+cropping, boiling, brushing and steaming processes of the latest
+invention, and we claim that the output of our manufactory will
+henceforth vie with the first qualities of goods advertised by the
+leading firms of Belgium, England and France.
+
+"My mother's letters palpitate with your praises.  What happiness,
+Mademoiselle, awaits the man who shall be privileged to confer upon
+such beauty, goodness, and amiability, the sacred name of wife.  You
+will be interested to hear that for Saxonies, tweeds, merinos, and
+cashmeres for ladies' drapery our house maintains its old reputation,
+as well as for the heavier fabrics of masculine wear.
+
+"Were I now at your side, how enchanting it would be to confide to
+you that we have struck out a bold and original line in dress-stuffs,
+dyed with the new agent called Aniline.  It is extracted from
+coal-tar, and the magenta so much admired by our Parisian _mondaines_
+is obtained from it, by treating the crude substances with the
+chloride of tin.  From magenta we derive rosaniline, a dye as
+delicate yet as passionate as a lover's fondest wishes.  In an
+experiment recently made in my presence I beheld a pure young girl
+immerse in a solution of this extraction containing a little ammonia,
+a spotless lily, when instantly the virginal blossom's whiteness was
+changed to the loveliest roseate hue.
+
+"Thus, dear Mademoiselle, your soul, so chaste, so spotless, and so
+innocent, being plunged in the consecrated vat of marriage, will
+assume the glowing hue of Love.  Bleu de Lyons with Violet Imperial,
+all the most fashionable shades of mauve and other colors can be
+obtained by methods equally simple, and with the addition of aldehyde
+and sulphuric acid, we secure a green of the most brilliant, and a
+yellow that enchains the eye.  By a simple process these colors may
+be fortified to stand the test of washing, as firmly and unchangeably
+as the affection I am privileged to offer you; which is hallowed by
+the blessing of the best of mothers, and of a father noble as your
+own.
+
+"Receive then, dear Mademoiselle, the tenderest assurances of
+devotion,
+
+  "From yours eternally,
+      "CHARLES JOSEPH TESSIER."
+
+
+Over this epistle, apparently begotten between a trade-circular and a
+polite letter-writer, Juliette had wept helpless tears of mirth.
+Reading it, one may conjure up a picture of the excellent Charles,
+spurred by the maternal threat of partial disinheritance to a
+desperate effort, bending over the paper in the throes of
+composition, diluting the ink with the sweat of a non-intellectual
+brow.
+
+Also, one may suspect the anonymous heroine of the experiment with
+the lily to have been none other than Mademoiselle Clémence Basselôt,
+but the suspicion has not, to the present date, been verified.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+In the July of that year, while the gilding was yet untarnished upon
+France's brand-new Constitution--ratified by a _plebiscitum_ obtained
+after the usual methods, and recording seven millions of pinchbeck
+votes--while the Imperial Court of the Third Napoleon played at
+Arcadian pastorals under the mistletoe-draped oaks and spreading
+beeches of St. Cloud, the question of the Candidacy of Prince Leopold
+of Hohenzollern for the vacant Throne of Spain appeared in the
+firmament of European politics (even as the voice of Lord Granville
+prophesied a lengthy period of unbroken fine weather)--and broke
+about the ears of the Power most concerned like a stinging shower of
+hail.
+
+The Spanish crown upon the head of a Hohenzollern.  Rather a
+Montpensier, intolerable as that would have been.  True, the Almanach
+de Gotha had offered (to General Prim, President Zorilla, and the
+Cortes, assembled in solemn session) only the unwelcome alternative
+of the legal heir to the throne going begging; true, the Spanish
+people were very well satisfied with the idea of being ruled by a
+Catholic gentleman of Royal blood, suitable age, handsome person, and
+military experience, married to a Portuguese princess, and possessing
+two healthy sons.
+
+But that a Prussian Prince, holding a commission in Prussia's Army,
+should be set up like a signpost of warning on France's southern
+frontier, as though to keep her in mind of what would happen in the
+event of another war on the Rhine--was, from the Gallic point of
+view, intolerable.  "The security and the dignity of the French
+nation are endangered by this candidacy!" cried Jules Favre.
+According to M. Thiers, "the nominacy was not only an affront to the
+nation, but an enterprise adverse to its interests."  Gambetta cried
+aloud that all Frenchmen must unite for a national war.  Marshal
+Vaillant made a memorandum in his notebook.  "_This signifies war, or
+something very like it!_"  And at the Council of Ministers hastily
+summoned to St. Cloud on the morning of the sixth of July, the
+Emperor passed to the Duke de Gramont, his Foreign Minister, a
+penciled communication.  "_Notify Prince Gortchakoff at Petersburg
+that if Prussia insists upon the accession of the Prince of
+Hohenzollern to the throne of Spain, it will mean war!_"
+
+What haste to clutch at the _casus belli_.  When the Ministers
+quitted the Imperial Council, and the Corps Législatif opened its
+session, long-continued applause greeted the declaration of Gramont
+from the tribune that a certain unnamed Third Power, by placing one
+of its Princes on the throne of Charles V., threatened to disturb the
+equilibrium of Europe, to imperil the material interests and endanger
+the honor of France.  "If it be impossible to prevent this," ran the
+peroration, "strong in your support, Messieurs, we shall perform our
+duty without hesitation or faltering!"  Here was an ultimatum that
+sounded the very note of war.
+
+Do you hear the echo of the thunderous acclamations that attended the
+Foreign Minister to his seat, the clapping of hands, stamping of
+feet, roaring of lungs that have been dust for more than forty years,
+or are now on the point of dissolving into their native element?
+Naturally because the Right were defiant, the Left called their
+utterances bellicose.  Had the Right manifested a disposition to turn
+the other cheek in Scriptural fashion, the Left would have
+passionately taunted this band of politicians with cowardice, lack of
+patriotism, indifference to the sacred cause of national
+freedom,--would have accused them of being traitors to their country,
+and Heaven knows what else.
+
+The Press threw oil upon the roaring conflagration.  Were this
+affront submitted to, cried the _Gaulois_, "there would not exist a
+woman in the world who would accept a Frenchman's arm!"  The
+_Correspondant_ was "relieved to find that Frenchmen once more have
+become Frenchmen."  The _Moniteur Universel_ was charmed to discover
+that the blame for this momentous conflict could never be attributed
+to the French Government.  The _Figaro_ left off making a cockshy of
+the Imperial dignity, to admit that for once the Emperor's official
+mouthpiece had spoken the right word.  And the _Débats_ praised the
+attitude taken by the Government.  "Silence at this juncture would,"
+it cried, "have been pusillanimous.  Shall the nation be accused of
+bowing its head for the second time, before the cannon of Sadowa?"
+
+Lord Granville, replacing the recently deceased Clarendon at Great
+Britain's Foreign Ministry, mentioned to the Spanish Ambassador to
+England that the choice of Prince Leopold would create a sore.  He
+wrote to Layard at Berlin that he considered France had been given
+good cause of resentment.  Lyons, in the shoes of Lord Cowley, at the
+English Embassy in Paris, wrote to his chief that the unhappy affair
+had revived all the old animosity, though it seemed to him that
+"neither the Emperor nor his Ministers really wish or expect war!"
+The _Times_ of July 8th was severe on the policy of Prussia; the
+_Standard_ for once expressed the same opinion as the _Times_.  The
+_Daily Telegraph_ prophesied that the succession of the Prussian
+Prince would mean France's present humiliation and future peril.  The
+_Pall Mall Gazette_ poked mordant fun at the attitude of
+unconsciousness assumed by King William, who, between sips of Ems
+water, declared his ignorance of the whole affair.  The _Early Wire_,
+backing and filling, kept an even keel for a day or two.  Then said
+Mr. Knewbit confidentially to P. C. Breagh, one midsummer evening,
+after the early supper:
+
+"My opinion is we are a-going to give a leg-up to this 'ere
+'O'enzollern business, our Chief being--when England, Home, and Duty
+permit him to indulge the weakness--a red-'ot admirer of a Certain
+Person at Berlin.  Who"--Mr. Knewbit's wink was infinitely
+sagacious--"is said on the strict Q.T. to have put up Field-Marshal
+Prim and the Government at Madrid to making the proposal to the young
+gentleman.  For the sake of giving a jolt-up to the elderly swell at
+the Tuileries.  We all have our ideal 'eroes," Mr. Knewbit added,
+"and our Chief's partiality dates from his acting in an emergency as
+Special War Correspondent for his own paper, durin' the
+Prusso-Austrian War of 1866.  It was at the Battle of----that name
+always beats me----"
+
+"Königgratz, perhaps?" suggested Carolan.
+
+"Königgratz--when this 'ere Bismarck spurs his big brown mare up to
+Colonel von Somebody to ask him why, seeing the 'eavy losses
+occurring in his neighborhood from Austrian Artillery--he didn't ride
+forward with his Cuirassiers to find out where the shells came from?
+Took our Chief's fancy uncommon, that did, as the iron sugar-plums
+was dropping freely in the neighborhood, and when he had rode on,
+swearing at the Colonel like anything you can imagine--the old man
+picked up a cigar-stump he'd pitched away, and keeps it to this hour
+in the pen-tray of the silver inkstand the Proprietors presented him
+with when he came home."
+
+Said P. C. Breagh reflectively:
+
+"It's the rule, invariably.  Men love Bismarck or lampoon him--swear
+by him--or swear at him.  He's the devil or a demigod--there's no
+alternative!"
+
+"Good!" said Mr. Knewbit, leaning back in his Windsor chair, and
+rubbing the ear of the ginger Tom with the toe of one of his carpet
+slippers.  "Tell us a bit more.  Anything you can lay hold of.  I
+want to see him stand out a bit clearer in my mind."
+
+"He gets his name from the Wendish--I've read in the _Kleine
+Anekdotenbuch_," said P. C. Breagh, "that 'Bismarck' really means
+'beware of the thorns.'  And there's a golden sprig of
+blackberry-bramble among the family quarterings, so perhaps there's
+something in it, after all.  An ancestor of his who lived in the
+sixteenth century was a tailor--and a natural son of Duke Philip of
+Hesse, by the way!  Duke Philip was a lineal descendant of St.
+Elizabeth of Hungary--who in her turn was descended from the Emperor
+Charlemagne----"
+
+"Lor' bless my soul!" said Mr. Knewbit, rubbing his knees.
+
+"And he--this man you want to know about!--was born the younger son
+of a Pomeranian country squire, and entered the University of
+Göttingen in 1831.  They say that he permitted study to interfere so
+little with the more serious business of amusement that the name of
+Mad Bismarck was given him then, and had stuck to him even when he
+passed his examination as Referendar, and began to practice law in
+the Municipal Court of Aix-la-Chapelle."
+
+Mr. Knewbit, drinking in the information at every pore, nodded
+"_More_"--and P. C. Breagh obliged him:
+
+"He served his year as Volunteer at Potsdam in the _Jägers_ of the
+Guard, and then went home to the paternal estate of Kneiphof, and
+began sowing wild oats--acres and acres of them.  The officers of the
+garrison were a hard-drinking set of fellows, and the county Junkers
+scorned to be outdone by them--so they hunted and shot and danced and
+made love to the local beauties--they dined and supped and gambled
+and fought duels.  In fact, they did all the things men usually do
+when they mean to have a high old time and don't care a damn for the
+consequences," said P. C. Breagh, "and when you regularly hail
+smiling morn with cold punch, beer, and corn-brandy, and wind up the
+night with quart-beakers of champagne and porter, the consequences
+must be----"
+
+"A taut skin and a fiery eye next morning," interpolated Mr. Knewbit,
+"and a tongue like a foul oven-plate or a burned kettle-bottom.
+But--my stars!--what a constitution that man must have to be as hale
+and as hearty, and as upright as they say he is, at fifty-five, and
+with a family of grown-up sons!  One wonders how his sweetheart ever
+had the courage to marry such a--such a Ring-tailed Roarer....  But
+Love's a thing you can't account for nohow."
+
+"I have heard that the Fräulein Puttkammer's family objected to the
+engagement," said P. C. Breagh, "but he seems to have got over their
+prejudices in a way peculiarly his own.  By betrothing himself
+privately to the Fräulein first, and then calling openly to inquire
+how the family felt about it," he added, in response to the
+interrogative hoist of Mr. Knewbit's eyebrows, "and taking the
+precaution, upon entering the room--to hug the young lady before all
+her friends."
+
+"The hugging would settle the thing--in Germany?" asked Mr. Knewbit.
+
+"To a dead certainty."
+
+"Without any male cousin or anything of that kind getting up and
+calling the hugger out?" asked Mr. Knewbit dubiously.
+
+"When a man is six feet two inches in height, is as strong as a bull,
+and possesses a well-earned reputation as a fencer and pistol-shot,
+even male cousins," returned P. C. Breagh, "are content to sit still
+and let him hug."
+
+"And then he married her and went into politics--and to-day, when the
+Press says 'Prussia,' it means him!" cried Mr. Knewbit.  "What our
+Chief likes, and what fetches me!--is his cool owdaciousness.  If
+ever I chance to find myself in Berlin," he added, "before visiting
+any State Collection of Art Objects ever brought together--I'd choose
+to 'ave a look at that man!"
+
+Said P. C. Breagh:
+
+"I've seen the Iron Chancellor just once--in '67--passing through
+Schwärz-Brettingen on his way to Berlin.  It was in my first semester
+at the University, and just after the Constitution of the North
+German Bund was put into force by Royal Patent.  The Social Democrats
+had protested against the withdrawal of the Prussian garrison from
+the independent State of Luxembourg--wanted to rush Germany into war
+over the business, and they, as well as the _Ultramontaine_, having
+plenty of followers among the students--both parties formed up on the
+platform of the railway-station, and gave the Count three groans."
+
+"How did he take 'em--the groans, I mean?'
+
+"Rather as if he liked them, now I come to think of it.  I can see
+him now, in civil dress, black frock-coat, vest and trousers, with a
+white choker something like a Lutheran clergyman's.  And he jammed
+his great black felt hat down on his head and thrust his huge body
+half out of the carriage window.  His eyes--fierce blue eyes heavily
+pouched underneath, and blazing from under shaggy eyebrows--swept
+over us as though we were a lot of squeaking mice--though he was
+laughing in a good-tempered sort of way.  And he shouted something in
+dialect--they said it was a common Pomeranian proverb, '_Let not live
+men fight over a dead dog!_'"
+
+"Meaning----?"
+
+"Meaning, one would suppose, that the Luxembourg garrison was a right
+which had been given up as unimportant, and therefore was of no more
+value than a dead dog, set against the cost of a new war."
+
+"I'm obliged for your information," said Mr. Knewbit, pushing back
+his chair and getting up to reach his brass tobacco-box from the high
+kitchen mantelshelf.  "In return I'll give you a bit o' news--which
+may be of walley to you.  You have been talking A.1 journalism, young
+man, as different from the stuff you commonly put on paper as gold is
+from this metal"--he tapped the brass tobacco-box--"and--my advice
+is--For the future, write only of what you know; have felt, and heard
+and seen!"
+
+He sucked despairingly at the wooden pipe he was filling and, finding
+it foul, stuck the stem in the spout of the boiling kettle--a
+practice abhorred of Miss Ling--and left it to be cleaned as he
+continued:
+
+"Big things are going on in the world at this moment--things worth
+watching and waiting for.  Damme!--though I'm not a swearer as a
+rule," said the little man, "if I don't wish I could change places
+with something that has wings.  The great man we have been a-talking
+of is at this minute at his country-seat in Pomerania--that's the
+estate he bought with the grant--sixty thousand pounds English, it
+came to--the German Parliament voted him after the Prussian-Austrian
+War.  And the King of Prussia is at Ems, a-drinking the waters, and
+the French Ambassador has been sent there by the Emperor Napoleon
+III. to obtain a special audience, I'm told.  And if you or me could
+swop jobs with a fly on the wall at one place or the other--being a
+German insect it would be likely to understand their crack jaw
+language--me or you would be able to supply a leaded half-column for
+Special Issue that would fairly set the world afire.  See this!"
+
+He took the short poker from the top of Miss Ling's kitchen-range,
+and, pushing back his chair, rose and approached the wall, which was
+destitute of pictures, and distempered in an economical brown color.
+
+"Look here, I say!..." began P. C. Breagh.
+
+"The breath of genius inflates me," said Mr. Knewbit, who had had
+more than his allowance of beer at supper.  "The impulse to prophesy
+stimulates me.  Look at this!"
+
+He wielded the poker deftly as he spoke.  And on the brown distemper
+appeared in huge white letters:
+
+  WILL THERE BE WAR?
+  YES!
+  HOHENZOLLERN QUESTION NO DEAD DOG TO FRANCE!
+  GAUL, AND TEUTON RIPE FOR CONFLICT.
+  BISMARCK'S VIEWS!
+
+
+"But, there, my inspiration gives out," said Mr. Knewbit, replacing
+the poker on the range and shaking his head mournfully, "unless it
+was possible to change with that fly on the wall--and take him at one
+of his expansive, confidential moments--if he ever has any--neither
+me nor any other man living will ever be able to give Bismarck's real
+views upon this or any other subject dealing with Politics.  Who's
+this?"
+
+The hall-door had slammed a moment previously.  There had been a step
+upon the oilcloth-covered basement staircase, and now it bore Miss
+Ling's first-floor lodger, Herr von Rosius, the "quiet gentleman,"
+who taught German to English students and English to Germans at the
+Institute of Languages in Berners Street, W.--across the threshold of
+her tidy kitchen, pipe in mouth and hat in hand.
+
+"Meine Herren, I haf to beg your pardons!  I seek the Fräulein
+Ling----" he was beginning, when suddenly the tall, broad-shouldered
+figure in the ill-fitting checked tweed clothes was petrified into
+rigidity.  The felt hat he had civilly removed dropped from his hand,
+his jaws clenched on his inseparable meerschaum.  Bolt upright,
+crimson to the hair, and staring through his steel-rimmed spectacles,
+he stood confronting the huge white letters that disfigured Miss
+Ling's brown distemper.
+
+"_Kreuzdonnerwetter! was ist dies?_" Carolan heard him mutter in his
+own tongue.  "_Es ist in jedermanns Mund!_"  Then he recovered
+himself almost instantly, picked up his hat, and gave good-evening in
+his stiff, yet civil, way.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+"Good evening!  Miss Ling is out, and won't be back for an hour,"
+explained Mr. Knewbit, "but if there was anything you were wanting in
+a hurry, I'll see that you get it, somehow."
+
+"Thanks, thanks!" said Herr von Rosius pleasantly.  "So that I shall
+have my bill within an hour I shall need nothing.  Pray inform the
+Fräulein I haf just received a cable from my family in Germany.  They
+tell me I am wanted at home."
+
+"Sorry, sorry!" said Mr. Knewbit in his pouncing manner.  "Sudden,
+sudden!  Hope no bad news?"
+
+Von Rosius's pale blue eyes might have been stones, they were so
+hard, and had so little expression.  He removed and wiped his glasses
+with his silk handkerchief, and said, carefully replacing them:
+
+"_Nein, ganz und gar nicht_, but my mother is in need of me.  So I
+have resigned my post at the Berners Street Institute of Languages,
+and got my passport from our North German Consul in your city.  Be so
+good to give my message to the Fräulein.  I go upstairs to pack my
+trunks and bags!"
+
+Von Rosius's long legs had carried him to the first-floor before Mr.
+Knewbit had done rubbing his ear and thinking.  When his sitting-room
+door had banged, and the kitchen gaselier ceased to vibrate at the
+concussion, the little man said, looking at Carolan:
+
+"You have an eye in your head, young chap, and have lived in that
+gentleman's country, and speak his language.  And yet the setting of
+his upper lip and the blank expression he throwed into his spectacles
+when I put a plain question to him, have told me more about him than
+you've learned.  I'll bet you a ginger-ale that Germany is his
+mother, and he has been recalled to serve in the Reserve Force, I
+forget what they call it just now."
+
+"They call the Reserve the Reserve, but I expect you mean the
+_Landwehr_," returned Carolan, wondering at the little man's
+sharpness.
+
+"That's it.  Listen to him singing," said Mr. Knewbit, as the
+first-floor sitting-room door banged open again, heavy steps crossed
+the landing, and the robust baritone of Herr von Rosius trolled forth
+a fragment of song: "Now, if that might be anything in the 'Rule
+Britannia' line, my ginger-ale's as good as won."
+
+"It's the _Wacht am Rhein_," said P. C. Breagh, returning enlightened
+from an excursion to the bottom of the kitchen staircase, "and I
+believe you've hit the nail on the head."
+
+"He served in '66 he told me," said Mr. Knewbit, indicating the
+unseen Von Rosius with an upward jerk of his chin, "and now he's got
+to go back and be a cog or a screw-nut somewhere in the big
+war-machine you've told me of.  What did he call Service of the
+Active kind?  'Camping under the helmet-spike.'  We shall miss him,
+for a quieter and civiler lodger never wore out oilcloth.
+Hark!--that was the hall-door.  Monsieur Meguet's back uncommon
+early.  As a rule, after the Museum Print Room closes he goes to his
+club in Leicester Square."
+
+The French gentleman who lived on the second floor had ascended the
+doorsteps simultaneously with Mr. Ticking.  Mounting to the hall on
+his way upstairs, attended by the ginger Tom--no longer a kitten--P.
+C. Breagh found them, surrounded by a blue haze of Sweet Caporal and
+Navy Cut, finishing a political discussion on the mat, while Mr.
+Mounteney, languidly leaning against the door-post of the
+ground-floor front-parlor, listened with a detached and weary air.
+
+"_C'est de bouc émissaire_--I tell you he is the scapegoat of a
+diplomat's malice!" declared the French gentleman.  "Of himself he is
+without designs--unambitious! a good child, nothing more!  Brave as
+he is--has he not been trained from infancy to hardihood and acts of
+daring?--has he not slept with but a blanket for covering, and eaten
+the soldier's sausage of pea? ... Brave as he is, he dare not draw
+upon his unhappy country the terrible--the devastating--the
+exterminating wrath of France!"
+
+The French gentleman whose profession was Prints had spoken
+loudly,--possibly without the design of being heard upon the first
+floor.
+
+Now, as he paused to wipe his streaming brow with a brilliant green
+silk handkerchief, a door upon the landing immediately above was
+suddenly thrown open, and as a trunk was dragged across the landing,
+a stave of the German equivalent to "Rule, Britannia," boomed forth
+in Herr von Rosius's powerful baritone:
+
+  "_While there's a drop of blood to run,
+  While there's an arm to hold a gun--
+  While there's a hand to wield a sword--
+  Brum--brum brum brum----_"
+
+
+The German words were lost in the racket accompanying the violent
+ejection of heavy articles from the bedroom.  Comparative calm ensued
+as M. Meguet continued:
+
+"Disciplined, well drilled, energetic, and brave, the Army of France
+is unmatched and invincible.  Our Emperor assures us upon the honor
+of a Napoleon, that, equipped and ready to the last buckle--to the
+final gaiter-button, it waits but the signal to roll on.  Its musket
+is infinitely superior to the Prussian needle-gun, that feeble
+invention of an ill-balanced mind!--its artillery is commanded by a
+picked corps of officers--is enforced by that terrific weapon, the
+_mitrailleuse_.  The Army of Prussia is a bundle of dry bones,
+fastened together--not with living sinews--but with rusty wire.  The
+Prussian Monarch is a tottering pantaloon of seventy-three, crowned
+with dusty laurels; who submits to be the puppet of a demon in human
+form!  The Genius of France is a divine and glorious being, whose
+soul burns with the noble thirst for warlike achievements, whose
+blood courses with the fire and heat of unimpaired youth...."
+
+From upstairs came the big baritone, buzzing like a gigantic
+bumble-bee:
+
+  "_The oath is sworn--the hosts roll on,
+  In heart and soul thy sons are one.
+  Dear Fatherland, no fear be thine,
+  We'll keep our watch upon the Rhine!_"
+
+
+"I tell you!" cried M. Meguet passionately, and pitching his voice so
+as to be heard, if possible, still more distinctly on the floor
+above; "France will cross the Rhine!  Her hosts will inundate the
+soil of Germany like a vast tidal wave, and in one moment
+obliterate----"
+
+Silence had prevailed above during the utterance of the
+above-recorded sentences.  At the word "obliterate," a heavy canvas
+holdall dropped over the balusters of the upper landing, missing the
+speaker by a calculated inch; and as the ginger Tom, with an
+astonished curse, disappeared in the direction of the kitchen:
+
+"_Prut!_" said the voice of Von Rosius from above, "that was an
+uncommonly near shave.  Pray pardon," he added, appearing on the
+staircase, emitting volumes of smoke from his big meerschaum.  "I so
+much regret the accident!"
+
+He was attired in rough traveling-clothes, and wore an intensely
+practical woolen cap with ear-flaps, though the July night was
+oppressively hot.  And his spectacles were inscrutable as he gathered
+up the boots, slippers, and clothes-brush that had escaped from the
+holdall, leaned the bulky brown canvas mass against the
+hall-wainscoting, and felt in the drawer of the rickety hatstand that
+never had hats on it, for the cab-whistle that was wheezy from
+overwork.
+
+"It is nothing, Monsieur, you have not deranged me for an instant,"
+returned M. Meguet, with ominously smiling bonhomie.  Then refixing
+his late audience with his eye, he went on as though the interruption
+had never happened:
+
+--"and obliterate from the face of the earth the entire German
+nation."
+
+Von Rosius opened the hall-door, letting in the sultry smell of the
+hot street.  He stood upon the threshold, and blew for a
+four-wheeler, one tittering, mocking trill.  M. Meguet continued,
+quavering, and clutching his brow in the character of the terrified
+Hohenzollern, and imparting a tremor of agitation to his legs:
+
+"Is it, then, to be wondered at," cries this unhappy Leopold, "that
+the opinion of Queen Victoria and the observations of the Czar of
+Russia have quickened scruples already existing in my breast?  Will
+my royal relatives wonder that I say: _This shall not be_?  The brand
+designed to set a world on fire has been quenched by my mother's
+tears, and the entreaties of my wife and infants.  Let M. de Bismarck
+mount the Spanish Throne, and adorn his crafty temples with this
+crown of piercing bayonets.  I withdraw from this fatal candidacy,
+though the whole world should say----"
+
+M. Meguet shrugged his shoulders and struck the blow for which he had
+been saving himself:
+
+--"should say what the latest edition of that admirably-informed
+journal, the _Evening Gazette_, quotes from this morning's edition of
+_Le Gaulois_:
+
+"'_La Prusse cane!_'"
+
+Von Rosius was standing on the threshold of the open door as the
+words hissed past him.  Distant wheels were rumbling up the dusty
+cobblestones of Coram Street from, the cabstand at the corner of
+Russell Square
+
+"Now, what's the English of that?" asked Mr. Ticking, rashly.
+
+"Possibly," remarked M. Meguet, with a sardonic smile at the tall
+figure and broad shoulders that blocked the hall-doorway, "Herr von
+Rosius might be able to inform you!"
+
+Von Rosius signaled to the driver of the approaching cab before he
+turned.  In his rough, loosely-fitting clothes, he bulked large and
+menacing, though his spectacles were as inscrutable as ever, and
+under his light mustache his excellent teeth showed quite smilingly.
+He felt for money in his trousers-pocket as he answered composedly:
+
+"With pleasure.  It is a slang expression used by the blackguards of
+the lowest quarters of Paris.  '_Cane_' is to 'back out' or to 'climb
+down,' as the Americans would say.  Excuse me!  I go to pay my bill."
+
+He nodded slightly as he passed Ticking and Mounteney, and bestowed
+the same civility on P. C. Breagh.  Then his heavy footsteps
+thundered down the kitchen staircase, from whose hatchway he emerged
+a few minutes later, accompanied by Mr. Knewbit, who had volunteered
+to help with the luggage, and this being stacked on the cab, their
+owner got into it, and Herr von Rosius, rigidly shaking hands with
+his English fellow-lodgers, and exchanging a distant salute with M.
+Meguet, got into the fusty vehicle and was driven away to the
+triumphant strains of the Marseillaise, performed by his racial
+antagonist on the piano appertaining to the first-floor sitting-room
+he had a moment previously vacated.
+
+"'Prussia climbs down,'" murmured Mr. Knewbit, standing before the
+inscription on the kitchen distemper.  "With the 'and on her 'elm
+that she 'as----" he went on shedding "h's," as was his way when
+deeply meditative, "I should doubt the correctness of that report.
+Still, I shall advise Maria to keep them first-floor apartments
+vacant a day or two--in case Mr. von Rosius's mother doesn't want him
+after all....  What does Solomon say?  '_Designs are strengthened by
+counsels, and wars are to be managed by Governments._'"
+
+The kettle was boiling madly, and a volume of steam was issuing from
+the pipe-bowl.  Mr. Knewbit rescued the blackened briar-root,
+mechanically filled it, and looked for a light.
+
+There was a crumpled pale green paper lying near his boot upon the
+worn linoleum.  He picked it up, and saw that it was a cablegram
+issued by the North German Submarine Telegraph Company, addressed to
+Von Rosius, and containing a message of four words:
+
+"_Lanze inden Schuh, Uhlan!  Hauptquartier, Berlin._"
+
+"Now, which shall I do?" asked Mr. Knewbit, scanning the baffling
+foreign words written in the familiar English characters.  Torn
+between conscientious scruples and a characteristic thirst for
+information, the little man was pitiable to see.  "Which shall I do?"
+he repeated.  "Use this here for a pipe-light--or show it to my young
+shaver upstairs?"
+
+Deciding on the latter course, he climbed to the attic rented by the
+young shaver, and knocked at the door.
+
+"Come in! ... I'm not working to-night," said P. C. Breagh out of the
+darkness.  Upon Mr. Knewbit's striking a match, the young man, who
+was leaning back in his chair before the venerable davenport,
+contemplating the dusk oblong of starry sky visible above the
+chimney-pots of Bernard Street, shook himself free of thought as a
+setter shakes off water, and got up.
+
+"Feel out of sorts?" asked Mr. Knewbit, burning his fingers, and
+striking another match as he bustled to the single bracket over the
+narrow wooden mantelshelf and lighted the gas.  "Anything wrong?"
+
+"I feel out of the swim," said P. C. Breagh, sitting down again
+astride his chair, and cupping his square chin in a fist that had
+ink-smears on it, as he stared at the wobbling blue flame that
+presently spread itself into a yellow fan of radiance, "and hipped
+and beastly.  I've no right to quarrel with my bread-and-butter, but
+I'm doing it to-night.  The fact that I'm a Nobody doesn't prevent me
+from wanting to wind up as Somebody.  Putting the case roughly,
+that's what's wrong."
+
+"This here house," said Mr. Knewbit in his pouncing manner, "belonged
+to a man who was a Nobody, if you like.  A Master Seaman, who used to
+tramp it to his ship at Wapping, and pick up the outcast babies lying
+in the kennels, and roll 'em in his big boat-cloak and carry 'em
+home.  Them foundlings was nobodies--yet two of 'em lived to be Lord
+Mayors of London.  Old Captain Coram, who founded the Hospital, died
+neglected and forgotten, but nobody looking at his tomb in the Chapel
+yonder will deny he wound up as Somebody at last!"
+
+P. C. Breagh yawned hugely and rumpled his hair discontentedly.
+
+"The chap you're talking of was a philanthropist, and I want--I'm not
+ashamed to want--to build a career for myself instead of founding a
+charity-school.  I want--your own talk has made me want!--to get out
+of this little squirrel-cage--even though there are nuts and sugar
+and bread in it all the year round.  And"--his scowl was
+portentous--"if this Hohenzollern hadn't backed out of the Spanish
+Crown affair, when France cockadoodled, and there had been a racket
+on the Rhine frontier--I'd just have rummaged round to find an editor
+who'd be ass enough to pay a raw hand for letters sent from the seat
+of hostilities--and if I couldn't have found one--and of course I
+couldn't--when seasoned men are as plentiful as nutshells in the
+Adelphi gallery--I'd have gone to the war as a camp-follower--and got
+experience that way!"
+
+Said Mr. Knewbit, turning and scanning the resolute, dogged young
+face, with black eyes that twinkled like jet beads:
+
+"I don't agree with you that seasoned Correspondents are plentiful.
+There are thousands who're ready to sit in an office behind the
+Compositors' Room, and write eyewitnesses' accounts of thrilling
+charges.  But them that are ready to go out with a Permit and get
+attached to a Staff; them that are ready and willing to march with an
+Army on the War path--starve when there are no rations, lie in the
+fields in the sopping rain when no roof's to be had to cover
+'em--write accounts of the day's fighting under shell-fire, and
+cheerfully get killed if a bullet comes their way in the course o'
+things!--you can't call the journalistic profession overstocked with
+them.  If you do, just name me one such man for each finger of these
+two big hands of mine.  I defy you to, so there!"
+
+They were very big hands, and as Mr. Knewbit held them up side by
+side, with the palms toward his young shaver, they not undistantly
+resembled a pair of decent-sized flatfish.
+
+"To become a man like one of these--and they're the Pick of the
+British Nation," said Mr. Knewbit, "you must be pitched into the
+midst of things neck and crop, and left to sink or swim.  I
+compliment you when I say that I believe you one of the swimming
+kind.  Now, supposing War broke out after all--how much Hard Cash
+would you want to carry you through a Campaign?"
+
+"I've got five pounds put away in the Post-Office Savings Bank,"
+returned P. C. Breagh, after a moment's mental calculation, "and I
+believe I could manage if I had another fifteen."
+
+"Making Twenty Pound," said Mr. Knewbit, biting a finger
+thoughtfully.  He threw the finger out at P. C. Breagh, and his black
+eyes twinkled more than ever.  "For Fifteen Pound down would you
+undertake to write and send home to the person advancing you the
+money, for--say four weeks (that'd give two nations comfortable time
+to have it out and settle their differences in a Christian-like
+manner, with a little burning of powder, and bloodshed)--three
+letters per week, describing in a style readable by plain, ordinary,
+everyday people--what you've seen, and heard--and felt--and
+smelt--don't forget that!" said Mr. Knewbit, shaking his finger
+warningly at P. C. Breagh, "on the march, or in the bivouac, or while
+the fighting was going on?"
+
+P. C. Breagh would have broken in here, but the held-up finger
+stopped him on the verge of utterance:
+
+"Avoid sham Technicality," said Mr. Knewbit sternly.  "Don't let me
+have stuff like: '_Sir--On the morning of the --th the Field-Marshal
+von Blitherem--or General Parlezvous--shifted the left wing of his
+Division nearer to his center, and shortly after nine o 'clock the
+forces under command of What'shisname and Thingummy began to move in
+column of so and so.  A light 'aze lay upon the fields--the droppin'
+fire of the enemy's Artillery made itself felt at the Advance Posts
+nor' and nor'-west._'  Nor don't you ladle me out sentimental
+slumgullion, after the fashion of--'_All is Peace, while I pen these
+'asty lines and sip my morning coffee.  Yet ere the radiant beams of
+Sol will have dried the pearly dew from these smiling fields, the
+'ideous roar of cannon and the withering burst of shrapnel will have
+devastated and blighted Nature's choicest 'andiwork, and Man, that
+noblest work of the Creative Power--will be engaged in the 'orrible
+task of destroying fellow-men wrought in the image of hisself._'  For
+the Lord is a Man of War--according to the Scriptures," said Mr.
+Knewbit, ignoring P. C. Breagh's amusement.  "And it is written that
+He shall overthrow Kingdoms and break the scepters of Kings, and
+cause that nations shall be swallowed up in nations."  He added, with
+a sharp change to his business tone, "And bad or good, these letters
+of yours are mine, to burn or print as I think fit and necessary?
+All right!  I'll draw up a little agreement--and whenever you choose
+to sign it--there's your Fifteen Pounds.--Lord! to think I should
+live to send out a Special Correspondent, all to my own cheek!
+It's--a--a luxury I should never have anticipated."
+
+"The Correspondent won't be much use without a war to correspond
+about," said Carolan, growing weary of Mr. Knewbit's humor.  "And I
+suppose there won't be one now."
+
+"We shall know for certain, I dare say, when you've thrown your eye
+over this paper here," said his patron, producing a crumpled oblong
+of pale green.  "That it's addressed to another person ain't your
+business.  I mean that person no injury--and naturally no more don't
+you.  What you're asked to do is to English these words for me."  He
+handed over the cablegram and expanded himself to hear.  P. C. Breagh
+read with lifting eyebrows:
+
+"_Lanze inden Schuh, Uhlan!  Hauptquartier, Berlin._"
+
+"And what's that mean?  English it, can't you?" snapped Mr. Knewbit,
+rabid with curiosity.
+
+P. C. Breagh Englished it as requested:
+
+"Lance in rest, Hussar.  Headquarters, Berlin."
+
+
+Said Mr. Knewbit later on, warming his calves despite the heat of the
+weather, at the low coke fire in the kitchen register, while Miss
+Ling bustled about clearing away the supper-cloth:
+
+"That there cable was received in London at six-thirty this evening,
+and the _Evening Gazette_ Meguet quoted from was the latest
+issue--about eleven a.m.  I shall go down early to the office
+to-night!"
+
+
+His Excellency Field-Marshal General Count von Moltke had said that
+day, having dropped in at the Berlin Headquarters of the Reserve
+_Landwehr_ for the purpose of perusing certain lists sent from London
+a few days previously by the Teutonic gentleman who taught English to
+German immigrants at the Institute in Berners Street, W.:
+
+"It was an excellent idea of Colonel von Rosius to fish for missing
+Prussian conscripts and deserters from our _Landwehr_ in the
+character of a teacher of English to foreigners in London.  He has
+netted in a year, two thousand privates and non-commissioned
+officers, would-be waiters, clerks, porters, valets, and
+tradesmen--men of all ages, from forty to nineteen.  A useful
+officer--a very intelligent officer.  We shall make up much leakage
+in adopting his plan!"
+
+
+In the dimly gaslit murkiness of three o'clock in the morning Mr.
+Knewbit sallied forth to business, carrying his hat in his hand as he
+went, for the weather was oppressive, yet walking at his usual
+red-hot pace, and making as much noise with his boots as three
+ordinary men.
+
+"I'm not in my usual mood for Nature," he said, on reaching the
+bottom of gray, grimy Endell Street, "and I flatter myself on being
+tough enough--at a pinch--to do without my customary dose of fresh
+air.  So I'll twist down Long Acre and take the Drury Lane short-cut.
+Not that there is any special reason for hurry to-night."
+
+Yet hurry seemed abroad to an observation as strictly professional as
+Mr. Knewbit's.  Cabs rattled over the stones of the Strand, dashing
+Fleet Streetward; panting messengers clutching envelopes dived under
+the horses' noses; hurried pedestrians carrying little black bags
+jostled Mr. Knewbit every moment; windows of offices glowed like
+furnaces, and the champing of steam-engines made a continual beat
+upon the ear.
+
+"The last report from the late Debate in the Commons is in by now,"
+said Mr. Knewbit, looking at his stout silver timekeeper, under a
+gas-lamp, "and Gladstone 'as made short work of that last batch of
+Bills for the Session.  Fee Fo Fum was nothing to 'im.  Merchant
+Shipping, Ballot, Turnpikes, Inclosures--and a baker's dozen of
+Scotch Bills 'ave been offered up in a regular 'ecatomb, and
+anathemas 'ave been 'urled at the 'eads of the Opposition with the
+usual inspiritin' effect.  The gentleman who is a-trying to put a
+stop to the employment of young children in Factories and Workshops
+'as been put down with the powerful argument that the kids like their
+work, and would get up at four in the morning to do it for nothink if
+they wasn't paid for it.  What a headin' I could make out of that!
+The stoker who was drivin' the engine to give the reg'lar driver a
+rest when the Carlisle Railway Disaster happened has been released
+without a stain on 'is character, and complimented by the Committee
+on his 'umanity into the bargain.  Mr. Bright is better, and will
+wake up the Board of Trade presently.  That's all we shall have for
+our bill of fare this issue, includin' the City Correspondence,
+Sportin' Intelligence, Markets, Stocks, and state of the weather,
+Railway Shares, Law and Police reports, and Births, Deaths, and
+Marriages, and not leavin' out the new midsummer drama at Sadler's
+Wells Theater or the letters written by gentlemen with grievances,
+signing theirselves 'Pater-familias,' or 'Englishman,' or 'Verax,'
+who have been sauced by hackney-cab drivers or over-rated by the
+Income Tax, or overcharged for a cold-mutton, lettuce-salad and
+cheese luncheon in a country inn.  That's all, and no more than bound
+to be!  And yet I feel as if something was going to happen.  I'm not
+due in my Department for another hour.  I shall do a bit of a Look
+Round."
+
+He entered by the swing-doors of the Fleet Street general entrance,
+meeting a rush of hot air, powerfully flavored with gas and
+machine-oil, and was instantly borne off his feet by an avalanche of
+telegraph-agency messengers in oilskin caps and capes.  The place was
+ablaze with gas, shirt-sleeved men and grubby boys ran hither and
+thither like agitated insects.  The walls shook with the panting of
+engines getting up steam.  Perspiring printer-foremen shot in and out
+of little baking-hot glass offices where sub-editors were cutting
+down heaps of "flimsy," ramming sheets of copy on files, correcting
+proofs, and curtailing pars....
+
+Said Mr. Knewbit, fanning himself on a landing after climbing a great
+many iron-shod staircases, and passing in and out of a great many
+swing-doors emitting puffs of the hot gas-and-oil-perfumed air
+already mentioned, and leading to glass-roofed departments, where
+shirt-sleeved and aproned men labored for dear life, and huge
+steam-power machines at high pressure trembled and panted like
+elephants gone mad:
+
+"The Foreign Telegrams are in type and the Leaders are in the chases.
+The forms are in the machines, and in another minute the word will be
+given to Print.  Halloa!  Beg pardon, sir!  I'm sure I didn't see
+you!"
+
+For a little red-hot, perspiring gentleman had leaped up the
+staircase like a goat of the mountain, had charged at the swing-doors
+immediately behind Knewbit, collided with him, sworn at him
+breathlessly--and vanished with a double thud of the swing-doors, and
+a shout of "Matheson!"
+
+A clang of voices seemed to answer him, there was a brief minute's
+delay, ages as it seemed to the waiting Mr. Knewbit; then the mad
+elephants, unchained, began to heave and stamp and snort.  And--at
+the rate of twenty-five thousand an hour, began to roll, from the
+great cylinders of damp paper, the day's issue of the _Early Wire_.
+
+They rolled out--as similar cylinders were rolling up and down Fleet
+Street and all the world over, the Report of the late Debate in the
+Commons, the list of Bills beheaded by the Prime Minister, the
+ineffectual efforts of the gentleman who was trying to stop the
+Factory Owners from employing Infant Labor, the result of the
+Commission of Inquiry upon the Carlisle Railway Disaster, and all the
+News of the day.  And in a space reserved for the Latest Foreign
+Intelligence appeared a telegram sent from Ems by the King of
+Prussia, as condensed at a dinner-council of three convivials, in the
+Wilhelm Strasse, Berlin.
+
+And all the world read it and commented, as British stocks went up
+and Continental Stocks played seesaw:
+
+"The King of Prussia refuses to receive the French Ambassador! ...
+This most certainly means WAR!"
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+Perched on the wall,--hung with an old-world Chinese paper, figured
+with sprays of bamboo, pagodas, bridges, mandarins promenading under
+yellow umbrellas, and fair Celestials reclining on the banks of a
+meandering, bright blue stream--the German fly of Mr. Knewbit's envy
+would have reaped scant information from the conversation of the
+three men sitting at the dinner-table, for the reason that they
+conversed in English--perhaps for privacy's sake.
+
+The apartment, not ordinarily used as a dining-room, possessed three
+sets of folding-doors, and beyond a sofa and twelve heavy chairs,
+upholstered with a Chinese brocade matching the paper, was scantily
+furnished.  The table plate was solid and handsome.  A pair of huge
+silver-gilt wine-coolers displayed a goodly array of champagne
+bottles, a cellar-basket with rows of horizontal wicker-nests
+contained claret, Burgundy, and Rhine wine.  The second course was
+under discussion, but the servants, after placing the dishes on the
+table, had withdrawn.  By a bell kept on a dumb-waiter at the host's
+elbow, bearing sauces, clean plates, spare glasses, bread of white
+and black, and other requisites, the attendants could be summoned at
+need.
+
+The hostess's chair at the table-head was vacant.  The two guests'
+places were laid on the right and left hand of the host.  All three
+men were in uniform, two were well stricken in years; and Time had
+not left sufficient locks among them to furnish a wig-maker with
+material for covering a bald patch.
+
+Also, they were men of whom the world had heard much already, and
+was, before the ending of the year, to hear a great deal more.
+
+The tall, heavily-built man of sixty-seven, in the uniform of a
+General of Division, who sat upon the host's right hand, boasting a
+hair-tuft above either ear, a pair of shaggy eyebrows, and a
+bristling mustache dyed to savage blackness, any intelligent Berliner
+would have recognized as Von Roon, the Prussian Minister of War;
+while the mild-looking veteran of seventy who opposed him, displaying
+the crimson badge of the Great General Staff upon a plain dark
+close-buttoned military frock, with the ribbons of a dozen
+decorations showing in a narrow line on his left breast and the
+coveted Cross of the Red Eagle of the First Class hanging at the
+black regulation stock that clipped his unstarched linen collar,
+would have been claimed by the veriest street urchin as "Our Moltke!"
+
+You saw in this hale, lean, stooping Staff Officer, who covered a
+scalp as bare as a new-born babe's with an obvious auburn wig, the
+first soldier of the day, the past-master in war-craft.  His fine,
+transparent beaky profile, tight mouth, clear light eyes, set in a
+net of innumerable knowing little wrinkles, and the cross-hatching of
+tiny scarlet veins that made his hollow cheeks ruddy as Cornish
+apples, might have belonged to some aged, ascetic Cardinal, or
+venerable Professor of Science, rather than to Baron Helmuth Carl
+Bernhard von Moltke, General, Field-Marshal, and Chief of the Great
+General Staff of the Prussian Army; whose heraldic motto, _Erst wagen
+dann wagen_ summarizes his strategical policy; whose conduct of the
+Danish War of '64 and the Austrian War of '66 had placed Prussia in
+the forefront as a military nation, under whose banner were soon to
+gather the Confederated German States.
+
+Questioned as to the identity of the man at the head of the table,
+the long-limbed, heavily molded, powerfully built personage of
+five-and-fifty, attired in the undress-uniform of a Colonel of White
+Cuirassiers, and wearing the Order of Commander of the Red Eagle, the
+citizen would most likely have scowled, the street-boy spat forth
+some unsavory epithet, tacked on to a name that was destined to be
+inscribed upon the era in divers mediums, inclusive of marble and
+iron, brass and gold and silver; lead and fire; bright steel and red
+blood.
+
+For this was the Minister to whom diplomats, Parliamentary orators,
+and political leader-writers referred when they mentioned Prussia;
+the accursed of Ultramontane, the abhorred of Socialists.  Walking
+alone through the streets, as, indeed, he loved to do, his keen eye
+and huge physical strength had saved him, ere now, from the
+assassin's bullet or knife.  And you could not look upon him without
+recognizing a Force, all-potent for good or all-dominant in evil, an
+enemy to be execrated or a leader to be adored.
+
+The massive, high-domed head was scantily covered, save for a grayish
+lock or so above either temple, and a thin thatching behind the
+finely shaped, sagacious ears.  The eyebrows were thick--of gray
+mixed with darkish brown; the luxuriant brown-gray mustache covering
+the large, mobile, sarcastic mouth, grew heavily as any trooper's.
+The short, straight nose was rounded at the end like the point of a
+broadsword.  And in the indomitable, vital regard of the blue eyes,
+partly hidden under thick and level lids, you felt the master-mind,
+as they coldly considered some question of finance or diplomacy, or
+blazed challenge and defiance, scorn and irony.  And in the sagging
+orbital pouches, as in the puffy jowl, you read the unmistakable
+signs of bygone orgies, deep potations, marvelous vital powers taxed
+to the utmost in the past pursuit of pleasure, as by present
+indefatigable, unsleeping labors with brain, voice, and pen in the
+service of Throne and State.
+
+The table-talk dealt chiefly, at first, with culinary and
+gastronomical matters.  Asparagus soup iced and a clear soup with
+vermicelli had preceded the course of fish, placed on the table by
+the servants, who had then been dismissed.  A huge dish of Waldbach
+trout with green sauce and another, as capacious, of crayfish stewed
+in cream with mushrooms, vanished before a double onslaught on the
+part of the War Minister and the Chancellor, the Chief of the General
+Staff partaking sparingly, as was his wont.
+
+Said his host, smiling and setting down an empty wine goblet:
+
+"You eat nothing, Herr Baron Field-Marshal, whereas I, who come of a
+family of great eaters, and His Excellency, who boasts a similarly
+inherited capacity, have taken twice of each dish."
+
+"Thanks, thanks, dear Count," said Moltke mildly, glancing downward
+at the well-marked hollow behind his middle buttons; "but I do not
+like to overload my stomach, particularly at my time of life."
+
+"Being aware of Your Excellency's objection to dishes that are
+heavy," the Chancellor continued gravely, but still smiling, "I took
+pains to select a menu of light, easily digested things.  What are
+three or four dozens of oysters at the commencement of a dinner?"
+
+Von Roon agreed, in a hoarse bass, that set the chandelier-glasses
+vibrating:
+
+"Or a few half-pound trout, or a helping or so of stewed crayfish?
+Mere nothings--to a strong digestion."
+
+"Mine cannot be strong," the great strategist remarked modestly, "for
+I find that an over-plentiful meal oppresses the brain, and hinders
+steady thought."
+
+Said the Chancellor, filling from a long-necked bottle one of the
+three large crystal goblets that served him as wine-glasses, emptying
+it at a draught and setting it down:
+
+"Hah!  Were that known in a certain high quarter at Paris, what a
+cargo of delicacies you would presently receive from the Maison
+Chevet!"
+
+Von Roon's big voice came in:
+
+"Was not Chevet the Parisian purveyor who supplied the
+banker-minister Lafitte with fish for a Dieppe dinner in the time of
+the French Monarchy?"
+
+"So!"  The Chancellor, holding his napkin delicately in both hands,
+dried the wine from his mustache, and added, turning his great,
+slightly bloodshot eyes upon the interrogator.  "And who is now chief
+caterer for the Emperor Napoleon the Third."  He added, glancing back
+at Moltke, and observing that his glass stood unemptied: "Since Your
+Excellency will not eat, let me recommend you the wine, which is of
+special quality.  Not only Rüdesheim, but good Rüdesheim.  Ha, ha,
+ha!"
+
+The veteran's clear eyes became mere slits in the mass of puckered
+wrinkles.  He pushed back his auburn peruke, showing his high-arched
+temples, and laughed, revealing gums as healthy as a child's, and
+still accommodating three or four staunch old grinders inclined at
+various angles, like ancient apple-tree stumps.
+
+"_Nu, nu_!  You are twitting me with my candor to Sultan Mahmoud in
+1835; but what else could I say when Chosref Pasha intimated that His
+Sublimity required my opinion?  Directly I tasted his wretched wine,
+I knew some rogue had sold him an inferior brand, and thus I told him
+honestly: 'It is Rüdesheim, Your Majesty, but it is not good
+Rüdesheim!'  And with the first of the boxes of tobacco and
+cigarettes that came from Constantinople after my return to Germany,
+I received the message that the _tutun_ was not only Turkish _tutun_,
+but good Turkish _tutun_."  He drank off his wine, ending: "And so my
+nephews say it is, for I smoke neither cigarettes nor pipes."
+
+"I smoke pipes," said the Chancellor, stretching a white, muscular
+hand toward the bell on the dumb-waiter, "when my doctor prohibits
+cigars."  He added: "Pipes of all materials and descriptions--one
+sort excepted.  I have no doubt Your Excellency could give it a name."
+
+The War Minister, pondering, knotted his heavy tufted eyebrows, and
+presently blew out his cheeks as a man may when the jest baffles his
+wit.  The Field-Marshal began to laugh, a gentle chuckle that began
+by agitating his lean abdomen, and shaking his bowed but vigorous
+shoulders before it widened his mouth into a slit curved gaily at the
+corners, and squeezed tears of merriment out of his puckered eyes.
+
+"I'll wager half a pfennig I will name it at the first guess!  You
+mean the Calumet of Peace!"
+
+Von Roon barked out a laugh.  The Chancellor nodded, smiling.  Then
+two middle-aged, grave-looking male servants in plain black entered
+with the third course, and the faces of the diners underwent a
+curious change.  They were more suave, and all expression seemed as
+though it had been wiped from them.  Until, following on the heels of
+the servants (who brought the _entrées_), there appeared a colossal
+boarhound, dark tawny in color, with black pointings, short, rounded
+ears, massive chest, square muzzle, and red-rimmed eyes.  Fixing
+these fierce orbs upon his master with an affection proved not
+altogether disinterested by the copious dribbling of his jaws, the
+great brute sat upright at his left hand, flogged the carpet with his
+heavy tail, and saluted the placing of the dishes on the table with
+three gruff barks.
+
+"Aha, Tyras!"
+
+"Hey, then, Tyras!  So they have cut short your furlough, boy!"
+
+"He would tell you, like that sergeant of infantry who was made
+postman of a country district after the war of '66, and at whom the
+illiterate population--who never got anything but bad news or dunning
+letters--used to shoot as a mild hint to keep away altogether, that
+all the days are field-days to him.  Speaking as a dog with a master
+who walks when he does not ride, and must be waited for when he is
+neither riding nor walking."
+
+The Chancellor, smiling, looked at the huge brute, which rose and
+laid its massive jowl entreatingly upon his chair-arm, and receiving
+no immediate return in caress, lobbed a heavy forepaw pettishly upon
+the tablecloth.  A chased silver-gilt salt-cellar, in the shape of a
+Bavarian peasant-girl carrying two milk-pails, toppled, and might
+have fallen to the floor, but that the Field-Marshal caught it
+dexterously, though without being able to prevent the salt being
+spilt.
+
+"No harm done.  See!"  He triumphantly set the milk-maid in her place
+again: "Only the salt is spilled upon the cloth!"
+
+"Now, if Tyras were superstitious!" commented the host, as a servant
+hastened to repair the damage with the aid of a napkin and a
+porcelain dessert-plate, "he would be convinced that Madame Tyras and
+her sons were not doing as well as might be hoped."
+
+"The bitch has pupped, then?" said Von Roon as a trio of corks
+exploded; and the servants, having carried round the dishes, placed
+them on the table, set an open bottle of champagne, dewy from the
+ice, and enveloped in a damask napkin, at the right of each diner,
+and noiselessly quitted the Chinese room.
+
+As the door shut, the Chancellor continued, responding to Roon's
+question with a nod, and looking at the Chief of the Great General
+Staff:
+
+"However, Tyras is not one of those nervous sires who rend heaven and
+earth with outcries if danger threatens one of their offspring.  The
+Pomeranian breed are possibly less nervous than the strain at
+Sigmaringen.  I think Prince Antony----"
+
+Blurted out the Field-Marshal, bolting a mouthful of cutlet and
+crimsoning to the edges of his wig with sudden anger: "May the great
+devil fly away with that pompous old sheep's-head!"
+
+"It was not without reason," said the Chancellor, without slackening
+in his onslaught upon an _entrée_ of duckling stewed with olives,
+"that I arranged for us three to dine without the servants.  Did I
+not foresee that the hot blood of the warlike youth would effervesce
+in some such expression as that I have just heard!"
+
+Said the old man, still flushed, but laughing, and sipping at a
+bumper of dry Sillery:
+
+"He is a sheep's-head, and a pompous one!  He negotiates with Prim,
+as head of the Hohenzollern family, quite forgetting the King, it
+would appear!  He is very well pleased--he thinks the place will suit
+his son capitally!  He sends him on second thoughts to ask the King
+if he does not think so.  Then when France hurries her Ambassador to
+Ems to inform the King, who has not said 'Ay' or 'Nay' in the matter,
+that she will not tolerate a Prince of Prussia on the Throne of
+Spain, he writes to the King saying that he is much impressed by the
+turn things are taking at Paris, and though he thinks he cannot in
+decency break off the affair, perhaps the King will do it for him!
+Meanwhile Prince Leopold, who is the chief person concerned--where
+withdrawal or acceptance is in question--has quitted Ems and gone
+where you please....  Not to his parents' country castle of
+Sigmaringen, but to the Tyrol....  Now why to the Tyrol?  This
+marching and countermarching--with no definite purpose in it, makes
+my blood boil.  Phew!"
+
+And really the perspiration fairly bubbled from the pores of the old
+warrior, as he took off his auburn peruke and mopped his dripping
+head and face with a large white handkerchief.
+
+The Chancellor, who had been discussing a second helping of the dish
+before him, laid down his knife and fork upon their silver-gilt
+supporters, unfastened a hook of his undress frock, and said,
+withdrawing a small roll of tissue papers and separating one thin
+penciled sheet from the rest:
+
+"There is some reason for the Prince's agitation.  This morning a
+telegram in cipher--of which this is a fair transcript--was
+dispatched from Sigmaringen to Olozaga, the Spanish Ambassador at
+Paris.  It conveys the intimation that Prince Antony withdraws from
+the candidacy in the name of Prince Leopold.  It was sent by the
+French Emperor's secret agent, a Roumanian named Straz."
+
+He went on informing himself, with a quiet side-glance to right and
+left, of the effect his communication was producing:
+
+"Perhaps you do not know Straz--a man with the profile and curls of
+one of M. Layard's man-god bulls of Nineveh, a living tool that might
+have been tempered in the workshop of an Alexander Borgia, or a
+Catherine de Medici----"
+
+He stopped to fill one of his great crystal goblets from the
+champagne-bottle that stood beside him.  Moltke, indifferent to the
+dishes that stood temptingly within reach, had been wiping the inside
+of his wig dry with his handkerchief.  Now, oblivious of the wig, and
+crumpling it with the handkerchief into a ball, he was squeezing the
+ball between his narrow palms as he listened to the speaker.  Von
+Roon, who had been busy upon some sweetbreads cooked in sour cream,
+paused in the act of helping himself again largely.
+
+"So--so--this fellow--Straz----"  The Chancellor stuttered now and
+then, and he did it here effectively--"This uns-scrupulous f-fellow
+of whom I am t-talking----"  He drained the big glass to the dregs,
+wiped his mustache carefully, and began delicately unfolding more
+thin sheets of paper from the small but pregnant wad.
+
+"Ah, yes, where was I?  Th-this morning, the twelfth of July, the
+originals of these three telegrams, which are not in cipher, were
+sent from Sigmaringen by Prince Antony.  The first, to Marshal Prim,
+at Madrid, withdraws his son from the candidacy.  The second, to
+Olozaga, recapitulates the wording of this.  The third, ostensibly
+addressed to the principal journals of Berlin and Germany, and to the
+German Submarine Telegraphic Agencies by order of Prince Leopold of
+Hohenzollern, abandons all pretensions to the Spanish scepter, and
+restores to Spain her freedom of initiative."
+
+Von Roon bellowed like a nine-inch siege gun:
+
+"What May-madness has the confounded old billy-goat?"
+
+The Chief of the Great General Staff put on his wig, and said,
+folding his lean arms upon his sunken chest:
+
+"How has he at Paris managed to frighten the old man?"
+
+The Chancellor said, fixing his full, powerful eyes upon the light
+ones twinkling through their wise old puckers:
+
+"The mission of M. Straz, privately sent, upon the advice of the Duke
+de Gramont, by the Emperor of France to Sigmaringen (while Count
+Benedetti repairs to the King of Prussia at Ems, and a third
+emissary, Bartholdi, is sent to menace President Zorilla at
+Madrid)--the mission of M. Straz is to terrify the Prince and
+Princess with threats of the assassination of one, if not both their
+sons."
+
+Commented Moltke, shrugging a shoulder:
+
+"To work on the woman, always--if there is one! ...  Badinguet's
+tactics are not new--but they are effective beyond doubt."
+
+"Knave!" came from Roon, in a blurt of indignation
+
+"Says Straz to Prince Antony of Hohenzollern--I give you the exact
+words;--'Highness, His Imperial Majesty the Emperor authorizes me to
+inform you that a group of Roumanian conspirators are plotting
+against the life of your elder son, Prince Charles von
+Hohenzollern--now Charles of Roumania.  The threads of this plot
+being centered in Paris, it is in the Emperor's power to sever
+them--he will do so if Prince Leopold withdraws from the
+candidature,--he will not seek to deter the conspirators, should the
+Prince prove obstinate.  Reflect in addition that Prince Leopold, as
+King of Spain, will have to contend against the plots of Alfonsists
+and Carlists--as against the intrigues of Montpensier and other
+aspirants to Isabella's vacated throne.  He will not be summoned to
+reign--he will be called to a disaster.  Death will sit beside him,
+under the Royal canopy.'"
+
+The reader's muscular white hands drew another crackling sheet from
+the little roll of papers.  He went on:
+
+"The mother of the two young men was present--as was intended--when
+Straz delivered this message from the Emperor.  Naturally the
+Princess brought her batteries to work upon the Prince and her
+younger son, who, though it is not admitted, was actually present.
+She has wept, implored, prayed, fainted, argued for forty-eight
+hours----"
+
+The Field-Marshal muttered:
+
+"Poor soul!"
+
+And with his wrinkled hand he rubbed a glistening drop from his
+cheek, that was not perspiration.  Von Roon snorted like a dyed old
+war-horse:
+
+"Meanwhile, the Imperial Ambassador, Count Benedetti, will be setting
+forth the object of his mission to the King!"
+
+Said the Chancellor, letting the words come out softly and
+distinctly,--and one would have expected so huge a man to roar after
+the fashion of giants, rather than to speak in such mellifluous tones:
+
+"His instructions run thus: '_Say to the King that we have no secret
+motive, that we do not seek a pretext for war--and that we only ask
+to reach an honorable solution of a difficulty that was not created
+by us._'"
+
+"It is honorable, then," said Von Moltke in a tone of childlike
+wonder, "to threaten to murder that old woman's two sons?"
+
+"Meanwhile," said the mellifluous, pleasant voice of the Chancellor,
+"the Emperor and Marshal le Bœuf have sent Staff-Colonel Gresley
+to Algiers with secret orders to MacMahon to embark those troops from
+Africa which are most available for service on the Continent, and to
+warn the most distant regiments to be at Algiers on the 18th.  The
+Generals of his Artillery and Engineers have been dispatched upon a
+plain-clothes confidential visit of inspection to the fortresses of
+the North-East, all leave has been stopped, and the commanders of
+brigades have apprised the staffs of the mobilization offices to
+dispatch the orders of recall of the reserves.  This was put into
+effect on the 8th.  Upon the same day the order was given to bring
+the Infantry regiments up to War strength by the creation of their
+Fourth Battalions, and General Blondeau, of the Administrative Branch
+of the War Department, has been authorized to exceed his credit by
+the sum of a million francs."  He ended, showing his small, regular
+teeth, as he smiled agreeably upon his hearers: "The Tuileries system
+of Secret Intelligence is certainly excellent, but I do not think we
+are so badly served!"
+
+"Badly served!" echoed Roon.  "One would say not!"
+
+"You must be served by the great devil himself and all his devilkins,
+Otto, my dear fellow!" said the Chief of the Great General Staff,
+with a merry chuckle, "to have all this dished up to you before it is
+cold!  Well, well!  Thanks be to the good God--we are not so far
+behind these French as we might be!  No, no! not at all so far
+behind! ..."
+
+He said this musingly, his startlingly limpid eyes almost hidden by
+the wrinkles and puckers, his long, humorous upper lip drawn down and
+set firmly on the lower one, as he cupped his sharp chin in the palm
+of one wrinkled hand, nursing the elbow appertaining to it in the
+palm of-the other hand.
+
+"'So far behind,' do you say?" growled Von Roon.  "_Sapperlot_!  I
+should call it a day's march and a half-day's march ahead!"
+
+"It may be--it may be!" said the Field-Marshal placidly.  "God grant
+that it prove so!"
+
+"You are as pious as the King to-night," said the Chancellor,
+laughing heartily.  "And your God is the God of Battles, we all know!"
+
+"Yes, yes, the Friend Above does not forget this old fellow!" said
+the Field-Marshal simply.  "The thousand-ton Krupp gun--whose
+acquaintance the Parisians made at the Exposition of 1867,--has been
+waiting ever since to make upon them an impression of a different
+kind!  Like the gun, I have _bided my time_, as the Scotch say.
+Neither the cannon nor myself will last for ever, but to worry is
+folly! ... Heaven will not let us rust upon the shelf!"
+
+"'_Mensch ärgere Dich nicht_' is a good proverb," said the
+Chancellor, "not only for Your Excellency!  Chained to my study-table
+all yesterday and this morning,--horribly handicapped by the absence
+of my First Secretary Abeken, who is doing duty with the King at
+Ems.--listening to reports, receiving showers of telegrams, dictating
+replies in answer to the appeals or expostulations of Foreign
+Ministers--sending instructions to Ambassadors, and drinking
+Mühlbrunnen water,--which must not be taken when one is vexed or
+worried, if one wants it not to play the very devil in one's inside,
+I chewed the cud of that proverb, '_Man, do not vex thyself!_' to
+keep myself from gnawing my tongue.  That official international
+threat of Gramont, uttered in the session of the Corps Législatif of
+July 6th,--the filth hurled by the Paris Press--did not cost me a
+sleepless night.  But that, after such insults, the King of Prussia
+should treat with Benedetti at Ems while the Prussian Foreign
+Minister remained at Varzin--stuck in my gizzard as though I had
+swallowed a prickle-burr.  It was worse than Olmütz....  I saw
+nothing but resignation ahead of me!"
+
+Von Roon agreed:
+
+"To me also it seemed a slight not to the Foreign Minister alone--but
+to His Majesty's Government in your person."
+
+The Field-Marshal added, his wrinkled face lengthening dourly:
+
+"I may tell you--there being no ladies present!--the whole affair
+acted on me like unripe gooseberries, especially after reading that
+sentence in the _Gaulois_, written by a _gamin_ with a finger to his
+nose...."
+
+Von Boon thundered:
+
+"'_La Prusse cane_!'  Only say black-dose, rather than sour
+gooseberries, and there you have the effect of the words on me!"
+
+Said the Chancellor, with a twinkle of humor:
+
+"They wrought upon myself as an emetocatharsis.  For, repudiating the
+slight, and simultaneously expelling from my system the last remains
+of compunction, I decided then and there to hurry off from Varzin to
+Ems for the purpose of urging upon His Majesty the urgent necessity
+for summoning the Reichstag.  The words I meant to use kept drumming
+in my skull--_We shall be traitors to ourselves if we do not accept
+this challenge.  Without an instant's delay, we must mobilize!_"
+
+Said Roon:
+
+"Why not, when we are prepared to take measures for the safety of the
+Rhenish provinces?  We can put Saarbrück in a state of defense in
+twenty-four hours, and Mainz in less than forty-eight.  Is it not so,
+Herr General Field-Marshal?"
+
+Von Moltke's dry, level voice returned quietly:
+
+"My plan of invasion was drawn up in 1868.  All my arrangements are
+made, as I have said.  When His Majesty--when the Chancellor of the
+Confederation and Your Excellency give the signal--I go home to my
+quarters on the first floor of the south-east wing of the Great
+General Staff Department, and dispatch a telegraphic message of three
+words..."  He began to laugh, rubbing his hands together.  "Then--you
+will see whether I am ready!  All I ask is Opportunity--like Krupp's
+thousand-tonner gun!"
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+The Chancellor said, emptying another bumper of champagne:
+
+"This morning the opportunity lay within grasp.  So strongly
+convinced was I of this that as my phaeton passed through the village
+of Wussow, on the way to the station, 'War is Inevitable' seemed
+written on every house.  The old clergyman stood before his parsonage
+door and greeted me with a hand-wave.  My answer was the gesture of a
+thrust in _carte_ and _tierce_.  For me the three words: 'War is
+Declared' replaced the lettering of the advertisement posters on the
+walls of the stations the special rushed through.  Yet, though I had
+notified His Majesty of the advisability of summoning me to his
+assistance, I received, even as I stepped out of the train at the
+Stettin Station, a vacillating telegram from him, enjoining delay."
+He added, laughing: "Together with a message in cipher from our
+Prussian Ambassador at Paris, informing me that it has been given
+forth from the tribune of the Corps Législatif that had not Prince
+Leopold retreated from the Spanish candidature, to prevent the war
+with which the Emperor threatens us--the Government of Napoleon III.
+would have extorted a letter of apology from the King."
+
+Roon could not speak.  Said Moltke:
+
+"The Gallic cock crows loudly!  Such a letter would nicely recoup
+France for the humiliation of Sadowa."
+
+"Did France succeed in extorting it," retorted the Chancellor, "but
+she has got to get it first!"
+
+The forehead of Roon was black as thundercloud.  He unhooked his
+collar, and wiped his congested face.  The Field-Marshal thrust his
+hand under his wig perplexedly, saying:
+
+"That His Majesty should continue to treat with Benedetti after all
+these insults and outrages....  It passes my understanding, I am fain
+to confess!"
+
+"The Count himself would have no difficulty in reading the riddle,"
+said the Chancellor, shrugging.  "He is--according to his own
+conviction--a diplomat of the first water, a statesman of infinite
+finesse and irresistible persuasions.  Yet he did not coax us into
+the Emperor's trap in 1867.  Speaking of that, I have in my pocket
+something that will presently jump out of it, a testimony in his own
+handwriting that he is not quite so clever a fellow as he thinks!"
+
+"To-day," boomed Roon, "I met Prince Gortchakoff.  We were riding in
+the Unter den Linden when he stopped.  He spoke of the King's
+age--the merest allusion in reference to a site he pointed out as
+being suitable for a statue.  His Majesty was to be represented
+holding a wreath of laurel with the dates of 1864 and 1866 upon it.
+While emblematical figures of Peace, and the Genius of the Domestic
+Hearth, were shown disarming him of his helmet and sword."
+
+"A sneer thoroughly merited," said the Chancellor, "by these days of
+hesitation!"  He added: "The Genius of the Domestic Hearth is for the
+moment at Coblenz.  However, wifely expostulations can be conveyed by
+telegram.  Her Majesty's cry is, '_Remember Jena and Tilsit and avoid
+war, even at the cost of national dishonor!_'  Should these
+entreaties of the Queen prevail, she will merit the reproof of Sir
+Walter Scott--I think it was Sir Walter Scott!--who addressed to his
+grayhound, Maida, who had torn up--unless I err?--the manuscript of a
+newly-completed novel.  '_Poor thing! thou little knowest the injury
+thou hast done!_'"
+
+"Women are less reasonable," declared Von Boon, "than bitches, to my
+mind!"
+
+"Nay, nay!" said the Field-Marshal with sudden anger.  "Maida was not
+a bitch, and I cannot agree with you!  Great and noble female
+characters have been, and exist now--not only in the pages of
+history-books.  It may be that Her Majesty is prejudiced--her
+influence has not always been favorable to the adoption of measures I
+would have counseled.  But she is high-minded!--a great lady, and
+truly devoted as a wife.  And with this ring upon my finger"--he held
+up his wrinkled left hand and showed the narrow band of gold--"it
+would ill become me to sit still and hear women likened to the
+unreasoning beasts that perish, when for all I know my beloved wife
+Mary is standing by my side!"
+
+He drank a sip of wine, and continued more mildly:
+
+"The good God took her to Himself twelve years ago, in the fullness
+of life and strength and English beauty!--while I, more than thirty
+years her senior, hang yet upon the tree.  On the top of the hill at
+Crusau is her tomb, where one day I shall lie beside her.  But before
+that day"--the brave old eyes snapped fire, and he wrinkled up his
+ancient eagle-beak as though he savored the fumes already--"it may be
+that I shall smell powder again!"
+
+"Let us drink to that!" said the Chancellor.  As they filled their
+glasses there came a peculiar, scratching knock on the door.
+
+"Come in, Bucher!" cried the host harshly, and the summons was
+answered by one of His Excellency's Privy Councillors of Legation, a
+little, stooping old gentleman, with a large hooked nose and a
+grizzled mustache and whiskers, who was dressed in a
+chocolate-colored, single-breasted frock-coat, tightly fastened with
+gilt buttons, and who wore a black satin stock, with the tongue of
+the buckle sticking up among the locks at the back of his neck, and
+baggy black cloth trousers ending in the feet of a Prussian
+Lifeguard, encased in huge and shapeless cloth boots; these moved him
+noiselessly to the elbow of the Chancellor, to whom he whispered,
+handing him a card, large and square, and unmistakably feminine:
+
+"And so, as Madame was urgent ... Your Excellency knows what women
+are!"
+
+"Thanks to some early studies in femininity, I am credited," said the
+Chancellor, "with knowing a great deal too much about the sex.  Where
+have you put Madame?"
+
+Bucher answered, raising himself on his toes to approach his lips to
+the large, well-shaped ear; for even seated, the Chancellor
+overtopped him:
+
+"In the gracious Countess's little red damask back drawing-room."
+
+"It is doubtful, my good Bucher, whether--did she know how she was
+honored--the gracious Countess would welcome her visitor."
+
+"Alas!  Your Excellency!" pleaded the Councillor, "but Her Excellency
+does not know!--and the room contains nothing valuable.  Only a few
+family pictures--no china, silver, or _bric-à-brac_.  Nothing that it
+would be any use to steal!"
+
+"Come, come!" expostulated the Minister, his blue eyes alight with
+cynical amusement, "you must not speak of Madame as though she were a
+house-thief.  Our good Bucher," he went on, turning jestingly to his
+table companions, "sees little difference between a person who picks
+brains for pay, and sells the pickings, and another person who picks
+locks and steals silver vases and cups.  Rather a reflection on the
+Diplomatic Service, now I think of it!"
+
+"_Ach!  Herr Gott!_" said the Councillor in alarm, "I cast no
+reflection, Your Excellency knows it!  Only the woman is of light
+reputation----"
+
+"And may be light-fingered into the bargain.  Possibly--" said the
+Chancellor, "and all the better if she be so!  We will risk my wife's
+family portraits in her vicinity until after dinner.  Have coffee and
+liqueurs sent to her, and beg her to wait a while."  He added, "Let
+them put cigarettes on the tray--I have no doubt she smokes tobacco.
+And as the smell will have passed off before my wife and daughter
+return from Varzin, neither of the ladies will ever know of the
+desecration of the red damask back drawing-room."
+
+And as Bucher shuffled out of the room to execute his errand, his
+Chief rang the bell for the third course.
+
+"By the way, Excellency," said the War Minister, as the demure
+servants out of livery removed the empty dishes: "that Frenchwoman of
+poor Max Valverden's is driving about Berlin."
+
+"So!" commented the host, turning an inscrutable face upon the
+Minister.  "She must find it very warm, and insufferably dull."
+
+"She consoled herself," said Roon, "not long after Count Max's
+suicide."
+
+"There," burst out the Field-Marshal, "was an incomprehensible
+catastrophe!  That young man--who was military attaché at our Embassy
+in Paris until the return of the Allied Armies of Great Britain and
+France from the Crimea in 1856; and in 1866, ten years later, joined
+my staff in Austria as third _aide-de-camp_--I cannot understand
+it--he must have been demented!"
+
+He unbuttoned the frock-coat, showing an unstarched, but scrupulously
+clean white shirt and vest of white nankeen, and taking a little
+silver snuff-box from his waistcoat pocket, laid it down carefully
+upon the tablecloth as he said:
+
+"In '56 he brought his mistress from Paris with him--he was
+infatuated with her spirit and beauty.  They said she was the wife of
+an officer in Grandguerrier's Division, who had served throughout the
+whole of the War in the Crimea."
+
+"A _chef d'escadron_ of Mounted Chausseurs, who seems to have taken
+his wife's desertion philosophically," commented the Chancellor.
+
+The Field-Marshal took a pinch of snuff, and gravely shook his head.
+
+"Of that I know nothing, but there was no meeting.  Max Valverden
+assured me, on his honor, that an opportunity for the challenge had
+been given.  Otherwise the young Count could not have continued in
+our Prussian Army--one would naturally have been obliged to retire
+him."  He sneezed and went on: "My personal acquaintance with
+Valverden began ten years later.  He served me--excellently.  One
+should always give due praise to the dead.  But when he returned from
+Austria--then happened the tragedy, at Schönfeld in the Altenwald,
+where lies his patrimonial property, and where the lady waited.
+And--he shot himself, upon the very night of his return to her."
+
+"Not," interposed the cool, level voice of the Chancellor, "not being
+expected until noon of the day following."
+
+"Of that I know nothing," said Moltke, turning his ascetic hairless
+face full upon the speaker.  "What I know is that an officer who
+faithfully served his country and whom I had recommended for
+distinction, at the earliest opportunity--died by his own hand!  How
+the woman was left, I cannot tell you."
+
+"Count Maximilian von Schön-Valverden had provided for Madame de
+Bayard when summoned upon active Service," said the Chancellor.  "His
+family did not contest the will, and she is not badly off.
+Therefore," he added with a smile, "when she condescends to serve my
+Intelligence Department as a spy, you may suppose she does not do it
+too cheaply.  I must refer to my perambulating ledger, Bucher, before
+I quote you the exact figures of the sum I am to hand her to-night.
+She is a true daughter of the horseleech, who cries '_Give, give,
+give!_' incessantly.  But all the same I am indebted to her for those
+remarkably interesting particulars concerning the Mission of M. de
+Straz to Prince Antony."
+
+"So!" ejaculated Von Roon in astonishment.  The Field-Marshal rubbed
+his chin and turned his clear eyes upon the speaker, who went on
+smilingly:
+
+"M. de Straz is susceptible--a fatal fault in a conspirator.  Madame
+is still seductive, with a figure like Circe, ropes of black silk
+hair, a skin of cream, though the roses are bought ones! and eyes the
+color--exactly the color of old, pale tawny port.  Now, when you
+reflect that she is waiting in my wife's red boudoir to interview me
+in my next spare moment--do you fear for my hitherto unassailable
+virtue, or regard me as proof against such charms?"
+
+"I never bet more," said Moltke, "than half a pfennig, and then only
+when I play cards with my niece."
+
+"I will wager you proof," cried Roon, "for two hundred thalers!"
+
+"I can hardly bet upon my own marital infidelity!" said the
+Chancellor, laughing, as a servant uncovered the dish newly placed
+before him.  "Will Your Excellency take some of this?"
+
+"This" was the savory _pièce de resistance_ of the masculine banquet,
+a lamb of six weeks, roasted to a golden brown, basted with marrow,
+and surrounded with tiny cucumbers stuffed with seasoning.
+
+Moltke accepted the offer with alacrity, indifferent to the charms of
+veal with tomatoes and aubergines.  Von Roon, declining, hurled
+himself upon a fillet of beef _jardinière_, and hacked a huge steak
+from its surface as with a sword, rather than a carving-knife.  The
+Chancellor, plying his gleaming weapons delicately, liberally
+supplied his guest and piled his own plate, saying as he launched
+himself upon its contents with unabated appetite:
+
+"Confederations may disappoint us--Kings may deceive us--while our
+teeth and our digestions faithfully serve us, we can find some zest
+in life.  When I retire, I shall cultivate vegetables, plant
+forest-trees, rear trout, breed cattle, sheep, pigs, and
+poultry--drop my hereditary patronymic as I shed my titles of office
+and be known to all posterity as the Farmer of Varzin!"
+
+The hall-bell had been heard to ring a moment previously.  There was
+another scratching signal on the door, and Bucher appeared,
+manifestly excited and carrying a telegraphic dispatch.
+
+"What now?" asked the Chancellor, finishing a mouthful.
+
+"A telegram from Ems----" began the Councillor.
+
+The imperious hand whipped it from between his pudgy fingers; the
+masterful voice demanded, as the envelope was rent open:
+
+"The decipherer has not left?"
+
+"Excellency, no!" twittered the Councillor, agitated by the
+portentous frown of his Chief, and by the grave faces of Moltke and
+Roon.  The paper was thrust back to him with the curt order:
+
+"Get this deciphered--do not delay!"
+
+And as the Legation Councillor vanished, Bismarck said with a short
+laugh, bending his powerful regard on the gaunt, black stare of the
+War Minister:
+
+"It is from the King, and will not please us.  We may make up our
+minds beforehand to that.  Yet I drink this glass to the honor of
+Prussia!"  And filling his great bumper glass from a fresh bottle
+that had been placed at his elbow, he gulped down at least a pint of
+the creaming nectar of the Widow Clicquot, and his guests, in smaller
+measures, pledged the same toast.  After that they sat in silence,
+the Chancellor alone continuing to eat with appetite--until the
+Councillor's big feet came shuffling back again.
+
+"The copy, Excellency, 200 groups altogether," he began, "signed by
+the Herr Privy Councillor von Abeken, at His Majesty's command."
+
+The papers he held were whipped away from him.  The Chancellor
+read--and his countenance most grimly altered.  His brows grew
+thunderous, trenches dug themselves along his forehead, caves
+appeared about his blazing eyes, and the pouches under them
+portentously bagged.  The heavy mustache might shade the mouth and
+chin, but could not hide that they were changed to granite.  He
+passed his firm hand over them and said, his incisive tones veiled
+with a curious hoarseness:
+
+"Mr. Councillor of Legation, you will now leave us.  When I ring the
+bell it summons you.  Pray tell Dr. Busch that his services will be
+needed.  Some articles must be written for the Press to-night."
+
+He said, as the door closed behind Bucher, and the smile that
+accompanied the words was grim and cynical:
+
+"Well, gentlemen, we have got our final slap in the face!  The Press
+organs of the Ultramontane and the Democrats will call us by our
+nicknames to-morrow: 'Old Hellfire' and 'Death's Chess-Player' and
+'The Pomeranian Ogre' and all the rest.  But--I swear to you that no
+enemy of mine will ever despise me as I now despise myself!"
+
+Roon and Moltke regarded him in silence.  He went on speaking, still
+with that strange hoarseness:
+
+"Some have called me the Iron Chancellor.  I will tell you by what
+title Wilhelm the First of Prussia will go down to posterity.  Men
+will speak of him as the Fluid King.  It is written in the
+Scriptures,--all day the phrase has haunted me,--'Unstable as water,
+thou shalt not excel!'"
+
+At a glance from the War Minister, Moltke rose up suddenly.  His
+stooping scholar's body sprang upright as a lance.  He said, and the
+words rang clear as steel on steel:
+
+"Your Excellency, I deplore the necessity of imposing silence upon
+you.  But the obligation of my military oath, and your own----"
+
+He paused as the great figure of his host reared up at the head of
+the table.  He saluted the Field-Marshal and said coldly:
+
+"Herr General Field-Marshal, the rebuke is merited.  Holding the
+King's commission as Colonel of White Cuirassiers of the _Landwehr_,
+I have spoken treasonably.  Does your Excellency wish me to ring for
+my sword?"
+
+Moltke's wrinkled face flashed into amusement, as the Chancellor
+imperturbably stretched his hand to the bell beside him.  He said,
+laughing:
+
+"Colonel Count von Bismarck-Schönhausen, I accept your apology.  I
+will limit the period of your arrest to confinement to this room
+until conclusion of dinner, on condition that you read now this
+message from Ems."
+
+The Chancellor saluted, and glancing at Roon, who was now standing,
+gloomy and downcast, "We look," he said, "like three mourners about a
+bier.  It is, in fact, Prussia who lies dead upon the table.
+However, judge of the situation for yourselves."
+
+And he read out the famous telegram handed in at Ems at three-thirty:
+
+"_Count Benedetti spoke to me on the Promenade in order to demand
+from me finally, in a very important manner, that I should authorize
+him to telegraph at once to Paris that I bound myself for all future
+time never again to give my consent if the Hohenzollerns should renew
+their candidature.  I refused at last somewhat sternly, as it is
+neither right nor possible to undertake engagements of this kind _à
+tout jamais_.  Naturally I told him that I had received no news; and
+as he was earlier informed from Paris and Madrid than myself, he
+could clearly see that my Government once more had no hand in the
+matter._"
+
+"Ei-ei!" broke in Moltke, "'_Somewhat sternly_' ...  '_Naturally I
+told_' ... '_Neither right nor possible,_' and then '_no hand in the
+matter!_'  Do I hear the King--or have my ears played tricks on me?"
+
+"_Kreuzdonnerwetter!_" exploded Roon.  "Well might one ask 'Is this
+the master or the servant speaking?'  But go on, go on, I pray your
+Excellency!"
+
+The reader had transformed his face to an expressionless mask that
+might have been wrought in stone or metal.  Now the tell-tale
+huskiness of fierce emotion cleared from his voice.  He resumed:
+
+"This closes His Majesty's personal communication.  Herr Privy
+Councillor Abeken continues to the end."
+
+Said Moltke: "Let us hear what little Abeken has got to say to you."
+
+The cold, incisive voice recommenced reading:
+
+"_His Majesty commands me to inform you, that he has since received a
+letter from the Prince.  His Majesty, having told Count Benedetti
+that he was awaiting news from the Prince, has decided, upon the
+representation of Count Eulenburg and myself, not to receive Count
+Benedetti again, but only to let him be informed through an
+_aide-de-camp_ that His Majesty has now received from the Prince
+confirmation of the news Benedetti has already received from Paris,
+and has nothing further to say to the Ambassador.  His Majesty leaves
+it to Your Excellency whether Benedetti's fresh demand and its
+rejection should not be at once communicated both to our Ambassadors
+and to the Press representatives._"
+
+The close of the Royal communication plopped into a pool of silence.
+The Chancellor coughed, and said with his characteristic stutter:
+
+"The-the laxity and diffuseness of the verbiage of this dispatch
+l-lul-leave me in no doubt as to the favorable effect the Ems waters
+have already wrought upon the constitution of His Majesty!"
+
+Roon barked his laugh.  Moltke raised his thoughtful head from his
+breast and said laconically:
+
+"It gives me the belly-ache to listen to such rubbish.  Are we German
+men or German mice?"
+
+The Chancellor shrugged and said:
+
+"More than ever it is clear that my position is untenable.  The King,
+under pressure of threats mingled with entreaties, has permitted
+himself to be heckled by the Emperor's Franco-Italian emissary.  He
+ignores my urgent request that he should refer Benedetti to his
+Foreign Minister.  Now, by the medium of an inferior official, he
+tells me that I may acquaint the representatives of the State and the
+Press--that nothing is settled and no definite end in view!  What is
+settled is, that I resign!"
+
+Von Roon called out harshly, striking a sinewy fist upon the table:
+
+"Your Excellency will not leave your friends in this extremity?"
+
+Moltke turned to him half whimsically, half pleadingly:
+
+"For our sake, Otto, stick by the old wagon!"
+
+The Chancellor said, with a sudden softening of the grim lines of his
+strong face, and of the eyes that had been fixed and expressionless:
+
+"You talk, both of you, like two babes in the wood.  As far as
+regards my personal influence to sway the King or control the feeling
+of the Reichstag--another hand may guide the State as well as this of
+mine.  Yet, were it possible--having already the King's
+permission--to produce a somewhat concentrated version of this
+verbose telegram....  Has either of you a pencil?--mine has been
+mislaid.."
+
+"Here, take mine!" said the Field-Marshal eagerly.
+
+The Chancellor took the offered pencil with a brief nod of thanks,
+swept the silver-gilt milkmaid ruthlessly aside, and spreading the
+forms containing the Royal dispatch on the space she had occupied,
+pored over them for a moment, frowning heavily, before the red-chalk
+crayon began to play its part.  Words were struck out--then whole
+sentences....
+
+"Ah, ah!" said Moltke, beaming.  "He has finished at last.  Now let
+us hear what it sounds like with its mane cropped and its tail
+docked?"
+
+"Reduced," said the Chancellor, lifting his great eyes from the
+red-crayoned papers, "without addition or alteration, the message
+might run thus..."
+
+He read:
+
+"_After the news of the renunciation of the hereditary Prince of
+Hohenzollern had been officially communicated to the Imperial
+Government of France by the Royal Government in Spain, the French
+Ambassador at Ems further demanded of His Majesty the King that he
+would authorize him to telegraph to Paris that His Majesty the King
+bound himself for all future time never again to give his consent
+should the Princes of Hohenzollern renew their candidature._"
+
+"Good, very good!" growled Roon.
+
+"That seems to me excellent!" said Moltke, twinkling.
+
+The Chancellor finished:
+
+"_His Majesty the King thereupon decided not again to receive
+Benedetti, the French Ambassador, and sent the aide-de-camp on duty
+with the information that His Majesty had nothing further to say to
+him!_"
+
+"_Bravo, bis!_" roared Roon.
+
+"Why," said Moltke, rubbing his hands delightedly, "now it has a
+different ring altogether.  Before it sounded like a parley.  Now it
+is a fanfare of defiance!  Sentences like these are worthy of a King!"
+
+"And there can be no accusations of falsification," said the
+Chancellor, bending his powerful regard upon his two colleagues.
+"The Bund Chancellor carries out what the Prussian monarch commands.
+He communicates this text by telegraph to all our Embassies and to
+the Press agencies.  Is it his fault if its published words provoke
+the Gallic cock to show fight?"
+
+"I understand," said the War Minister joyfully, "that we should be
+the party attacked first.  And we shall be, and we shall win!  Our
+God of old lives, and will not let us perish!"
+
+"Has Your Excellency nothing to say to me?" asked the Chancellor,
+fixing his great eyes on the face of Moltke, now radiant with
+childlike happiness.
+
+"Were I a poet," returned the joyous old artist in war, seizing the
+hand outstretched to him across the table, and wringing it between
+both his own, "I should crown you with a wreath of laurel inscribed
+'_Hail to thee, Guardian of Prussia's honor!_' or something of that
+kind.  Being what I am, I say that you are what my English nephews
+would call '_a trump_!'  As you said this morning when you quitted
+Varzin, 'War Is Inevitable!'"  He added, hitting himself a resounding
+thump in the chest: "And if I may but live to lead our armies in such
+a war--then the devil may come directly we have conquered these
+Frenchmen and fetch away this crumbling old carcass!"  He added, with
+a change to gravity: "I do not say my soul, for I am a decent
+Christian.  Hey, look here, our dinner has got cold!"
+
+It was true; the viands were stagnant in the dishes.  The fillet sat
+in the center of a stagnant lake of congealed gravy; the roasted
+lamb, reduced by the onslaughts of the Chancellor to a partial
+skeleton, was covered with a frosting of rich white fat.  He said,
+with a laugh that clattered against walls and ceiling like a
+discharge of musketry, and reaching for the bell that would summon
+Bucher:
+
+"It does not matter; my cook has always a second menu ready in case
+of delays or accidents.  While Bucher communicates to our Embassies
+and the European Press Agencies the concentrated essence of His
+Majesty's telegram--while hundreds of thousands of handbills are
+being printed that shall disseminate the text throughout Germany, and
+Busch writes the articles that shall put the needful complexion on
+this affair--we will order up the Moet and Chandon White Star--I am
+thirsty after so much talking!--and eat our dinner again!"
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+Ever since the King, returning from the baths of Ems, had been met at
+the railway-station by his Under-Secretary of State bearing France's
+declaration of war,--a huge, orderly crowd, compact of all classes
+and callings, had ceaselessly rolled through the streets of Berlin,
+chanting with its thousands of sturdy lungs "_Heil dir im
+Siegerkranz_" and the "_Wacht am Rhein_" until its patriotic fervor
+reached a state of ebullition only to be relieved by volleys of
+cheers.
+
+Jammed in the solid mass of bodies blackening the Unter den Linden
+and packing the Opera-Platz to suffocation,--until the bronze
+equestrian statue of the Great Friedrich, opposing the eastern
+courtyard gateway of the small stuccoed Palace, reared above a
+tossing sea of heads,--P. C. Breagh tasted the raptures of
+emancipation from the mill-round, and drank in news at every pore.
+
+For this was life in earnest....  With the red-hot cigar-end of a
+corpulent merchant burning the back of his neck, and the crook of a
+market woman's blue-cotton umbrella imperiling his left eye; while
+the sword-hilt of a gigantic Sergeant of Uhlans insinuated itself
+between his third and fourth ribs on the right side, and the huge
+flaxen chignon of a servant-girl, armed with a capacious
+market-basket crammed with meat, fish, and vegetables for family
+consumption, bobbed itself into his mouth whenever he opened that
+feature to cheer, or gasp for air, heavily burdened with the fumes of
+beer, schnaps, herring-salad, garlic, sauerkraut, and perspiring
+humanity, he was happier than ever he had been before.
+
+The King, it was said, was holding a council with his Ministers and
+Generals in his study on the ground-floor of his Palace looking on
+the Opera-Platz.  Presently His Majesty might be expected to come out.
+
+The tall, elderly, white-whiskered officer in the undress uniform of
+the Prussian foot-guards--a blue tunic with red facings, silver
+buttons and epaulettes--had already appeared upon the balcony of a
+window overlooking the Linden, and touched his spiked helmet in
+response to the frenzied acclamations of his scarlet, perspiring
+subjects, whose staring eyes and open mouths a Berlin dust-storm was
+filling with peppery grit.
+
+Presently the King had moved back into the room behind him, and
+returned with the Queen, a tall, thin, elegant lady in half-mourning,
+who was weeping; people said, because she hated the thought of war,
+and had besought her husband, on her knees, to truckle to the
+Napoleon at Paris, and thus avert hostilities.
+
+When the royal couple had retired amid plaudits of a somewhat less
+enthusiastic kind, the people had demanded the Crown Prince; and the
+King had stepped out yet again with his hand on the shoulder of the
+heir-apparent, a tall and stalwart man of thirty-nine, with a clear
+red-and-white complexion, setting off his well-cut features, kindly
+blue eyes, and flowing beard of yellow-brown.
+
+_Unser Fritz!_--his manly good looks and the Order of Merit shining
+on his general's uniform had provoked fresh outbursts of patriotic
+enthusiasm, in which the gray-powdered foliage of the overrated
+linden-trees, limply resting during a sudden lull of the dust-storm,
+had been wildly agitated, and the very street-lamps had rocked.
+
+But when the King, turning to his heir, gave him his hand,--when the
+son, reverently bending, raised it to his lips, and the father with
+manifest emotion embraced him,--there had fallen a silence of
+sympathetic emotion....  Then the great martial figure had reared
+erect again and, stepping to the front of the balcony, had shouted to
+the people:
+
+"_Krieg!  Mobil!_"
+
+"Mobilization!... War!..."
+
+
+All the shouting that had gone before was no more than the squealing
+of a kindergarten compared with the mighty roar that greeted these
+two pregnant words!  The scorching, dusty blue sky-dome, now tinged
+with sandy-pink sunset toward the Brandenburg Gate, seemed to quiver
+with the upward rush of it.  And--not by accident--from the forest of
+flagstaffs mounted on the Palace, the Opera House, and the buildings
+contingent,--as down the whole length of the Linden to the
+Ministerial palaces of the Wilhelm Strasse,--the black-and-white Flag
+of Prussia and the Hohenzollern banner of white with the black eagle
+and the cross of the old Teuton Order, broke and fluttered on the
+sandy breeze.
+
+The National Anthem broke out once more, and the war-song, "_Ich bin
+ein Preusse_."  The King retired on his son's arm manifestly overcome
+with weariness.  Still the vast crowd of heated faces, set with
+shining eyes, and holed with roaring mouths, persistently turned
+toward those ground-floor windows of the Palace.  _Something more
+yet!_ asked all the gaping mouths and staring eyes.
+
+
+But the blinds of the monarch's study were pulled down, unmistakably
+signifying that all was over for the present....  The central valves
+of the great gilded Palace gates were now shut, leaving open only the
+smaller carriage-way, through which mounted _aides_ and orderly
+officers conveying dispatches presently began to stream.  The
+carriages of Ministers and other State officials followed these,
+while lesser personages, emerging from the exit left for pedestrians,
+began to hail cab-drivers from the stand of hackneys on the Linden
+side of the Opera House.  Swearing, the frustrated Jehus of these
+vehicles laid about them with their whips in the endeavor to force
+their animals through the solid crowd....
+
+A man went down under the hoofs of a wretched Rosinante.  There were
+cries for "Police!" and spiked helmets appeared in the crowd.  It
+surged and swayed....  The guardians of the law had drawn their
+cutlasses and were beating their fellow-children of the Fatherland
+upon their heads with the flat of these weapons, in the attempt to
+effect a junction between the cabs and those who wished to hire them.
+Thus the pressure on the flanks, ribs and breast-bone of P. C. Breagh
+became suffocating.  Lifted from his feet, he was carried backward
+and forward by rushes, growing less certain of his own identity as
+the roaring in his ears became louder.  Just as his eyelids dropped
+and he passed out of his own knowledge, a powerful hand caught him by
+the coat-collar, and a solid rampart of human flesh interposed
+between his lately-drifting body and the waves of the human sea that
+raged beyond.
+
+Gulping, P. C. Breagh became aware that he was spread-eagled against
+the railings of the Palace courtyard facing the Unter den Linden, and
+that a big man in a loose black waterproof rain-cloak and
+broad-leaved black felt hat was holding to a railing on each side of
+him and warding off the rushes.
+
+"Th-thanks!  I'm tremendously obliged!..." he was beginning, when the
+swish of the cutlasses and the shrieking of the cutlassed drowned his
+voice.  Yet another voice, masculine, resonant, and imperious,
+dominated all others; it cried:
+
+"The King commands the police to sheath their swords!"
+
+And upon the instant lull in the tumult that followed came another
+order:
+
+"His Majesty has work to do for the Fatherland.  Let the people
+disperse quietly to their homes!"
+
+And the crowd, pacified and quieted, answered, "We will so!" in a
+crashing volley of Teutonic gutturals, and began to split up and move
+away in sections, singing "_Heil dir im Siegerkranz_" in sonorous
+unison.  When through the Palace gates came a small and shabby
+brougham drawn by a venerable bay, and driven by an elderly coachman
+in gray-and-black livery, the sight of whose military cockade evoked
+another whirlwind of enthusiasm....
+
+"Moltke!  It is our Moltke!" men shouted to one another, and the old
+General, who sat alone in the carriage, the lean, stooping,
+septuagenarian in the spiked helmet, whose thin, ascetic face was
+rosy with suppressed excitement and whose pale blue eyes twinkled
+good-humoredly between their narrow lids at the seething ocean of
+humanity in which the shabby brougham labored, saluted in
+acknowledgment of the cheers.
+
+"Moltke!  Long live our Moltke!  But where has Otto got to!" hiccuped
+an alcoholic seaman, clutching the ledge of the brougham window.  He
+continued in the midst of a silence born of consternation: "What has
+become of the Big Pomeranian?  We would have--hic!--carried him home
+shoulder-high for this week's--hic!--work he has done!"
+
+Zealous hands dragged the presumptuous speaker back, as the venerable
+expert in war doffed his spiked helmet, and said, popping his
+auburn-wigged head out of the brougham window:
+
+"Where Count Bismarck is needed there he will be, depend on it!  Now,
+children, let me get back to my maps!"
+
+"Tell us first how things are going in France yonder?" bellowed
+another Berliner, and the great Field-Marshal answered, pointing the
+jest with his keenest twinkle:
+
+"You want to know how things are going there?  Well, the wheat has
+suffered from the drought, but acorns and potatoes promise to be
+plentiful, and pumpkins will be big this year!"
+
+And the crowd, splitting with laughter, made way for the brougham of
+the Chief of the General Staff, and the joke was sown broadcast over
+Germany before the end of half an hour.  For were not Moltke's acorns
+the oblong, round-ended bullets of the Prussian needle-gun, as his
+potatoes were the shrapnel shell cast by the six-pounder steel
+breech-loaders designed by Krupp for the Prussian field-artillery,
+and the big pumpkins the seventeen-pound projectiles fired by the
+siege-guns of nine centimeters' bore? ...
+
+
+The massive ribs that had acted as buffers between P. C. Breagh and
+the battering onslaughts of the crowd shook with laughter as the
+brougham moved on through a lane that continuously opened in the mass
+of bodies and closed when it had passed....  Then their owner settled
+the wide-leaved felt hat more firmly on his head, and said in
+well-bred, fluent English, turning his heavily-jowled face and
+powerful, fiery-blue eyes on P. C. Breagh, who was thanking him in
+his best German for his timely assistance:
+
+"Do not thank me so effusively.  I have a habit of sometimes saving a
+man's life!  Yours happened to be in peril; there is no need to say
+more!"
+
+The clear incisive tones had an inflection that was almost
+contemptuous, yet a smile, curving the heavy mustache, showed the
+small and well-preserved teeth it shadowed, as he added in his
+admirable English, fastening a button of the thin black waterproof
+cloak which had been disarranged in the recent struggle sufficiently
+to show that it covered some sort of military uniform:
+
+"Save this,--that I happen to possess a son about your age, and
+should not care to lose him!"
+
+And with this he was gone, leaving P. C. Breagh breathless with the
+greatness of the adventure that had befallen him.  For the owner of
+the bulldog face with the fierce blue eyes blazing over their heavy
+orbital pouches, was the unpopular Minister who had been booed by the
+Ultramontane and Socialist students three years before, as the Berlin
+express-train passed through the station of Schwärz-Brettingen--the
+all-powerful Chancellor, who was meant when diplomats and Press
+leader-writers referred to "Prussia."
+
+
+What did he on foot in those packed, roaring thoroughfares, where the
+assassin's dagger or revolver might play its part so safely?
+Perhaps, like the Third Napoleon, whose peacock bubble of Empire
+might now have reached the point of bursting, Count Bismarck believed
+in his fortunate star....
+
+Ah! what was that round bright object lying on the pavement?  P. C.
+Breagh, still dazed with the magnitude of the thing that had befallen
+him, stooped and picked, it up.
+
+It was a medal of silver, with the Prussian Eagle enameled in red
+upon the obverse, and a name which left no doubt as to the identity
+of P. C. Breagh's rescuer.  Upon, the reverse was the inscription:
+"_Fur Rettung aus Gefahr_"--"For Saving From Danger."  With the date
+of the 24th June, 1842....
+
+No doubt the Chancellor prized this, the decoration earned at
+twenty-four for saving his orderly-groom and another private from
+drowning, when serving as _Landwehr_ cavalry officer with the
+Stargaard Regiment of Hussars.  Well, he should have it back,--but
+into no hands but his would P. C. Breagh surrender it,--P. C. Breagh,
+who had been cast out with mockery from the editorial offices of one
+daily and two evening newspapers, when he had offered--at a rate of
+astounding cheapness,--to supply their columns with material drawn
+from the experiences of one who had never previously enjoyed an
+opportunity of seeing the thing called War.
+
+One Editor had dealt with him drastically, pitching his card into the
+waste-paper basket, and saying, "No!  Get out with you!"  A second
+had whistled up a tube and called down a sub-editor, and said to him,
+"Look at this!"  The third had preached a brief but pithy sermon on
+presumption and cocksureness, winding up with the intimation that if
+P. C. Breagh ever found himself at the seat of war and in possession
+of any experiences worth recording, he might submit them for
+consideration if he chose.
+
+These men would never know it, but they were profoundly humiliated.
+At least one of them had lost a half-column, striking the note of
+personal adventure to the clink of shekels of fine gold.  As for Mr.
+Knewbit ... P. C. Breagh could almost hear him chuckling--had only to
+shut his eyes to see the poker, sketching out headings on the Coram
+Street kitchen wall:
+
+  "ADVENTURE OF YOUNG ENGLISHMAN.
+
+  WAR CORRESPONDENT IN BERLIN.
+
+  CRUSHED BY THE CROWD.
+
+  RESCUED BY BISMARCK.
+
+  THE IRON HAND SAVES A LIFE!"
+
+
+Meanwhile, the medal had to be returned to the hands of its owner,
+who must, P. C. Breagh was firm on that!--consent to receive it from
+the hands of the finder, if he wanted it back again.  P. C. Breagh
+knew the Foreign Office, in the Wilhelm Strasse--the shabbiest
+residence in all that street of official palaces--with its
+high-pitched, red-tiled Mansard roof, its shabby gray stuccoed front
+(a main building with two short wings, pierced by twelve windows, and
+decorated with a sham-Hellenic frieze and shallow pilasters),--and
+its big, park-like garden stretching away behind.
+
+So, clutching the precious token, P. C. Breagh plunged back into the
+crowd.  It was dense, but no longer solid, and, still lustily
+singing, with intervals of cheering, it bore him down the Linden as
+far as the Brandenburg Gate.
+
+There it split into three vociferating rivers of humanity.  One of
+which streamed north-westward toward the offices of the Great General
+Staff, where Moltke, the ancient war-wizard, was busy over his maps!
+Another, desirous of refreshment, surged onward in the direction of
+the Thiergarten.  The third flowed down the street of palaces, and
+with it went P. C. Breagh.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+The Foreign Office knocker was a colossal funereal wreath, of sooty
+bronze laurel, that wakened hollow startling echoes in the tomb-like
+void of a grim stone vestibule.
+
+The vestibule lay at the end of a glass-roofed passage.  On the right
+was a window, behind the window gleamed an eye, belonging to the
+Chancery janitor who had manipulated the door-levers.  The door
+banged behind P. C. Breagh, and his hope climbed a central flight of
+stairs, gray-white marble, with bronze balusters badly in need of
+cleaning.  The staircase was covered with worn Turkey carpet, was
+lighted from above by a green and gold cupola, and guarded by two
+conventional figures of sphinxes, carved in shiny blackish stone.
+
+All these details the eye of P. C. Breagh gleaned over the arm of the
+Chancellor's door-porter, a seven-foot East Prussian, who wore plain
+black official livery and carried no gold-headed staff, yet would
+have snubbed the Rector of the University of Schwärz-Brettingen had
+he presented himself in this unceremonious way.
+
+"What does he want?  The young man must know that His Excellency the
+Royal Chancellor of the North German Confederation is engaged upon
+State business--not to be approached by strangers having no
+appointments or credentials previously obtained.  An introduction to
+His Excellency is indispensable.  Where has the young man lived that
+he does not know that?"
+
+To which the young man thus addressed could only reiterate that he
+deeply regretted the absence of a letter of introduction, and that
+his credentials could only be displayed to His Excellency himself.
+
+"It is likely!"  The porter's forehead corrugated with suspicion:
+"Thus is he approached by lunatics and dangerous persons, armed with
+crazy petitions or lethal weap----"
+
+"Bosh!"
+
+The English word made the porter leap in his square-toed,
+steel-buckled half-shoes.  Recklessly P. C. Breagh went on:
+
+"I'm neither a lunatic nor an assassin...  It's just a case of
+_Rettung aus Gefahr_.  Two lives saved in the year 1842, and another
+less than an hour ago....  Send that message to His Excellency, and
+he'll see me, I believe!"
+
+"He believes!" ... snorted the porter indignantly.
+
+A little, stooping, shabbily dressed old man in a chocolate-colored
+frock-coat with gilt buttons came shuffling across the vestibule
+carrying a handful of papers, telegrams they appeared to be.  He had
+paused to listen to the latter part of the colloquy, holding his head
+on one side, as though the better to focus his sharp gray glance on
+the dusty, obtrusive young Englishman crowned with a sun-burnt Oxford
+straw hat, attired in a well-worn brown Norfolk jacket,
+knickerbockers and heather-mixture woolen stockings, and shod with
+stout, black, leather-laced, hob-nailed boots.
+
+"He believes!" exclaimed the porter as though referring to the
+chocolate-coated old gentleman.  "Will not the highly well-born Herr
+Legation-Councillor order that I summon Grams and Engelberg, and have
+this presumptuous person thrown into the street?"
+
+"Softly, softly, my good Niederstedt!" advised the little
+chocolate-coated old gentleman.  He added, shuffling forward in his
+immense black cloth boots over the slippery marble pavement of the
+vestibule: "It has occurred to me that an utterance of this young
+man's referred to an article that has been lost by His Excellency."
+He added, fixing his sharp, gray, jackdaw's eyes on the face of the
+young man: "Not valuable, but worth recovering--purely as a memento
+of the past!..."
+
+Said Carolan bluntly:
+
+"I did refer to such an article.  In fact, I have it on me!"
+
+A finger and thumb, stained with snuff, dipped into the Councillor's
+waistcoat pocket.  He said, secretly conveying an order to the
+watchful porter with a twirl of one jackdaw-eye:
+
+"For a couple of thalers," he displayed the coin, "a box of smokable
+cigars may be purchased in Berlin."  He added, having cast for a
+bite, and missing the rise: "Four thalers secures a really excellent
+article!"
+
+"Certainly," agreed P. C. Breagh.
+
+"But for ten thalers," continued the old gentleman with forced
+enthusiasm, coaxingly beckoning P. C. Breagh to approach nearer, "one
+may smoke the choicest Havana brands.  Give me the medal, fortunate
+young man, and take the money.  Such a sum is not often picked up in
+the street!"
+
+Said the young man, thus adjured, thrusting out his square chin
+obstinately:
+
+"If His Excellency consents to receive me, I will personally return
+the medal to him.  Be good enough to let him know as much."
+
+"Unhappy young man! you realize not the greatness of your own
+presumption!" expostulated the old gentleman, lifting up his warty
+eyelids and puffing out his whiskered cheeks over his old-fashioned
+black satin stock.  "Is the Chancellor of the Realm to be--and at a
+national crisis such as this?--at the beck and call of every English
+traveler?"  He added with warmth: "For I know you to be of that
+nation, young man, though you speak German with some approach to
+facility.  Hence!  Trouble here no more, but give me that medal
+before you take your departure.  Otherwise you will be forcibly
+relieved of it by the hands of those who are accustomed to deal with
+bumptious and obstinately-authority-defying persons of your
+description...."
+
+He added, as the arms of P. C. Breagh were pinioned in an iron grip
+that clamped the elbows together behind the shoulder-blades, drew his
+arms down, and pinioned his wrists: "He, he, he!  That was a capital
+stratagem of yours, my excellent Niederstedt!  Really very smartly
+done!"
+
+The grim, sable-clad porter, in whose huge hands P. C. Breagh vainly
+struggled, relaxed into a smile at the compliment.  He said, as from
+different points two stalwart liveried attendants appeared, hastening
+to lend assistance:
+
+"One has not served in the Prussian Guards for nothing.  Once a
+soldier, always a soldier!  Will the highly well-born Herr
+Legation-Councillor order Grams and Engelberg to hold this English
+pig-dog while I take His Excellency's medal out of the fellow's
+clothes?"
+
+Snarled P. C. Breagh, livid with rage and glaring at the hostile
+faces like a young male tiger-cat:
+
+"Add robbery to violence if you think well!--you are four to one--and
+in your own country.  But as an English journalist I protest against
+the outrage....  And the British Ambassador shall take the matter up!"
+
+There was an instant's pause of indecision, during which P. C. Breagh
+heard the opening of a door on the landing above.  Then, with the
+rustle of silk, and the soft fall of footsteps traversing heavy
+carpets, a resonant voice called down the stair that led up between
+the basalt Sphinxes:
+
+"Meanwhile, you will allow me to apologize for the too-excessive zeal
+of my servants.  Do me the favor to come up here!"
+
+The grip of the giant porter became flaccid as an infant's.  The
+voice spoke again from the summit of the stair:
+
+"Herr Legation-Councillor, will you kindly see Madame to her
+carriage?  Au revoir, Madame, et bon voyage!"
+
+A liquid voice responded:
+
+"_Au revoir, Monseigneur_!  At Paris--who knows!--before the Noël!"
+
+She pulled down her veil, curtsied with demure elegance, and came
+softly rustling down in pale-hued, trailing silks and laces, one
+snow-white hand blazing with splendid emeralds lightly passing over
+the bronze baluster-rail, the other holding the ivory and jeweled
+stick of a dainty parasol.
+
+"Madame!"
+
+As by an afterthought he had called her.  Midway in her descent the
+lady turned to look up at him.  He said, bending his powerful eyes
+upon the face of sensuous loveliness:
+
+"Pardon! but I believe--you are a native of France?"
+
+The hint stung.  She returned, with the stain of an angry blush
+darkening the roses purchased from Rimmel; and a hard line showing
+from the angle of each delicate nostril to the corner of the
+deep-cut, scarlet lips:
+
+"Monseigneur is correct ... I am a Frenchwoman....  But the heart is
+free to choose its own country....  And--mine has learned to beat for
+the Fatherland!..."
+
+So exquisite was the cadence with which the words were uttered, that
+P. C. Breagh heaved an involuntary sigh.  The Legation-Councillor
+took snuff--it may have been his way of showing emotion.  The huge
+porter sighed like a locomotive blowing off steam.  His colleagues,
+who, like himself, stood waiting in rigid military attitudes,
+suffered no sympathy to appear in their wooden faces, yet may have
+felt the more.  But the heavy mask of their master was divested of
+all expression.
+
+"Even," said he, in his clear, resonant voice, "to the point of
+outdoing Agamemnon, King of Argos.  For he--but doubtless you are
+familiar with the classic story!--merely sacrificed Iphigeneia on the
+altar of the virginal Artemis...."  He added with a tone of
+intolerable irony: "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!"
+
+She had shuddered and winced as though his words had been
+vitriol,--dropped from above--corroding her delicate flesh....  The
+costly toy had fallen from her hand as the shudder had passed over
+her, and rolled down the stair, as she continued her descent.  P. C.
+Breagh picked it up and handed it to her, as she set foot upon the
+lowest step of the staircase.  She looked at him, and bent her head.
+And the beauty that had been hers a moment back was so strangely,
+bleakly altered, he could scarcely repress an exclamation of dismay.
+
+Thus Circe might have stared, thought P. C. Breagh, when her feeding
+hogs leaped up as men frantic for vengeance.  Thus Duessa, when the
+spotted image of her own vileness was reflected in the glassy shield
+of Truth.
+
+The change in the boy's face stabbed Madame to consciousness.  She
+caught at her mauve tulle veil, forgetful that it was already
+lowered, and tore it horizontally, so that her full white rounded
+chin emerged with fantastic effect, like the moon through a bank of
+storm-wrack.  And then, with her head held high, she swept through
+the vestibule in a frou-frou of silks and a gale of perfume, and down
+the passage ending in the hall-door with the funereal knocker.  The
+Legation-Councillor trotted after her.  One of the servants followed
+him, and P. C. Breagh, mounting the staircase between the Sphinxes,
+reached the landing and the summit of his ambitions in a breath.
+
+"Time is scarce!" said the man who was meant when Prime Ministers and
+political leader-writers referred to Prussia.  "I have no more than
+five minutes to spare, but you shall have them.  Come this way!  So
+you are an English journalist!  What paper do you represent, here in
+Berlin?  Sit down and tell me in as few words as possible!"
+
+They were in a small but lofty room on the first-floor, hung with
+green flock paper.  It had a fireplace as well as a stove, and it was
+a study, yet it contained no bookcases, only a couple of shelved
+stands laden with pamphlets and papers of the official kind.  The two
+high windows--open and unblinded, though the green-shaded
+reading-lamp upon the big carved mahogany writing-table was
+alight--looked across the extensive gardens reaching to the
+Königgratzer-Strasse.  Beyond lay the Thiergarten, all black with
+masses of people under the sultry red-gold sunset of middle July.
+
+Perhaps you can see--like Scaramouch and the Sultan in the Eastern
+story--P. C. Breagh, hot and dusty, flushed and rumpled, seated
+opposite the most formidable personage of the day.  He who dictated
+to Kings and carried his Foreign Office trailing after him whenever
+he chose to go campaigning, stood upon the skin of a white lioness
+that served as hearthrug, and bit off the end of a huge cigar.  He
+looked bulkier than ever, and the powerful modeling of his
+scant-haired temples, the splendid dome of the skull that housed the
+keenest intellect in Europe, the masterful regard of the great eyes,
+the sarcastic humor of the mouth shaded by the heavy mustache--traits
+and features reproduced so constantly in the illustrated newspapers
+of the period,--conveyed to Carolan the impression that a portrait
+moved and spoke.
+
+He was attired, as usually represented, in a dark blue, braided
+military undress-frock, and trousers tightly strapped over boots with
+cavalry spurs.  An Order hung at his collar.  As he threw back his
+head in the act of lighting his cigar, P. C. Breagh recognized
+it--the Cross of a Commander of the Red Eagle.  While on the left
+breast of the blue frock-coat was a small three-cornered rent in the
+cloth from which the lost medal had been somehow wrenched away....
+
+The sight of that tear in the dark blue-faced cloth sent the blood
+racing to P. C. Breagh's forehead.  He knew himself for a
+presumptuous young man.  He plunged his hand into the pocket of the
+brown Norfolk jacket, and brought out the red-and-white enameled
+decoration, and said, awkwardly laying it upon the edge of the big
+writing-table, in the yellow radius thrown by the lighted lamp:
+
+"I found this after Your Excellency had gone!"
+
+"Hand it here!" said the heavy blue eyes imperiously.  P. C. Breagh
+got up and obeyed.  The Chancellor's long arm shot out, and the
+muscular white fingers whipped the medal from the palm that offered
+it.  Its owner assured himself by a brief scrutiny that the token had
+sustained no injury, nodded, and re-pinned it on the breast of his
+frogged military frock-coat.  When this was accomplished,--the small
+solution in the continuity of the cloth being covered by the
+decoration,--he said, taking the cigar from his mouth, and knocking
+off the long crisp ash upon the edge of the white earthenware stove:
+
+"I should have been sorry to have lost that.  But, while thanking you
+for having restored it, let me say that had my servants taken it from
+you by _force majeure_ they would not have been robbing you,--though
+in law they might have been held guilty of a personal assault.  Now
+as to your business.  You have had one of your five minutes!  You
+have just now said you are an English journalist.  Does your business
+concern the War?"
+
+P. C. Breagh stammered--for the heavy eyes that rested on him seemed
+to oppress him physically:
+
+"To be frank with Your Excellency, I represent no newspaper.  I have
+some slight experience as a journalist, that is all,--War
+Correspondence seems to me the highest branch of journalism,--and I
+want, naturally, to fit myself to practice it.  Therefore, as no
+newspaper would employ me, I accepted a private commission given, out
+of good-nature, by a friend, who has helped me before.  And--my first
+day in Berlin--I fell in with Your Excellency.  I won't deny it
+seemed a hopeful augury!"
+
+"For the future! ... I understand!" said the Chancellor, sending out
+a long cloud of cigar-smoke.  "And in what way do you suggest that I
+should help you?"
+
+
+He put the question so bluntly that P. C. Breagh, in the effort to
+answer, floundered and boggled.  He had suddenly realized his own
+insect-like insignificance in the eyes that were so intolerably heavy
+in their regard.  His own eyes sank to the neat, small, polished
+boots of the big man.  who stood smoking upon the white lioness-skin.
+To the wearer of those boots he was merely a beetle who could be
+crushed by them.  The slight ironical smile that altered the curve of
+the mustache said as much.  But the Minister's tone was suave as he
+went on:
+
+"I think I have grasped the mainspring of your reasoning.  To begin
+with, you desire to accompany one of our armies on the campaign?"
+
+"Yes--sir!  Your Excellency, I should say!"
+
+A lambent light of humor danced in the blue eyes that were bent on
+him.  The faint ironic smile broadened into a laugh.  The Chancellor
+took his cigar from his mouth, knocked off the ash, and said quite
+pleasantly:
+
+"And deducting from this premise, I conjecture that--because I have
+been privileged to save you from being trampled to death under the
+feet of the mob upon the Linden, you naturally take it for granted
+that I would further your ambitions.  Gratitude, one of your English
+authors has admirably defined as a lively sense of favors to come...."
+
+P. C. Breagh, who had been for some time shrinking in his own
+estimation, suddenly saw himself in a newer, meaner light.  His
+torturer went on in mellifluous English:
+
+"I do not know that any classical German author has defined gratitude
+quite so cleverly.  But we in Pomerania have a folk-story which may
+be new to you."  He drew sharply at his cigar, then laid it glowing
+on the edge of the stove:
+
+"You speak German quite passably, so I will tell it in our Pomeranian
+dialect.  If this is not done, the dialogue lacks salt.  Thus it
+goes: Wedig Knips, a peasant of Dalow, whose horses wanted watering,
+went one winter's day to break the ice that covered the
+drinking-hole....  'Bless us! what have we here?' says he, when he
+finds a kerl called Peders, frozen in the ice, with his head down and
+his heels up.  To make a long story short, he chops out Peders, takes
+him home, and sets him up to thaw before the fire....  'Now,
+neighbor,' says he, 'go about your business!'--'How can I when my
+jerkin is wet and my breeches are full of muddy water?'--Says Wedig:
+'Poor devil!  I will give you my Sunday trows!'--'And a jerkin too,
+for you saved my life, you must remember!' ...  Wedig scratches his
+head, but hands over a jerkin with the rest.  'Come, now be off!'
+says he.  '"Off," with my under-pants and shirt all sopping!  Do you
+want to kill me--now that you have saved my life?'--So Wedig pulls a
+wry face, but hands over the underclothes....  'Put these on and be
+off, we are busy people in this house!'  'What,' says Peders,
+'without paying me the value of the good duds spoiled in your
+stinking horsepond?'--'Must I pay?' ... 'Certainly, you have saved my
+life!  Nobody asked you!--I had thrown myself in because I was tired
+of living.  Now it is your bounden duty to make things tolerable for
+me!'--'How make things tolerable?'--'To begin with, I want a cottage
+to live in, and a plot of kail-ground to it, and a wee pickle
+furniture.'--'But I have only this cottage, and the bits of sticks
+you see!'--'Well, give me them!  Didn't you save my life?' ... Wedig
+gets confused, sees no way out of it.  'The devil!' says he, 'this is
+a nice affair!  However, take them, man!'--'I will take them,' says
+Peders, 'but you must give me the cart and plow, the cow and the two
+horses?'--'_Himmelkreuzbombenelement_!  Have I got to give you all
+that because I saved your life?'--'Ay, undoubtedly!--and you must let
+me have your wife into the bargain.  It's your bounden duty----'  'I
+know! because I saved your life!  Shan't make such a mistake next
+time, you may be sure of that!'--'No, but you did, so to grumble is
+no use.'--'Thunder! my old girl will make a terrible
+squawking.'--'Not when you have explained how you saved my life!' ...
+Wedig scratches his head, rubs his chin, gets a bright idea....
+'Help me to explain to the wife, do you agree?'--'Ay, of course!
+What is it you want me to say to her?'--'Oh! say nothing.  Only let
+me show her exactly how I got you out of the
+water-hole.'--'Willingly!'--'But to do that I must put you back just
+a minute!'--'Put me back?'--'Only for a minute.'  'Promise when I cry
+"_Genug!_" you'll take me out directly!'--'All right!  Come along!'
+So Wedig takes Peders by the legs and sticks him back where he found
+him, driving his head well down into the mud at the bottom of the
+pond....  So--he never cried '_Genug!_' and Wedig left him there....
+
+The hard blue eyes that had been all alight with laughter, the
+heavily molded face that had unexpectedly proved itself capable of
+comic changes, the voice that, as the droll dialogue proceeded, had
+conveyed with slight, admirably restrained mimicry the complacent
+assurance of the knave and the dull bewilderment of the victim,
+changed, became the Minister's again.  He said, in his smoothest
+tones:
+
+"I cannot put you back into the crush of the crowd, because by an
+appeal to its loyal feelings and domestic instincts I was so
+fortunate as to disperse it.  What I might do, of course, is to
+deliver you to the tender mercies of my servants, to whom,--when you
+brought back the medal,--you blustered about delivering it to me
+personally.  This not-exactly-very-clever ruse would have failed--had
+I not happened to step upon the scene.  Your English policy is often
+more fortunate than masterly....  Fortune certainly has favored you
+to-day.  Not in the fulfillment of your ambition to accompany a
+Prussian Army to the field of action--that is a wish impossible to
+gratify.  For we put up a general defense against the presence of any
+save the most highly accredited Correspondents, and the War Minister
+will only grant Legitimations to two or three.  But in obtaining for
+an obscure paragraphist a special interview with the Prussian
+Minister for Foreign Affairs on the eve of a world-crisis, Fortune
+has certainly favored you.  Go back now to your hotel and write your
+article; then telegraph to Fleet Street and make your own terms!"
+
+"I'll be shot if I do!" choked out P. C. Breagh, flaming scarlet to
+his hair-roots.  "And I thank Your Excellency for a lesson, and I beg
+to take my leave!"
+
+"Why does he go?  Why does he talk about a lesson?" asked the broad,
+cynical gaze that rested on him.
+
+As though he had spoken aloud, P. C. Breagh answered:
+
+"Because I set my personal advantage above common gratitude and
+honor.  Your Excellency lost the medal in pulling me out of the
+scrimmage at the risk of your own life, and when I found the thing--I
+used it,--exactly as you say!  True, you'd snubbed me when I'd tried
+to thank you! yet I did believe your having saved me might help me in
+some way....  But it would be better to cadge in the dustbins for a
+living, than make money out of information gained by trickery.  And I
+apologize sincerely for having been such a cad!"
+
+"'Cad' is the slang for vulgarian, is it not?"  He added: "Yes, they
+inculcate a code of honor at the English public schools."
+
+The voice grated.  P. C. Breagh hated its owner.  But he answered,
+looking squarely in the bulldog face that bent on him:
+
+"They do, and I am sorry to have broken at least one of its articles.
+May I wish Your Excellency good afternoon!"
+
+The speaker bowed, not clumsily, and turned to quit the room, when a
+ferocious growl behind him, and the scraping of heavy claws on
+slippery parquet pulled round his head.  Savage, red-rimmed eyes
+challenged, and the bared gleaming fangs of a huge boarhound couched
+at length under a wrought-iron sofa at the west end of the longish
+room menaced the stranger's throat:
+
+"Down, Tyras!" ordered the Minister harshly, and with a deep groan
+the heavy brute dropped its nose between its forepaws, and lay still,
+shaken by occasional rumbling growls.
+
+"You see," said the Minister, laughing, "that I can afford to
+dispense with the services of detectives when this good servant is at
+hand.  Come, sit down another moment....  I am really willing to help
+you....  You have not come so badly as you imagine out of the affair!"
+
+"But I have said I will not write the article, and I am intruding on
+Your Excellency's privacy."  The soul of P. C. Breagh yearned for the
+freedom of the streets.  To be shut up in the study of the greatest
+of living Ministers,--set beak-to-beak with the man who was occupying
+the attention of Europe--the master-mind in statecraft, who used
+blunt truth as a weapon to beat down diplomatic falsehood, and
+comported himself amidst the striving parties of his national
+Parliament as a giant surrounded by dwarfs;--had seemed, previously,
+a thing to boast of--a dazzling feather in the cap of achievement.
+Now it was no triumph, but a torture.  He writhed under those keen,
+amused, analytical glances, knowing himself worthy to be so despised.
+
+"I have twenty minutes in which to refresh and rest, not having eaten
+or sat down since ten o'clock this morning.  You have had ten--I will
+give you another five.  Sit down again there!"
+
+Tyras emitted another savage growl as though in support of his
+owner's authority, and P. C. Breagh, loathing his host even more
+intensely than he hated P. C. Breagh, obeyed the imperious hand that
+pointed to the chair he had vacated, and sat down, white-gilled now,
+and sick with longing to be out of this presence into which he had
+thrust himself--beyond the reach of the icy, contemptuous tones and
+the arrogant, domineering eyes.
+
+
+The Chancellor had turned away to pull at one of the red woolen
+bell-ropes that hung on either side of the fire-place, shabby things,
+threadbare with use, like the Persian carpet that was trodden out in
+paths by the spurred feet of the man who stood for Prussia; worn like
+the leather cushions of the great wrought-iron sofa, under which the
+great man's faithful attendant couched, with one eye on the familiar
+face, and the other on the strange one that might mask an enemy.
+
+Above the sofa, beneath a trophy of fencing-swords and masks,
+reigning over a rack supporting a number of red and white military
+undress-caps in all stages of wear, and another containing a
+collection of pipe-sticks and unmounted pipe-heads, hung the
+half-length oil-portrait of a beautiful girl in ball-dress.  Below
+was a large-framed photograph of a noble-looking woman, with a mass
+of black braided hair framing a long, serious face, with grave dark
+eyes, thick straight nose, and full-curved, humorous lips recalling
+published engravings of the English author of "Adam Bede."  Probably
+it was the Countess--that same Fräulein Johanna Puttkammer who had
+been hugged under the gaze of her assembled family.  She looked
+strong, serene and courageous, fit--thought P. C. Breagh--to be the
+wife of a man destined by Fate and framed by nature to become a
+leader of men.  Also, she looked like a woman who could love with
+old-world, elemental, forceful passion.  She had bestowed such love
+upon this man--who had begun life as a roaring, hard-drinking young
+Pomeranian squire, well worthy of the sobriquet of "Mad Bismarck,"
+bestowed upon him by his native county.
+
+She had sifted the gold out of the sand....  She had never openly
+displayed her influence....  All the same it had been there, guiding,
+sustaining, controlling....  He had written to her, years after, when
+he had begun in earnest to be a power in politics....  "_You see what
+you have made me!  What should I have done without you?_"
+
+Arrogant, harsh, domineering, merciless, as his enemies had reason to
+term him, there must be something noble in the man who had written
+like that.  He was said to be a kind, if not over-indulgent, father
+to his two big sons, even then serving as private soldiers in a
+well-known regiment of Dragoon Guards, and to be worshiped by his
+daughter, a feminine copy of himself, if that oil-portrait were
+anything like....
+
+"Have you taken any food to-day?..."
+
+The interrogation brought P. C. Breagh's head round.  A servant must
+have appeared, and gone, and come again in answer to the
+bell-summons.  For on a clear corner of an étagère otherwise piled
+with official papers and pamphlets, stood a tray, bearing glasses and
+a vast crystal jug of creaming golden-hued nectar with miniature
+icebergs floating on the surface; and several dishes of rolls, split,
+profusely buttered, and lined with something savory, the sight and
+scent of which awoke tender yearnings within....
+
+"No!--I thought not.  Drink this and eat some of these sandwiches.  I
+myself have fasted longer than is agreeable!"
+
+And a huge goblet of the ice-cold creaming nectar was handed to P. C.
+Breagh, who immediately realized that his tongue and palate were dry
+as the sun-baked asphalt of the Linden.
+
+"_Prosit!_" said his host, and drained his glass, adding, as the
+guest duly responded according to the classic formula and drank: "You
+are University-bred, I see!  What Alma Mater had the preference?
+Schwärz-Brettingen! ... Ah, they thought very badly of me there about
+the time of the Luxembourg Garrison Question.  Nearly all the little
+foxes barked at me as I passed through.  However, we are now
+reconciled, and more than a thousand of the students have applied to
+serve as volunteers in this war,--there's an item of interest for
+your paper!--though you have Quixotically determined, you say, not to
+make use of any information that I may be enabled to offer you.  All
+Quixotism is weakness, in my estimation; a man, according to my code,
+should pursue his advantage where he finds it irrespective of ethical
+laws or religious prejudice.  Now eat some of these stuffed rolls.
+Here are caviar, smoked goose-breast, Westphalian ham and
+liver-sausage.  You see I set you an example!--and a would-be
+campaigner should be able to sleep soundly under any and all
+conditions; and eat whenever anything eatable is obtainable, with
+unflinching appetite!"
+
+The savory rolls were vanishing under the speaker's repeated attacks,
+and the golden tide in the great crystal decanter was sinking
+visibly.  He said, lifting and holding it so that between the light
+of the green-shaded table-lamp and the red glow of sunset pouring
+through the unblinded western windows, the liquid in it shone ruby
+and emerald....
+
+"Come, let me fill your glass again, and then I shall send you about
+your business.  Absolved, you understand, from that ridiculous vow of
+yours--and with a magic talisman to enable you to use your eyes."
+
+The steady hand set down the now emptied jug, and took from the red
+marble mantelshelf a small and perfectly-finished pair of
+field-glasses, covered in black Russia leather and mounted in ivory.
+An inlaid silver shield bore a monogram, "O. v. B.-S.," and a date.
+
+"You can shoot with a pistol?--Good!--then I should advise you to buy
+one, if possible.  A revolver of the American Colt's
+invention--six-barreled--a feature which increases weight in
+proportion as it adds to effectiveness--would be useful.  Indeed, I
+carry one myself!  One day they will turn out such things with one
+barrel--but we must wait for that, I am afraid.  Here is the case
+belonging to the glasses, with a strap to sling it round your
+shoulders--and one thing more I will give you--though I am less
+certain about its ultimate usefulness!"
+
+The writing-table stood in the middle of the room.  He moved to it
+with one of his long, heavy strides, sat down--dipped quill in
+ink--and penned a few lines rapidly, glancing at the sunburned,
+freckled face as though to refresh his memory--holding up an
+imperious baud for silence when the recipient of the field-glasses
+seemed about to protest against the value of the gift.
+
+"Your nationality?--'British.'  Name, 'Patrick Carolan
+Breagh--pronounced "Brack."  Your height?--Be very accurate.  One
+half-inch too much or too little might bring you into trouble of a
+serious kind.  'Five feet nine' ... you promise to be taller.  Your
+age ... twenty-three last January....  Shoulders broad, good muscular
+development.  Your hair ... Reddish, is it not? ... You have gray
+eyes with what the French would call _taches_ of yellow in them.
+Complexion fresh, considerably freckled.  Nose short and straight,
+ears small, teeth white and regular.  Chin square and with a
+cleft--weaklings have not such chins!..."
+
+He added a brief sentence to the hastily scrawled description, signed
+and blotted it, rose and came to P. C. Breagh and thrust it in his
+hand.
+
+"Do not thank me!  It is my passing whim to help you--regard it in
+that light.  As to this pass, safe-conduct or whatever one may call
+it--it may forward you or hinder you....  _Potztausend_!  I am a mere
+officer of Cuirassiers of the _Landwehr_--General by courtesy--not
+Generalissimo! ... You, Bucher! ... What is there wanted now?..."
+
+For a scratch on the door-panel had been succeeded by the flurried
+entrance of the little Councillor of Legation, breathing hard, and
+red in the face.  He gabbled in Spanish:
+
+"Pardon, Your Excellency, that I enter without knocking.  But His
+Highness the Crown Prince is coming upstairs!..."
+
+And almost in the same instant, as Tyras uttered a deep "wuff" of
+friendly greeting, the open doorway was filled by the stateliest and
+most martial figure in Europe, and a pleasant, manly voice said:
+
+"Not finding you in your official quarters below-stairs, I ventured,
+my dear Count Bismarck, to follow you to your private study.  It is a
+question of whether Le Sourd delivered the war-gauntlet from Paris,
+or----  Pardon!  I had no idea that you were not alone!"
+
+The tall, broad-chested, golden-bearded Viking in the undress uniform
+of the First Regiment of Guards touched his cap in acknowledgment of
+P. C. Breagh's respectful salutation.  Then, as in obedience to a
+glance from the Minister, the lean claws of the little Councillor
+closed upon P. C. Breagh's arm, and he was plucked from the room, the
+Prince asked, glancing after the queer couple:
+
+"May one ask who your young friend is?" and got answer:
+
+"It is only an English schoolboy, Your Royal Highness,--who thirsts
+to try his hand at War-correspondence--having had a few articles
+printed in some London rag.  And this being so, he applies to me, who
+am the least leisured person in His Majesty's dominions---for a
+moment of my spare time!..."
+
+"It is annoying, my dear Count," answered the mellow-voiced Viking,
+"but cannot your people keep such troublesome persons outside?"
+
+The Minister returned, laughing:
+
+"He caught me on my doorstep,--as the polecat waylaid the
+badger!--and as he brought back a decoration I had lost, and which
+he, luckily for himself, had found!--I could not refuse him a
+minute's interview.  But with regard to Your Royal Highness's
+question of an instant since--Le Sourd, the French Chargé d'Affaires,
+placed the Emperor's declaration of war in my hands about an hour
+after the opening of Council in the Palace to-day."
+
+Said the Prince:
+
+"Unhappy man! driven to risk the loss of an Empire that he may
+continue to rule a nation of enemies.  One can hardly doubt the
+issue--yet at what cost of lives shall we not purchase victory!"
+
+Bismarck said in harsh, metallic tones, bending his brows upon the
+Prince, who all the world knew loved peace, and loathed the thought
+of the red months of strife that were approaching:
+
+"Your Royal Highness is aware that I look upon this war as necessary,
+and that I should not have returned to Varzin without giving in my
+resignation to His Majesty had the issue been other than what it
+is....  As for this weak-backed Napoleon, this Pierrot stuffed with
+bran,--who is kept in an upright attitude only by the slaps I deal
+him on one cheek and the buffets the Monarchists and the
+Revolutionists lend him on the other!--it will be better for him to
+meet his end by a bullet or a sword-thrust on the banks of the Rhine,
+than to be blown to pieces by some bomb in the streets of Paris, or
+to die of apoplexy in the bedroom of some nymph of the
+theater-coulisses!"
+
+He drew himself to his full height and, folding his powerful arms
+upon his breast, said, looking full at the Prince, who had declined a
+seat and who was standing near the window, his hair and beard glowing
+golden-red in the full rays of the setting sun:
+
+"Your Royal Highness speaks of the effusion of blood.  I am of those
+who have drawn the sword in the service of their King and country.  I
+do not regard war from the point of view of the man who stops at
+home.  More than this! ... His Majesty is not the only father who has
+a son serving in our Army....  I have two.  Herbert and Bill...."
+
+A pale purplish tint suffused his heavy face and crept to the summit
+of his rugged forehead.  His fierce blue eyes dimmed.  He said, in
+slightly muffled tones:
+
+"I am not given to pompous phrases.  Yet if German unity can only be
+brought about by a great national war waged against our near-hand
+enemy--our old, cunning, sleepless foe--I hail that war, even though
+it leave me without posterity!  If the gulf that divides the Northern
+and Southern sections of the Fatherland can be better bridged by my
+boys' dead bodies ... I would give them as freely as I would give my
+own!"
+
+A spasm twisted his under-jaw.  He said, laughing in his stern way:
+
+"Three long-legged Bismarcks should equal one eighteen-foot-seven
+plank.  And I speak not only for myself.  My wife would echo me."
+
+Said the Prince in his cordial way:
+
+"My mother has a great admiration for Her Excellency.  My wife, too,
+speaks of her as a woman of antique nobility of mind."  He continued,
+with a smile that curved the bold, frank mouth under the glittering
+mustache into lines of exceeding pleasantness: "And her personal
+solicitude for Your Excellency pleases my father much!"
+
+The heavy face that opposed him lost its dogged, set expression.  The
+Minister broke into a hearty laugh.
+
+"So!  I have been waiting to hear somewhat of that voluble telegram
+of hers to Abeken: '_Pray ask the King not to bother Count Bismarck
+about State matters just now, when he is taking Carlsbad waters for
+the gout!_'
+
+"Ha, ha!"  The Prince joined gaily in the laughter.  "The Councillor
+was working with the King and myself, when he received that wire.  It
+came with a sheaf of others--he read it aloud without a change of
+expression.....  Then you should have seen his face ... a study for a
+comedian...."
+
+The Minister said, still smiling:
+
+"My wife pours many confidences of the domestic sort into Abeken's
+bosom.  She said to him during the Constitutional Conflict of '66 ...
+'Bismarck cares really nothing at all about these stupid political
+matters.  A cabbage well grown, or a fir-tree well planted, means
+more to him than the Indemnity Bill.'  Yet when the Bill passed she
+was all-triumphant.  And to-day she remarked to me: 'War is horrible
+to me on principle.  But it would be equally horrible to me if you
+said to me to-morrow: "_All is over!--we do not fight!..._"'  I made
+her angry by telling her that one might parody in application to the
+mental attitude of her sex the lines of the English Poet Laureate,
+and say:
+
+  "Her reason rooted in unreason stood."
+
+
+"When our German women become too highly educated," said the
+fair-haired giant, "love will take wing for a land where the culture
+of the feminine intellect is still unpopular.  We males hold our
+supremacy on the very insecure tenure of a carefully inculcated
+belief that, being men, we must be wise!"
+
+Said the Minister:
+
+"There is a Pomeranian proverb bearing on that question.  '_In the
+house where a strip of green hide hangs handy, the wife will never
+know better than her old man!_'"
+
+"Unless she happened to be the stronger of the two, bodily as well as
+mentally, dear Count," the Prince rejoined; "in which case the
+husband would be well advised to accept the inferior place.  For
+against brute-strength and brains combined, there is no remedy but
+patience."
+
+Bismarck retorted:
+
+"Possibly--but what if the muscular brute with the brains possesses a
+share of patience also?  There is nothing like knowing how to wait--I
+assure Your Royal Highness!"
+
+The Prince looked at the great figure topped by the stolid bulldog
+face, and recalled something that the English Princess, his wife, had
+said to him that day:
+
+"This fearful struggle will set the coping-stone upon that man's
+colossal labors and ambitions!"
+
+But he was all grave, gracious cordiality as they passed from the
+lighter vein of talk to serious questions, though, as he took leave
+of the Minister at the hall-door and stepped into his waiting
+carriage, he said to himself mournfully:
+
+"Alix was right.  He has what he has waited and schemed for.  To
+light this international conflagration he would have ventured down to
+fetch a burning brand from the nethermost Hell.  And what oceans of
+blood will be poured out before the fire may be extinguished--none
+knows but God alone!"
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+Von Moltke, the ancient war-wizard, went home from the
+Council-Extraordinary to his private quarters at the offices of the
+Great General Staff.  He dispatched the three-word telegram, and the
+vast machine began to work....
+
+All had been ready for two years.  Nothing was left to finish at the
+last moment.  Not a speck of rust marred shaft or spindle or bearing,
+not a drop of oil was clogged in any slot.
+
+Days back, the Heads of Departments had been recalled by a brief
+telegram from the Chief who knew how to be taciturn in seven
+languages.  Now, while in Berlin, as in every other city and town of
+Prussia Proper and her Eleven Provinces, palaces, mansions,
+restaurants and _cafés_, beer-gardens and schnaps-cellars blazed with
+gas and resounded with the clinking of glasses, and people sat late
+into the grilling July night discussing and rediscussing that special
+supplement of the _North German Gazette_--which was being distributed
+gratuitously by hundreds of thousands,--predicting the next move of
+the Man of Iron, and the latest ruse of the Man of Paris,--consuming
+tons of sausage, caviar, pickled salmon, herrings in salad, and
+potted tunny, with strawberries and other fruits and sweet dishes,
+all washed down by floods of cooling beer, or iced Moselle and
+champagne--the numberless huge barracks and other military
+establishments displayed another kind of activity.
+
+Here no outbursts of patriotic song and festivity checked the rapid,
+organized, methodical scurry of warlike preparation.  Soldiers ran
+about like busy ants, purposeful and unblundering.  Long trains of
+Army Service carts and wagons streamed in at divers lofty gates, to
+emerge at others after the briefest interval, heavily laden with Army
+stores, Army baggage, War material of all kinds.  Night and day, huge
+Government factories and foundries dithered and roared, filling up
+newly made vacuums in those huge magazines and storehouses which must
+always be kept full.  In the gloomy dominions of the Iron King, Herr
+Krupp, that stout-loined Teuton who begat great guns instead of tall
+sons, and had them godfathered by Prussian Royalty--what forests of
+tall chimneys belched forth smoke, canopying begrimed and prosperous
+Westphalian towns, populated by innumerable swarthy toilers in the
+gigantic iron and steel foundries!  At Essen, where mountains of coal
+kiss the sooty skies, and heavy locomotives ceaselessly grind over
+networks of shining steel rails, dragging strings of trucks,
+containing yet more fuel for the ever-hungry furnaces,--within an
+impregnable rampart of solid masonry,--he dwelt in a Babylonian
+palace.  The panting of innumerable steam-power engines, the banging,
+moaning, crashing, groaning, and grinding of forges, lathes, and
+planing-machines; cutting, shaping, boring, and polishing machines;
+with the beating of sixty-two steam-hammers, of all weights up to
+that of fifty tons, which cost £100,000 to manufacture, sounded like
+a cannon whenever it was used, and was kept working without pause, so
+as not to lose a fraction of the interest of the capital sunk in
+it--made his concert by day, and by night served for his serenade and
+lullaby.  He made laws for the control of his grimy subjects, this
+Briareus of ten thousand hands--and enforced them by the aid of his
+own police and magistrates.  With orders in course of execution for
+Turkey, China, Egypt, Russia, and Spain, he was yet able to deliver
+eighty cannon per week to the different artillery depots of his
+Fatherland.  His steel, tempered by his secret process, the new ore
+being brought him from his Spanish mines by his own fleet of
+transports, surpassed even Bessemer's.  Yet he was not a conceited or
+purse-proud man.  By the chief entrance of the biggest of all his
+factories stood the little soot-blackened forge where forty years
+before young Krupp had labored with his father and a couple of
+workmen.  Small wonder the powerful Iron King had honor from his
+over-lord.
+
+
+Conceive next the well-ordered bustle at the headquarters of the
+different Army Corps, when the withered finger of the Warlock pressed
+upon the button, and the spark of electricity leaped along a thousand
+wires, carrying with it the vitalizing word....  Moltke's methods
+were then fire-new, and made the world sit up.
+
+
+You might have seen the Reserve men of the Twelve Provinces--whose
+summons for assembly lay ready in the Landwehr office of every city,
+town, village, or hamlet--streaming in at the district depots,
+bringing each Line regiment up to war-strength (nearly double its
+numbers in time of peace).  Mobilization was no foreign word to them,
+for once a year, after Schmidt, the field-laborer, had done getting
+in the harvest, and when Schultz, the bank-clerk, and Kunz, the
+chemist's assistant, had got their annual autumn holiday, Schmidt,
+Schultz, and Kunz were accustomed to perform a series of carefully
+rehearsed physical exercises ending in maneuvers, and a safe if
+inglorious return to the domestic hearth.
+
+Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz were only remarkable by their unlikeness
+to each other--Schmidt being the brown, uncouth, and unshaven husband
+of a stout wife and numerous tow-headed babes.  Schultz was more
+recently married to a young lady remotely connected on the maternal
+side with a family possessing the right to inscribe the aristocratic
+prefix "von" before its surname.  The couple lived frugally on Herr
+Schultz's salary of thirty pounds a year, somewhere upon the
+outskirts of the select quarter of the country town (some four miles
+distant from Schmidt's native village)--while Kunz, the graduate of a
+University, and author of a text-book of Analytical Chemistry, sold
+impartially to both, squills, rhubarb-tincture, and porous plasters
+over the counter of his employer's shop.
+
+Served by the Burgomaster's clerk, or a wooden-faced
+orderly-corporal, with the compelling bit of paper, Schmidt, Schultz,
+and Kunz, having taken farewell embraces of their nearest and
+dearest, would sling over their shoulders canvas wallets containing a
+lump of sausage, a shirt or so, a huge chunk of bread, white or
+black, with a bottle containing wine or schnaps, and stowing next
+their skins leather purses containing a few coins, and a parchment
+volume resembling the English soldier's "small book," would hasten by
+rail or road in the direction of their regimental rendezvous, toward
+which bourne the Reserve contingent of other towns, villages, and
+hamlets would also betake themselves, until the roads were blackened
+with their tramping bodies and the trains would be packed chock-full.
+Arrived at Headquarters, batch after batch,--subsequently to a brief
+but exhaustive medical overhauling--would be dispatched to the
+arsenal, where attaching themselves to a tremendous queue of other
+Schmidts, Schultzes, and Kunzes, they would mark time in double-file
+outside a vast, grim, barn-like structure, until the moment arrived
+for entering; when with well-accustomed quickness, each would find
+his way to a certain hook or group of hooks, surmounted with his
+regimental number, from which depended a certain familiar uniform,
+with accoutrements and weapons equally well known.
+
+Picture innumerable alleys formed by these dangling uniforms,
+radiating away to the point of distance,--and suppose Schmidt,
+Schultz, and Kunz equipped in something answering to the twinkling of
+a Teutonic eye.
+
+In--supposing Schmidt, Schultz, or Kunz to belong to the Infantry--a
+pair of dark gray unmentionables, red-corded down the side-seams, and
+a pair of mid-leg-high boots, very roomy and strong.  Inside the
+boots were no stockings, tallowed linen bands being bound about the
+legs and feet.  A single-breasted tunic of dark blue cloth with red
+facings followed, and a flat forage-cap of blue cloth with a red
+band, or a glazed black leather helmet with a brazen Prussian eagle
+front-plate and a brass spike-top.  With the addition of a zinc
+label, slung round the neck, and bearing a man's name, number,
+company, and regiment, an overcoat made into a sausage and tied
+together at the ends, a canvas haversack, glass leather-covered
+canteen, a pipeclayed waistbelt with two cartridge-boxes of black
+leather, and a knapsack of calf-skin tanned with the hair, stretched
+upon a wooden frame, and slung by two pipe-clayed straps hooked to
+the waistbelt in front and then passing over the shoulders.  Two
+shorter straps, going under the armpits, would be fastened to the
+knapsack, which had a receptacle for a packet of twenty cartridges at
+either end of it.  Within, suppose the usual soldier's kit, with
+spoon, knife, fork, comb, and shaving-glass; and on top imagine a
+galvanized iron pot, holding about three quarts, with a tight-fitting
+cover which became, at need, a frying-pan.  Arm with a strong
+waistbelt-sword about fifteen inches long, an unburnished needle-gun
+heavily grease-coated, and Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz, having hung
+their civilian garments on the hooks that erst supported the martial
+panoply, tugged at a final buckle-strap, wheeled and passed out,
+transformed, by yet another door.
+
+
+Always the three had known that an hour would come when these
+familiar exercises would not end with half-a-dozen exceedingly
+strenuous field-days, and a return,--on the part of Schmidt and
+Schultz,--to the arms of their respective wives.  Schmidt, on whose
+breast shone the war-medal of '66, and who must now be addressed as
+"Herr Sergeant" by his social superiors, seemed not to mind at all,
+though he swore at his boots, quite unjustly, for pinching.  But the
+bank-clerk's espousals were too recent, and his first experience of
+paternity too near at hand, for any display of hardihood, while Herr
+Kunz was but newly betrothed to the apothecary's daughter Mina, and
+could not forget how the tears had rolled out of her large blue eyes
+at the prospect of parting with her beloved Carl.
+
+Therefore, although the mouths of the trio were, when not
+professionally shut, busily engaged in bellowing "_Die Wacht am
+Rhein_," "_Ich bin ein Preusse_," and other patriotic songs, or
+sending up deafening "Hochs" for the King, the Crown Prince, Prince
+Friedrich Karl, "Our Moltke," and another public personage recently
+very much elevated in the popular esteem,--the mental visions of at
+least two of them were occupied with prophetic visions in which
+blue-eyed sweethearts pined and faded away out of grief for absent
+betrotheds, and young wives wept over empty cradles until they too
+expired, with faltering messages of love for the husband so far
+distant on their dying lips....
+
+"_Sapperlot_!  What in thunder are you gaping at, you _gimpel_, you?"
+a rough, loud voice would shout, and a terrific thump from the hard
+and heavy hand of Sergeant Schmidt would visit the shoulders of
+Private Schultz, or Kunz.  Who thus addressed would jerk out:
+
+"Oh, nothing, nothing, Herr Sergeant, truly nothing at all!" and
+receive from their recently despised inferior the rude counsel to
+look alive and keep cheery:
+
+"For this will be a war worth fighting in, mark you!  The Man on the
+Seine has played the part of the Evil Neighbor too long.  France and
+Prussia have got to come to clapperclaws--there's no help for it!
+The soup is cooked, so let us eat it.  He is the luckiest who gets
+the spoon in first!"
+
+You may suppose precisely similar scenes and dialogues occurring in
+the experience of Kraus, Klaus, and Klein, who, having served their
+time with the active Army and passed from the Reserve into the
+_Landwehr_, were now fetched out with the First Call, not only to
+replace the garrisons of Saxony, Prague, Pardubitz, and all the other
+fortified points on the lines of communication, but to guard and
+patrol those lines of road and railway over which the three marching
+armies were to receive supplies of food, ammunition, clothing,
+stores, and medicine; and maintain telegraphic communication with
+Berlin.  Meanwhile Grein, Schwartz, and Braun, men of riper years,
+stiffer joints, and older experiences, remained at home; waiting the
+hour when, Death having thinned the ranks of the fighters in the
+forefront of the battle, the Second Call should sound.  When these
+hardy veteran battalions, formed into divisions of the same numerical
+strength as those of the regular Army, would roll over the frontiers,
+to fill up the bloody gaps left by the scythe of the Red Mower, and
+play their part in the vast, chaotic, multi-tableauxed drama of War.
+
+Prussia contributed some 652,294 actors of small parts to the said
+drama, not counting the leading men, stars of the war-theater, who
+supported the heavier roles.  And Bavaria, Würtemburg, and Baden
+contributed their contingents, bringing up the strength of the cast
+to 780,923 performers.  The equine actors numbered 213,159.
+
+
+The vast machine worked wonderfully.  It is interesting to know that
+the German Staff maps of France showed recently made roads which in
+July, 1870, had not been marked upon any map issued by the Imperial
+War Office at Paris, and that within three days from that three-word
+signal-wire of Moltke's, military trains full of men, guns, horses,
+ammunition, and proviant, began to run at the rate of forty per day,
+from north, east, and south, toward the narrow frontier between
+Strasbourg and Luxembourg.
+
+"For God and Fatherland!" and "Watch well the Rhine!" said the
+miniature banners carried by thousands of people.  You could see them
+fluttering from crowded roofs and packed windows, and variegating the
+sidewalks of thoroughfares below, as regiment after regiment marched
+to the station, in shining rivers of _pickelhaubes_ and bayonets, or
+Dragoon helmets, Hussar busbies, and Uhlan schapkas, flowing between
+upheaped banks of waving women and cheering men.
+
+Speedily, in response to communications addressed by the Crown Prince
+to the South German sovereigns, notifying these potentates of his
+appointment as Commander-in-Chief of their armies, came replies
+expressing satisfaction of different shades and qualities.  The Grand
+Duke of Baden's bubbled with joy, and expressed the determination of
+his troops to gain their Royal Commander's confidence by fidelity and
+bravery.  The King of Würtemburg rejoiced likewise, but in cooler
+terms, "in our German affair" being brought to a head at last; and
+was anxious to have the opportunity of saluting the heir of Prussia.
+The King of Bavaria telegraphed "_Very happy.  Many thanks your Royal
+Highness's attention!_"  A message which conveyed no more warmth than
+was felt.
+
+His telegram of martial support, addressed at the outset of affairs
+to Onkel Wilhelm, had seemed quite genuine.  Had not Count Bismarck
+quite a sheaf of documents, more or less compelling, signed in the
+youthful monarch's scrawling hand?  King Ludwig had ordered immediate
+mobilization of the dark green and light blue uniforms--expended
+millions of gulden in variegated lamps, public fountains of white
+beer and red wine, bands, Royal Command Opera performances, patriotic
+set-pieces in fireworks (representing the tutelary genii of Prussia
+and Bavaria, cuirassed and armed, upholding the standards of
+black-and-white and blue-and-white), joined in the "_Wacht am Rhein_"
+as though he liked the tune (which he abhorred), and certainly
+enjoyed the tumultuous plaudits with which his subjects greeted their
+monarch's first and last appearance in the character of a man of
+action.
+
+But instead of riding away at the head of the South German Army,
+Nephew Ludwig sent an excuse to Onkel Wilhelm--one has heard a
+gumboil named as occasion of the disability--and Cousin Fritz was
+dispatched to take over chief command.
+
+Prince Luitpold of Bavaria accompanied the First Army Headquarter
+Staff.  Alas, the appointment but served to inflame the gumboil of
+the jealous King,--the accounts that were daily to reach him of the
+prowess of his martial cousin of Prussia worked like poison in his
+blood.  He drew the hood of his mantle of dreams more closely over
+his head to shut out those fanfares of triumph, those "Hochs!" and
+cheerings, and plunged more deeply into the solitudes of his forests
+and mountain-caves.  Blood and iron were his bugbears, and yet they
+might have been his tonics too.  They might have staved off the black
+hound of Destiny, already baying at his heels, and saved him from
+vicious decadence, ultimate madness, and a strange and sordid end.
+
+And yet, how did his chivalrous cousin die, at the meridian of robust
+manhood, under the newly imposed weight of an Imperial Crown?  Not
+the swift, soldierly death that is given by the bullet of a
+chassepot--the projectile from a mitrailleuse--the flying fragment of
+an exploding shrapnel-shell--but a straw-death, a bed-death such as
+angry seers and cursing Valkyrs of Scandinavian legend foretold as
+the speedy punishment of warriors who had broken faith and tarnished
+by false oaths the brightness of their honor.
+
+But no shadow of the grim fate that was to befall him darkened those
+brave blue eyes at this period.  Laboring night and day at the
+mobilization of his Third Army, in concert with his Chief of Staff,
+Von Blumenthal, he was buoyantly happy, despite his hatred of the
+shedding of blood and his undisguised compassion for the conjectured
+plight of the Man on the Seine.
+
+With whom Britannia at first expressed a sympathy not at all
+restrained or guarded, and for the success of whose arms she was
+openly eager, until, toward the close of this momentous month of
+July, 1870, the text of a brief but pithy diplomatic document, penned
+in precise and elegant French, and dated a few years previously--made
+its appearance in the columns of the Times.
+
+The movements of the opposing forces camped on the banks of the Meuse
+and the Saar lost interest for the public eye in perusal of this
+rough memorandum of a proposed treaty between the Third Napoleon and
+the King of Prussia, scrawled in Count Benedetti's flowing Italian
+hand.
+
+Since the spring of '67 it had been hidden away in a snug corner of
+Bismarck's dispatch-box, waiting to jump out.  You recall the terms
+of the thing--one of many overt attempts to seize a coveted prize.
+The Empire of France was to recognize the acquisitions made by
+Prussia in the war of 1866 with Austria.  Prussia was to aid Napoleon
+III. to buy from Holland the debatable Duchy of Luxembourg.  The
+Emperor was to shed the luster of his smile and the _ægis_ of his
+approval upon Federal Union between the North German Parliament and
+the South German States--the separate sovereignty of each State
+remaining.  In return, Prussia was to abet the Bonaparte in the
+military occupation and subsequent absorption of the Kingdom of
+Belgium.  And in furtherance of these laudable ends, an alliance,
+offensive and defensive, against any Power, insular or otherwise, was
+to be compact between the great gilt eagle of the Third Empire and
+the black-plumaged bird across the frontier.
+
+Britons, with inconveniently good memories, perusing this draft,
+recalled the existence of a treaty existing between France, England,
+and Prussia, mutually binding these Powers to protect the neutrality
+of Belgium, and drew reflections damaging to the betrayer and the
+betrayed.  French diplomatists asserted that the project had been
+drawn up by Benedetti at Bismarck's dictation.  Why preserve so
+explosive a document, they argued, if it was never to be drawn out
+and supplied with detonators in the shape of signatures?  Later on M.
+Rouher's boxes of official papers, found at his château of Cercay,
+gave up the original draft-treaty annotated in the Emperor's
+handwriting.
+
+For it was his nature, may God pardon him! to be false and specious,
+ungrateful and an oath-breaker.  He must always repay great services
+with great wrongs.  Thus in the red year 1870, England, who in '54
+had poured out blood and treasure lavishly to aid him, receiving this
+plain proof of treachery, stood sorrowfully back and saw him rush
+upon his fate.  Sick and desperate, madly hurling his magnificent
+Army hither and thither upon the arena, a Generalissimo out-generaled
+before the War was a week old.
+
+He had made France his mistress and his slave, and now her fetters
+were to be hacked apart by the merciless sword of the invader.
+Through losses, privations, and humiliations; through an ordeal of
+suffering unparalleled in the world's history; through an orgy of
+vice and an era of infidelity; through fresh oceans of blood shed
+from the veins of her bravest; she was to pass before she found
+herself and GOD again.
+
+Meanwhile, North, East, South and West, prevailed a great swarming
+scurry of military preparation, the tunes of the "_Wacht am Rhein_"
+and "_Heil dir im Siegeskranz_" clashing with "_Partant pour la
+Syrie_" and the "_Marseillaise_"; and the solemn strains of masses
+rising up together with Lutheran litanies, as two great nations
+strove to convince Divine Omnipotence that Codlin deserved to whip,
+and not Short.
+
+Strange! that Christian men, who frankly confess themselves to be
+sinners, worms, and dust-grains before the supreme Majesty of the
+Creator, should be so prone to offer Him advice.
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+The lovely lady whose lace parasol P. C. Breagh had picked up at the
+bottom of the Prussian Chancellor's staircase was driven, by the
+tipsy-faced Jehu of a debilitated hack-cab, to a semi-fashionable
+hotel situated in a graveled courtyard facing toward the Linden.  The
+bureau-manager looked out of his glass-case as she swept her rustling
+draperies over the dusty Brussels carpets of the vestibule, and
+muttered to the pale-faced ledger-clerk at his side:
+
+"A representative from the firm of Müller and Stettig,
+Charlotten-Strasse, has called three times to see the lady in Suite
+35.  With a jewelry account for payment, promised and deferred."
+
+The clerk assented with a nod of the double-barreled order, and
+reaching an envelope from a numbered pigeon-hole offered it for the
+inspection of his superior.
+
+"Baroness von Valverden," sniffed the bureau-manager, and in his turn
+reached a squat red Almanach de Gotha from the top of a pile of
+ledgers, and ruffled the leaves with an industrious thumb.
+
+"It is as I thought--there is no Baroness von Valverden.  Baron Ernst
+von Schön-Valverden is a minor and a bachelor, private in the --th
+Regiment of Potsdam Infantry of the Guard.  This must be the
+Frenchwoman I have heard of as mixed up in the scandal connected with
+the death of Baron Maximilian at Schönfeld in the Altenwald some
+years ago.  He left Madame a lapful of thalers--I suppose she has
+played skat with the money.  Not that that matters if the hook-nosed,
+long-haired Slav she has got with her upstairs has the cash to settle
+with us!  But if not----"
+
+The manager's tone was ominous.  The clerk scratched his nose with
+the feather-end of his pen, and said admiringly:
+
+"If not, the Herr Bureau-Director will give orders to detain their
+valises and trunks?"
+
+The bureau-manager smiled, and said, jerking his chin at another
+envelope reposing in the numbered pigeon-hole:
+
+"Send that up at once and let them know we will stand no nonsense.
+Keep Müller and Stettig's back for the present.  Understand?"
+
+And the clerk nodded again, and whistled down a tube, and evoked from
+regions below a brass-buttoned, gilt-braided functionary, to whom he
+entrusted the missive indicated, which bore the monogram of the
+hotel-company, and indeed contained their bill.
+
+It was handed to Madame by the brass-buttoned functionary just as she
+reached the ante-room of her second-floor suite of apartments.  She
+took it from the salver, and said without looking at it:
+
+"Presently!"
+
+The functionary gave a peremptory verbal message.  She repeated:
+
+"Presently, sir, presently....  At this moment I am exceedingly
+fatigued!"
+
+The brass-buttoned functionary begged to remind the gracious lady of
+similar excuses previously received by the management.  At this she
+turned upon him the battery of her magnificent eyes.  Always
+economical of her forces, she had removed her torn tulle veil during
+the cab-drive, and with a delicate powder-puff drawn from a jeweled
+case dependant from her golden _châtelaine_, removed from her lovely
+face all traces of emotion.  Only a spiteful woman would have called
+her thirty-five....  And the functionary was a man, despite his brass
+buttons and gilt braiding.  When she smiled, he caved in, bowed, and
+left her.  But he did not forget to leave the bill.
+
+She had it in her hand as she entered the drawing-room of the suite
+of apartments, one of those impossibly shaped,
+fantastically-uncomfortable salons, possessing a multiplicity of
+doors and windows, upholstered with rose-satin and crusted with
+ormolu, such as are only seen in foreign hotels and upon the stage.
+Despite the sultry heat of the July weather the windows were shut,
+their Venetian blinds lowered, and their thick lace curtains drawn
+over these.  And in a rose-colored arm-chair with twisted golden legs
+and arms and an absurd back-ornament like an Apollonian lyre, huddled
+a dark, hawk-featured, powerfully built man of something less than
+forty, wrapped in a short, wide coat lined, cuffed, and collared with
+black Astrakhan; wearing a traveling-cap similarly lined, and
+presenting the appearance of one who suffers from a cold of the
+snuffly, catarrhal kind.
+
+He sneezed as Madame surged across the threshold, and would have told
+her to shut the door, only that she divined his intention and
+forestalled him, throwing her parasol upon a sofa and sinking into a
+chair as ridiculous as his own.  Yet when her wealth of pale-hued
+draperies poured over it, and the ripe outlines of her voluptuous
+form concealed its crudities of design and coloring, it could be
+forgiven for being in bad taste.
+
+She looked in silence at the traveling-cap, not at its sulky wearer,
+until, conscious of her sustained regard, he raised his hand to his
+head.  In haste then, as though she dreaded the shock of his
+purposeful abstention from the customary courtesy, she said:
+
+"Do not take it off!  Pray keep it on!"
+
+"Thanks!"  He uttered the word laconically, drooping his immense,
+black-lashed eyelids over his fierce and staring eyes.  They, too,
+were black, with the white, hard glitter of polished jet; black also
+were the great curved eyebrows, the coarse and shining hair that fell
+to his shoulders, the parted mustache, and the wedge-shaped beard
+that depended from his boldly curved chin.  Rippling in small,
+regular waves, suggestive of the labor of a primitive sculptor's
+chisel, the inky _chevelure_ of this man with the cold,--taken in
+conjunction with his large, aquiline nose, deep chest, fleshy torso,
+and thick muscular limbs, reproduced the type of an ancient Assyrian
+warrior, as represented in some carved and painted wall-frieze of
+Nineveh or Babylon, marching in a triumphant procession of
+Shalmaneser or Sennacherib.  Even the conical head-dress was
+reproduced by the modern cap with ear-pieces, and turned-up border;
+and the deep yellowish-white of the alabaster in which the ancient
+sculptor wrought his bas-relief was reproduced in thick, smooth,
+unblemished skin.
+
+Handsome as he undoubtedly was in his exotic, Oriental style, even in
+spite of influenza, Madame contemplated him with ill-concealed
+distaste.  To a woman who loves, what matters the temporary
+thickening of the beloved object's profile, even when accompanied by
+attacks of sneezing and a running at the nose and eyes?  She can wait
+the day when his voice will clear, and his leading feature will
+regain its former beauty.  That is, as long as she continues to love.
+
+The passion of this man and this woman had in its brief time burned
+high and fiercely.  So does a fire of paper or straw.  Now Passion
+lay dying, and Satiety and Weariness were the only watchers by the
+death-bed.  Every twenty-four hours that passed over the heads of the
+couple brought nearer the hour when these would give place to Hatred
+and Dislike.  And meanwhile both were infinitely hipped.
+
+"Every window....  Every curtain....  Must we, then, asphyxiate?..."
+At the end of her patience, she made an angry gesture as though to
+loosen the ribbon of mauve velvet that held a diamond locket at the
+base of her round white throat, bit her full lip--and let her hand
+drop idly into her silken lap again.
+
+Her companion stretched out a pair of muscular, but shortish legs,
+encased in dark green trousers with braided side-stripes, and looked
+with interest at his patent boots.  Then he answered, speaking with a
+drawling, nasal accent:
+
+"Unless M. de Bismarck has supplied you with the means of averting a
+singularly-unpleasant catastrophe, it may be that the answer to your
+question should be 'Yes'!"
+
+She understood that he questioned, and said, drooping her proud,
+languorous eyes under the hard black stare of his:
+
+"You would be wiser to speak in a lowered tone, when you refer
+to--that personage.  One does not trifle with him--here or elsewhere!"
+
+"The Pomeranian bear," said her companion, pouting a slightly swollen
+lip, and dabbing gingerly at his reddened nostrils with a voluminous
+cambric handkerchief exhaling the heavy perfume of opoponax, "has
+claws and fangs.  Also a hug, in which friends of mine have stifled.
+But they were men and you are an enchanting woman!"  He removed his
+cap and bowed; resuming: "Besides you went to M. le Ministre with a
+trump in your hand--a little Queen of Diamonds, fresh as a rosebud.
+Have you played her, may I ask?"
+
+He got up, pocketing his handkerchief, came over to her and stood
+beside her, in the upright attitude which called attention to the
+disproportion between his huge torso and his too-short legs.  He held
+his furred cap upon his hip with one hand, and with the other stroked
+his waved wedge-beard.  The rasping sound made by his heavily-ringed
+fingers as they passed through the thick, crisp hairs irritated her
+to anguish.  Yet not so long ago it had thrilled her to sensuous
+ecstasy.
+
+"I played the girl--and I have lost!"  Almost against her will a cry
+broke from her.  "My God! what things he said to me!  My God! what
+humiliations we women endure for men!"
+
+"I had imagined, my Adelaide," said he of the Assyrian hair and
+profile, showing in a smile a double row of teeth so perfect that
+they struck the imagination as being carved out of two solid curves
+of ivory--"that you were playing for your own advantage--even when
+you played my game.  Did M. le Comte mention me at any point of the
+interview?"
+
+She started at the unexpected question.  Her voice shook a little in
+the reply.
+
+"He said that he had heard--that M. de Straz had lately visited
+Berlin.  That his agents would tell him.  Of course!"
+
+"He said nothing of--a flying visit of mine to Sigmaringen?"
+
+She answered hastily:
+
+"I think not.  No!  I am quite certain he did not."
+
+"No?"
+
+Straz sniffed and whipped out his handkerchief, grumbling:
+
+"Yet the purport of my mission to that South German crow's-nest was
+known to him--here in Berlin--I can prove it!--by nightfall of the
+day I interviewed the Prince."  He added, trumpeting in his
+handkerchief, "Of course, M. Bismarck has spies everywhere.  But all
+the same it was quick work!"
+
+Her face was immovable.  No guilty flush stained its smooth ivory
+surface.  Only the lines about her scarlet mouth sharpened, that was
+all.
+
+Straz went on, peevishly, strolling to the fireplace, and leaning an
+elbow on the corner of the mantelshelf.
+
+"I suppose they call that princely hospitality--to send a man who has
+traveled night and day, and is decanted out of a crazy
+railway-station droschke at the door of their confounded Stammschloss
+at five o'clock in the morning--to an inn!"
+
+She said in a velvet tone of amorous insinuation, and with a glance
+of sleepy fire:
+
+"To an inn where Love lay waiting!..."
+
+"Truly," he admitted, "but how were they to know that you were there?
+What possible connection could have been imagined between two chance
+travelers--I--arriving from Paris--you coming from Berlin?
+Besides--to send me to a summer tavern on the banks of the
+Danube!--when they have two hundred bedrooms at the Schloss!  If that
+is princely hospitality, I tell you that I spit upon it!  I grind it
+under the heel of my boot!"
+
+Her nostrils dilated with disgust as he demonstrated by spitting on
+the hearthrug.  She said, meeting his angry black stare with eyes
+that were of the color of tawny wine:
+
+"The Prince cannot have regretted his omission to accommodate you
+with an apartment, when the Emperor's message was made known to him!"
+
+He demanded:
+
+"Am I a hired bravo?  _Pardieu_! your words suggest it.  Were either
+of the old man's sons in danger personally, from me?  Not at all!  I
+but repeated a lesson--gave a warning as it had been given....  But I
+understand--you have been chagrined by the nature of your reception
+from the Federal Chancellor!"
+
+She returned, now flushed and breathing deeply:
+
+"It is true.  I suffocate at the recollection.  Give me time to
+breathe!"
+
+She rose.  Straz said, going over to her, taking both her hands,
+kissing them and replacing her in her chair:
+
+"Compose yourself.  Let me understand the attitude M. le Ministre is
+taking.  I need not remind you that not until I had learned from you
+that, through the lamented Count Valverden, you were sufficiently
+acquainted with M. de Bismarck to obtain an interview, did I suggest
+that you should seek one.  Well, you did, and it has taken place.
+You told him of the little episode I witnessed in January--on the day
+of the funeral of Victor Noir at Neuilly.  Monseigneur the Prince
+Imperial was riding with his governor and escort--the Avenue of the
+Champs Elysées was blocked by troops.  A charming girl threw M. Lulu
+a bunch of violets--made a little scene of loyalty and enthusiasm in
+contrast with the unamiable attitude of the crowd assembled.  An
+equerry dismounted and gave the flowers to Monseigneur.  He carried
+them with him as he galloped toward the Bois de Boulogne.  Nothing of
+importance in that, perhaps, had he not afterward sent for the
+equerry who had picked up the flowers, and said to him, blushing,
+'_Pray tell me who was she?_'  So skilled a master of phrases as M.
+de Bismarck could hardly have undervalued the question from the heir
+to an Empire, taken in combination with the blush.  Or discounted the
+importance of the fact that, later, when the equerry brought him the
+information that the charming unknown was the daughter and only child
+of a certain gallant Colonel commanding the 777th Regiment of Mounted
+Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard--at that moment quartered at
+Versailles,--Monseigneur said, with another blush as ingenuous as the
+first, 'I am glad she is the daughter of so brave a soldier!
+Possibly I may meet her one of these days.'  Being told that her
+baptismal name was 'Juliette' he blushed once more, and wrote it
+down,--together with Mademoiselle's surname and address,--in a little
+memorandum-book he habitually carries....  And there, my exquisite
+Adelaide--if your narrative style did credit to my teaching, the
+interest of M. de Bismarck should have been engaged."
+
+She lowered her chin and drooped her somber eyelids, and said with
+curling lips:
+
+"It was.  He took out his watch, and told me: 'I can hear you for
+three minutes longer!  Has the Prince Imperial--with the
+disinterested assistance of those about him, altered that possibility
+into a certainty?'  I explained to him then that nothing further had
+come of the _rencontre_,--though measures had been taken to preserve
+Monseigneur's interest from dying for lack of excitement, bouquets of
+violets being sent to him at regular intervals, with a slip of paper
+attached to the stems, upon which had been written in an unformed,
+girlish hand--'_From one who prays for the Hope of France!_'
+
+"And then?..."
+
+"Then M. de Bismarck spoke, keeping his thumb all the time on the
+watch-dial: 'So!  The girl plays the part of an ingenue for the
+present!  Will she keep these airs of candor and innocence when she
+has got her claws on that poor stripling?  And do you suggest that
+the Prussian Secret Service should supply her with funds for the
+carrying out of her design, whatever it may be?  Are we to lay our
+heads together, like the Brethren in the libretto of Mehul's opera
+"Joseph," and sing in chorus: _This is the heir.  Come, let us kill
+him!_'"
+
+"Even Beelzebub," said Straz, "can quote from Scripture when it suits
+him.  I suppose you were annoyed, and showed it--which was an error
+of judgment on your part!"
+
+"I rose up," said she, and suited the action to the word, "with
+indignation, assuring M. de Bismarck that his suspicions were unjust.
+That the young girl mentioned was of ancient family and
+irreproachable morals, convent-bred and highly educated.  And that I,
+myself, being her nearest living relative of her own sex, was able to
+vouch for the fact.  I added that the interest displayed in her by
+Monseigneur the Prince--who until that moment had never been known to
+look at a woman--led me to conceive that by aid of a few deft hints,
+a little discreet encouragement--another distant glimpse--a meeting
+accidentally brought about in some retired spot favorable to the
+revival of first impressions, an influence might be brought to bear
+upon the Imperial boy which might develop his mind and mold his
+character.  Somehow in my agitation the name of Juliette de Bayard
+escaped me.  'De Bayard,' exclaimed M. de Bismarck.  'So!  You are
+her mother!'  Great Heaven!--the intolerable tone in which he uttered
+the words!  Only the most abandoned of her sex could have supported
+the insulting irony of the look accompanying them.  Choking, I took
+my leave....  He accompanied me to the staircase, with a false
+appearance of courtesy.  As I turned to descend, he hurled the last
+insult of all!  Nicolas, do not ask me to repeat the sentences!--and
+yet, I must have them written in another memory....  He twitted me
+with my nationality before his secretary and servants.  He likened me
+to a mythological character with an unpronounceable name....  He said
+only a modern mother would be infamous enough to devote her only
+daughter to Venus Something-Or-Other....  Next to my husband, I
+detest that man!"
+
+Straz had been pulling at his moist red underlip as she raved out her
+story in a frenzy of rage and resentment, intensified by the
+necessity of speaking in a lowered tone.  Now he dragged the feature
+out as though it had been made of india-rubber, let it snap back, and
+said, shrugging his bull's shoulders and getting up:
+
+"You are a woman and he is--Bismarck!  He does not for the moment
+want the wares you desire to sell him.  It is unlike him--the
+diplomat who could encourage M. Benedetti to lay before him the
+Emperor's _projet de traité_ in writing--and lock it away for use at
+a future opportunity--not to be willing to secure an
+advantage--placed before him with clearness and skill--in the newly
+awakened fancy of a schoolboy who, if he lives, will be an
+Emperor--for a charming and innocent young girl!"  He pronounced
+these words as though they were smeared with something sweet and
+luscious, licking his lips gently, and rolling his dead black eyes in
+sensual enjoyment.  "As regards your husband, he has certainly not
+replied to the letter of your solicitors, but why do you hate the
+unlucky man?"
+
+"Do you ask?" Adelaide demanded, with glittering eyes and heaving
+bosom.  "Did he not refuse to divorce me?  Should I not have legally
+borne the title of Baroness von Valverden if his sentimental
+prejudices had not blocked the way?"
+
+Straz pulled his waved beard, and said, delicately separating a
+strand of it from the rest, and keeping it between his thick white
+fingers:
+
+"Sentimental, why sentimental?  Do you not even give him credit for
+sufficient spirit to resent being made ridiculous?  The desire to be
+revenged--you will not even allow him that?"
+
+She bit her scarlet underlip and answered, breathing quickly:
+
+"He was too good, too high-minded--too chivalrous--oh! 'tis
+ridiculous, I admit!" for Straz commenced to titter silently,
+screwing up the corners of his eyes and shaking his shoulders, as he
+sat with his thick, short arms folded on his chest.  "An idea to make
+you hug yourself as you are doing.  But true, nevertheless!  He would
+have said--at this distance of time I can still hear him preaching:
+'_I will avenge the injury to my honor when I am confronted with my
+enemy.  I will not revenge myself upon the woman who deserted me for
+him!_'"
+
+The words came, not in her own voice.  Straz left off sniggering.  He
+said to himself, considering her through narrowed lids:
+
+"Those were De Bayard's actual words.  I wonder, since she has
+neither seen nor heard from him since she left him, how it is she
+knew that they were spoken?  Some obliging mutual friend may have
+repeated them.  Or she read them in some letter of his, written to
+Count Valverden.  That is quite possible.  But the question is,
+whether she would detest him so bitterly if her passion for him were
+absolutely extinguished.  She is even jealous when one speaks of
+their daughter, whom he worships....  I will play her on this
+string--it may be useful, who knows?"
+
+Aloud he said:
+
+"Detest your husband, dear friend, if it affords you entertainment.
+Probably he deserves it, though women I have met who knew him vowed
+him _un crème d'homme_, worthy of the name he bears."  He smiled in
+his beard, hearing her foot tap upon the shining parquet, and went
+on.  "Men have praised his gallantry and his disinterestedness----"
+
+"'Disinterestedness!'" she mocked.  "Truly--to the point of
+fanaticism he is disinterested.  Have we not to thank that
+characteristic for the ruin of our plans?"
+
+Said Straz:
+
+"A little more subtlety upon the part of your solicitors, and you
+might have found M. le Colonel less obstinately inclined to
+discourage the idea of a reconciliation.  To have entrusted a
+portrait to the hands of the lawyers would have been an excellent
+move.  Once convinced that the thirteen or fourteen years that have
+elapsed since you--parted--have increased rather than diminished the
+beauty that once he worshiped--and I fancy De Bayard would have
+accepted your terms!"
+
+He sniggered, and waited as the violet shadows about her brilliant
+eyes deepened, and she breathed more quickly.  Then he went on:
+
+"They were generous--I allude to the conditions.  Ninety men out of a
+hundred would have accepted them.  For what has De Bayard to condone
+that others have not winked at?  You were a mere girl, weary of
+separation from a husband who doubtless consoled himself after his
+own fashion, for his detention in the Crimea.  Bored to
+desperation--condemned to spend your days in the care of a child, and
+in listening to the imbecile grumblings of a sick old devotee,--point
+out to me the woman, young, beautiful, brilliant, and ambitious--who
+would not--in your place--have done precisely as you did?"
+
+She threw her head a little backward, bringing into prominence the
+superb modeling of her columnar throat and the heavy lines of the
+lower jaw.  Her wine-colored eyes considered him between their
+narrowed lids.  She savored his words, silently, with palpitating
+nostrils, and rippling movements of the muscles of her tightly closed
+lips.  And the qualities of treachery and cruelty, mingling in her
+strange character with sensuality, and pride, and recklessness, were
+written upon her beauty as plainly as they are stamped upon the
+individuality of a tigress, or a poisonous snake.
+
+"You speak of weariness ... of boredom..."  She spoke between her
+teeth, accentuating the vowels and prolonging the sibilants:
+"Nicolas, it was hellish--that _ménage_ at Auteuil!..."  She clenched
+the white hand that rested on the chair-arm and continued, looking
+with burning eyes through Straz into the past.
+
+"That woman--my husband's mother, with her parade of devotion for the
+absent.  With her ceaseless repetition of 'my son,' 'my son's child,'
+and 'my son's wife!' ... Grand Dieu!--how she enraged me!  How she
+made me hate--hate--hate them!--yes! all three....  Perhaps myself
+also, most bitterly of all!"
+
+"We have a curious proverb in my country," commented Straz, with his
+snigger: "'_I draw water from a well that has no bottom when I tell
+my gossip of the faults of my mother-in-law!_'"
+
+She said, with undisguised scorn:
+
+"I am not a collector of curios from your country!"
+
+"Ah, but wait!  Hear the rest of it!" said Straz, dexterously
+embroidering on the original: "'_But when my mother-in-law wishes to
+acquaint my husband with my good qualities, she will write them with
+the plume from a gnat's head, on the paper that wrapped a butterfly's
+egg, when she has bought her ink at the shop where they sell none!_'"
+
+Adelaide continued, ignoring the labored witticism:
+
+"In the letter of farewell that I wrote to De Bayard I said '_Your
+mother will console you, I have no doubt!_' ... How often I have
+imagined I could hear her talking to him....  He would weep on her
+knees, like a schoolboy.  She would lead him to look at the child,
+asleep in its cot by the side of her bed, and tell him, '_Do not
+fear!  She will not be like her mother!  She will grow up candid and
+discreet and virtuous!_'  Everything that Adelaide was not, you
+understand....  Ha, ha, ha!  Absurd old creature!  Were she not dead,
+I should detest her still!"
+
+Straz mentally commented: "The daughter has inherited the hatred,
+unless I am mistaken."  Aloud he said:
+
+"The prophecy, if made, has not been fulfilled, my Adelaide....
+Mademoiselle, if inferior to her mother in splendor and beauty,
+certainly has been dowered with her elegance and charm."  He bunched
+the fingers of his right hand, kissed them, and launched the kiss,
+conjecturally, in the direction of Paris.  "A pocket edition of
+Psyche before that little affair with Cupid!  A rare jewel!  A _chic_
+type, give you my word!"
+
+The daintily shod foot had beaten time, as Straz enlarged upon the
+theme of Juliette's perfections, to what might have been the tune of
+a tarantella: now it ceased.  She laughed in the Roumanian's face,
+and cried, still laughing:
+
+"A child! ... A schoolgirl--who has seen no more of the world than
+the pearl in the oyster!  All this is too funny--_give you my word!_"
+
+Said Straz, lolling his head against the chair-back and licking his
+red lips cattishly:
+
+"Ah, but when the pearl-diver opened the oyster, he said: '_Here is a
+gem worth a Kingdom, or an Empire, when it shall be polished and
+properly set!_'"
+
+"'Or an Empire!'"
+
+She echoed the three words, throwing her head back in imitation of
+Straz's attitude, and looking at him with languid provocation.  Then
+she yawned, showing her perfect teeth and the tip of a rosy tongue,
+and remarked with an air of boredom:
+
+"My friend, whether your pearl be worth an Empire or a cabbage-plot,
+your chance of proving its value is forever forfeited, thanks to the
+obstinacy of M. de Bayard."
+
+Said Straz:
+
+"Our plan would have been easier to carry out,--had M. de Bayard been
+more--complaisant."
+
+She rose up, her beautiful face livid and gray under its artificial
+roses.  Her eyebrows writhed like little live snakes, her eyes burned
+like wind-blown torches.  She spoke, looking past her confederate in
+the chair, and with a voice he barely recognized:
+
+"His mother must have prayed her Saints for this," she said, "that I
+should always fail in the moment when triumph seemed most sure.  Max
+Valverden would have married me--it is absolutely certain!--had not
+Fate sent him back on leave from the Staff in Austria but a couple of
+hours too soon.  Weak, sentimental Max! always threatening extreme
+measures.  Who would have believed him capable of carrying out that
+menace so often reiterated!  But this I know.  Had he confronted me
+with what his letter termed '_the unmistakable proofs of my appalling
+treachery,_' I would have convinced him even against the testimony of
+his own ears and eyes.  But De Bayard--but my husband!----"
+
+She had forgotten Straz; she saw nothing but her own frustrated
+ambitions, the dead body of the man whose suicide had robbed her of a
+title, and the living husband whose stern rejection of her overtures
+had left her forever outside the social pale....
+
+"Do I not know the man he is!  With another it would have been so
+easy.  He would have granted an interview,--I would have been
+suppliant and humble--I would have told my tale in such a voice! ...
+_You were away....  I was young and inexperienced....  I foolishly
+yielded to the persuasions of another....  Once I had let Valverden
+kiss me I felt myself smirched for ever.  I fled with him because I
+dared not meet your eyes!_"
+
+Straz sniggered.  She went on, not hearing him....
+
+"He would have taken me to his heart again.  Once reinstated there I
+would have regained the _entrée_ to Society.  For a woman who has
+lived within the pale--even if she finds it better fun outside--it is
+hideous to be _déclassée_.  A few triumphs,--a little intriguing--and
+I should have been received at Court....  For the Emperor is above
+all a man of the world; and the Empress loves to surround herself
+with beautiful and witty women.  With gifts, talents, charm like
+mine, I should have carried all before me!--I should have reigned--I
+should have drunk the wine of Success from a goblet of diamond."
+
+"Without doubt," agreed Straz, "had M. le Colonel consented to
+receive you.  Yet I contend, his refusal is a hopeful sign, if it
+means that he is afraid."
+
+She winced as though he had thrust a knife in her side, and cried out:
+
+"Afraid!  You do not know him....  No!--I tell you, that it is to him
+as though I had never existed....  Did we meet, he would look me in
+the face--pass me by without the twitch of a muscle--without the
+flicker of a glance....  But you have shown me how I may reach his
+heart--and one day I shall thrust my hand into his breast and tear it
+out and trample on it....  It is she--my daughter--who will
+accomplish this!..."
+
+Said Straz, pushing back his chair, getting up and blowing his nose
+loudly:
+
+"Then the sooner we exchange these avenues of dusty lime-trees,
+choked with crowds of bellowing Teutons, for the boulevards of Paris,
+the better.  We shall, of course, be forced to return by a _détour
+via_ Brussels--the Rhine Valley railways being reserved for the
+transport of troops.  Passports can be had on application to the
+usual authorities.  The only insuperable obstacle to our departure
+is--the bill!"
+
+Madame came back to consciousness of sordid things as the Roumanian
+ostentatiously turned out his trouser-pockets.
+
+"You are at an _impasse_ for lack of funds?" she asked him.
+
+"Upon my life, my soul!" Straz smilingly assured her, "I am at
+present without a radish!  A sum of two thalers negotiable currency
+constitutes my stock of cash.  Although, as I have told you, I carry
+secreted on my person an order for"--he tapped his bosom--"ten
+thousand francs payable from the Secret Funds of the Imperial
+Government.  This I tried to cash before I left Paris----"  He
+measured off an infinitesimal quantity of finger-nail and displayed
+it to her.  "Do you think I got a franc from anyone?  No!--you know
+better!  The Emperor's methods are understood too well.  And thus it
+is that the disinclination of M. de Bismarck to finance our plan for
+the union of two young and ingenuous lovers has hit me in the
+midriff.  A thousand curses on his niggardliness!"
+
+As though prompted by some recollection of Adelaide's previous
+display of tragic passion, he scowled portentously, spat at the
+fireplace, then began to strut about, vaporing and waving his ringed,
+hairy-backed hands.
+
+"Penniless....  What damnable absurdity!  The Emissary of a
+Potentate!  The Bearer of the Bowstring--with Life or Death in my
+hand.  For lack of cash I travel second-class to that accursed South
+German Principality--I stoop to put up at a third-rate inn.  My
+Mission performed, I yield to the promptings of my ardent nature.  In
+the company of her who reigns sultana of my soul,--who for my sake
+has shared the discomforts of that abominable caravanserai--I return
+to the barbarous capital of the Hohenzollerns--I risk my person in
+the streets of Berlin.  Had my brain been cooler--had your image
+glowed less seductively before my mental vision"--he rolled his black
+eyes amorously and laid a thick ringed hand upon his breast--"it may
+be that I should not have accompanied you,--that I might have hurried
+back express to Paris--presented myself to my Imperial master--and
+reaped the golden prize!"
+
+"Say rather," responded Madame, in a tone not untinged with acrimony,
+"that as the result of your unsuccessful endeavor to enlist the
+interest of M. de Bismarck in that charming plan to unite two
+ingenuous young people--you are placed in a position that is not
+without unpleasant possibilities.  My _beaux yeux_ are less to blame
+than your ambition '_to kill_,' as the English say, '_two birds with
+one stone!_'  You----"
+
+"Say 'we,' not 'you,' my divine Adelaide," corrected Straz, with
+tender insistence, "for if not in actuality husband and wife, we are
+thus inscribed upon the bureau-register.  'One in sorrow, one in
+joy,' to quote a poet of my nation.  I wish you were acquainted with
+the verses of Stepan Mieciwycz.  They would afford you exquisite
+delight."
+
+"Possibly," said Madame, with an ominous hardening of the facial
+muscles, and a whiteness about the lips.  "What does not afford me
+delight is that these brigands downstairs have threatened to seize
+our luggage if their claim is not satisfied within an hour."
+
+"_Sapristi!_" commented the Roumanian.  "A beautiful imbroglio!
+And--as I have no luggage--beyond a traveling valise," he added with
+a gentle snigger, "your trunks, bonnet-boxes, imperials,
+traveling-bags, and so forth--must become the prey of the management.
+It grieves me to the soul that you should suffer this denudation at
+the hands of these coarse Germans.  But what I cannot prevent, I can
+but deplore!"
+
+"And if," she said in a vibrating voice of anger, "these coarse
+Germans should lay hands upon your person, for the purpose of
+ascertaining for themselves the state of your purse! ... What then?"
+
+"What then?" Straz's cynical composure broke up.
+"_Istenem!--Istenem_!  Nothing could be more dangerous!  My letter of
+instructions from M. de Gramont, annotated in the Emperor's own hand!
+The official letter, of introduction from the Minister to Prince
+Antony--the copies of those three telegrams His Highness sent from
+Sigmaringen--the order on the Privy Purse--all concealed in a silk
+belt I am in the habit of wearing--these Prussians will find the
+papers should they search me to the skin.  Then I, _with my
+wife_----"  He italicized the sentences.
+
+"One in sorrow as in joy, I think you said!" interpolated Madame,
+bitterly.
+
+"We should be arrested--dragged before official
+interrogators!--imprisoned!--Oh! do not imagine I am laying on the
+colors too thickly.  Is it incredible that M. de Bismarck might
+welcome an opportunity--pending the result of this war--to turn the
+key on us?"
+
+"Why on us?" demanded Adelaide.  "Do _I_ wear a silken belt
+containing incriminating letters?  Orders on the Secret Funds ...
+copies of Hohenzollern telegrams?"
+
+Straz looked at her, and his black stare hardened suspiciously.  The
+swift Oriental blood that pigmented his eyes and skin, and fed the
+luxuriant growth of hair upon him, leaped in the dark to the
+conclusion that he had been betrayed.  He said, smiling, and speaking
+with a lisp, a trick of his that boded ill, had she but known it:
+
+"Not to my knowledge....  I have never searched while you were
+sleeping,--or spiced the draught that made the sleep profound."
+
+"My thanks," she said, keeping her countenance magnificently, "for
+the glass of mulled Burgundy I gave you when you returned from the
+Schloss.  You were suffering from chill--you shivered and burned
+alternately....  Like a woman, I did what I could--and you are
+ungrateful, like all other men."
+
+"My soul," simpered Straz, "I adore you madly.  But like every other
+man, I am a son of Adam, and you are a daughter of Madame Eve.  And a
+little snake hisses in my ear whenever I am not looking at you: '_She
+would be truer to her sex if she were false!_'"
+
+
+"Nicolas!  This is too much!  No, no, I beg of you to let me leave
+you!"
+
+Adelaide had put her hand to her heart, given him a look in which
+passionate tenderness seemed to strive with wounded pride, quitted
+her chair, and hurried, the Roumanian hot upon her heels, to the door
+communicating with the boudoir.  Detained by his feverish grasp upon
+her hand, prisoned by the muscular arm about her waist, she could
+only reiterate her desire for freedom.  Straz asseverated:
+
+"Yes! when you have forgiven me!  Pardon, beloved Adelaide!  Life of
+my life, you know we Slavs are naturally suspicious--it is always in
+our blood!"
+
+He thrust his face to hers, amorously ogling.  The slight thickening
+of the consonants, due to catarrh, made his passionate speech sound
+grotesquely ridiculous.  The approach of his mouth, the contact of
+his breath, reminded the fastidious Adelaide that such colds could be
+transferred.  So she smiled dazzlingly upon him, and gently freed
+herself from his enfolding tentacles, leaning her softly-tinted cheek
+downwards to the shoulder her own overtopped.
+
+"You are pardoned, my beloved one!  But think with me how this bill
+may be settled!  What if you really should be in danger in this
+place!"
+
+He shrugged hopelessly, and ejaculated:
+
+"_Sapristi_!  I can conceive it possible....  But--hampered by the
+lack of money, what are we to do?"
+
+She said with a start, as if suddenly enlightened:
+
+"Dearest, I have some jewels....  Think nothing of the sacrifice! ...
+Will it not be made for him who is more to me than all?..."
+
+"Angel! ... Now I know, indeed, that Adelaide is true to me!  Pardon
+thy slave, who dared to deem otherwise!"
+
+Straz devoured her hand with kisses, became more enterprising as she
+grew, or seemed to grow, more yielding.  But she put him from her,
+suffering her bright glance to linger on him amorously, saying in
+tones of liquid sweetness, with a bewitching accent of rebuke:
+
+"Be good now!  I am tired, and must positively dine in my room
+to-night.  My maid will bring you in a few moments a case
+containing--what I mentioned just now.  Late as it is, shops are
+still open ... there is a firm of jewelers--Müller and Stettig in the
+Charlotten-Strasse, who will buy such things for ready money....  It
+should bring sufficient to supply us with funds for a long time....
+Poor Valverden paid eighteen thousand thalers for it!"  She added as
+Straz licked his lips appreciatively: "It is a star of emeralds and
+brilliants you have often seen me wear."
+
+"Thou art my star!  O incomparable Adelaide!"
+
+She pushed him from her, yet oozing with impassioned admiration.  She
+gently shut the boudoir-door--and noiselessly shot the bolt.  Then
+her face changed, and all her disgust for Straz, his cheap
+compliments--his slovenliness--his arrogance and self-satisfaction,
+his impecuniousness and his cold in the head, was written on her face
+and expressed by every movement of her body.  She ran across the
+boudoir, abandoning her air of languor, burst into the bedroom
+beyond, and aroused a dozing maid.
+
+"Wake up, Mariette!  Find me--it is in the red morocco jewel-case in
+the brown leather imperial--the diamond star with emerald points!"
+
+While the woman rummaged, the mistress swiftly reviewed the
+situation.  The cold, clear brain that dwelt behind that velvet mask
+of sensuous beauty had formulated a plan for getting rid of the Slav.
+
+He would be an enemy dangerous as a rattlesnake, she told herself.
+But--trap your rattlesnake, and he cannot bite.  On the other hand,
+his subtle capacity for intrigue--his swift Oriental cunning--even
+his masculine strength,--made of him a useful ally, even when he had
+no more secrets for a clever woman to ferret out and sell.
+
+For the brief telegram in cipher, dispatched by Madame to a
+studiously unsuspicious address in Berlin before nightfall of the day
+of the arrival in Sigmaringen--with the later-sent copies of
+Gramont's letters--the formal introduction which had secured the
+Agent from the Tuileries an audience of Prince Antony, and the four
+pages of secret instructions margined with the Emperor's annotations,
+had brought in a handsome sum of money, thanks to the potency of
+mulled Burgundy heavily dosed with laudanum.  Adelaide had known a
+moment of deadly terror when the Slav's black eyes had looked at her
+with that sinister stare of suspicion, and his conjectures had leaped
+in the dark, so very near the actual verity.  She felt no desire to
+encounter that look again.
+
+So she pondered, fingering the bulky roll of Prussian banknotes paid
+her by Privy Councillor Bucher a few days previously,--how she might
+best get rid of Straz without another scene.  His Oriental cunning,
+his childish vanity, his petulance and sensuality, his colossal greed
+of money and money's worth, blinded her to the ruthlessness and
+ferocity of his tigerish nature, and provoked her to brave a risk far
+greater than she guessed.
+
+She would get rid of him--play the game he had devised, without him;
+and win, in spite of cold water thrown by M. de Bismarck.  The trap
+he had planned to catch the son of the Emperor should yet be set
+successfully.  Was not the intended bait of living maiden's flesh her
+own?
+
+She felt no pity for the innocence of the girl, or for the
+inexperience of the stripling.  She was curious to know how--under
+given circumstances--they would comport themselves; she was eager to
+bring to terms the Minister who had contemptuously rejected her
+proposal--she thirsted above all for revenge upon the husband she had
+wronged.
+
+Straz stood in the way, therefore Straz must be swept aside.  His
+mission to Prince Antony performed, the Napoleon would have no more
+use for the instrument.  Perhaps that order on the Privy Purse would
+never be paid?
+
+She arrived at this conclusion as the maid brought the red morocco
+jewel-case.  She unlocked it with a key she wore in a bracelet, and
+drew out a shagreen-covered box containing the vaunted ornament.  It
+had not been given her by her dead lover; the story of the thousands
+spent on it was no more reliable than the doubleted emeralds, and the
+thin central star of diamonds set flush with the gold setting of the
+toy.
+
+But it looked well; and Straz was no good judge of jewels, and she
+had not paid Müller and Stettig the moderate sum demanded as its
+price.  The merchants had been rude enough to dun her, and when Straz
+should appear and tender the article for sale to them, the manager
+would summon a policeman, and the Roumanian would be detained.  He
+would refer to herself, but long before a representative of the firm
+could appear to interrogate her, she would have paid the hotel-bill
+and departed, leaving the price of the trinket in the hands of the
+management.  Flaws in the plan, no doubt, but on the whole it was
+workable.  She rose, took the star from the case stamped with the
+too-revealing names of Müller and Stettig, glanced in the mirror,
+left the bedroom and swept through the boudoir.
+
+"Nicolas!" she whispered, unbolting the door noiselessly, and opening
+it a little way.
+
+"My Peri, I am here!" snuffled the impassioned Roumanian.
+
+She opened the door a little further, and thrust out a white palm
+cradling the glittering gewgaw.  He pounced on it, leaving a kiss
+instead.
+
+"Remember, Müller and Stettig, 85 Charlotten Strasse.  Fly!"
+
+"Sultana, I depart upon the wings of Love, to return like the bee to
+the rose, laden with golden pollen."
+
+"Your wings, unlucky bee, will be clipped by a policeman," Madame
+said inwardly, as the drawing-room door shut and the Slav's footsteps
+crossed the little ante-room.  There was a murmur of voices, that of
+Straz raised as if in surprise or interrogation.  Probably the
+gilt-buttoned functionary had been lying in wait for him with the
+hotel-bill.  She listened a moment, heard no more, and went back,
+saying to her attendant:
+
+"Pack everything.  We leave at once for Brussels."
+
+The maid said, with peculiar demureness:
+
+"And Monsieur, Madame?"
+
+Her mistress told her:
+
+"Monsieur has gone to call upon his bankers."
+
+The maid responded with even greater demureness:
+
+"Madame should know that in her absence Monsieur endeavored----"
+
+Madame said hastily:
+
+"Pay no heed.  These are customs common in Roumania!"
+
+The woman continued, bridling with all the scorn Lesbia's
+waiting-maid feels for the penniless gallant:
+
+"Monsieur endeavored to borrow of me ten thalers...."
+
+Madame shrugged and bade her:
+
+"Go on with your packing!  Monsieur does not accompany us!"
+
+And without the exchange of another word the mistress and maid
+understood each other perfectly.  The impecunious Straz was to be
+jettisoned for the lightening of the ship.
+
+Meanwhile, Fate willed the Slav should encounter on the threshold of
+the ante-room the emissary of Messrs. Müller and Stettig, who had
+called for the third time to demand payment of the bill.  This being
+offered for his inspection as the responsible male of the party,
+threw unexpected light on the intentions of Adelaide.
+
+"Sixteen hundred thalers," he murmured.  "Reasonable, too--most
+reasonable!  I have seen Madame wearing the ornament, and admired it
+very much.  Yes, if you desire it, I will speak to the lady.  It is
+doubtless mere forgetfulness that has deferred the settlement of your
+claim.  Wait here!"
+
+He unwound a knitted silk scarf that was folded round his bull-neck.
+He turned down the collar of his Astrakhan-lined coat, and went back
+with noiseless steps.  The door of the boudoir was ajar.  He
+satisfied himself that Adelaide was in the bedroom beyond it.  He
+stepped in, glanced about him, formulating his plan, then locked the
+boudoir-door, put the key in his pocket, crossed the room, and
+knocked upon the door of the bedroom, swiftly stepping aside, so that
+the door--which opened outward,--should conceal him from those within.
+
+"Who is it knocks?  Open and see!" he heard Madame command her maid
+within the bedroom.  The maid appeared, crossed the boudoir, found
+the door fast, and returned to tell her mistress.  But then she found
+the door of the bedroom she had quitted was bolted on the other side.
+There was no sound within, but a kind of rustling, and once or twice
+a footstep on the carpet.  So, with the patience of her caste, the
+maid sat down upon a sofa until it should please her lady to undo the
+bedroom-door.
+
+Her lady was incommoded by the grip of Straz's thick hairy hands upon
+her windpipe.  He freed one in a moment--and then Adelaide was being
+blinded by the folds of a silken scarf....  Long, wide, and elastic,
+it served the Roumanian's purpose admirably.  Perhaps it had been
+useful in that particular way before.  And as he rolled and twisted
+it, he whispered sniggeringly in the little pearl-white ear that
+jutted from between the crimson swathings, almost as though it had
+been purposely left free:
+
+"So, my Sultana!--so,--you would betray me!..."
+
+Enveloped, she stammered through the silken meshes some barely
+intelligible sentences.  The folds tightened chokingly--and the words
+died in a gasp.
+
+"Mercy!... Forgive!..."
+
+"Surely, my proud Sultana," said the thickish voice with the
+catarrhal snuffle in it.  "What will men not pardon to beauty such as
+yours!"
+
+She moaned and strove to tear away the smooth bands that were
+suffocating her.  He whipped a velvet ribbon from the toilet-table,
+brought down her hands, and bound them behind her back.  That little
+shell-shaped ear was purplish by this time.  At the point of losing
+consciousness, she felt him softly groping for the treasure hidden in
+her bosom--she heard the crackling of the roll of notes withdrawn.
+
+"_Do not...!_" she tried to say, but no sound came from her but a
+groaning; and through the roaring of her blood she heard him answer
+back:
+
+"Do not rob you! would you plead, my peerless Adelaide?  Far from it.
+I merely take from you what is my own!  For--there was the taste of
+opium in my mouth when I awakened in Love's embraces.  And
+conviction, stronger than proof, convinces me that I have been sold.
+Else why this store of honey in the breast of the Queen of the
+garden, while the black bee was sent roaming to gather store
+elsewhere?  Eh, eh!  I think I could manage to guess at the reason
+why I was to have been detained by those jewelers on suspicion of
+theft!  My Sultana would have vanished, leaving no address behind
+her....  _Istenem!_ but the emerald star would have served your
+purpose well!"
+
+There was a silence.  Rings of fire, stars of emerald whirled before
+Adelaide's blinded vision.
+
+"Do not be afraid, my Queen, I am not going to murder you!" chuckled
+the thick voice in the little swollen blackening ear.  "Only to spoil
+your beauty a little--nothing more terrible.  Your eyes will be less
+clear, your skin less dazzlingly unblemished, after this experience.
+You will never again look in your mirror without remembering me!"
+
+Rocking and swaying, ready to fall, she was only kept upright by the
+arm of Straz about her body.  She felt him free that arm, shifting
+her weight against his great chest, and as she lay blind and helpless
+there, his snigger vibrated through her horribly.  Then--the smooth,
+slippery folds of the silk scarf tightened murderously, stopping all
+breath, shutting out consciousness.  Whelmed in an abyss of
+Nothingness, she felt and knew no more....
+
+"Madame is a little unwell," said Straz, who regained the
+ante-chamber by the way of a dressing-room communicating with
+Madame's bedroom.  "She will call on Messrs. Müller and Stettig
+to-morrow, and settle their account.  Meanwhile"--for the
+representative of the firm was beginning to expostulate--"she returns
+the emerald-pointed star with her regrets."  He added smilingly as
+the relieved _employé_ gratefully pocketed the trinket: "Ladies are
+not business-like in these little matters of money.  But Heaven, who
+inspired in man the desire to see them well-dressed, has conferred on
+him the privilege of paying their bills."
+
+He accompanied the jeweler's foreman down to the vestibule, chatting
+agreeably.  He carried no valise, so was allowed to pass out with the
+man.  Keeping one thick, hairy-backed hand thrust down into a pocket
+of his Astrakhan-furbished shooting-jacket, close-clutched upon the
+solid roll of Prussian banknotes, reft from that smooth and perfumed
+hiding-place.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+"The Crown Prince," wrote P. C. Breagh, "and the Red Prince--as
+people nickname Friedrich Karl of Prussia, in virtue of his
+partiality for the crimson uniform of his regiment, the Ziethen
+Hussars,--have departed amidst scenes of overwhelming enthusiasm, to
+take over the respective commands of the Third and Second Army Corps.
+On July 31st, at half-past-five noon, the very day on which I pen
+these lines, the aged Sovereign drove in an open landau drawn by two
+superb black Hungarian horses to join his Ministers and his Chief of
+the Great Staff at the station, where waited the special train
+destined to convey the venerable Commander-in-Chief of the Field
+Armies of Germany to the immediate Seat of War."
+
+There was a jolt, the pencil bucked furiously, and the writer's skull
+came smartly into contact with the uncushioned seat-back of the
+gray-painted, semi-partitioned railway transport-car, in which, with
+some forty blue-uniformed infantrymen of the Prussian Guard, P. C.
+Breagh was being hurried toward the Rhine frontier, in a din so
+comprehensive that you could only make your neighbor hear by putting
+your mouth to his ear and bawling, and in an atmosphere so thick with
+dust and smells, of varied degrees of intensity and picturesqueness,
+that you drew it into your lungs in gulps and exhaled it with
+sensible effort.
+
+The partly-glazed windows did not let down, bars began where the
+glass left off, and therefore the N.C.O.'s of the eighth of a company
+appropriated to themselves the corner-seats.  Sandwiched between two
+large and heated warriors, with his unstrapped knapsack on his knee,
+and his elbows jammed immovably against his lower ribs, P. C. Breagh
+abandoned the impulse to rub his bump, and continued to write, using
+the old straw hat which crowned the knapsack as a support for a
+notebook.
+
+"The Queen," he went on, "who was evidently laboring under the
+influence of emotion, accompanied His Majesty.  A thunderstorm
+coruscated and detonated overhead as the Royal salute of guns crashed
+out, and King Wilhelm's subjects greeted him with round upon round of
+enthusiastic '_Hoch's_.'  The object of their acclamations kept
+continually smoothing his heavy white mustache with the right,
+ungloved hand, between the salutes with which he acknowledged the
+plaudits of his people--a characteristic gesture of the veteran
+monarch when..."
+
+The pencil faltered.  "Under the influence of emotion" could not be
+used again, because it had already done duty for the Queen, whose
+eyes, poor lady! had been red with crying.  P. C. Breagh knocked off
+to sharpen his pencil and read over what he had set down.
+"Coruscated and detonated" pleased him, though to have said that the
+thunderstorm had growled and blazed would have been a good deal
+nearer the mark.  And "characteristic gesture" was loftier language
+than "familiar trick" or "habit." Mr. Knewbit would have snorted at
+it, it was true, but this was not one of Mr. Knewbit's stipulated-for
+letters, "describing in a style readable by plain, ordinary, everyday
+people, what you've seen and heard, and felt, and smelled."
+
+Still, one could not hope to please everybody--and this was a
+descriptive article--not a chatty news-letter.  When complete, it
+would be forwarded to the Editor of a Leading Daily, with the brief
+intimation that more like it might be had--at a price.  That it would
+draw commissions, P. C. Breagh believed implicitly.  There was a
+stately stodginess about the style that could not fail to impress.
+So he continued as "_Die Wacht am Rhein_" broke out once more; and
+the deep bass notes emitted by his burly right-hand neighbor tickled
+his ribs and made him goosefleshy.
+
+"The aged monarch seemed weary, it appeared to me."
+
+"Ach, ach! but the old man looks tired!" people in the front had
+holloaed to one another.  All the week-end one had seen the King
+bowling up, and down, and round-about Berlin in his little one-horse
+carriage, with a single, mounted orderly-officer in attendance;
+giving out colors, addressing the regiments, conversing in short,
+soldierly sentences with the field-officers in command.
+
+"Baron von Moltke, Chief of the Great General Staff," went on the
+pencil, "the War-Minister General von Roon, and the Federal
+Chancellor and Minister-President General Count von
+Bismarck-Schönhausen, with the personnel of the Great Headquarters
+Staff and the mobilized Foreign Office, received His Majesty at the
+railway-station, tastefully adorned with black-and-white bunting,
+carpeted with red, and garlanded with roses, said to be the favorite
+floral emblem of the septuagenarian potentate...."
+
+It could not be denied by P. C. Breagh,--the painfully hammered-out
+paragraphs smacked of the sample supplied by Mr. Knewbit for
+avoidance.  "Sham technicality and sentimental slumgullion," he
+seemed to hear that rigorous critic saying, so loudly and in such a
+pouncing manner, that P. C. Breagh hurriedly scratched out the
+sentence about the floral emblems, though "septuagenarian potentate"
+must be reserved for use later, as offering a refreshing change from
+"aged King" and "veteran" or "venerable monarch."  "Hoary-headed
+Ruler" would come in usefully by-and-by....
+
+_Bump--bump--jolt, ker-link-ker-lank ker-lunk!_ ...
+
+The two powerful engines, pulling a train-load of fully two-thirds of
+a regiment at fullest war-strength, were slowing up at a station: ...
+A roar of voices kept continually at crescendo hailed the arrival.
+Another roar, mixed with fragments of patriotic song, replied.  The
+platform presented a sea of heads of both sexes, backed by an
+imposing array of shelves, decorated with foliage, dangling lamps and
+national bunting; surmounted by a bust of the King between busts of
+Moltke and Bismarck, and literally groaning under piles of sausages,
+loaves, cheeses, oleaginous packages of sandwiches and pastry--rows
+of gilt and silver-foiled wine-bottles, and then more rows....
+
+Barrels of genuine Berlin beer, adorned with the Hohenzollern colors,
+stood hospitably ready to replenish glasses and mugs.  Filled with
+the amber nectar, trays of these, suspended from the shoulders of
+stalwart youths, wearing Red Cross arm-badges, and
+white-muslin-draped maidens adorned with crimson sashes, waited to
+quench the thirst of Prussia's soldier sons.  And taking in the
+condition of things at a glance, said one of the two N.C.O.'s in
+charge of the party:
+
+"_Himmeldonnerwetter!_ ... Lads, there seems no help for it.  We have
+got to tuck in again!"
+
+And simultaneously with the bass response: "At your service, Herr
+Sergeant!" and almost before the slow-going locomotives stopped,
+panting Samaritans hurled themselves upon the carriages, and arms
+ending in hands proffering packages of comestibles and tobacco,
+bottles of beer or frothing glasses, or packets of cigars, were
+thrust in between the window-bars, until every man's jaws were busy,
+and every man's hands were laden....  Until even the modestly
+retiring P. C. Breagh had been compelled to accept a mighty hunk of
+iced plum-cake and a giant package of liver-sandwiches, and forced to
+empty a foaming beaker of brown Bavarian.
+
+"Why not, why not, when they have plenty for everyone?" hiccoughed a
+stalwart private, who had emptied many mugs: "Won't every fellow of
+the regiment find his double-pint waiting him, when the next train
+comes up?"
+
+
+There was plenty for everyone.  Not only the troop-train that would
+follow this, containing the odd thousand rank-and-file and the rest
+of the regimental officers, would find the "cool blonde" and the
+"dark brunette," the savory snack and the soothing weed, as ready for
+the alleviation of possible requirements as they had been at every
+halting-place--the City of Hanover severely excepted--since the huge
+send-off at Berlin on the afternoon of the previous day.
+
+Every class contributed to the refreshment of the soldiers.  Wealthy
+brewers sent drayloads of barrels, rich aristocrats gave wines from
+their cellars.  The bakers bestowed bread, the pork-butchers
+contributed hams and sausages, the tobacconists cigars and
+pipe-tobacco.  While the cook baked cakes with her perquisites of
+lard and dripping: and the servant-maid took from her scant savings
+for the purchase of a gross of match-boxes, to distribute at the
+station when the military trains came in.
+
+Poor was the wight who could be liberal in nothing.  And thus thought
+the little old woman when she cooked her dozen ginger-snaps.
+
+She was a tiny little monkey-faced old peasant, in a frilled white
+mutch, jaded red shawl, blue apron and brown-striped drugget
+petticoat; and she stood quite alone in a clear space left upon the
+platform of a little country station, as the eager philanthropists
+about her crowded to lavish hospitality on the inmates of the
+incoming train.  As the pastry and the cakes, the coffee, beer, and
+spirits flowed in at the windows and down the throats of the wearers
+of the blue, white-faced Guard uniforms, this little old woman made
+no effort to offer her ginger-snaps, which were ranged in three rows
+of four on a dingy white cloth in a little broken basket, and were
+palpably melting under the rays of an ardent July sun.
+
+Her timidity and her feebleness had kept her back, but when the
+Colonel in command issued the order to entrain, and the officers who
+had clanked in pairs up and down the platform, good-humoredly
+answering the questions of old ladies, and gallantly returning the
+admiring glances of young ones, accepting a leaf-full of fruit here,
+or a glass of Rhine wine or a cigarette there,--began to take their
+places,--she mustered courage to hold up her basket to a dandy young
+subaltern and murmur: "Please to take!"
+
+Next moment--the dandy could not have meant it,--but as he pushed
+away the extended basket, and swung round upon his heel, his silver
+sword-knot caught in the frayed cloth or broken wicker-work, and down
+went the basket, and the snaps were spilt upon the ground....
+
+"Thou dear God!" the little old woman cried in anguish.  "_Ach--ach!_
+the good, the delicious ginger-snaps! ... Who now will eat them?
+_Ach!--Ach!_"
+
+And up to her poor eyes went her blue apron.  It was a terrible
+tragedy to her.  Some people pitied her.  Others were heartless
+enough to laugh after the fashion of the blond, red-lipped
+officer--and to laugh once more at the summary fashion of his
+setting-down.
+
+For a terrible, rasping voice said, speaking behind the dandy
+subaltern, and full four inches above the level of his ear:
+
+"Under-Lieutenant Fahle will remedy the damage done by his
+carelessness before he resumes his place in the train!"
+
+Thus the train waited while the offender, blood-red with rage and
+confusion, picked up the sticky brown cakes with his snowily gloved
+fingers, and replaced them in the broken basket, amidst the little
+old woman's humble apologies, and entreaties that the gracious
+gentleman would not trouble himself.  When the Colonel, owner of the
+rasping voice above referred to, in conjunction with a bushy scarlet
+beard and bristling mustaches, a stately height of six feet four
+inches, a regulation waist, and three rows of decorations, performed
+an act of bravery for which he deserved another medal still.  For,
+selecting the snap that looked cleanest, this dauntless warrior
+gravely took it between his thumb and finger, bit a piece out, and
+declared it excellent.  Then, amidst the rapturous plaudits of the
+onlookers, he solemnly saluted the twittering old lady, and swung
+himself loftily back into his carriage, thundering out once more the
+order:
+
+"Entrain!"
+
+Conceive the banging of doors, the bumping and clanking, the cheers
+and the tears _da capo_, and the curtseys the little old woman
+dropped, one after another, almost faster than one could count.
+Suppose the train moving slowly on, and a tricksy spirit inspiring a
+wag among the rank-and-file aboard, to shout to her:
+
+"Hey there, Mother Ginger-snaps! give us one before we go!"
+
+Twenty voices took up the cry, and blue cloth-covered arms were
+thrust out between the carriage window-bars.  Hands waggled,
+soliciting the sugary boon.  And the little old woman, torn between
+the desire to give and the impossibility of giving,--danced like a
+hen on a hot griddle, until a giant porter, compassionating her
+plight, snatched her up like a large doll, and ran with her beside
+the moving carriages, holding her out at arm's length, as she upheld
+her basket, until all the ginger-snaps were gone.
+
+Instinctively as P. C. Breagh had felt that the cumbrous
+grandiloquence of his descriptive article would be snorted at by Mr.
+Knewbit, so he knew that the little incident of the ginger-snaps
+would afford his patron delight.  Therefore he tucked it away in a
+safe pigeon-hole of his memory, with a description of the rough,
+gay-painted, crowded wooden box he sat in, odoriferous with its
+conglomeration of smells, based on the combined stenches of tallow
+and perspiring humanity, laced with the sharp sour of malt, and
+mercifully tempered with the fumes of strong tobacco.
+
+Piff!  The hot, cinder-flavored draughts that raced in over the
+glazed half-windows were powerless to freshen or dilute the
+atmosphere.  Yet among the varied types of men who, their heavy
+knapsacks disposed in iron racks above them, sat packed as close as
+sardines on the narrow benches, were not a few, who, judging by the
+mute evidence of their well-groomed skins and carefully kept
+finger-nails, their finer hair and more clearly modeled features,
+belonged to Germany's upper class.
+
+Shriek!  The train plunged into a cutting ending in a tunnel of sheer
+blackness.  Bursting, with another shriek, into the light of day, she
+raced for a while neck-and-neck with a cavalry-train.  They were Red
+Dragoon Guards and White Cuirassiers of the Great Headquarters Staff,
+and they exchanged cheers and sharp, staccato shouts of "_Hurrah,
+Preussen!_" with the infantry of the Guard, as the latter were
+hurried by.
+
+Nothing was left to Chance.  All was deadly, methodical accuracy.
+The keen, clear brain under Moltke's wig controlled the speed of
+every train upon the six Rhine and Moselle railways over which the
+Army of United Germany was rolling to inundate France.
+
+Trains, trains, trains!
+
+Trains of trucks, laden with gabions woven of split beech-saplings,
+with oaken lascines and bales of empty earth-bags.  Commissariat
+trains of wagons packed with sheep and cattle, and the ubiquitous pig
+of the Fatherland.  Coffee-and-sugar trains, trains of pea-sausage
+and the rock-hard brown biscuit wherewith "Our Moltke" fed his
+soldier men.  Trains of spare arms, clothing, trenching-tools and
+cooking-utensils; trains of cartridges, gunpowder, blasting-powder,
+solid shot, shrapnel, and the big projectiles destined for the
+siege-guns; with trains upon trains close-packed with the men who
+were to use these things,--took precedence or gave it, because the
+withered finger beckoned or waved....
+
+"Our Moltke," so mild and affable and courteous, truly, when the
+Genius that possessed thee spread his steely wings and soared, thou
+wert a very terrible old man, or so it seems to me.
+
+
+The descriptive article laid by, you found P. C. Breagh, in the
+interests of Mr. Knewbit, studying his fellow-travelers.  The
+weak-eyed, spectacled young soldier on his left-hand, whose fingers
+were burned and yellow-stained, as though their owner had dabbled in
+chemical experiments, and who had remained mute as a fish throughout
+the journey, only opening his mouth to eat or drink, or reply to a
+remark addressed to him by a non-commissioned officer, was reading
+the "Iliad" of Homer in the original, from a little parchment-bound,
+Amsterdam-printed Elzevir edition, that he seemed to cherish as the
+apple of one of his short-sighted eyes....  A handsome young bugler
+in the next compartment had a well-thumbed copy of "The Pickwick
+Papers."  The huge tanned Guardsman on his right, whose broad breast
+displayed the medals of 1866 and of the Schleswig-Holstein campaign,
+and whose powerful bass notes had reverberated through the diaphragm
+of his neighbor when he sang, was chatting with a younger comrade who
+sat opposite.  Holding the well-greased unburnished needle-gun
+between their solid thighs--to hang the silver-spiked Guard's helmet
+on the muzzle seemed a popular way of disposing of the
+headpiece--they exchanged experiences in a genial roar, subdued to a
+growl at confidential passages.
+
+"Grete came to the Barracks to bid me God-speed....  There were a few
+tears--dried when I promised to bring her a wedding-gift from Paris.
+Thou seest, she is going to turn over a new leaf, and get married to
+a waiter at a Sommer-garten--a club-footed man who is not called upon
+to serve--being on the Exempt List."
+
+They guffawed at the picture of the happy bridegroom.  Said the
+senior, wiping his overflowing eyes with a hand as brown and broad as
+an undersized flitch of bacon:
+
+"I looked up 'Mina in the Landsberger-Strasse.  She could not meet
+me, as her old woman had a betrothal-party for one of her daughters.
+A young student from a Conservatoire, in a tail-coat three sizes too
+small for him, and a pair of linen cuffs as big as starched
+table-napkins, was the victim served up.  I saw him as 'Mina carried
+in the spiced wine and rum-punch, and a longer pair of lantern-jaws I
+never saw.  But when they sat down to table, and I took another peep
+through the door-crack, I promise you those jaws of his were grinding
+away like steam!"
+
+"Nu, but the punch?" asked the other Guardsman.
+
+"_Sapperlot!_--do you suppose I went without my whack of it?--and
+'Mina's eyes as red as preserved cherries with crying about my going
+to the War?  I had had a mug of the good stuff, and a bottle of
+something or other!--gilt paper on the neck of it--nothing at all but
+fizzle inside.  Then I settled down to a jug of cool beer and the
+breast of a turkey, while 'Mina was waiting on the parlor-folks.
+Heard her step coming along the passage--thought I'd play the fool
+with her a bit--so I turned the kitchen-gas low and hid behind the
+door.  In she comes!--I'd got my arms round her and kissed her--a
+regular juicy smack or two, before--by the yell she gave!--I knew it
+wasn't 'Mina at all...."
+
+"_Potzblitz!_ who was it, then?"
+
+"Who but the old woman?  But for the thumping size of the waist I'd
+squeezed, and the taste of violet-powder in my mouth, I might have
+thought I'd got hold of one of the young Fräuleins.  'Help, murder,
+thieves!' cried she.  'How dare you insult a respectable mother of a
+family!  Give your name, you rogue, or I'll have in the
+police!'--'Don't do that,' says I.  'I'm only 'Mina's
+brother--dropped in to take leave before going to the War!'--'A fine
+brother!' says she.  'Do brothers hug their sisters in that bearish
+way?  Be off with you quick march! and think yourself lucky to escape
+so easily!'..."  He wound up: "But if she had reported me to the
+_Herr Oberst Leutnant_, nothing much would have come of it.  He'd
+have said: '_Was sol Ich!_--but we're off to the War!'"
+
+A sentence or so more, and the conversation resolved itself into
+strong tobacco-smoke.  Twilight was fading into dusk.
+Dortmund--Elberfeld--Düsseldorf had paid tribute of beers, cheers,
+and tears to the defenders of German Unity, the most inveterate
+songsters and conversationalists were getting sleepy, and it would be
+midnight before the troop-train, traveling, like the others that
+followed it, at a speed strictly calculated to permit of the somewhat
+slower transit of six supplementary trains bearing the King and his
+Great Headquarter Staff--could reach Cologne.
+
+The lamps, adding the flavor of hot kerosene to the conglomeration of
+odors--had been lighted at Düsseldorf.  The tobacco-reek had grown so
+dense that below their band of yellow light was a sharply defined
+band of opaque blue fog, in which medium colors were neutralized to
+monochrome, and outlines of sleeping, or chatting, or card-playing,
+or reading soldiers blurred into vagueness, wavered, and were blotted
+out for P. C. Breagh in a sudden doze.
+
+
+He wakened at a late hour, to the iron measure clanked and ground and
+beaten out by couplings and brakes, wheels and axles.  Snores of all
+kinds--from the shrill clarionet-note of the spectacled student of
+Homer to the deep 'cello-bass of the Guardsman who had hugged 'Mina's
+mistress in mistake for his sweetheart--resounded on all sides; the
+tobacco-fog had somewhat thinned.
+
+Finding it possible to move, because his burly neighbor was soundly
+sleeping, pillowed upon the body of the man upon his right hand, P.
+C. Breagh yawned--recovered his knapsack, which had slipped from his
+knees to a floor which in point of cleanliness left much to be
+desired, removed from it with a fragment of newspaper the worst
+impurities it had contracted by contact, threw the newspaper out of
+the nearest window and, in the performance of this act, caught a not
+unfriendly eye.
+
+Its owner, a huge young man, who, occupying a place on the end of the
+same seat, had been hitherto screened by the body of the huger
+private who had kissed not wisely, said, and in English of the Oxford
+brand:
+
+"You find our men lacking in good manners?  Yet there is much
+spitting on the part of English soldiers, when they are standing at
+ease, or off duty.  I have myself observed this."
+
+"Then you know England?" P. C. Breagh interrogated, and the private,
+who was very tall, very blond, very broad-shouldered,
+straight-featured, blue-eyed, and small-waisted, answered:
+
+"Pretty well.  I have a relative who married a lady who is your
+countrywoman.  I have been the guest of her family at their London
+house.  You speak our language, for I have heard you.  And with a
+North Prussian accent, by the way."
+
+P. C. Breagh returned:
+
+"I spent three years at Schwärz-Brettingen.  With the sole result
+that I can make myself understood by Germans who don't speak English.
+And that I owe to my landlady."
+
+Said the Guardsman, yawning and smiling:
+
+"My father sent me to Oxford.  Three terms have yielded this
+result,--that I can converse with Englishmen who know German.  Thanks
+to a charming young lady, a niece of the relative I spoke of just
+now, who was so good as to read the poems of Tennyson with me.  'The
+Princess,' 'In Memoriam,' and 'Maud,' were her chief favorites--I
+preferred his epics founded on the Arthurian legend.  Though my
+charming English cousin was often vexed with me for saying that our
+Wagner's verse-drama of the Nibelungen-Ring possessed far truer
+inspiration, and that 'Die Walküre' and 'Tristan' would have been
+finer than anything Tennyson has ever written,--had they existed
+simply as poems, and never been wedded to music at all.  At that the
+young English lady was angry; she said things to me in her
+indignation which were terrible; but she forgave me, because I was
+compelled to leave the University and return to Germany to put in my
+term of service as a private, before I present myself as a candidate
+for an officer's silver sword-knot in the usual course of things.
+You are, perhaps, acquainted with our German methods of qualifying
+for a Commission?  Bismarck has two sons serving as troopers with the
+1st Dragoon Guards; whereas a private of Ours is a nephew of
+Moltke's, and two or three others are cadets of princely
+families--representatives of what your countrymen would call the
+'aristocracy of Germany.'  Perhaps one or two of them will find that
+silver sword-knot they are looking for--across the frontier,
+somewhere between the Rhine and the Moselle!..."
+
+"When do you think there will be fighting?"
+
+Inexpressibly P. C. Breagh yearned to know when and where the dance
+was expected to begin.  But his eagerness seemed to freeze the
+loquacious Guardsman, whose blue eyes narrowed, whose smile
+stiffened, whose smooth voice instantly diverted the current of the
+talk to other things:
+
+"Were you at the Gala Performance at the Opera, the night before
+last?  Delphine Zucca could hardly sing; her husband, young Baron von
+Bladen, of the Jastrow Hussars, has been appointed first galloper on
+the Staff of General Manteuffel, Chief of the First Corps, First
+Army.  So the Zucca is naturally inconsolable, as they've only been
+married a month.  But Elise Hahn-Tieck, as the Genius of United
+Germany, in a corslet of gilt chain-mail, and a helmet crested with
+oak-boughs, with a green Rhine meandering over her white muslin robe,
+was tremendous when she came down to the center of the stage to sing
+'_Die Wacht am Rhein_,'---carrying our East Prussian Flag and the
+banner of the Hohenzollern, and followed by other operatic actresses
+in character as the Auxiliary States.  _Sapperlot_!  When she drew
+her sword, she was tremendous!  And when she fell upon her knees, the
+big chandelier in the auditorium jumped.  She sang the part of
+_Gretchen_ last season, and looked not much over thirty.  Make-up,
+because, you know, she has a grandson who is a junior-lieutenant in
+the Duke of Coburg's Regiment of White Cuirassiers, and must be sixty
+if she's a day.  _Prime donne_ are like wines, no good till they've
+arrived at a ripe old age.  Though I could introduce you to a little
+girl of eighteen or so, just now doing a song-and-dance at the
+Schützen-Strasse Tingel-Tangel, who has a voice that pleases me
+better than the warblings of any of the highly paid Opera House
+nightingales.  And what a figure! round and tempting and seductive.
+And such arms, and--_Sapperlot!_--what a pair of legs!"
+
+Thus prattled the twenty-year-old sprig of German aristocracy, to the
+other youngster, his senior in years if his junior in knowledge of
+the world.  He went on in his Oxford English:
+
+"Not that I'm inclined to ruin myself for women, though I must say a
+good many pretty ones have been uncommonly kind to me.  That sort of
+thing runs in my family, though! and I ought to be obliged to my
+Cousin Max for dying a bachelor.  Killed himself in '66 about a
+mistress who was playing the double game.  A regular French
+adventuress, diabolically handsome, who eloped with him when he was
+_attaché_ of our Prussian Embassy at Paris in '57, and has a husband
+living, they say.  Colossal impudence--actually passes herself off as
+my cousin's widow, in society of a certain sort.  So, out of the
+desire to deal Madame Venus a slap in the face, I got a comrade who
+knew her, to introduce me at a festive supper-party....  Said he:
+'Countess von Schön-Valverden, permit me to present my most intimate
+friend,' and reels off my name.  Would you believe it, the woman
+never turned a hair.  It was I who got flustered when she stared me
+in the face.  Colossal coolness--I can hear her now, lisping: '_The
+Herr Count is doubtless a relative of my poor, dear Maximilian!  Even
+had he not borne the name, I should have been struck by his
+resemblance to my beloved lost one._'  And then I got out, not half
+as cleverly as I had planned it: 'And even had you borne the name
+that is your own, Madame, I should have been shot through the heart
+by the beauty that has already proved fatal to one member of my
+family!'"  He added, "I laid an emphasis on those four words, '_shot
+through the heart_,' because my unlucky cousin actually met his death
+after that fashion....  Will you have a cigar of mine?  They are
+better than the weeds our patriotic friends have bestowed on us."
+
+P. C. Breagh accepted a smooth light-hued Havana from the offered
+case, asking with interest, due to the lurid flare of tragedy in the
+background of the other's lively chatter: "And the lady of the
+Venusberg--how did she take your reference to her past?"
+
+The Guardsman, cigar in mouth, stopped in the act of striking a
+fusee-match to answer: "She took it--as a woman of Madame de Bayard's
+stamp might be expected to.  With a _sangfroid_ that one could only
+admire somewhat less than her superb skin and hair, her shape of a
+goddess and her marvelous eyes--almost the color of Brazilian
+tourmaline."  He sent out a spiral of fragrant brownish-blue smoke
+and added: "Had I actually stood four years ago in the shoes which I
+have legally inherited, I'll be hanged if I'd have shot myself and
+left her to my rival.  For the other was at Schönfeld--actually in
+the house, you must know!--when Cousin Max came home on leave.  Hence
+the tragedy at three o'clock in the morning.  Such a depressing hour
+to commit suicide.  Now, had it been after supper..."
+
+He shrugged, and sent out another spiral of cigar-smoke, and,
+perceiving that his whilom listener heard no longer, ceased to talk.
+
+The while P. C. Breagh plunged into a brown-study by the chance
+utterance of a stranger's name, and unblushingly abandoning the
+effort to remain true to his gigantic type-ideal, hung fondly over
+the mentally evoked image of an Infanta in miniature.
+
+Where was Juliette de Bayard now?  Had the outbreak of war hastened
+or delayed her marriage with the happy master of swordsmanship?
+And--worshiping her father as Monica had said she did--how had she
+borne the parting from him?
+
+She would be very calm....  P. C. Breagh pictured the little face
+drawn and pinched with misery; saw the sapphire eyes dimmed with
+tears unshed, imagined the slender throat convulsed with sobs that
+were kept resolutely back, heard the silver-flute voice saying:
+
+"My father has honored me with his confidence as long as I can
+remember, sir!" and, "See you--I will be trusted absolutely, or I
+will not be trusted at all!"
+
+Strange that his elfin queen--his carved ivory Princess--should bear
+the same name as the woman the Guardsman had gossiped of--the
+beautiful, evil creature with the eyes like Brazilian tourmalines.
+And, what particular color in Brazilian tourmalines might have been
+intended?  Some were purple, others pink, and yet others
+reddish-brown.  The woman who had dropped her parasol on the
+staircase at the Chancellor's had had eyes of tawny wine-color.  With
+the remembrance, came back the perfume shaken from her rustling silks
+and laces, and the languid echo of her caressing voice.
+
+
+Drowsiness came next, and then oblivion, in heavy slumber.  And, as
+the unconscious form of P. C. Breagh lapsed this way and that, and
+his chin burrowed deeper into his bosom, the Sergeant who occupied
+the corner-seat facing the sleeper,--shading his eyes from the
+lamplight with a broad brown hand that wore a thick silver wedding
+ring upon the little finger, lowered the hand, and, leaning forward,
+stared in the young man's unconscious face, with small, suspicious,
+unwinking eyes.  Now the eyes looked round so sharply, that every
+waking man in the compartment, save the blue-eyed patron of the
+Tingel-Tangel girl, found it necessary to assume the appearance of
+slumber, and the Sergeant's voice said hoarsely:
+
+"Private von Valverden!"
+
+"At your service, _Herr_ Sergeant."
+
+"Private von Valverden, is this one, then, an Englishman?"
+
+"Undoubtedly, _Herr_ Sergeant!"
+
+"_Gut!_" said the Sergeant.  "But what is his calling?  Is he of the
+newspaper-offices that he sits and scribbles so?"
+
+"That question I cannot answer, Herr Sergeant, but if he be on the
+staff of any paper, he cannot accompany us without a _Legitimation_,
+and a letter from someone in authority."
+
+The Sergeant sucked in his bearded lips, and rolled his sharp little
+eyes more suspiciously than ever.  Valverden went on:
+
+"Doubtless he has them--I saw him show a paper to the Halt Commandant
+at Berlin, and the _Herr_ Colonel himself spoke to him and told him
+he might travel as far as Bingen by this train.  And I happen to know
+that four London newspaper correspondents have been accredited by the
+King upon the instance of Count Bismarck; one being appointed to
+accompany the Crown Prince, another being permitted to accompany the
+Second Army, while two are attached to the Great Headquarter Staff."
+
+The Sergeant said, glancing at the unconscious slumberer:
+
+"_Gut, gut!_ but is this fellow one of them?"
+
+"If he be not, _Herr_ Sergeant, he will get no farther than Bingen,
+for doubtless the Commandant there will be on the lookout for persons
+whose credentials are not of the best."
+
+The Sergeant shook his head vigorously, wrinkling up his full-bearded
+countenance suspiciously:
+
+"And suppose the Commandant is not on the lookout, Private von
+Valverden?  See you, I have had my suspicions since yesterday, and I
+tell you..."
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+Every waking ear in the neighborhood, and there were now a good many,
+pricked with curiosity as the Sergeant half-rose, and, inclining his
+inflamed countenance and bearded lips toward the ear of his selected
+confidant, continued in a hoarse rumbling undertone:
+
+"Two of those _verdammte_ English newspaper-scribblers that have got
+on the blind side of Their Excellencies and His Majesty the
+Commander-in-Chief were at the station at Berlin picking up
+information the very day we entrained.  Well do I know that paunchy
+little one with the big beard, who has, they say, as many Orders as a
+Field-Marshal, and who will venture to thrust himself upon Our Moltke
+in his study, and accost His Excellency Count Bismarck upon the very
+doorsteps of the Reichstag itself.  They got off three trains ahead
+of us, paying for men and horses and trucks, to Cologne; and if this
+fellow were not a knave, would he not have gone with them?  _Ach,
+ja_!  It would have been so!  But they did not even know him, though
+he pretended to touch his cap to them....  I tell you he turned as
+red as beetroot when they passed him without a glance.  _Nu, nu!_ he
+is an unlicensed meddler, if not a French spy, speaking English.  Do
+they not teach it at their Lycées?  And he has got on the blind side
+of the Commandant at Berlin and the _Herr_ Colonel.  But I, Sergeant
+Schmidt, have my weather-eye open, and it sticks in my gizzard that
+our so-glorious Moltke, let alone His Majesty, should with so much
+civility these quill-driving vagabonds encourage; when they say the
+French Emperor has given orders that, should the like of them about
+the heels of his Army Corps be caught sniffing, they are to be shot."
+
+"Possibly the Napoleon has more deficiencies to be ashamed of than we
+have, _Herr_ Sergeant!"
+
+Taking a deep breath, the Sergeant blew himself out to the utmost of
+his capacity and bellowed:
+
+"_Himmeldonnerwetter!_ are you going to insinuate in my presence that
+the Prussian Army has anything at all to be ashamed of?  Now you've
+waked this rascal with your racket, maybe you'll sit on his head
+while I go through his pockets.  Here, Braun and Kleiss, catch hold
+of his arms and legs!"
+
+Waking in the chiaroscuro of the smoke-filled, lamplit troop-carriage
+to find himself in the brawny grip of the aforesaid Braun and Kleiss,
+P. C. Breagh fought for freedom, yelling as one possessed, and
+lashing out with all his might.  In the heat of the scrimmage that
+followed, as a muscular arm in a coarse blue sleeve came round his
+neck from behind and choked him into silence, somebody said in his
+ear:
+
+"Keep still ... not hurt you!  Only going ... search!"
+
+And before he had rallied his wits sufficiently to realize that the
+warning was in English, a pair of extra-sized hands had deftly
+emptied the pockets of the old brown Norfolk jacket, relieved him of
+the cherished binoculars, a brand-new revolver, and a purse and
+letter-case that had been hidden in his bosom next the skin.  Then, a
+soiled newspaper having been spread upon the carriage-bench and the
+pieces of conviction arranged upon it, Sergeant Schmidt, surrounded
+by an audience of admiring inferiors, commenced to interrogate their
+owner:
+
+"What is this?"  He held up the well-used briar-root.  "A pipe, and
+yet it might be used to conceal dispatches or tracings.  A pistol
+also.  On the principle of the French mitraille, with many barrels.
+Prisoner, answer!  Where did you get this?"
+
+Returned P. C. Breagh, scarlet and breathing shortly:
+
+"I bought it in Berlin from a pawnbroker in the Landsberger-strasse.
+By what right..."
+
+Someone behind hacked him on the ankle, driving home the axiom that
+silence was wisdom, and he subsided, boiling within, as the Colt, a
+nearly brand-new six-barreled weapon, seen and purchased, together
+with its box of three hundred cartridges, for seven of P. C. Breagh's
+cherished sovereigns, was laid by, while the Sergeant, breathing
+stertorously, examined the contents of the purse.  He snorted,
+letting the bright coins run through his greedy fingers like yellow
+water:
+
+"Nine pieces of gold.  French coins, too, or call me a sheepshead!"
+
+"At your service, Herr Sergeant," put in the smooth, well-bred voice
+of Valverden, following on the ominous murmur that had greeted the
+Sergeant's announcement; "the money is as English as this revolver is
+American.  Prove the first for yourself.  When has the French Emperor
+figured in a woman's hair and _corsage_?"
+
+A guffaw went up.  P. C. Breagh, recognizing the voice which had
+spoken from behind him, realized that here was a friend in need.  But
+an attempt at speech on his part was frustrated by an ominous
+tightening of the muscular arm that had previously half-strangled
+him.  The Sergeant, his fiery pot-zeal rather damped by frequent
+set-backs, snapped-to the purse and said, keeping it tucked in one
+capacious palm, as he shook out the contents of the letter-case:
+
+"_So_!  He is cunning, like many another of his kidney.  Yet it may
+be here is proof sufficient to show him a rogue!  Who here reads
+French?"
+
+"I do, _Herr_ Sergeant."  Once again the well-bred voice of
+Valverden.  The Sergeant grunted surlily:
+
+"There is another here ... Private Kunz!"
+
+The spectacled soldier who read Homer in the original, and who had
+been violently displaced when the muscular Braun and the athletic
+Kleiss had obeyed the order to pinion the suspected one, shot bolt
+upright in his distant corner, saluted and said in a meek voice:
+
+"At your service, _Herr_ Sergeant!"
+
+"Private Kunz, canst thou read French?"
+
+"_Zu befehl, Herr_ Sergeant!"  The spectacled private added as the
+Sergeant passed him over the contents of the letter-case: "But these
+letters are not in French.  Two are in English, and one is in German."
+
+The Sergeant scowled and thundered:
+
+"Thou art an ass!"
+
+"At your service, Herr Sergeant," mildly agreed the spectacled
+soldier, "but Private Count von Schön-Valverden, who understands the
+French and English languages, will corroborate my statement if you
+will kindly refer to him."
+
+"'Kindly refer.' ... 'Corroborate my statement.' ..."  The Sergeant,
+purple in the gills, and with bolting eyes, loosened his collar-hook
+before he launched into profanity: "_Potzblitz_!  Never did I meet
+with language to equal thine.  What wert thou as a civilian before
+thou didst enter the Army?"
+
+"Graduate of the University of Würzburg, _Herr_ Sergeant," faltered
+the spectacled Guardsman, "and _Privat-docent_ in Chemistry and
+Philosophy.  Occupying the post of assistant to Herr Weber,
+Dispensing Chemist, of Strahlsund, near Stettin."
+
+"_Sehrgut_, Private Kunz," said the Sergeant, conscious of the grins
+lurking behind the respectful faces about him.  "Tell us plainly, and
+without lying or skipping, what are these papers the fellow has got
+on him?  Put him back on the seat, Braun and Kleiss, and sit on
+either side, each taking a wing.  Now, Kunz, do thou begin!"
+
+And the little sheaf that had been transferred from the horny
+clutches of the Sergeant, to the yellow-stained sensitive-looking
+fingers of the chemist's assistant, was subjected to the scrutiny of
+the weak eyes behind his large round spectacles, as sleepy-looking
+Westphalian villages of cottages with tall tiled roofs, grouped about
+squat, low-spired churches; and leagues of rye and barley, almost
+ready for the sickle, streamed by the half-glazed windows, all black
+in shadow and white in the clear, pure radiance of August's crescent
+moon.
+
+_Item_, a worn letter in English handwriting of the legal kind, dated
+in the January previous, and directed to P. C. Breagh, Esq., Care of
+Frau Busch, Jaeger-strasse, Schwärz-Brettingen.  _Item_, a passport
+issued some ten days previously, to the same person on application at
+the London Foreign Office, on disbursement of the sum of Two
+Shillings, and authorizing him, on payment of the proper dues and at
+his own risk, to proceed _via_ Ostend to Berlin.  _Item_, another
+passport, procured as a last resource--granting the said P. C. Breagh
+permission on the part of the Berlin Foreign Office, and as a
+strictly non-combatant British subject, to transfer himself, _via_
+Belgium and Luxembourg, to French territory.  Lastly, a half-sheet of
+tough Chancellory note-paper, covered with the large, closely-set,
+vigorous handwriting of the man who was meant when newspaper-editors
+and politicians, diplomats and monarchs, guttersnipes and generals,
+talked of Prussia.  What would happen when that came under the
+spectacles of the ex-chemist's assistant?  P. C. Breagh thirsted to
+know.
+
+What happened was, that the Sergeant, rendered impatient by delay on
+the part of the spectacled one, grabbed at the documents and dropped
+them on the unclean floor.  The half-sheet of Chancellory note was
+picked up by Valverden.  He gave it one glance and said, smoothly and
+with an indefinable change in the tone of the voice that P. C. Breagh
+had thought so friendly:
+
+"I would put this paper back with the rest and return them to their
+owner, Herr Sergeant, and prosecute no further inquiries, if I were
+you."
+
+"_Nu_? ... _Was_?  I cannot read the crabbed stuff that is written
+and printed on the other papers," grunted the Sergeant.  "But this
+seems wholesome German....  What says it, then?  Tell us, you, since
+that _gimpel_ in glasses can make nothing of it, for all his brag."
+
+Valverden obeyed and read:
+
+"_The bearer of this is an Englishman, named Patrick Carolan Breagh,
+speaking German with a slight accent.  Height five feet nine inches,
+age 23.  Hair reddish and curling, complexion fresh, much freckled.
+Short, straight nose, gray eyes with dots of yellow, chin square,
+slightly cleft.  Further his desire to proceed with our troops, if
+possible.  I can personally vouch for his honesty and good faith._
+
+[Illustration: signature of Otto von Bismarck]
+
+  "BERLIN,
+    "_July_, 1870."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+P. C. Breagh never heard the order given, but next moment his aching
+wrists were released from the huge, hard grip of Privates Braun and
+Kleiss, and the muscular legs that had affectionately twined about
+his own, were withdrawn.  Subsequently, singly, and in silence, the
+Sergeant handed back the watch, pipe, tobacco-pouch, purse, and
+note-case.  Last of all, Valverden, making a long arm, returned the
+half-sheet of Chancellory note, bearing the signature that had worked
+the miracle, without words, and looking coldly in its owner's face.
+
+"Thanks tremendously! ... I've no doubt I'm to blame for not
+producing my credentials earlier," said Carolan.  "But I'd no notion
+of the rather serious turn things were going to take.  However, all's
+well that ends----"
+
+His smile froze upon his lips, and died out of his eyes as he
+encountered the stare the other turned upon him, answering haughtily:
+
+"I regret that you have suffered some rough handling from my
+comrades, under the wrong impression that you were an agent of the
+French Secret Service.  Admitting that our own side act advisedly in
+employing persons like you, I must say that to me, personally, a spy
+is--a spy!"
+
+"But, hang it! you don't suppose----" Carolan choked out after a
+moment of angry bewilderment.  And with the Sergeant's piggish little
+eyes curiously fixed on him, Valverden answered curtly:
+
+"I suppose nothing.  Excuse me from further conversation."
+
+
+The revolver with its cartridges had not been returned with the other
+articles.  Its owner asked the Sergeant for it, getting in reply only
+a glare.  Thenceforward the long night's journey for one traveler was
+performed in unbroken silence.  P. C. Breagh had been dispatched to
+Coventry by one and all.
+
+Men who conversed spoke in barely-audible whispers, their covert
+glances, like the frigid indifference of Valverden's regard, and the
+extra six inches of seat-space accorded to the holder of the States
+Chancellor's written guarantee, testified to the aroma of suspicion
+that personage's document exhaled.
+
+So at breathless, baking midnight the troop-train clanked into
+Cologne, no longer throbbing with the beat of drums, roaring with
+iron-shod wheels, swarming with men in brass-spiked helmets, choked
+with continuously shouting patriots, as it had been a few hours
+earlier when the Headquarter Staff trains had passed through,--and in
+the close, gray dawn of a thundery day, jolted into Bingen.
+
+Here miles of rolling-stock and numberless engines blocked up the
+metal roads.  Shuttered windows and barricaded doors testified that
+house-owners had temporarily abandoned their property.  Strings of
+barges, laden with Commissariat stores and live-stock, were being
+towed up the Rhine by the gaily painted, white-awninged, paddle-wheel
+steamers familiar to the British tourist, while others were conveying
+voluntarily exiled residents and fugitive visitors down the classic
+stream out of harm's way.
+
+Conveyance by railway--of a kind--was to be had upon terms
+prohibitory to all but the opulent.  And disheveled ladies, pale or
+red with panic, besieged the station-master and his master, the Halt
+Commandant--with prayers, commands and entreaties, for places, but
+for places on some Northward-going train....
+
+
+Something was in the air besides the short, staccato bugle-calls, the
+scream of signal-whistles and the ceaseless beating of the Prussian
+side-drums.  P. C. Breagh knew it, even as a tall, lean, red-faced
+Inspector caught his eye and beckoned him imperiously to quit his
+cage, asking:
+
+"You have a _Legitimation_ to proceed with the troops to Kreuznach?
+No?  Then be good enough to stand aside until I have an opportunity
+of ascertaining why you were originally permitted.  Here is the
+Commandant."
+
+Standing on the whitewashed platform, hot, dusty, unbrushed and
+unwashed, burdened with his unstrapped knapsack, a stout
+walking-stick, a leather-covered, screw topped sling water-bottle,
+some crumpled newspapers and a package of solid sandwiches--thrust
+upon him at one of the previous stopping-places, P. C. Breagh was
+conscious of cutting a sorry figure.  Conscious, too, of Valverden's
+supercilious eye-glass, glittering a few yards off, as he stretched
+his long legs on the platform and talked eagerly with some comrades
+of his own standing, straight-backed, long-legged youngsters, with
+arrogant manners, clear eyes, budding mustaches, newly fledged
+whiskers, broad shoulders and regulation waists.
+
+No new pupil at a young ladies' boarding school, smarting under the
+double stigma of plainness and poverty, no cheaply arrayed debutante
+at a suburban subscription-ball, ever blushed more hotly or winced
+more painfully under the scrutiny of prettier and richer girls, than
+did P. C. Breagh under the glances of these young men.
+
+Not the memory of the Army Service examinations he had failed in
+galled him, or that missed shot for the I.C.S., or the University
+career foregone.  It was the word "spy" that rankled in his memory
+and took the starch out of his self-conceit.
+
+Before the discovery of the Minister's written guarantee, Valverden
+had gossiped with him as an equal--the other Guardsmen had been
+friendly in their rougher way.  The fateful half-sheet of Chancellory
+note had changed everything.  "As though one had blossomed out in
+plague or smallpox," P. C. Breagh had said to himself bitterly.  "And
+I feel like a kind of Ali Baba or somebody, whose talisman would only
+work upside down!"
+
+Even his parting salute had met with grudging acknowledgment.  The
+Sergeant had grunted.  Braun and Kleiss had spat, and looked the
+other way.  Valverden's finger had barely brushed the narrow peak of
+his forage-cap.  Only Kunz, the spectacled ex-chemist's assistant,
+had civilly bidden the parting guest good-day.
+
+He was horribly sore at the treatment received from Valverden.
+Susceptible of hero-worship, warm and sincere in feeling, he had
+taken a liking to the brilliant youngster, three years his junior,
+his superior in social status and in cynical knowledge of the world.
+Was it disgraceful to belong to the Prussian Diplomatic Secret
+Intelligence Department, that ramifying spider-web of invisible
+wires, reaching to the uttermost Kingdoms of the civilized globe, and
+emanating from the Chancellory in the Friedrichstrasse, Berlin?
+
+The Army had its secret agents, an army of them, by Jingo!  Had not
+scraps of conversation reached the ears of P. C. Breagh no later than
+the previous day, relative to a certain dandy Colonel of Prussian
+Field Artillery, who for the past two years had filled the well-paid
+post of lace and ribbon Department Manager at the Paris Bon Marche.
+
+Then why on earth....  But at this juncture the Halt Inspector
+returned with the Commandant, a white-whiskered, potty officer, in
+blue infantry uniform with distinctive white shoulder-straps, beside
+whom stalked a tall, middle-aged Colonel of Uhlans, whose pale eyes,
+unshaded by the tufted schlapka, glittered through steel-rimmed
+glasses, whose teeth were clenched on a familiar meerschaum--and
+whose gaunt, broad-shouldered figure looked better in the dark blue
+cavalry uniform with its yellow plastron and white cross-belt, than
+in Herr von Rosius's Berlin-made private clothes.
+
+For it was undoubtedly Miss Ling's quiet-mannered first-floor lodger,
+who had resigned his post of teacher at the Berners Street Institute
+of Languages when the wire had come from Headquarters, bidding him
+come back and be a cog-wheel in Moltke's big war-machine.  What Mr.
+Knewbit would have called "the blank expression" appeared behind his
+spectacles when they showed him his young fellow-lodger from Coram
+Street.  But he paused when the Commandant halted and began to ask
+questions--which Carolan answered in the German so frequently tested
+on Herr von Rosius.
+
+"How came you to travel from Berlin in a train set apart for the use
+of the Guard Infantry?  Show me your _Legitimations-Kart_ and
+military ticket, if you have one!--You have neither? ... Then how did
+you, against the regulations, obtain permission of the authorities to
+enter a _militär-zug_?  It is inconceivable that you should have
+managed to conceal yourself without connivance of some kind!"
+
+Things were getting close to the Chancellory half-sheet, but it would
+never be displayed with the consent of P. C. Breagh.  He had wild
+ideas of feigning idiocy, of appealing to Von Rosius, but the first
+resource savored of the theater too strongly for adoption, and the
+second--one glance at the hard, ignoring eyes behind the steel-rimmed
+glasses disposed of that for good.
+
+
+At his wits' end, a loud, genial voice hailed him in the English
+language, flavored with the County Dublin brogue.
+
+"By the powers! and there's the face I'm looking for.  Longer by a
+yard than it was when you capped me at Berlin.  Faith! and I stared
+at you with all my eyes, wondering where in the world I'd last beheld
+ye?  Till Chris Brotherton quizzed me and I bet him five shillings
+the place was Fleet Street.  Now, on your honor, was it?  Speak, or
+forever after hold your tongue!"
+
+"Not quite Fleet Street, sir, but hardly a stone's throw from it!"  A
+great wave of unreasonable hope lifted the sinking heart of P. C.
+Breagh.
+
+The big, warm voice and the kind, bright glance that had wrought the
+miracle, belonged to a stout little bearded gentleman of fifty,
+topped with a hard gray Derby, and attired in a pepper-and-salt
+cutaway coat, brown holland vest and neat white hunting-stock, gray
+Bedford cords and shiny black spurred Blucher boots.  Had you met him
+cantering on some plump and well-fed cob along a green lane in the
+Mother Country, you would have taken him--but for the revolver-pouch
+that depended from a neat black leather belt, and the wallet that,
+with its companioning field-glass, was slung across his
+shoulders--for a hard-riding country surgeon or solicitor, of the
+good old English kind.  But P. C. Breagh knew better, and his drab
+world changed to rose-color, as the big voice rolled from the
+capacious chest:
+
+"Hardly a minute's ... Hold on!  For the life of you, don't refresh
+my memory!  What would it be to find one's mental legs getting shaky
+at the start of a new campaign!  Not a stone's throw from Fleet
+Street, did you say? ... By the Beadle of Old Trinity! if you don't
+mean the Maze at Hampton Court or the Nevski Prospect at Petersburg,
+or the garden of the Dilkusha at Lucknow, you're talking of Printing
+House Square!  Am I right now?"
+
+"You've hit the nail, sir!  You were walking arm-in-arm with Mr.
+Sala--and I'd been introduced to him before, luckily! and he
+remembered my name and presented me to you!"
+
+"And I'm five shillings the richer by the meeting.  For if Chris
+Brotherton dares to say the _Thunderbolt_ office and Fleet Street are
+anything but synonymous, he's a bolder man than I take him to be.
+But I'm interrupting a conversation...."  He broke off, saluting the
+official.  "Pray accept my apologies, _Herr_ Commandant, I'll wait
+while you finish with my young friend."
+
+The Commandant stiffly returned the genial salute before he wheeled
+and walked off with the Inspector and Von Rosius, who, while the king
+of British War Correspondents chatted with his glowing vassal, had
+exchanged a few sentences with these personages apart.  Then said the
+kindly little gentleman, with a humorous twirl of the eye at the
+three:
+
+"I claimed your acquaintance because I saw you nearing the jaws of a
+German guardroom.  Though I fancy you'd a friend at Court in that
+Uhlan Colonel there! ... I heard him tell the Commandant that he'd no
+earthly idea how you got here, but you were simply an English
+schoolboy who was crazy to see a war.  And the Commandant said
+something about turning tail at the first whistle of a
+_Bombensplitter_--that's a shell-splinter.  Though I'm pretty certain
+by the cut of your jib you'd do nothing of the kind!"
+
+He added, as a familiar shout of "Entrain!" and a bugle-call brought
+the platform leg-stretchers scampering to their places and the long
+train of gray-painted wagons, officers' horse-boxes and baggage
+trucks, clanked into motion again:
+
+"Your friends of the Guard have gone without you.  Kreuznach will be
+their detraining-point--that's all I can tell you.  For the
+reason--and it's an uncommonly sound one!--that the newly mobilized
+men of the infantry battalions want a march to limber their joints
+and stretch their new boots a bit.  Begad! my own brogues would be
+the better of a day or two on the trees.  But rheumatism and corns
+are the price one pays for experience--and the privilege of talking
+like a daddy to harum-scarum gossoons like yourself.  You've no
+business to be here, boyo! but since you are--use your eyes and
+brains to observe with--never be ashamed of running away when you can
+get out of danger by doing it! and for your mother's sake, if she's
+living--don't be dragged into fighting on a side.  Forget that you
+have a revolver, if that bulge under your jacket means that you carry
+one,--and keep your temper cool and your opinions strictly neutral,
+if a fellow with a drop of Irish blood in him can!  Twit me with Bull
+Run, now, and you'll get the historic answer: 'Do as I advise you to
+do, not what I do!'"
+
+He pulled out the battered gold hunting-watch at the end of its
+short, strong leather guard, and glanced at it, saying with a sigh of
+relief:
+
+"Seven o'clock.  Breakfast ought to be ready at the Victoria--barrack
+of a hostelry, packed with cocky Prussian officers.  Suppose you come
+back there with me and have a bite and sup?"
+
+Dazzling prospect! to a young man given to hero-worship, which the
+historian of "Cromwell" had positively asserted to be good for
+youthful bodies and souls.  P. C. Breagh would have given a great
+deal if Valverden could have heard the invitation....  However, it
+was more likely than not that he had beheld the object of his scorn
+in familiar conversation with the most famous of British War
+Correspondents, as the gray-painted troop-train carried him away.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+That was an enchanted walk for P. C. Breagh, back to the big, bare,
+barrack-like Victoria.  It was the Doctor's generous amends for an
+unintentional slight.  Two days previously, at the Potsdam Railway
+Station, Berlin, when a companion had said to him: "Who's the
+enthusiastic young admirer who kowtowed to you?  English, I should
+say, and you cut him unmercifully,"--he had answered, out of the
+whirl of great affairs:
+
+"I've no notion; but I'll make amends if ever he crosses my path
+again.  It's not my way to hurt a boy."
+
+"Bet you five bob he hails from Fleet Street," the friend had cried;
+and the Doctor had answered:
+
+"If so, he has a claim on me I'm not going to deny."
+
+Dust underfoot made the tread fall as on velvet.  Dust in the air
+parched the throat and got in the eyes.  And the incessant rolling of
+the Prussian side-drums, lanced through with signal whistles and
+sharp bugle-calls, made the hot baked atmosphere quiver, and the play
+of early sunshine on myriads of brass helmet-spikes made the eyes
+water and blink, as the battalions of blue infantry that had marched
+into Bingen on the previous day mustered from their billets, were
+entrained and conjured away; and other battalions that had marched
+fifteen miles since cock-crow tramped in with the thick white dust
+turned to mud upon them by the heavy Rhineland dews that had soaked
+their boots and damped their uniforms, halted but to breakfast--and
+were off, almost on the heels of the first.
+
+Division after Division of Cavalry--Uhlans in light or dark blue
+piped with red, and shiny black Lancer _schapkas_, Cuirassiers in
+white uniforms, with steel breast and back plates, and steel helmets
+simple in design as those of Cromwell's Ironsides; light blue
+Dragoons, Hussars with tufted shakos of miniver, and braided jackets
+of red, black, green, brown and pale blue, with their flying
+batteries of Horse Artillery, their proviant columns and
+ammunition-trains, had been rushed to the frontier with astounding
+speed.  Now the blue deluge of marching men with needle-guns came
+rolling after.  With thunder of heavy siege-trains, with patches of
+green upon the monotonous blue, that stood for picked battalions of
+sharpshooters; sons of gamekeepers and forest-rangers; bred from
+childhood to woodcraft and hunter's lore; experts in the use of the
+rifle, scouts and trackers of daring and skill.
+
+On the seventeenth of July the Warlock had said to his King, "Give me
+to the third of August and we are safe."  This was the third of
+August.  And the air was thick with something besides dust.
+
+Conscious of this, they talked, the neophyte and the adept discussing
+things that had happened during the pregnant interval.  How Forbes of
+the _Daily News_, who tramped it up to Saarbrück by the Nahe Valley
+Road from Kreuznach, had seen the first blood flow, when a couple of
+infantrymen of the garrison were brought in in a chipped condition,
+having been sniped at by red-breeched French marksmen across the
+frontier-line.
+
+With a single battalion of the Hohenzollerns, the 7th Regiment of
+Rhineland Uhlans had hitherto constituted Saarbrück's garrison.  And
+the French being reported in force at Forbach, some fifteen or
+sixteen thousand men being said to be strung out along the frontier,
+a detachment of Uhlans with spare troop-horses had ridden into
+Neunkirchen on the morning of the twenty-fourth of July, and borrowed
+from the collieries a dozen stout miners, armed with picks, and
+supplied with blasting cartridges, fuses, and so on.  These grimy
+stalwarts they tied on troop-horses; crossed the frontier, and blew
+up the viaduct on the railway-line branching from the Forbach-Metz
+railway near Cocheren and connecting Metz with Saarguemines, Bitche,
+Hagenau and Strasbourg.
+
+Thenceafter, nothing of note happened until the twenty-eighth of
+July, when the Emperor Napoleon III. entered Metz with his Staff and
+the heir to the Throne Imperial, and formally took command of the
+seven _corps d'armée_ known as the "Army of the Rhine."  Upon the
+same day, a party of the Hohenzollerns, commanded by an N.C.O.,
+reconnoitering on the right front, flushed a French _vidette_, in a
+wood covering a knoll of rising ground, over the top of which went
+the imaginary frontier-line.
+
+Being shot at, the Hohenzollerns retired to garrison.  But about
+regimental soup-time, twelve or thereabouts, a battery of six French
+field-pieces came over the slope of the Spicherenberg heights,
+getting into position on a plateau half-way down.
+
+And while the Prussian drummers beat to arms; while the Hohenzollerns
+hastily posted their four companies, one on each of the town's three
+bridges, and sent one forward on the heels of a squadron of Uhlans,
+up the Forbach Road, which runs through Saarbrück, rising as it
+trends to the west;--while the rest of the Uhlans stood to their
+horses in the Markt-platz, and the civilian population stopped to
+look on, or scuttled for cover, six shells were fired, three of them
+hitting a little beerhouse on the hill-brow, just off the Forbach
+Road--and the Imperial cannonade was over, the artillerists retired,
+and nothing more had happened,--though the _videttes_ and patrols,
+Gallic and Teuton, had cracked away at each other from high noon till
+batlight.
+
+
+Discussing these things, the adept and the neophyte came to the
+Victoria, every window of which was crowded with Prussian officers,
+eating, drinking and smoking, or shouting for breakfast, coffee,
+beer, wine and tobacco in every key of the human register.
+
+Distracted waiters ran about like ants, and before the packed and
+roaring caravanserai--keeping guard over one of the little decrepit
+iron tables that stood under the dusty acacias--a little table that
+had a fly-spotted cloth upon it, and a great glass basin filled with
+sugar cubes, and was further adorned with brown rings made by the
+bottoms of coffee-cups and beer-glasses, were the two friends
+referred to by P. C. Breagh's Good Samaritan.
+
+One was a handsome, fair-haired, smiling man in the scarlet,
+yellow-faced, gold-adorned uniform of a crack regiment of British
+Light Dragoons, "a swell of the haw-haw type" Mr. Ticking would have
+termed him.  With this splendid personage, who was generally referred
+to as "Major Brotherton," was a shorter, plainer individual with
+fluffy whiskers, attired as for the sports of the field, in a white,
+low-crowned felt, large checked tweeds, in which orange and pink
+predominated, drab leggings and heavily nailed highlows.  A Dolland
+field-glass was slung from his shoulders, and over a neighboring
+chair lay a huge box-coat, the multitudinous pockets of which
+appeared to contain his luggage, for a bath-sponge in a rubber bag
+rolled out of one as he rose up to welcome the leader of the party,
+and a box of areca-nut tooth-paste, and a hairbrush with a patent
+collapsible handle had to be shifted before the sponge could be
+replaced; just as though Mr. Toole had thought out the costume and
+the comic business for some traveling Briton in a new farce.
+
+You may suppose P. C. Breagh blushing from consciousness of the
+contrast of his own travel-stained griminess with the Major's
+dazzling brilliancy, when that personage shook hands with him and
+said it was going to be a hot day.  Introduced by his kindly patron
+to the sportsman in pink and orange tweeds with:
+
+"Tower, this is a young countryman of mine--picked up at the
+station--just tumbled out of a troop-wagon full of Guards
+Infantry----"
+
+The fluffy whiskered sportsman civilly nodded and observed: "And
+dashed good luck for him!"  He added: "Doctor, if you recognized your
+baggage-van by that confounded goat you've had painted on it, I'll
+admit it's served some purpose besides frightening German crows!"
+
+"Begad! it frightened me when I saw it on the siding this morning!"
+avowed the genial Doctor.  "But how was I to know that the Berlin
+painter who undertook to copy the crest from my family coat-of-arms
+had got a magnifying eye?"
+
+Said the man in cavalry uniform, smoothing his drooping mustache, and
+speaking with the drawl of Robertsonian comedy:
+
+"At any rate, the size of the animal testifies to the antiquity of
+your race, and so on.  For in prehistoric days, I take it, goats were
+as big as cows are now!"
+
+"My thanks to you, Brotherton, for supplying so plausible an
+explanation.  I'll salve my pride of pedigree with it next time I'm
+taken for a traveling quack, and Prussian soldiers suffering with
+indigestion apply to me for pills and black-dose."  He added, with
+his pleasant laugh, catching P. C. Breagh's glance of incredulity:
+"Actual fact, and no embroidery, I assure you!  You understand that
+to emphasize the strictly pacific nature of my calling, I'm
+exploiting my honorary degree for all it's worth!"  He added, rather
+pointedly addressing the handsome cavalryman, "I've no special
+ambition to be shot as a combatant!"
+
+"Nor have I," said the man in sporting checks, warmly.  "And,
+Brotherton, my dear fellow, if this 'ere 'umble individual may add
+his advice to the counsel you've already had from the man, by Jove!
+who of all men knows best what he's talkin' about, you'll stow that
+'ere lady-killing uniform, and the silver helmet with the flowin'
+plume away in some spare portmanteau, and leave 'em with your saber
+and the dazzlin' horse-furniture you showed me this morning in charge
+of the landlord here, until you come back from the war-path safe and
+sound.  Am I talking 'oss sense, Doctor?"
+
+"Indeed you are, Tower!" agreed the Doctor.  "And, Chris, if you'll
+listen to him, I'll be eternally grateful to you, for your own sake.
+You've too much of what Tower and the Yankees call 'horse sense' not
+to know you're handicapped as a war correspondent by your glorious
+panoply!"
+
+The Major smiled, and said, smoothing the drooping mustache with a
+fine white hand that wore a diamond-set signet:
+
+"You can't blame me for thirsting to carry the harness I've worn in
+sham fights for nearly half my lifetime, where bullets are flying in
+real earnest?"
+
+"Not a bit, dear fellow," said the Doctor, with a twinkle, "so long
+as you thirst to do it and don't!  That letter 'R' on your
+shoulder-cord is hardly big enough to serve as cover where those
+bullets are plentiful.  And with your influence, prospects in life,
+and position, you'd be an ingrate to Fate if you were anxious to die
+at thirty-four."
+
+Said Brotherton, knitting his fair eyebrows over the restless fire in
+his handsome eyes:
+
+"Influence has been my bane, and the two other things have stood in
+my light ever since I was an urchin in knickerbockers.  I've been
+Queen's page, and Prince's Equerry, and _aide-de-camp_ on the Duke's
+Staff, and I've never seen an army in the field, or smelt powder,
+except at Aldershot, or Shorncliffe, or the Curragh of Kildare, or at
+carbine-practice.  What luck do you call that?"
+
+"Dashed hard!" said Tower.
+
+Brotherton went on:
+
+"I was a callow cadet at Sandhurst when the Regiment covered itself
+with glory at Balaclava, and as it has seen no active service
+since--I've had no chance to find out whether I'm a real soldier, or
+a kid-glove one."
+
+"Why not have exchanged----" began Tower.  The Major shook his head.
+
+"It wasn't to be done, for a very solid reason.  My father, who
+served with Redlett's Brigade in the Crimea, was killed on Balaclava
+Day; and I was an only son.  And my mother was a confidential
+Lady-in-Waiting, and knew where to apply, by Jove! when my youthful
+ambition was to be cold-watered....  And now that the dear soul has
+gone, and I'm on the Retired list--after fifteen years of Windsor,
+Buckingham Palace, Whitehall, Pall Mall and Hyde Park--out breaks the
+war that I've been sighing for.  And, after hovering about the
+_Thunderbolt_ office till every printer's devil knows me by name, and
+cooling my heels on the doorstep of your chambers in the Albion so
+persistently that your housekeeper believed me a bailiff with a
+writ--I managed to knock over Opportunity on the wing--and secured,
+thanks to you, Doctor! the chance of my life!"
+
+He stood up, a handsome, martial figure in his scarlet and golden
+uniform, his eyes ablaze under the silver, gold-starred, white-plumed
+helmet, his fine face flushed with the battle-lust.  And as he
+stretched out his hand across the spotty tablecloth, the feasting
+flies rose in a buzzing cloud.
+
+"And glad am I if word of mine helped to get that chance for you, and
+you know it, Chris, and that it's a pleasure to have you with me,"
+said the genial voice, as the Doctor took the offered hand.  "But the
+military array, my dear fellow!  The wampum and war-paint--that's
+what I kick at, with my gouty toe of fifty-two."  He added: "But here
+comes the waiter with the coffee and eggs, and bread and butter, and
+something like the cold sliced ham I'm dying for--if only it doesn't
+happen to be raw!  So sit down and we'll fortify ourselves against
+possible short-commons at Mayence.  For that's where the King is,
+with Moltke and the Great Headquarters.  And that's the destination
+we take rail for at twelve noon."
+
+He added, as Brotherton and Tower started in their chairs, and P. C.
+Breagh quivered like a fox-terrier shown a rat: "As for the other
+chiefs, the Red Prince is--no one seems able to tell where--and the
+Crown Prince is on the frontier.  Maybe we'll hear of him at
+Wissembourg by-and-by!"
+
+"We should be there ourselves, in the thick of it," asserted
+Brotherton, savagely slashing at a pallid pat of butter, as Tower
+poured boiling milk and coffee into cups half-an-inch thick.
+
+"We would be, Chris, me dear man!" said the Doctor, liberally piling
+slices of cold veal and ham-sausage on his guests' plates, cutting
+bread and passing the pickles, "if the authorities panted to have
+English correspondents at their elbows while they're posting their
+pawns and pieces for the opening game!"
+
+Brotherton retorted with a touch of pomposity:
+
+"You take it lightly, sir.  But for the honor of our profession, we
+should extort recognition at the hands of these foreigners.  We
+should, as representatives of a great Power, submit to no belittling.
+Wielding as we do----"
+
+"Keep all that toffee for the speechmaking end of a Newspaper Press
+dinner, Chris, my boy," drolled the Doctor.  "Sure, 'tis we ourselves
+are the foreigners here--hard as it is of conception to a true-born
+Briton.  And--since we're permitted on sufferance to accompany the
+forces of United Germany--the least we can do is to extract the
+necessary information painlessly!"
+
+"But, my God! when I think of what may be doing at this moment!"
+broke out Brotherton, hitting the table, "I feel as if I should go
+stark, staring crazy!  Have I sacrificed what I have
+sacrificed--and--and borne what I have borne, to trot like a stray
+tyke at the tail of a moving Army--picking up such scraps as may be
+thrown me from day to day?  I tell you, sir, the mere idea is
+horrible to me!  I cannot put it more mildly.  My blood is not yet
+chilled by age, or my susceptibilities blunted...."  He pushed away
+his plate and rose, pulling his gloves from his belt, and taking up
+the cloak that had been thrown over a neighboring chair.  "I will ask
+you to excuse me!  I have not yet received my papers back from the
+Halt Commandant.  I will call upon him now!"
+
+"Come with you, if you've no objection to walking in civilian
+company?" said Tower, swallowing a mouthful, emptying his coffee-cup,
+and reaching for the white felt hat and the box-coat.
+
+"Come back about ten--I may have a scrap or two of news worth
+hearing," said the Doctor, with imperturbable good temper; and with a
+horsey touch of the hat on Tower's part, and a sulkily dignified
+salute from the Major, the tall soldierly figure in its scarlet and
+blue and gold, and the less dignified personality in the clothes that
+might have been worn by Toole in the part of a horsey squire, went
+away together, over the yellow-burnt grass and the dusty sun-baked
+gravel, dotted with little breakfasting groups of officers, who had
+been crowded out of the Hotel.
+
+"I'm glad Tower's gone with him.  He's in a frame of mind that won't
+make for pleasant relations with Prussian transport-officers," quoth
+the Doctor, looking after the retreating couple with something like a
+twinkle and something like a sigh.  "But he's a grand fellow!--a
+splendid fellow is Brotherton!--even if he sometimes reminds me of
+the Quaker wife who said to her husband: 'Friend Timothy, all the
+world is wrong except thee and me, and thou is a little wrong
+sometimes, Friend Timothy!'"
+
+And having got rid of his vexation in one gentle gibe at the
+idiosyncrasy of the petulant Brotherton, he fell to his breakfast
+again, urging his guest to a renewed attack on the strong ham-sausage
+and weak coffee, with the words:
+
+"Bad policy--neglecting rations.  Must stoke when fuel for the human
+engine is to be had, if you're going to chronicle the deeds of an
+army that fights as it marches.  And when you've cleaned your plate,
+and drunk another cup of coffee, you shall tell me why you came here
+and what you want to do."
+
+He commented, when P. C. Breagh, duly replete, had stated the nature
+of his aims and ambitions; touching upon his discouragements as
+briefly as might be:
+
+"War Correspondence! ... Well, I'll admit I guessed that you'd set
+your heart on something of the kind, when I saw you tumble out of
+that troop-wagon with a note book sticking out of your jacket-pocket.
+And so old Knewbit financed?  Sporting of him!--and he deserves that
+his letters should be worth reading.  Call 'em 'Experiences of a Tyke
+at the Tail of an Army.'"  He added, his bright brown eyes twinkling
+through their gold-rimmed glasses.  "For that's where you've got to
+be!"
+
+He lighted a huge cigar, twisted round his green-painted iron chair
+and sat astride upon it, resting on its rickety back his folded arms,
+short and strong, with small muscular hands, sunburned like his
+bearded face and thick bull-neck.
+
+"I am not joking, my young acquaintance.  Can't you understand that
+to keep abreast with even a secondary Staff in the war-field you have
+to sweat out money at every pore?  And--without gold for transport or
+thalers for _trinkgelt_--or seasoned knowledge to help you even if
+your pockets were full, what can you accomplish?  I tell you
+frankly--nothing at all!  But if you'll follow on the fringe of a
+Division, marching with the hangers-on and officers' servants--you'll
+get many a scrap of useful news and many a meaty bone of valuable
+information tossed to you day by day.  And even with the rear of the
+Army Corps you elect to stick to, you'll sup your fill of raw-head
+and bloody bones--take the assurance from me.  Will you--with the
+advice?"
+
+The great man was so unassuming in his kindness that the little one
+hardly grasped the full extent of it, even as he said, blinking as
+though a cinder of the Lower Rhineland Railroad had got into his eye:
+
+"Yes, sir, and thank you!  I shall never forget how good you've been
+to me!" and got reply:
+
+"You've no business to be here, boyo, but since you are, more by luck
+than grace, use your eyes and stuff your memory with things worth
+keeping.  Now as my time is precious,--is there anything more you
+want to know?"
+
+"Only one thing....  I have been puzzled by an--an incident that
+happened to a--fellow in my own position."  P. C. Breagh boggled
+horribly: "Was regularly set on getting to the Front--hadn't a notion
+how to set about it--when he--accidentally--managed to get hold of
+a--kind of official authorization.  An informal pass, certifying the
+bearer as trustworthy--written and signed by Count Bismarck
+himself...."
+
+"And that wasn't half bad," the Doctor said, knocking the ash off the
+huge cigar, "for a beginner pretty well, it seems to me!"
+
+Said P. C. Breagh:
+
+"He was tremendously elated at having got the paper.  It seemed to
+smooth away every difficulty.  But later, when he found himself in
+touch with Prussian Army men--they,--not only the gentlemen privates
+qualifying for commissions, but the common rankers,--dropped him like
+a hot potato once they knew!  And--I'd like to know the reason why
+they cut me--I mean him?--because they supposed him to belong to the
+Secret Intelligence Department?  '_A spy is--a spy!  Excuse me from
+further conversation!_'  His mouth twisted wryly, repeating the
+hateful words.
+
+"I--understand."  The Doctor stroked his beard.  "And previously this
+young Englishman and the rank-and-file of the Guard Infantry"--P. C.
+Breagh kept as straight an upper-lip as was possible--"had chatted
+together upon friendly terms?"
+
+"That was it.  He had got on splendidly with them--one fellow
+especially.  And--it hurt, being suddenly sent to Coventry!..."
+
+"And does it strike you"--there was infinite sagacity in the clear
+brown eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses, "that if you had been
+chatting freely with a supposed equal, about your own position,
+prospects, and opinions, you would have 'dropped him like a hot
+potato' if you had suspected him of being commissioned to sound you
+for French sympathies, predilections, and so forth--on the eve of
+hostilities with France?"
+
+A light broke in upon the darkness in which Carolan had groped.  His
+eyes became circular, and his mouth shaped for a whistle.  He
+exploded:
+
+"Oh, hang it!  I never thought of anything so--so beastly....  I
+wondered why Valverden shied, supposing me a Secret Information
+agent, when the Army has shoals of 'em....  But that Government
+should set such fellows sniffing at the heels of the Army--of course
+I never thought of that.  It's not--cricket, is it, sir?"
+
+The Doctor's hearty laugh pulled round the heads of a breakfasting
+party of officers not far off.  He said, lowering his voice:
+
+"You remember the nigger's definitions of verse and prose, don't you?
+'_Go up mill-dam, fall down slam! dat verse.  Go up mill-dam, fall
+down whoppo, dat blank verse._'  Prussian military authority may
+hold, that between spying on the enemy before the Army and spying on
+the Army before the enemy, there is as little distinction.  Though
+they'd think differently at the Horse Guards, thank the Lord!  By the
+way, with regard to that gaunt, long-legged Lieutenant-Colonel of
+Uhlans of the Landwehr who claimed to know something of you, rather
+luckily for your ambitions!--where did you come across him?  '_An
+English schoolboy,' he called you, 'crazy to see War!_'"
+
+P. C. Breagh explained:
+
+"He did know something of me, sir!--though it was the merest
+chance--our meeting.  Until a week ago he was a teacher of English at
+the Berners Street Institute of Languages, and lodged at my
+landlady's.  And they recalled him to Berlin a few hours before the
+Declaration of War."
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+It was the Doctor's turn to whistle.
+
+"Phew!  So that's how they spy out and trap deserters from their
+Reserve and _Landwehr_.  Clever--uncommonly!  Possibly it's not
+business to tell you, but you've given away a genuine bit of
+information.  And as a lesson in caution for the future, I shall
+annex your nugget--do you hear?  In return--I've a pass for an extra
+groom who has shot the moon with three weeks' double pay in advance,
+the cowardly beggar!  And--supposing you're not too proud--I'll take
+you with me as far as Mayence."
+
+"I don't know how to thank you, sir!"
+
+"Leave thanking for the present."  He pulled out the gold
+chronometer, secured by its twisted thong.  "Ten o'clock, and here
+come Towers and Brotherton, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, '_with
+a kind of confession in their looks which their modesties have not
+craft enough to color_.'  No news to be had?  No starting for Mayence
+before twelve sharp, in spite of honied entreaties lavished on the
+authorities?"
+
+"Deuce a scrap!"
+
+"Devil a minute!"
+
+They threw themselves upon chairs, hot, dusty and panting.  They had
+got their papers back, countersigned, from a kind of understrapper,
+after, to do him justice, very little delay.  But of intelligence,
+not a modicum was obtainable, except that the Emperor was said to be
+close to the frontier near Saarbrück at the head of the Imperial
+Guards.
+
+"Though they've been saying that for forty-eight hours," grumbled
+Tower, "and I'm dam' if I call it anything but Ancient History."
+
+At which candid confession the Doctor's mouth twitched under the
+thick, curling mustache of rusty iron-gray.  He said, his quick eye
+noting an excited stir and bustle about the thronged entrance of the
+hotel, and the crowding of officers about another, who had a paper in
+his hand:
+
+"Those officers have heard--something that is not Ancient History.
+And look at the fellows who were eating at the tables in the windows;
+they've something tastier to discuss now than the landlord's
+indifferent grub!"
+
+It was true.  In the long dining-room, in the restaurant, and in the
+reading-room, which had been converted into a temporary coffee-room,
+men were swarming like bees and buzzing like them, while detached,
+staccato sentences shaped out of the buzz.
+
+"Saarbrück ... Spicheren ... Frossard ... Colonel von Pestel...."
+
+"Something up...."  Towers adjusted his eyeglass.  Brotherton,
+catching a sentence shouted by an officer of a _jäger_ battalion to
+another green-coat leaning from a window on the second-floor, jumped
+as though he had been prodded with a bayonet, and turned a flaming
+face upon his friend:
+
+"A telegram has come in...  There has been serious fighting at
+Saarbrück.  Did they lie to us at the station, then?  Officers and
+gentlemen----"
+
+"Softly, Chris!"  The Doctor's hand upon his arm checked him on the
+verge of a fiery outburst.  "I fancy they've a right to hold back
+intelligence dispatched from Headquarters when the senders mark the
+wire '_Delay_.'"
+
+"No doubt, but I had better interview the Commandant.  Details would
+be worth having!" said Brotherton, adding with a peculiar smile, "Or
+at least I, in my inexperience, am inclined to think so."
+
+Came the quick answer:
+
+"You can have details now--without troubling the Commandant!
+Full--well, as fully as I got them--under a strict undertaking of
+secrecy for four hours--at six o'clock this morning!"
+
+Brotherton turned as ashen-pale as he had hitherto been crimson.
+Towers called out gleefully, as active little thrills of excitement
+coursed down P. C. Breagh's spine:
+
+"Bravo, Doctor!  And you had it up youi sleeve all the time.
+'Unfold, thou man of 'orrid mystery!' as Miss Le Grange says at
+Astley's in the _Specter's Bride_."
+
+"There's not so much to unfold.  But from, eight thousand to ten
+thousand French troops made an attack on Saarbrück yesterday.  Some
+battalions of the 8th Prussian Army Corps had augmented the original
+garrison, and their nearest support was at Lebach, five miles to the
+rear.  A mitrailleuse-battery and some field-guns posted on the
+Keppertsberg drove the Blue Uniforms out of the town!"
+
+Towers said: "Then why the deuce..." and broke off.  Brotherton
+gloomed heavily.  The Doctor went on:
+
+"The Emperor and the Prince Imperial were on the heights, with the
+Imperial Staff, to see the show--an astonishing spectacle it must
+have been.  Frossard, in the center with supports drawn from the
+Second Corps--Marshal Bazaine on the right, with troops picked from
+the Third.  And in command of the Fifth Corps, De Failly, who crossed
+the river at Saarguemines."
+
+Queried Tower:
+
+"And when the big bow-wow had made the little one drop the bone, he
+didn't stick to it?"
+
+The Doctor returned:
+
+"No--and that's the puzzle of the whole affair.  The whole glorious
+display resolved itself into a cannonade, with occupation of the
+heights on the left bank, and nothing further.  Though the French
+foreposts actually occupied the three bridges and held the town."
+
+Tower said, his pale eyes sharp with intelligence:
+
+"Bet you a tenner it was done for the boy.  Got up to blood the
+young'un--cockerel of the Walk Imperial.  Geewhillikins!--What
+telegrams Nap must have fired off to St. Cloud!"
+
+"They'll have read them in Berlin and London long before they get to
+us," said the Doctor, shrugging.  "Where are you off to, Brotherton?"
+
+Brotherton returned--and the tone was offensive, if the words were
+not:
+
+"To do what my senior Special does not appear to think
+necessary--wire the news to Printing House Square."
+
+The elder answered with a good-humored twinkle:
+
+"Why, that was done hours back, by grace of the authorities.  They
+bridled my tongue, but left my pen unhampered.  Knowing, of course,
+that the British Public must wait for its news until breakfast-time
+to-morrow.  Were you speaking to me, Brotherton?"
+
+The Major was saying in a voice as little like his own as the livid
+mask of rage he turned on the Doctor resembled his ordinarily calm
+and placid visage:
+
+"I was addressing you, though it pleased you not to hear me.  I was
+asking you what you meant, by G----! in stealing a march on the man
+you've called your friend?"
+
+The Doctor's eyes blazed behind their gold-rimmed glasses.  Anger
+darkened his handsome sunburnt face.  He drew himself up and said,
+speaking simply and with dignity:
+
+"How do you infer that I have 'stolen a march on you'?  By taking the
+apology they give one here for a cold tub at cockcrow and going over
+to the Hauptmann's office with our papers while you and Tower were
+sleeping like----"
+
+"Like dormice, by Gad!" put in Tower.  "And so we were.  And it's a
+case of the early bird--and not the first time, I'll swear--by
+thousands!  And, Brotherton--you ought to apologize.  You were simply
+infernally rude just now!"
+
+Said the Major loftily:
+
+"I gave it as my opinion that I had been dealt with unfairly.  I do
+not withdraw the words I used.  But I comprehend that my senior in
+the service of the paper is not anxious to share the credit of the
+earliest intelligence with regard to what is taking place on the
+frontier just now."
+
+"For God's sake, Chris, don't say what you'll be sorry for!"
+
+"I'll say what I think, to you, sir, or to the King of Prussia!"
+
+The gray-bearded, strongly-featured face, with the look of generous
+sorrow on it, and the younger, fairer, handsomer face, with the stamp
+of arrogance and vanity and pride marring its manly beauty,
+confronted each other in silence, until, with an impatient snarl,
+Brotherton swung round upon his heel.
+
+"Look here!--look here!--where the merry hell are you off to?" Tower
+spluttered, grabbing at the sleeve of the splendid scarlet tunic.
+"Not going to part company for a misunderstanding--hey?"
+
+"I am going to part company," Brotherton returned bitterly, freeing
+himself from the detaining hand, "since the jealousy that hampered me
+in my military career threatens to mar my prospects now.  Where I am
+going to I cannot tell you--probably you will hear from me, but I
+cannot promise it.  Good-bye!  Or--if you prefer it--_Auf
+wiedersehen_!"
+
+He shook hands with Tower, nodded coldly to the astonished P. C.
+Breagh, formally saluted the Doctor, who returned with a slight bow,
+picked up his cap and cloak and strode away over the sun-dried grass
+and the hot yellow gravel, making for the gaudily painted iron gates
+that ended the drive.
+
+"Oh, Chris, man-alive, and am I jealous of ye?" said the Doctor, his
+spectacles dewy with irrepressible laughter, as the gallant figure in
+its gorgeous scarlet and golden trappings was swallowed in a crowd of
+blue uniforms: "If you'd waited another minute, I'd have told you of
+something else your senior in the service of the paper by seventeen
+years, some odd days, and a minute or two isn't anxious to share with
+you, and that is a reputation for not being a hot-headed,
+unreasonable young ass!"
+
+"He's making a bee-line for the Railway Station," said Tower, wiping
+his heated forehead with a gaudily-hued silk handkerchief, "and if he
+comes across any of those Transport swells there'll be the deuce to
+pay.  He's got the bit in his teeth and his tail tight down over the
+ribbons, by George!--and he'll kick the trap to pieces and lame
+himself to a dead certainty.  Shall I go after him and try to
+_soother_ him down a bit?"
+
+The Doctor shrugged assent.
+
+"If you think 'twill be any good! ... Meanwhile I have to write a
+letter or two, and pack, or rout my man out of the servants' quarters
+to do it.  As for you, my boyo!"--he turned on P. C. Breagh a keen,
+humorous glance that summoned up blushes to mantle under the railway
+grime--"a wash and brush-up will do you no harm, and besides--my
+absconding Berliner isn't described on his passport as a mulatto!"
+
+
+Tower came back in half an hour, reporting failure in the attempt to
+pacify Brotherton, who nevertheless joined the Doctor's little party
+at the station, having apparently recovered his serenity of temper,
+and abandoned his determination to forswear his senior's company.
+
+Beer, coffee, bread and meat were still being lavishly distributed
+among the troops continually parading for departure, and the
+train-loads of soldiers passing through.  And the exodus of
+panic-stricken visitors, flying from the little up-Rhine watering
+places, in apprehension of the arrival of the Emperor with his
+mitrailleuses, continued; until, in another hour, the shrunken finger
+of the Warlock wagged, and thenceforth the Rhine Valley Railways were
+totally blocked for civilian passengers, and given over to the
+transport of men and munitions of war.
+
+Presently, when a train of coal-trucks from Kreuznach came jolting
+into Bingen, bearing on their sable flanks the chalk hieroglyphics
+that signified their official emptiness, P. C. Breagh was destined to
+behold personages of the loftiest rank and the utmost exclusiveness,
+German Serene Highnesses, Austrian Duchesses, and English peeresses,
+with their children and lap-dogs, their maids, _chefs_, coachmen,
+lackeys, and grooms, packed into these grimy vehicles without
+precedence or selection, or any seating-accommodation other than that
+afforded by an empty sack or an armful of straw.
+
+The troop-train conveying the mounted gendarmerie of the Third Army
+Corps--huge men equipped as dragoons--to Mayence, afforded
+accommodation to the men, horses and vans of the Doctor's party.
+Long before the fortifications came in sight the roads were blotted
+out by marching columns, and the fields were dotted with moving
+transport-trains.
+
+At Mayence, whose stone-paved streets were roaring with the passage
+of iron-shod wheels, the trampling of iron-shod hoofs, and the
+measured tramping of infantry battalions, the Doctor, stepping from
+the train, was seized upon by friends.  Yet after the first eager
+interchange of interrogations and answers, he found time to bestow a
+parting hand-grip on Carolan and a final word of advice.
+
+"And--put this in your pocket--it'll be a help to you if it doesn't
+hang you.  They're lithographed by the Prussian War Department, and
+every German officer has one.  And here's something else, a lot more
+use than the revolver those chaps stole from you.  You'll know better
+than to use it unless in case of need!"
+
+This was a folding pocket-map of the Eastern Departments of France,
+with certain military routes very nicely marked in red upon it.
+While the something else proved to be a wicker-covered metal
+pocket-flask, containing about half-a-pint of the whisky of Kinahan.
+
+The donor added:
+
+"Remember, train your memory to pigeon-hole things for later
+description, and never be caught taking notes, or fighting on a side!
+And--be on your guard with women, pretty ones especially.
+And--there's a scrap of paper in the pocket of the map-cover, may
+come in handy, at a pinch.  No, no thanks!  General von Reigen,
+that's the light blue Würtemburg Hussar officer talking to
+Tower--tells me Moltke and his staff are quartered at the Hotel de
+Holland.  If so, the King won't be far off.  He thinks Bismarck has
+gone to a house outside the town, but he can't swear to it.  There
+goes a carriage with the Red Prince's big buck-nigger on the box.
+Shows his Highness must be somewhere hereabouts.  As for the Crown
+Prince, nobody will say anything.  He's marching--with an end in
+view.  And they say the French are shooting uncommonly badly--and
+that half of the Reserve men don't know how to use their chassepots.
+Well, they'll have practice enough before long.  Good luck, and
+good-bye!"
+
+The "scrap of paper," upon later examination, proved to be a
+five-pound note, placed there by the hand that later penned those
+wonderful war-letters--under a wayside hedge, at a corner of a plank
+bivouac-table, on the zinc counter of a wine-shop filled with
+carousing soldiers--at the ebony and tortoiseshell _éscritoire_ of
+Madame la Marquise, in the boudoir of the château that had been so
+sorely battered by those big potatoes of Moltke's.
+
+Kind little, great man; a whole chestful of Orders had no power to
+chill the big warm heart that prompted your many deeds of generosity.
+It molders in a coffin now, and the decorations are dimming with dust
+in a glass-topped box.  But beyond the Veil that parts the seen from
+the unseen world, I like to think that there were waiting for you
+rewards and honors, in comparison with which the most coveted earthly
+insignia were vilest dirt and dross.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+Said the sutler-woman, whose coarse black hair was powdered white as
+any lady's of the early eighteenth century, smearing the dust from
+the peonies of her cheeks with a brawny arm that was dusty as any
+miller's:
+
+"Young man, if thou stick to thy word, and take good care of the
+jackass, remembering the sharp nail-spike in the end of the whip-butt
+if he tries to kick or bite--I'll creep in under the tilt and take a
+forty-winks.  Lord be thanked! my legs are sound, but they ache a
+bit!"
+
+The jackass, who boasted the not inglorious name of "Rumschottel,"
+laid back his ears viciously at his mistress's reference to the
+persuasive spike in the whip-butt, and the young man addressed by his
+temporary employer nodded in assent without opening his lips.  For
+the dust in which the little tilt-cart moved was almost solid, being
+kicked up by the Seventh Corps of the Second Army of Germany, in line
+of march through the Haardt Wald by Kaiserslautern.
+
+The sutler-woman's young man had marched with the Fifth Corps from
+Mayence by Oppenheim and Alzey, and had picked up an American tourist
+who knew of a short cut to Kaiserslautern, and had mislaid the Army
+Corps in trying to find it.  Staffs, squadrons, batteries,
+battalions, transport and baggage had vanished like smoke among these
+vineyard-and-forest-clad hills, these pine-jacketed gorges, these
+roads that ran between natural ramparts of granite, or passed through
+quaint villages tucked under hillsides crimson and gold with laden
+appletrees, and dominated by ancient castles perched on towering
+platforms of rock.
+
+Scenery palls when the thigh-bones seem wearing through their
+sockets; when the stomach complains for very emptiness, and there are
+bloody blisters inside the ragged socks.  The American who had been
+so cocksure about the road to Kaiserslautern was lying up under a
+peasant's penthouse-thatch, at a twenty-mile distant village,
+drinking Kirsch, nursing his own skinless heels, and reading up
+"Murray."  His late companion had refused to give in, and
+perseverance had won its reward.  Sixty miles or so above Kreuznach,
+where the main road forks right and left, climbing the shoulders of
+the Nahe Valley, he had met the Ninth Corps of the Second Army
+marching up from Bingen, and hobbled at the heels of one of the dusty
+battalions until he could hobble no more.
+
+The sutler-woman had come upon him sitting pumped-out by the wayside,
+had sold him bread, coffee and sausage, doctored his blisters,
+supplied him with tallowed strips of linen to replace his wornout
+socks, earned his gratitude, and displayed no reluctance to profit by
+her philanthropy, when he had volunteered to help lead the jackass as
+far as Kaiserslautern.  True, he spoke a most vile jargon, but you
+cannot have everything.  And the weather was so beautifully dusty,
+thought the sutler-woman, that an assistant would certainly be of
+use.  Without the dust that clogs the human throat, the trade in
+liquid lubricants would be less roaring.  And the tilt-cart
+contained, beside other marching-requisites, a twenty-gallon barrel
+of rather luke-warm beer.
+
+The young man nodded again as the cart-shafts tilted in the
+hame-straps, and a command to throw his weight on the front-board was
+issued from behind.  There was a good deal of creaking as he obeyed.
+A heavy weight suddenly added to the jackass's load made Rumschottel
+look malevolently round his near-side blinker, and display an upper
+row of long orange-colored teeth in testimony of his desire to bite.
+Then his driver slid off the board, took the rope reins, and
+continued to trudge beside him, keeping well to the low hedgerow so
+as to leave a clear space between the sutler's cart and the seemingly
+endless column of dusty infantrymen, striding steadily forward
+through a blazing August noon.
+
+Ahead, where black-and-white and white-and-black lance-pennons
+flickered at the turn of the road below a steep hill-shoulder covered
+with bronzing vineyards heavy with purpling grapes, the light-blue of
+a Prussian Dragoon regiment and the facings of a squadron of Red
+Uhlans showed through the thick coating of dust that clung to horse
+and man.  But the dark uniforms of a succeeding battery of Horse
+Artillery and the indigo or rifle-green of the battalions that
+marched with the needle-gun, had long ago given place to a pervasive
+whitey-brown.
+
+Schmidt, Klaus, and Klein were pressing on in spite of dust and an
+eighty-five-in-the-shade thermometer, you must understand, so as not
+to get left out of the fighting that must be going on ahead.  For the
+First and Second Corps of the Second Army, with the Headquarters
+Staff, were known to have reached Homburg, and on the previous night
+the Army of the Crown Prince had bivouacked behind the Klingbach,
+south of Landau....  Five or six in the morning, supposing him to
+have marched at dawn, would see him well across the frontier.  And
+scouts on the hills had heliographed and flag-signaled the arrival of
+Imperial battalions and artillery at Wissembourg, and blue Baden
+Dragoons reported a cavalry camp at Selz.  For all they knew, "Unser
+Fritz" and the Napoleon were even then at grips.
+
+So they marched--as they had marched since they detrained at Bingen,
+swinging starkly on under the weight of the knapsack, eighty rounds
+of ammunition, rolled great-coat, camp-kettle, sword, spade,
+water-bottle, haversack and bread-roll, or half-a-dozen flint-hard
+brown biscuits threaded together on a bit of string.
+
+Men sweated and blistered under the relentless sun, but not many fell
+out, and there were very few severe cases of sunstroke, these for the
+most part falling to the lot of Reservists.  And in the hottest part
+of the day a plump of thunder broke among the hills eastward, and a
+deluge that followed turned the dust on them to paste.  Then the sun
+came out again and baked the paste hard; and the sutler-woman stuck
+her head out between the front flaps of the cart-tilt, and told her
+young man to pull up for a bit of a rest and a snack.
+
+So P. C. Breagh unharnessed Rumschottel, and the jackass rolled in a
+sandy hollow in asinine fashion, and rose up braying and refreshed.
+Then, quite mildly submitting to be hobbled by his mistress, he
+fell-to upon a patch of thistles that the battery-wheels had spared.
+And the sutler-woman, who answered to the name of Krumpf, produced
+black bread and cheese, with peppery sausage of Brunswick, and a
+mighty tin bottle of cold milk-coffee, from the depths of her
+vehicle, and liberally dispensed of these refreshments to her
+servitor.  She partook of them herself, largely, lacing her own mug
+of coffee out of a private bottle of _schnaps_.
+
+"_Herr Je!_" she grumbled presently, "what is he gaping at?"  For her
+young man had finished eating, and was absorbed in watching marching
+legs....  She added, snorting scornfully: "We might sit here and
+sleep for three hours, and they would still be going by when we woke
+up....  Horses' legs and men's legs, just as though they had got
+clockwork inside them....  It was so in Schleswig-Holstein, and it
+will be so in France.  And what the Danes got the French will get,
+and that will be a thumping!"  She nodded directly afterward and
+dozed heavily, leaning her broad back against the wheel of her cart.
+
+Perhaps she slept a quarter-of-an-hour while the dusty men marched
+by, four abreast, without slackening pace or changing step.  They had
+hard-featured, serious, intelligent faces for the most part, thought
+P. C. Breagh, though here and there was a visage that bore the stamp
+of vice upon it, or was pimply with drink, or brutal, or merely sly.
+They had ceased to sing, though their bivouac of the night before had
+been patriotically vocal; the dusty instruments of the bandsmen came
+less frequently out of their dustier bags.  They marched for the most
+part in silence, though the trampling of their feet made the solid
+ground reverberate.
+
+Sometimes a battalion would quit the road, and hedges would go down
+before it as by magic; and through the middle of a field of browning
+corn or whitening barley a broad white highway would be beaten hard
+as any threshing-floor, bare of anything save the most insignificant
+tokens of their passage, such as a covey of late-hatched partridge
+chicks trampled into rags, a broken strap, a fragment of biscuit, a
+scattering of potato-peels, an empty match-box, the paper that had
+held an ounce of tobacco, and many empty bottles that had held beer.
+Rarely, a great scurry in the dust where some obstreperous charger
+had reared and fallen with his rider, the extent of whose injuries
+might be guessed by a clotted puddle of drying blood and a broken
+stirrup-iron.  Thus, under the rhythmical tread of the dusty boots,
+as under the iron-shod wheels and iron-shod hoofs that had preceded
+and would follow them--green things were beaten from the face of
+earth, and fur and feather fled, as they were flying before the Third
+Army, marching toward Wissembourg; as they were flying before
+Steinmetz, bringing the First Army from the North.
+
+Where they halted they left their taint by the scorched hedgerows,
+and the black circles of their great fires remained to tell of them,
+like the soil-pits that scarred the fields where they had bivouacked.
+Last night, by some delusion of the wearied senses of sight and
+hearing, they had seemed to the boy who had slept on the outskirts of
+their camp to be marching even as they slept.  The lusty snoring of
+the countless swathes of sleepers between the long, orderly rows of
+stacked needle-guns topped with gilt-spiked helmets, suggested the
+rushing of a host in onward motion.  When the boy who had lain
+through the night under the sutler-woman's cart to guard it from
+light-fingered marauders had fallen into a troubled slumber, his
+blistered feet had carried him on in dreams behind them still.  Then
+in the blue dusk before dawn cavalry trumpets far ahead and shrill
+bugles near at hand had shrilled reveillé--and when the tremendous
+war-machine rushed on again once more, the dusty boy had been caught
+up once more by the wind of its going, and drawn along with it, as a
+chip is whirled in the under-draught of a rushing express-train, or a
+wisp of hay is caught up by a traveling tornado, and borne upon its
+dreadful way.
+
+He grinned now, reminiscent of the Doctor's analogy, as a
+blunt-nosed, shaggy dog of no distinguishable breed trotted past,
+sneezing, between the files at the rear of a half-company-column.
+"Whose is the beast?" he heard a soldier ask his neighbor on the
+right-hand, and: "Nobody's--joined the battalion at Bingen!" was the
+reply.  Upon which the inquirer tossed the canine waif a scrap of
+biscuit, with "Here, Bang!" and Bang, thus adopted and christened,
+neatly caught the morsel, bolted it, and trotted on,--no more an
+ownerless mongrel, but a regimental dog.
+
+
+Now the sutler-woman was waking, rubbing the sleep out of a pair of
+eyes which were less bright than they had been before their owner
+became addicted to the use of beer with _schnaps_ as a lacing.  She
+had an incipient beard, and the voice of a heavy dragoon, yet there
+was a tinge of womanly coquetry in her way of straightening her big,
+battered bonnet, and adjusting the checked blue-and-yellow shawl tied
+crosswise over her voluminous bust.  She yawned, struggled to the
+perpendicular position, with some difficulty, owing to her
+corpulence; and cried, pointing a stout red finger at her henchman,
+yet squatting in the shade of a clump of dusty whins:
+
+"Lord! if he isn't mooning still, with his chin on his two fists!
+Such a _gimpel_ I never yet did see!  But they say all the _Englisch_
+are mad, their climate makes them so.  Otherwise would they not live
+in their country?--but no! they can't.  _Hier_!  Catch Rumschottel,
+and let's be moving!"
+
+P. C. Breagh obliged, undisturbed by the appellation of idiot, or the
+contumely heaped on the United Kingdom.  It was better to be on the
+black books of the sutler-woman than distinguished by her
+too-favorable regard.
+
+For though the stout proprietress of the tilt-cart had undoubtedly
+played the part of a Samaritaness toward the wandering Englander, she
+was, it had to be owned, more charitable than chaste; trading not
+only in beer, bread, sausages, matches, cheap packs of cards,
+dominoes, pipe-tobacco, sweets and pickled cucumbers, but following,
+between marches, the oldest profession in the world.
+
+Being invited on the previous evening to convey a verbal billet of
+the amorous kind to a young Pioneer of Würtemberg Artillery, P. C.
+Breagh had flatly declined.  Conceiving the refusal to be prompted by
+jealousy, Frau or Fraulein Krumpf had not taken it in ill part.
+Until, being undeceived upon this point, she uncorked the vials of
+her anger and exerted a gift for vituperation justly celebrated among
+her clients of the rank and file.
+
+"You threadling, you whipper-snapper!  You pickled herring in a
+jacket and breeches!  There is a man buried in the Domkirche at
+Mainz, where I belong, that has been dead over a hundred years, and
+has more of good red life in him to-day than thou!  '_Frauenlob_,'
+they called him, because he couldn't live without women, and women!
+and when he died, eight of the town-girls carried him on his bier.
+And they poured wine over his grave so that you stepped up to your
+knees in it--all because he had liked the women as a tom-cat likes
+cream!"
+
+The first spate of her resentment over, she had accepted the
+situation.  But the wound remained; and as the better-half of
+Potiphar may have railed at her husband's young Hebrew steward, the
+sutler-woman nagged at the young man who limped beside her jackass,
+through the deep welcome shade of ancient oak-forests or over long
+blistering stretches of naked mountain roads, as those tireless,
+dusty men marched by.
+
+There was no keeping up with them; they passed, and others swarmed
+after them.  Batteries succeeded battalions, ammunition and baggage,
+ambulance and commissariat-trains were followed by yet other
+battalions, while the sweat dripped into the eyes of P. C. Breagh and
+the skin wore off his heels.
+
+At midday, when his chest hurt with the very act of breathing and his
+straining muscles seemed about to crack, a man died.
+
+He was an infantryman of Hessians, and it happened quite suddenly.
+P. C. Breagh, who had long ago abandoned all unnecessary integuments,
+marching without coat, vest, collar, or braces, had noticed him a
+moment previously swinging along with unbuttoned uniform--it was
+marvelous how small a minority of the soldiers had sought this method
+of relief....  His open shirt showed the lighter skin of his bare
+chest, his _pickelhaube_ was perched upon the cooking-pan crowning
+his knapsack-top, and he had draped a wetted red handkerchief over
+his steaming head.
+
+Save that his face was purple with congested blood, so that his pale,
+staring eyes seemed colorless by comparison, and he walked with open
+mouth, the Adam's apple in his lean throat jerking as he gulped down
+the hot air, he conveyed no dire impression of breakdown.  But
+suddenly he stumbled and spun round, as if seized by sudden
+giddiness, clutching at his shirt-breast, dropping his gun.  Men were
+thrown out of step as he fell, with an absurd clatter of metal and
+tin-ware.  Yet they marched on without a pause.
+
+Others came, stepping over the fallen figure lying huddled in the
+way.  Its fingers moved, paddling in the dust; and P. C. Breagh,
+yielding to a sudden impulse, dropped the bridle of the jackass, ran
+in, grabbed hold and hauled the heavy body out of the way.
+
+"What are you doing, born stupid that you are?" the sutler-woman
+cried viciously, for Rumschottel had swerved aside to the hedge and
+was ravenously devouring weeds.  She added, becoming aware of the
+prone infantryman, who was lying on his back staring at the sun
+unwinkingly: "It it all up with that one, his eyes are turning white
+already.  Such as he have never six pfennigs to pay for other folks'
+time and trouble.  Better leave him for the _Feld-lazarett_ to pick
+up."
+
+But P. C. Breagh only grunted dourly, hunkering by the prostrate
+Hessian, and with a parting sarcasm the proprietress of Rumschottel
+seized her beast's head and trudged on.  If she had looked back, she
+would have seen good Irish whisky wasted.  For despite the shade of
+the tree under which he was hauled, the rolled-up coat thrust under
+his head and the laving of his face and breast with spirit, it was
+all up with the man, as she had prophesied.
+
+He grabbled with his sunburnt fingers in the dust a little, and tried
+to lift a hand to his perspiring chest.  By the tin crucifix
+dependent from a leather bootlace round his neck, you could tell that
+he tried to make the sacred Sign.  Then his eyes rolled up, and an
+expression of great surprise overspread his discolored countenance.
+His knees jerked and a sound like a rotten stick of wood, breaking,
+came from his open mouth.
+
+"_A-a-ach!_"
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+He would breathe for possibly an hour longer, but practically the man
+was dead.  Still listening for the faint, intermittent heart-beats, a
+splash of gravel stung P. C. Breagh smartly in the neck and cheek,
+and the dull thunder of horse-hoofs came unpleasantly close and
+stopped.  He lifted his ear from the rattling chest, and looked up
+into the face of an infantry officer, who was reining up his beast
+and bending from the saddle as he looked at the casualty on the
+ground.  The officer asked in staccato sentences:
+
+"It is a case of heat-stroke?  You are a doctor?"
+
+P. C. Breagh answered shortly:
+
+"Enough of one to know that there is no hope."
+
+The horse, a fine, spirited animal, hoofed the ground impatiently.
+The captain said, patting the glossy, sweating neck:
+
+"Very good.  Will you kindly show me his name-tag?"
+
+P. C. Breagh found the zinc label, bearing the moribund Hessian's
+name, regimental, battalion and company-number, and turned it
+face-upward on the discolored breast.  The captain, leaning from the
+saddle, read, and mentally registered.  His keen eyes, hedged with
+dusty fair lashes, narrowed against the blinding white sunshine and,
+somewhat bloodshot with heat and fatigue, had something like a smile
+in them; and for some reason, to the dusty young man who squatted on
+the ground by the dying, the smile was an offense.  He scowled, and
+the officer, noting this, asked curiously:
+
+"Were you acquainted with that one, then?"
+
+He indicated the body by an overhand thumb-gesture.  Resenting the
+gesture for the same inexplicable reason, P. C. Breagh responded with
+a head-shake.  The captain pursued, pulling the damp and blackened
+reins between his gloved fingers, stained with his own sweat and the
+horse's within the palms....
+
+"I asked, because you seemed--how shall one put it?--sorry for him,
+you know!"
+
+The dust-smeared, freckled face turned on the interlocutor angrily.
+The smouldering fire in the eyes leaped into sudden flame:
+
+"I am, damned sorry for him!  To come by his end like this--without
+firing a single shot!"
+
+There was something unusual about this little dialogue, carried on
+between the smart mounted officer and the footsore, untidy
+pedestrian, over the body stretched out by the roadside.  As the
+broad stream of marching men flowed by, curious eyes rolled their
+way, the whites showing startlingly in their owners' sunburned faces.
+Men wondered what he had died of, and what they were discussing
+there.  And P. C. Breagh went on, his mouth pulled awry with wrathful
+bitterness:
+
+"He was as good a patriot, I'd bet my hat!--as any fellow in his
+battalion.  He set as much store as others by King and Fatherland!  I
+daresay he dreamed of getting the Distinguished Service medal for
+some tremendous act of gallantry, and astonishing his wife--he wears
+a wedding ring, so I suppose he had one!--with it when he got home.
+And now it's all over.  It makes me feel sick.  All over, and nothing
+to show for it!"
+
+The blank, rolled-up eyes, staring unwinkingly in the face of the
+coppery, westering sun, and the discolored face, with the look of
+agonized surprise now fixed upon it, seemed to echo dumbly: "Nothing
+but this!"  The officer returned:
+
+"So! but there will be a war-pension for the widow, as he died upon
+Active Service, and that will not be so bad, after all.  And
+presently the _Feld-lazarett_ will come up and put him in a wagon.
+He will be buried at sundown, when we halt....  They will give him a
+firing party and a bugler--everything will be done decently.  After a
+battle there is not always--you understand?..."
+
+He shrugged, and the Danish and Austrian war-medals on his dark blue
+tunic glinted, in witness of his ripe knowledge and experience.
+Hating him still more vigorously, P. C. Breagh ended his sentence:
+
+"Not always time to stow away lost pawns!"
+
+"'Pawns!'  My worthy sir, _our_ pawns are battalions!"  The captain
+laughed, showing even, but tobacco-stained teeth under his thick
+brown mustache.  "This was--a unit among myriads of myriads....  You
+will find plenty of work waiting for you among his comrades, if, as I
+guess, you are a graduate in surgery out for practice....  Let me
+advise you to join a Red Cross ambulance--the arm-badge is a
+protection--of a definite kind."
+
+He saluted, gave rein, and the tired, yet impatient horse snorted
+relief, and cantered on with him, sending another shower of
+dust-grains and gravel-grit over the extinct "unit among myriads of
+myriads" and the unkempt Samaritan hunkering by its side.
+
+A scalding wave of bitterness and resentment had swept over him a
+moment previously.  Behind and through the officer's brown-eyed,
+good-looking face he had seen the fierce, challenging blue stare and
+great domed skull and bulldog jaw of the great Minister who made wars
+at will.  And the limp, dead body of the "unit among myriads of
+myriads," lying by the beaten track where twenty thousand men thus
+clad and armed had passed already, had awakened in him a rage of pity
+and a fury of disgust.
+
+This War that had seemed such a huge and splendid world-event,
+shaking sovereigns upon their thrones and stirring nations to wildest
+enthusiasm, meant catastrophes innumerable as minute; infinitesimal
+tragedies never to be heard of, related or known,--involving the
+humbler and the weaker among the people of both sides.
+
+Meanwhile--here was a letter, pinned inside the dead man's shirt, an
+ill-spelt, loving scrawl, containing a wilted sprig of some kind of
+garden-herb, smelling evilly.
+
+"Glory is glory," said the poor soul who wrote, "but so thou bring
+thyself safe back to me and the Kinder, that will be enough."
+Meanwhile, entreating her lambkin to remember that "old man" kept off
+the fleas, she enclosed "a bit picked from the clump in the garden
+border by the old red gooseberry bush," and with a tender inquiry
+after his poor corns, and a row of blotty kisses, signed herself his
+faithful wife Lottchen.  One could only be sorry for poor Lottchen
+and note down her address, together with her deceased lambkin's name
+and regiment, and send her presently a line from a stranger who had
+been near him when he died.
+
+For the unit among myriads of myriads, nothing could be done beyond
+pulling his yet pliant limbs into decent straightness and folding the
+already stiffening hands upon the unheaving breast.  Then P. C.
+Breagh covered his face with the red handkerchief, and--a tin
+crucifix being suspended from the neck by a leather bootlace--touched
+the violet-mottled lips with it, and whispered a prayer for the
+departed soul, before, resuming possession of his discarded jacket
+and shouldering his knapsack, he trudged upon his way.
+
+"Our Moltke" was testing his material at the outset, by heavy
+marching.  Since breakfast-time there had been no halt; the columns
+of human flesh and horsemeat had pegged along, tirelessly as though
+the sinews that bore them had been forged of elastic steel.
+
+The blazing sun set in a great whirlpool of molten rubies and gold
+beyond the Birkenfeld, while the sky to the north and east was green,
+with a vivid, springlike hue.  The clear, thin dusk of August fell,
+yet the tireless columns marched on--and in company of other, even
+queerer wayfarers, the dusty young man with the knapsack doggedly
+continued to trudge beside them.  When at length the halt was
+sounded, he staggered through a hedge-gap into a field of flax, and
+threw himself heavily face downward amid the yellowing stems that had
+long ago flowered, and seeded, and ripened for pulling.
+
+Stupid with weariness, he might have lain there ten minutes, when a
+bugle shrilled close by, and the brown, hairy heads and forelegs of
+the leaders of a team of gun-horses crashed through the hedgerow, the
+scarlet face, open shouting mouth, and uplifted whip-arm of the
+forerider showing above.  As luck would have it, orders had been
+given that a half-battery of mounted artillery should bivouac in this
+flax-field.  And death under the iron-shod hoofs of the horses, and
+the iron-shod wheels that followed them, shaved very close to P. C.
+Breagh.
+
+Yet he was not grateful as he picked himself out of the hollow into
+which his frog-like, instinctive leap for life had landed him.  The
+heavy riding-whip of the forerider had cut him bitterly across the
+loins while yet in mid-air.  Adding insult to injury, the
+artilleryman had cursed his victim for getting in the way of the
+battery, and the other riders and the gunners on the limber were
+grinning from ear to ear.  Smarting, P. C. Breagh cursed back, in a
+cautious but vigorous whisper, as he hobbled back to the road....
+
+Upon the farther side two half-battalions of infantry, divided by a
+little bushy knoll, were already encamped upon a strip of gorsey
+grass.  The thing had been done as if by magic, the officers grouped
+in the foreground round their little camp tables were drinking Rhine
+wine and beer as peacefully as though they had not stirred for hours.
+Behind them the battalion-color and the halberd of the drum-major had
+been planted upright in the center of an orderly array of drums and
+band-instruments, the straight rows of knapsacks within rolled
+greatcoats, stretching away in the rear, were divided by the
+customary ten-pace interval, and the mathematically balanced stacks
+of needle-guns.
+
+Fires of brush and dry cones from the pine-groves fringing the road
+crackled in the small oblong trenches dug by the fatigue-men.
+Squad-cooks were cutting up pea-sausages, raw potatoes, and onions
+into camp-kettles of water, destined to simmer, slung on sticks
+reaching from bank to bank.  And the regimental butchers had already
+slaughtered a couple of young bullocks, whose skins lay smoking by
+the chopping-block.  Presently, when the officers' mess-cooks had
+chosen such joints as seemed good to them, the rest of the meat would
+go to enrich the stew of the rank-and-file.  Meanwhile the men,
+scattered to the utmost limits of the cordon of sentries, blunted the
+edge of hunger with black bread and the flinty brown biscuit, crowded
+thirstily round the beer and wine-carts, squatted in groups playing
+cards, chatting, or singing part-songs; wrestled and ran races, or
+dozed lying face downward on the sunburnt grass, their foreheads
+resting on their folded arms.
+
+A charming scene, now that the all-pervading dust had begun to
+settle--the bivouac roofed in by the clear green twilight, through
+which diamond star-points began to thrust.  If only one had been less
+sharp-set, and the proprietors of the wine and beer-carts had had
+bread and sausage to sell as well as warm, flat beer and
+musty-smelling vintage, the beauty would have appealed to one a good
+deal more.
+
+Squatted by a lichened boulder in a clump of sun-scorched bracken, P.
+C. Breagh searched his pockets, and then the recesses of his
+knapsack, for something to eat.  An ancient crust of black bread
+rewarded his investigations, just as the savory-smelling camp-kettles
+were taken off the fires.
+
+He fell to work upon his crust as the stew was apportioned, and the
+big cans of beer distributed to each mess; and as he gnawed dog-like
+at the stone-hard lump of baked rye-dough, he caught the eye of one
+of the Barmecides, a merry-faced, red-haired young private, who was
+evidently the jester of his squad.
+
+"Our soup smells good, what?  Well, the smell may be had for nothing.
+He may fill his belly with as much of that as he can!"
+
+A roar of laughter greeted the sally of the humorist.  To whom P. C.
+Breagh nodded assent, and, gravely extending his diminished crust in
+the quarter from whence the whiff of oniony pea-soup came most
+powerfully, fell to with apparently renewed appetite, provoking the
+approving comment:
+
+"He can take a joke!  Well, then, let him take this!  and this!
+Catch it, _junge_!"
+
+A lump of very fresh beef, boiled in the oniony pea-soup, was dumped
+into a bit of newspaper, screwed up, and pitched across to the
+supperless.  P. C. Breagh gratefully caught the oleaginous parcel and
+the two hard Army biscuits that came after, and, pulling out some
+small change, signified his desire to pitch back the coins in return.
+But a big hand waved them vigorously away, with the gruff
+exclamation: "_Der Teufel!_ let him keep his pfennigs.  One gives a
+share of one's supper--one doesn't sell!"
+
+And so genuine was the one that, despite the smarting weal that had
+been the gift of another less kindly, P. C. Breagh's faith in
+humanity lifted up its head.
+
+He disposed of the grub, and drank some hill-water tinctured with
+Kinahan, a permissible indulgence in view of his fatigue, and stuffed
+the well-used briar-root with bird's eye, and, propping his back
+comfortably against the boulder, kindled the pipe of peace.  By
+nature clubbable, and athirst for news, he would have liked to mingle
+with the replete, unbuttoned soldiers, who, supper over, gathered
+round the fires to smoke and chat and sing.  But the snub dealt by
+Valverden had not left off smarting; the fear of incurring another
+rebuff, even from a social inferior, kept him aloof and solitary.  He
+realized with dismay that his stock of self-confidence was beginning
+to run low.
+
+"I'd a lot of faith in myself when I accepted that commission from
+Knewbit," he ruminated, chewing hard on the stem of the venerable
+briar-root.  "More than half his money's spent--what did I want with
+that revolver?--and I haven't written him a line.  Instead, I've
+swotted up a thundering long descriptive article, telling people all
+about what they know already--and sent it to that shaved sea-elephant
+in a Gladstone collar, who told me I might forward letters from the
+seat of hostilities if ever I got there!"
+
+He frowned, mentally reviewing the points of the first-born launched
+upon the tide of speculation.  However ancient its matter might be,
+the vigor and mastery of that descriptive article--completed in the
+train between Bingen and Mayence, and dropped with paternal
+solicitude into the sack of a corporal of the Field Post--would
+surely--could not fail to--insure its appearance in print.
+
+Why did a horrible conviction of its utter stodginess come home to
+him at this eleventh hour?  Its labored periods revolted, its stately
+mawkishness sickened his memory.  He knocked out the pipe-bowl
+against the boulder and got out his note-book and began to jot down a
+letter to Mr. Knewbit by the light of the now risen moon, who, with
+Venus blazing emerald at her opulent side, hung high in the
+south-east, looking down upon forest and field, mountain, valley and
+river, and the armed men and beasts, guns and wagon-trains, strung
+out over leagues of distance, calmly as befitting an aged Queen
+familiar with the portents of War.
+
+She stared down so haughtily at the travel-soiled and dusty scallawag
+lying upon the fringe of the bivouac among the remnants of a meal
+cadged from a soldier's camp-kettle, that he caught her eye and broke
+his pencil-lead.  No! he couldn't write, even well enough to "please
+plain, homely people." ... Why, hang it all!--Old Knewbit must have
+known from the beginning, to do that was the highest and most
+difficult art of all.  Men came into the world equipped, as had come
+Shakespeare, and Scott, and Dickens, each with a single feather, such
+as might belong to the wing of a Phcenix or an Archangel, sprouting
+from his own flesh.  Urged by the inborn crave to set down Life, each
+had plucked forth his birth-gift with a pang of unutterable anguish,
+and there, at the quill-end, hung a single drop of red, red blood.
+And that drop tinctured every page they penned, and thus what they
+wrote lived.  To be a distinguished War Correspondent one had to be
+born with the magic pen-feather.  The Doctor had it.  That was why
+his written sentences dug home to the quick.  Without it, Success
+would never come to one, no matter how hard one tried for it.  One
+would be nothing better all one's life than a plodding paragraphist.
+
+
+Pity an unlucky youth, fagged, footsore, and smarting, not only from
+disillusion and chagrin, but from the very recent application of an
+Artillery horsewhip.  In addition, the infantry band had now begun to
+play with soul-melting sweetness.  First "The Lorelei," and then "Red
+Dawn That Lights Me to My Early Grave," and then the song of Siebel
+from "Faust"--with all its yearning passion and tender anguish.  And
+possibly other eyes were wet besides P. C. Breagh's, who fairly put
+down his head and sobbed, under cover of the twilight and the
+protecting boulder, as he had not done since his knickerbocker
+days....  Not now from a vague, wistful aching for the voice and the
+touch of the young, unknown, long-dead mother.  Pain and longing were
+there, but of how different a kind....
+
+The reign of Brünhilde-Britomart-Isolde was over.  That night saw the
+smallest and slenderest of heroines established on the vacant throne
+of the Ideal.
+
+He who wept was not the type of a young girl's hero, choking and
+gulping, and burrowing his hot, wet face into the dry, rustling fern.
+But he suffered as only youth can suffer, the pangs were very real
+that wrung from him such stifled cries as these:
+
+"Oh, God!  I love her--Juliette de Bayard! ... I have loved her since
+the moment our eyes met.  My infernal ingratitude that she forgave
+like an angel!--the brutal things I thought and said of her--were
+because I could not forgive myself for loving her so.  My discontent,
+my restlessness, my ambition to do something and be somebody--weren't
+they prompted by the longing to cut a figure in her eyes! ... Lovely
+eyes;--and at this minute her husband may be kissing them!--'the
+noble gentleman, brave as a lion,' who fought like the deuce and all!
+Stop, though!  If he's an Army man, he has had to leave her.  Could I
+have borne to do that if I had had the luck to be in his shoes?  Yet
+how she would despise a lover who hesitated between her and his duty!
+Even if '_her heart-strings about his heels were tied_,' as the
+Suabian ballad says, '_she would bid him march to war!_'  For a girl
+like that could love, mind you! like Juliet and Desdemona and Viola
+rolled into one, and yet never be blinded by love into forgetfulness
+of God, or honor, or loyalty.  It is written in her face.  Are these
+things first with me?  I'm afraid not!... I think not!... I know
+they're not!... And yet I dare to love her--to whom they mean
+everything!"
+
+His conscience stung and smarted like the weal from the Artillery
+whip-lash.  And the dread of Death and the Hereafter wakened in him,
+shuddering and quaking in the creeping dusk.
+
+Now he comprehended his own insignificance and weakness and
+loneliness....  He had seen a man die that day, suddenly, without
+time for preparation, as thousands of others would die before the
+ending of this war.  What if to-morrow at the hottest hour the
+trenchant blade of the sun should bite through P. C. Breagh's
+brain-pan?  He heard the other self within him saying "Suppose...?"
+And he asked himself, with a cold sweat breaking out upon his flesh,
+and a curious stirring among the roots of his hair, what would have
+happened only an hour or two back, if the flying squirrel-leap that
+had made the white teeth flash against the brown faces of the gunners
+on the limber, had failed to land the dusty scallawag who had been
+sleeping in the flax-field beyond reach of the pounding of the hoofs
+of the battery-team! ...
+
+"_Father, I cry to Thee!_"
+
+The soldiers were singing the Battle Prayer of Körner, the lusty
+Teutonic basses and baritones and tenors mingling in melodious unison
+with the night-breeze that had risen with the moon.
+
+Previously P. C. Breagh might have smiled at the simultaneous
+production of hymn-books, the rising at the word of command to
+sing--the short, business-like prayer recited by an officer, that was
+followed by a crashing Amen.
+
+Now, it seemed to him, there was something wholesome and good in the
+military regulation that united men of every Christian creed and
+denomination, with those who habitually omitted religion from the
+daily routine, in the brief act of worship described....  Recalled by
+it to the teachings of the Mother Church, he made the sacred sign
+upon brow and breast, and whispered his nightly prayers.  The name of
+Juliette mingled in the entreaty that Our Lord and His Mother would
+bless and guard those dear to the petitioner from danger and harm.
+
+"And not let me come to grief for _her_ sake--of course I mean
+Monica's!  For she never would have loved me even if there hadn't
+been another man.  But O! take care of her, and shield her from evil,
+sickness, grief, and danger.  And let me see her again one day!"
+
+He grew drowsy, lying against the yet sun-warm boulder, listening to
+the distant cry of the mousing owl, and the long rattling _chur'r'r!_
+of the nightjar, mingled with the occasional snorting of the tethered
+horses, the measured tramp of the sentries,--the small explosions
+made by pine-cones thrown upon the blazing guard-fires, and the other
+sounds of the bivouac.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII
+
+The watch was set at nine o'clock.  Then the "Lie Down" sounded far
+and near, and the moon stared down on rows of prone men wrapped in
+their greatcoats and pillowed on their knapsacks, stretching away
+under the pansy-dark canopy of heaven for miles.
+
+The officers sat for some time longer, drinking their Rhine wine and
+playing cards by moonshine and lantern-light, or strolling, cigar in
+mouth, upon the outskirts of the bivouac.  Several
+Artillery-officers, who had supped with them, went back to their own
+bivouac after voluble leave-takings.  Infantry-officers, who had
+shared the hospitality of the gunners, returned, enlivening the night
+with, scraps of gossip, and more or less melodious song.
+
+A couple of these late-comers halted on the outskirts of the cordon
+of sentries to finish a confidential conversation.  The moon was
+obscured by clouds, the bivouac was swathed in shadow.  Of the lumpy
+boulder by which the Adjutant stood, only its shape could be
+discerned against the dusty-pale grass by the dust-white road.
+
+Said the Adjutant to the senior Captain, and the excellent cigar he
+was smoking smelt pleasantly in the dark:
+
+"One can't call yesterday's a big battle, but at the same time it was
+a tolerably serious engagement."
+
+The senior Captain snorted.
+
+"_Donnerwetter!_ one would think so.  Nearly fifteen hundred
+prisoners, and Douay's Division obliged to abandon its camp and
+baggage.  The Crown Prince has begun well--one expected no less!"
+
+Said the Adjutant:
+
+"I shall advise the Herr Colonel to announce the news to the regiment
+at roll-call to-morrow.  It will make a good moral impression upon
+those who are new to Active Service, when they realize that the
+French have been trounced."
+
+Then they were silent a moment, but one felt that both were crowing.
+
+We know what had happened.  Before midday the Crown Prince had
+pounded Douay's Division into brickbats, the brave General himself
+was dead, the town of Wissembourg had fallen; by two o'clock the
+mitrailleuse-batteries on the Geisburg had been silenced, and the
+Chateau stormed and won.
+
+The men of the Imperial Army in Alsace had fought magnificently.
+Red-capped, swarthy Turcos in baggy white breeches, Zouaves and
+French infantrymen, light blue Bavarian and dark blue Prussian
+uniforms, with what had been brave men inside them, lay scattered
+among the hop-gardens and vineyards on the mountain-side.
+
+Of these no doubt the Adjutant was thinking when he threw away his
+cigar-butt and said, with a sigh and an oath together:
+
+"_Kreuzdonnerwetter!_ one does not win victories for nothing.  It
+must have been a bloody fight, and especially in the streets; you
+understand me?  The French fired from the windows, and from the roofs
+of the houses....  There was a terrible struggle at the point of the
+bayonet, and both sides used the butt--liberally!"
+
+"The butt may be brutal," commented the senior Captain, clearing his
+throat and expectorating copiously; "but all the same it is a
+hellishly useful thing!"
+
+"Why leave your enemy brains when he may live to plan your defeat by
+the use of them?" agreed the Adjutant.  The scabbard of his sword
+clinked, as he moved, against the boulder, and the sound made an
+eavesdropper go goose-fleshy all over, as he lay prone among dry
+bents and bracken in the blackness on the farther side.  Then he
+heard the Captain ask:
+
+"Did the Crown Prince continue the advance to-day?" and strained his
+ears for the Staff officer's reply.
+
+"Undoubtedly!  Moltke's telegram from the King's Headquarters at
+Mainz ran: '_Seek out and fight the enemy wherever you may find
+him,_' and Marshal MacMahon is said to be concentrating all his force
+on a high plateau between Froeschwiller and Eberbach, west of the
+Sauer and the Sulz.  The bridges have been broken--his position is an
+exceptionally strong one....  Of course you know the kind of ground!"
+
+"Open ground," snorted the Captain, "over which an assailant must
+pass to get at him.  _Sapperlot!_ don't I wish I'd had the chance
+to-day!"
+
+"You are too greedy, Scheren," joked the Adjutant.  "Ts't!  What was
+that?"
+
+Both men were silent, intently listening.  For the eavesdropper,
+titillated to madness by a spear of seed-grass that had thrust up a
+nostril, had given a smothered sneeze.  Now on the point of
+discovery, he found presence of mind sufficient to repeat the sneeze,
+panting doggishly, whining and scratching among the fern....
+
+The ruse was successful.  The Adjutant said, laughingly:
+
+"It's a dog, nosing at a rat or rabbit-hole.  Under-Lieutenant
+Brand's terrier 'Nagler,' perhaps."
+
+"Hie, then, boy!"
+
+"Here, Nagler!"
+
+The Captain whistled, the other man advised indifferently:
+
+"Let the brute alone--perhaps the rabbit's a French one!"  He added,
+"It would be amusing to read a dog's Impressions of the campaign.
+What time is it?  'Ten!'  Very well, I shall go and turn in.  You'll
+do the same thing if you'll take my advice."
+
+The Captain grunted assent, and the two officers clanked away
+together, while P. C. Breagh noiselessly collected his venerable
+waterproof, his water-bottle, and knapsack, and departed in search of
+a more distant sleeping-place.
+
+But when he found it in a dry ditch a quarter-of-a-mile below the
+Mounted Artillery bivouac, and stretched himself out to sleep, he
+could not....  His head rang with the news that would presently
+thrill the civilized world.
+
+First blood to Germany....  Did the Doctor know? ...
+
+That genial little gentleman had prophesied accurately.  The "meaty
+bone" of early and accurate information had fallen to the "tyke at
+the tail of the Army Corps."  While the prophet, delayed by
+pumped-out horses and recalcitrant grooms, at the Lion Inn of
+Neustadt, knew no more than that the heir to the Prussian Crown was
+over the frontier, and was reported to have taken Wissembourg from
+the French.
+
+
+That dry ditch accommodated a complacent lodger.  His misgivings
+banished by one stroke of fortune, P. C. Breagh brooded sleeplessly
+over the Koh-i-noor that had fallen to him....  Though, to hold such
+a jewel and know oneself impotent to use it, that was the verjuice
+mingled in the cup of bliss.
+
+Without funds for telegraphing--an Editor to print one's letters--and
+a public ready to read, what was the use of information?  Stop!  What
+was that the more authoritative of the two officers had said?--the
+one who had given the news to the other man?  "_It would be amusing
+to read a dog's impressions of the campaign! ..._"
+
+Would it?  Such a dog, perhaps, as the mongrel that had joined the
+green-jacketed Saxon infantry regiment at Bingen.  The cur the
+compassionate soldier had christened "Bang."  Lying on his back,
+pillowed on his knapsack, staring at the waning moon, the boy
+pondered.  Suppose one wrote one's letters to Knewbit in the assumed
+character of Bang?
+
+The idea grew, and he sat up to review its possibilities.  Something
+soft and feathery brushed past his ear as he stirred.  An owlet, most
+likely, yet I prefer to believe that it may have been the wing of
+Inspiration, touching the head destined to be crowned by Fame.
+
+
+"Pages from the Diary of 'Bang,' the Battalion Dog."  That should be
+the title, or simply, "The Story of 'Bang.'"  "Short and to the
+point," he heard Mr. Knewbit saying.  And Knewbit ...
+
+Here was day! ...
+
+Reveille after reveille sounded, shattering his train of thought,
+waking the hilly echoes.  Under how strange a sky the bugles
+clamored, the bivouac stopped snoring; men sat up on dew-wet cloaks
+and rubbed their eyes.
+
+The cup of heaven was red as though brimmed with blood new-drained
+from the veins of heroes.  In the leftward hemisphere looking East,
+Ursa Major swam in blood, blazing with white-hot fierceness.  On the
+ensanguined South the Dog cowered as though in terror.  And like a
+skeleton arm, the Milky Way pointed over the blood-dabbled
+hill-crests and the blood-tipped pine-groves from the south-east,
+West....
+
+Men's faces and hands were crimsoned by reflections cast from that
+portentous sunrise, the dew-wet grasses were dyed the same hue.
+
+They broke their fast on their black bread washed down with bitter
+black coffee.  In the pause that followed the roll-call, a voice
+spoke.  And amid deafening cheers the news sprang from bearded lip to
+lip.
+
+"Lucky is the standard that flies over the first-fought field!" says
+the proverb.
+
+How those Teutons marched, that day of rain-pelts and thunderstorms,
+upheld by their first draft of the strong wine of Success!
+
+
+At Mayence, Moltke had commented to his Sovereign, with his keen old
+eyes twinkling with joy:
+
+"Douay's troops were preparing their evening coffee when the Prince
+with his four Divisions appeared on the heights above Schweigen.  The
+Red Breeches thought it was a _promenade militaire_ in the Second
+Empire style, until the shells began to plop into their cooking-pots!"
+
+"Thanks be to Heaven!" returned King William piously, "our
+artillery-fire has improved since the Bohemian campaign."
+
+"All the same," returned the Warlock, shaking the wise old head cased
+in the auburn scratch-wig, "their musketry should do much for the
+French.  For the chassepot is quicker in loading than our needle-gun,
+and spits less, which is better for the aim....  Then our needle-gun
+has A poor trajectory at 500 yards, and wounds rather than kills
+outright.  While the chassepot bullet,--driven by its huge charge of
+powder--has a splendidly flat trajectory, And flattening out,--makes
+a magnificent wound!  In at the chest--out at the shoulder-blades!
+... The man has a hole in him you can see the landscape through!"
+
+And he nibbed his withered hands, the old specialist in slaughter.
+While Bismarck said, laughing, to his cousin and military _attaché_:
+
+"The enthusiast forgets that the perforated examples will be
+German....  Look at him!  Already he begins to resemble a bird of
+prey.  Have you read these French newspapers?  The King has laughed
+heartily over them, but they must horribly irritate the Emperor.
+Listen to this, from the _Constitutionnel: 'Prussia continues to
+insult us with impunity, when the Armies of the Empire, at a word
+from their Chief, might descend like three crashing avalanches upon
+the hosts of Germany.  Why is the word not uttered?  Why is the
+massacre--with the rout that must inevitably follow, delayed for a
+single hour?_'" ...
+
+The Emperor had perused the leaders, in his headquarters at the
+Prefecture at Metz.  His eyes seemed opaque as clouded glass, his
+face was a puffy mask, devoid of expression, as he replied to the
+hinted condolences of a sycophant upon his staff.
+
+"The opinions of these gentlemen of the Press were not solicited.
+They are free to criticize me, let them do so.  I am not bound to
+divulge to them my plans."
+
+Alas! vacillation, hesitation, and delay on the part of the Imperial
+Commander-in-Chief fatally clogged the movements of his magnificent
+Army.  He did not put in an appearance with his staff at headquarters
+until a fortnight subsequent to the Declaration of War.  A week
+later--and no Plan of Campaign had been issued to his generals.
+True, he had demolished, with field-fire, a beer-shop at Saarbrück.
+He had paraded on the hills with Frossard's Army Corps.  He had
+witnessed the evacuation of the town by its tiny garrison--had
+withdrawn his advanced posts and gone home to Metz to dine and
+telegraph to Paris of the "capture of the heights" and the "short
+resistance of the Prussians";--to tell of the cannon-balls and
+bullets which fell at his own feet, and those of the Prince Imperial,
+"who showed admirable coolness."  "Some of the soldiers wept," he
+adds, "beholding him so calm...."
+
+And indeed, though one takes the soldiers' tears with a grain of
+salt, the spirited bearing of the boy must have cheered the sick
+heart of his father, and yet thrust another dagger in it, too.
+
+Had the Imperial Commander-in-Chief any plan, one wonders....  Long
+after he had ceased to be Emperor, a pamphlet was published at
+Brussels, which is generally accepted as the work of the pen that
+signed the Capitulation of Sedan.
+
+"_To Marshals MacMahon and Lebœuf alone, the Emperor had entrusted
+his scheme of warfare.  His purpose was--to mass 150,000 troops at
+Metz, 100,000 at Strasbourg, and 50,000 at the Camp of Châlons.  The
+concentration of the first two armies--one on the Sarre, and the
+other on the Rhine--did not reveal the purpose of the Imperial
+Commander-in-Chief, for the enemy would be left in uncertainty as to
+whether the attack would be made against the Rhenish Provinces or the
+Duchy of Baden._"
+
+Would the Warlock have long remained in uncertainty?  But hear the
+pamphleteer:
+
+"_As soon as the troops should have been concentrated at the points
+indicated, it was the Emperor's purpose to instantly unite the armies
+of Metz and Strasbourg; and at the head of 250,000 men, to cross the
+Rhine at Maxau, compel the Southern States of Germany to observe
+neutrality, and hasten to encounter the Army of Prussia._"  Later on
+occurs the pathetic complaint: "_If one could only know beforehand
+exactly where the enemy was, one's plans would be easy to carry out!_"
+
+Indeed, the dispositions of Moltke were made with baffling secrecy.
+Even as the Heathen Chinee accommodated card-packs innumerable in his
+ample sleeves, so the Warlock hid the twelve Army Corps of the North
+German Confederation, with the Prussian Guard Corps, the Bavarian
+Field Army and the Württemberg and Baden Divisions, in the skirts of
+his military cloak....  When the moment came, the aged conjuror
+twitched open the garment and showed them: Steinmetz with the First
+Army at Treves, Prince Frederick Charles with the Second at Mayence,
+the Crown Prince with the Third at Landau.
+
+When the Three Armies rolled on, the art of the strategist covered
+their movements with a baffling veil of cavalry.  That immense,
+well-organized and highly mobilized arm was thrown well forward
+before the Germans crossed the frontier: at their first entry into
+France they came in contact with French troops.  A day's march ahead
+of the Army Corps' advanced-guards, Divisions of Uhlans, Dragoons and
+Hussars--(in a little all were "Uhlans" to the terrified French
+peasants)--provided for the security of the huge infantry bivouacs
+behind them; made requisitions for provisions, fuel, and forage;
+rendered railways and telegraphs useless--scouted for the enemy's
+positions--took prisoner or shot dispatch-bearers and
+patrol-riders--harassed marches, and boldly fired into camps.  Many
+fell in forays, or skirmishes, many were those accounted for by the
+long-range hitting chassepot, which was heartily detested by
+Prussia's mounted men.
+
+"If I had not been called to Metz to attend an Imperial War-Council,"
+Marshal MacMahon is reported to have said bitterly, when the news of
+the defeat of Wissembourg reached him, "this blow upon the south
+would not have fallen.  My Second Division would still be left to
+guard the opening between the Vosges and the Rhine."
+
+The thunder of the guns of Worth add their comment upon that
+utterance.
+
+Over the head of the town, lying at the bottom of a fertile valley
+patched with hop-gardens and vineyards, and threaded by a river, was
+waged between the Marshal with 50,000 troops, the pick and flower of
+the French Army, and "Unser Fritz" with twice the number of men, a
+desperate and bloody fight.
+
+The French on the bluffy wooded cliffs that are the foothills of the
+Vosges, occupied, as strategists have declared, an almost
+unassailable position.  But the fire of the mitrailleuses was
+hampered by the artillery of the 2d Bavarians under Hartmann, that
+seasoned veteran, who had fought at Waterloo in 1815 and now led an
+Army Corps against France in his seventy-sixth year.  Thus the
+Prussian infantry crossed the Sauerbach on bridges improvised of
+planks and hop poles; and though the chassepot proved an infinitely
+deadlier weapon than the needle-gun, the generalship of Von Kirchbach
+and Von der Tann,--in command of the Prussian 4th Division and 5th
+Corps, backed by a division of the 11th Corps,--forced MacMahon's
+hand.
+
+Outnumbered, outflanked and disorganized, with the loss of 9,000 men
+killed, 5,000 taken prisoners, twenty pieces of artillery, six
+mitrailleuses, and two eagles, the Marshal fled by the way of Zabern,
+under cover of night, trailing after him the beaten remnant of the
+Army of Strasbourg.
+
+The Third Army of Germany had lost 489 officers and 10,153 rank and
+file.  Before night of the 7th the dead were buried in great
+trenches, the columns of the Society of the Red Cross, the Sisters of
+Mercy and Lutheran Deaconesses, with surgeons, volunteers, and Army
+ambulance-bearers, had cleared the wounded from the field.
+
+"Ah! if we had only had this sort of thing at the Alma and at
+Inkerman!" a grizzled Zouave sapper growled to one of the ladies of
+the Red Cross.  "I was wounded there--sacred name of a pipe!  My
+belt-buckle was carried by a shell-splinter through my ceinture into
+my stomach.  This very buckle, look you, that I wear to-day!"  He
+added, rubbing the locality of the previous casualty: "There is
+nothing inside there now, because of late they have not fed us, or
+our chassepots.  How the devil can men kill Prussians without soup in
+their bellies or cartridges in their guns?"
+
+The Zouave spoke truth.  It was a half-equipped and under-rationed
+army that had made such a splendid show at Froeschwiller.  It was a
+starving, demoralized remnant that surged and weltered through the
+passes of the Vosges at MacMahon's flying heels.  Cavalry on foot,
+Zouaves riding Artillery-horses, mitrailleuse corps without
+mitrailleuses, baggage-wagons crowded with men of a dozen different
+regiments, went clanking and jolting over the roads that were
+littered with discarded chassepots, bearing witness to the pitiable,
+ghastly disorder of the retreat.
+
+The hour of their defeat had seen Frossard's Army Corps holding with
+Forton's Cavalry Brigade the heights over Saarbrück, simultaneously
+attacked by the 7th and 8th Corps of Unser Fritz's terrible army, and
+driven back in confusion and with slaughter, toward Metz.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX
+
+The huge peacock-bubble of the Third Empire was pricked and leaking
+in good earnest.  Thenceforward it was to shrink, and pale, and
+dwindle to its inglorious end.
+
+The Emperor must have known its days were numbered, when those wires
+of the 6th reached him.  On the 7th the news of Wörth electrified
+Paris.  Can you hear Jules Ferry joyfully exclaiming to the father of
+Paul Déroulède, "The armies of the Third Napoleon are annihilated!
+At last there dawns a day of hope for France!"  But fierce,
+triumphant voices like these were drowned in the muffled sobs of
+mothers, the moans of wives made widows, and the wailing of children
+now fatherless.  Later, and as though to enhance the bitterness of
+defeat, lying telegrams were published in Paris, announcing that the
+Duke of Magenta had retaken Wissembourg, captured sixty guns, and
+made 25,000 prisoners.  Chief among these unlucky ones figured the
+Prussian Crown Prince, who in an access of despair had shot
+himself....
+
+For some hours the streets and boulevards were packed with rejoicing
+multitudes.  Cries of "_Vive l'Empereur_," scarce at this era as
+snowflakes in summer, were suddenly heard again.  Flags and Chinese
+lanterns were displayed from every window, the people stopped the
+hansom-cab in which the famous Opera tenor Capoul was being driven
+along the Place de la Bourse, and, hoisting their idol to the top of
+a stationary omnibus, compelled him to chant the "_Marseillaise_."
+
+When the Emperor's sorrowful dispatches of the 7th revealed the cruel
+truth, and proclamations signed by the Empress and the Ministers made
+it public, rapture gave place to frenzy of the wildest.  Troops of
+cuirassiers and mounted Gardes de Paris,--bands of National
+Guards,--companies of the Line, and Marines were employed to clear
+the Rue de la Paix, and the Places de l'Opéra and Vendôme, of rioters.
+
+The Chambers assembled amid tumult indescribable.  Ministers were
+insulted on their way to attend the deliberations.  "_À la
+Frontière!_" cried the huge crowd, thronging the quay before the
+Palace of the Corps Législatif.  "_Vive Rochefort!_"  "_À bas les
+Ministres!_"  "_Chassepôts!_"
+
+Their reiterated demands for arms could be heard within the Chamber.
+Where, when M. Schneider mounted the tribune to read the Imperial
+Decree of Convocation, the opening formula: "Napoleon, by the Grace
+of God and the national will, Emperor of the French," was vigorously
+howled down.  Ollivier, the unpopular Head of the Imperial Cabinet,
+who had egged on the war, fared no better.  Later, the fall of his
+Ministry was greeted with salvo upon salvo of enthusiastic applause,
+and when the news was published all Paris went mad once more with joy.
+
+While the moment of supreme collapse of the great peacock bubble was
+coming nearer, the Crown Prince of Prussia was hunting MacMahon
+through the defiles of the Vosges, his flying cavalry snapping up
+scores of wounded or footsore stragglers, his advance batteries of
+light artillery harassing the bleeding flanks of the fugitive.  The
+Second and First Armies were moving Metzward, the Warlock having
+knowledge that the Emperor's main Army, the Imperial Guard, and
+Bazaine's, Ladmirault's and Frossard's Corps, with part of
+Canrobert's, were concentrating there.
+
+The Great Bubble was sagging pitifully.  The weather was wet and
+chilly, the Imperial troops not yet in action were disheartened by
+the news of battles lost.  Their equipment was incomplete, their new
+boots had proved to be of no better material than brown paper and
+American cloth.  Worst of all, the Commissariat, always inadequate,
+showed signs of caving in.  And the blame for all was heaped upon the
+shoulders of the Emperor, whose faith in his fortunate star had quite
+deserted him; a man tormented by telegrams of wifely censure and
+wifely advice from Paris; disgruntled, if ever man was; haunted and
+oppressed by premonitions of impending disaster; sleepless, shaky,
+sick, and prematurely old.
+
+The taking of the fortresses of Bitche and Phalsbourg--memorable by
+reason of its brave Governor's resolute defense--the seizure of the
+undefended City of Nancy, the Zorn Valley railway line, Forbach with
+its immense military stores, Sarreguemines, and other garrison towns
+were lesser shocks, falling on a mind already paralyzed.  Hasty
+decisions, contradictory orders, had emanated, one after another,
+from the Headquarters.  He was confused and flurried, finding his
+good brother of Prussia so near.  For the Warlock, scenting a
+movement of French troops to the rear, had crowned the uplands
+eastward of Metz with the 1st and 7th Corps of the First Army of
+Germany under the veteran General Steinmetz, cavalry well to the fore
+and outposts skillfully posted, so as to look into the French
+position from all points of view, while the Red Prince felt for a
+solid footing for his Second Army on the left or French bank of the
+Moselle.  Meanwhile, the Crown Prince, whose clutches Marshal
+MacMahon had evaded by taking a vast circuit to Châlons, had swept
+round and was marching northward from Vigneulles toward Metz.
+
+Ah! in what a hornet's nest the Imperial Commander-in-Chief found
+himself.  Almost incapable of mental effort, he recognized, like Mr.
+Wilkins Micawber,--whose epistolary style is occasionally suggested
+by his Proclamations and harangues,--that something had to be done at
+once.  To shake off the intolerable burden of authority was the most
+urgent necessity.  He transferred it to the youngest of his Marshals,
+Bazaine.
+
+"You will get us out of this, won't you, Marshal?" cried an officer
+of the Imperial Staff, as the new Commander-in-Chief came out of the
+Prefecture.
+
+The Marshal had left his Imperial master in bed, expecting answers to
+letters he had penned to the Emperor of Austria and the King of
+Italy, soliciting aid and alliance, which these potentates did not
+bestow.  True to himself, he could not quit Metz without a
+proclamation, penned in the old flourishing, ambiguous style:
+
+"Inhabitants of Metz.  In leaving you to oppose the invading enemy, I
+rely upon your patriotism to defend this great city.  You will not
+allow the foreigner to seize this bulwark of France, and you will
+emulate the Army in courage and devotion....  I hope to return in
+happier times to thank you for your noble conduct."
+
+Then he quitted the place with his son, his cousin and his personal
+following and escort.  As his _cortège_ clattered through the streets
+choked with soldiers, guns, provision-carts and baggage-wagons, and
+faces of contempt, or derision, or hatred turned to see, did he hide
+his sick, humiliated face behind the green silk screen of the
+carriage window?  How did he answer the inevitable questions of his
+son?
+
+A prey to hideous uncertainties, for the new Commander-in-Chief had
+suddenly applied to be superseded, the luckless Emperor spent the
+night at the camp at Longeville, waking upon a foggy morning--if he
+could be said to sleep, who never slept--to a brisk salute of
+Prussian guns.  For a patrol of Uhlans with a half battery had made,
+during the night, a bold attempt to seize upon the Imperial person,
+and being foiled within an ace of success, had retreated, plumping a
+shell or so into the lines from the German side of the river.  And
+while these hornets were being repulsed with heavy metal, the muddy,
+travel-stained Army of the Red Prince crossed the river lower down;
+the little episode described having diverted attention from their
+transit; effected, even as in a jam of batteries, battalions,
+squadrons, baggage and ammunition-trains, the French retreat was
+being made.
+
+So choked were the roads that the Emperor and his suite with the
+Imperial Guard Escort only managed to struggle as far as Gravelotte,
+a village some eight miles from Metz, where Bazaine had his
+headquarters:
+
+"Gentlemen, we will remain here, but keep the baggage packed!" had
+been the Emperor's instructions to his following upon alighting at
+the inn, where two miserable bedrooms were with difficulty obtained
+for himself and his son.  Prince Napoleon and the other personages of
+the suite found harborage at various cottages; the lackeys slept in
+the baggage-fourgons, it may be hazarded.  For in the morning these
+vehicles and their attendants were found to have disappeared.  They
+had departed for Verdun, whither their master was now to follow them.
+Bazaine, who could not shuffle off his now detested responsibilities,
+was summoned, to find the Imperial carriage standing in readiness
+before the tavern door.
+
+
+
+
+XL
+
+One can see the splendid bays, clamping their bits of solid silver,
+their sleek skins and their costly harness glittering in the sunshine
+that had driven the early morning fogs away, the postilions and
+outriders in their green and gold liveries sitting in the saddle, the
+landaus of the suite drawn up at the distance prescribed by etiquette.
+
+Everybody was breakfastless, save the Emperor, his son, and cousin,
+and their immediate following.  The regiment of Chasseurs d'Afrique,
+the gorgeous Cent Gardes in gold-crested, crimson-tufted, silver
+helmets with flowing white horsetails and caped cloaks of azure, were
+empty of all but air, like their own famous kettledrums.  Their
+horses had cropped a little grass in the fields during the night's
+bivouac, and were better off than their riders, by one meal.
+
+The young Prince Imperial looked sulky and discontented, but neat and
+soldierlike in his new uniform of a subaltern of infantry.  Prince
+Jerome Napoleon, the portly M. Plon-Plon of the Crimean War
+caricatures, wore a cocked hat pulled down hard over his eyes, and
+was buttoned up in a military cloak.
+
+The Emperor had suffered in the night, for a traveler who had slept
+in an attic above his bedroom had heard him pacing to and fro and
+groaning.  He wore a black-caped, red-lined waterproof cloak over the
+uniform of a General of Division; a glimpse of the Star of the Legion
+of Honor fastened on his breast showed as he raised his hand to throw
+away the butt of the inseparable cigarette, and set his neat little
+polished gold-spurred boot on the carriage-step, and beckoned with a
+small white-kid-gloved hand.
+
+Obeying this signal, a green-and-gold equerry and a demure elderly
+valet hoisted him respectfully on one side, while a keen-eyed,
+lean-jawed young man, accurately attired in deep black, propped him
+scientifically upon the other.  We know this deft and silent
+personage to have been a brilliant young Paris surgeon, retained
+about the person of the Emperor; a specialist whose ministrations, in
+dulling unbearable pain with subcutaneous injections of morphia, and
+combating the progress of disease by skilled surgical treatment,
+became more necessary every day.
+
+They got him in.  The sweat was starting through the rouge upon his
+livid face as he sank heavily upon the seat of the carriage.  His son
+and cousin followed.  Bazaine,--who was accompanied by Canrobert and
+Bourbaki, and did not dismount, rode up to receive his master's
+farewells.
+
+He did not entreat again to be relieved of the supreme
+responsibility.  Perhaps the Emperor imagined that he might.  For he
+put out his hand in haste and shook the Marshal's, reiterating:
+
+"All will go well!  Excellently, I have no doubt of it!  You
+understand, you have broken the spell."
+
+Of ill-luck, did he mean, clinging to the fatalist whose Star was on
+the point of setting.  He added:
+
+"I go to Verdun and Châlons.  Put yourself upon the road for Châlons
+as soon as possible....  May you be fortunate!  _Au revoir!  En
+avant!_"
+
+The brigadier-general in charge of the escort gave the word.  The
+Advance was sounded, the Chasseurs on their gray Arabs dashed onward,
+riding in fours, keeping a sharp lookout for Uhlans.  A half-troop of
+Cent Gardes preceded the Emperor's carriage, his equerries and aides
+and those of the Prince's household followed on their empty, chafing
+beasts.  Another _peloton_ of Cent Gardes were succeeded by three
+Imperial carriages containing the surgeon, secretaries and valets;
+grooms followed with led horses; and the Empress's regiment of
+Dragoons, brass-helmeted, black-plumed warriors, in green with white
+plastrons, brought up the rear.
+
+
+It was four o'clock in the morning when they started.  Deep defiles
+rather than roads, with wooded, precipitous banks, stretch between
+Metz and Gravelotte.  By the time the Imperial _cortège_ had
+extricated itself from the stray columns and batteries choking these,
+and the cliffy banks had lowered to hedgerows, it was six o'clock and
+a gloriously sunny morning.
+
+One may imagine, as the landscape broadened and smoothed like a human
+face relieved from carking anxiety, the young Prince Imperial turning
+in his seat, and looking back upon the scene he was unwillingly
+quitting, with a scowl of resentment and dissatisfaction that changed
+and aged his boyish face.
+
+He saw the white tents of the huge camps of the Imperial Divisions
+snowing over a vast area of country on the French side of the river,
+and the clotting of cavalry and infantry in swarms upon the roads,
+where vast aggregations of baggage and provisions and ambulance
+wagons impeded their passage.  He saw the Imperial Standard break out
+above the Tricolor on the flagstaff of the Fort of Plappeville,
+signifying that Bazaine had entered.  He could see the
+artillery-batteries on the high ground at Rezerieulles, and he knew
+that others were posted behind the woods of Genivaux, and yet others
+near the quarries of Amanvilliers.  The glitter of steel and the
+flutter of red and white lance-pennons told of the Light Cavalry
+outposts at St. Ruffine.  And sinister moving specks upon the
+hill-crests beyond the river above St. Barbe--and others moving in
+the villages, with darker, bigger patches toward Sarrebourg,
+testified, like the gray-white drifts of powder-smoke that came down
+upon the northeast breeze, with the reduplicated rattle of musketry,
+the detonation of field-guns and the yapping of mitrailleuses--to the
+near, active presence of the ancient, racial foe.
+
+_He_ was drawing nearer, always nearer, to the coveted key-city of
+the Two Rivers, seated within her ancient fortifications, guarding
+the northeast frontiers of France.  _He_ wanted Metz, with her vast
+modern arsenal, her huge hospitals and military colleges, her fifteen
+bridges--(the railway-bridge had been blown up by Bazaine's engineers
+on the night before last, when the squadron of Uhlans, greatly
+daring, had made their way into the French lines, with the project of
+seizing upon the person of papa)--and her glorious Cathedral, whose
+vast gray bulk was now bathed in the misty golden sunshine of a
+perfect autumn day.
+
+Soon, soon, those indomitable dark blue soldiers would be at grips
+with Frenchmen for the possession of Metz.  Oh! not to be able to
+fire a shot, or strike a blow with her defenders, because of one's
+pitiable weakness and youth!  Oh! to be perpetually guarded and
+protected and plucked from the very possibility of danger, because
+one happened to be Heir to the Imperial Throne.
+
+Why had the Emperor resigned the supreme command of the Army?  There
+had been reverses--does a Commander-in-Chief give up for that?  True,
+he was not well, but the First Napoleon had fought battles and won
+them, in spite of cramps and colic.  _He_ would never have driven
+away under the noses of King Wilhelm and Count Bismarck and the
+Prince Commanders.  He would have called the nephew who could commit
+such an _impair_ as that a _godichon_.  He would have said: "To the
+devil with you, who boast yourself of my blood!  A Napoleon--and not
+a general!  You might have proved yourself a fighter, at least!"
+
+The soldiers regarded the Emperor's resignation as the Great Napoleon
+would have done.  They had not cried "_Vive l'Empereur!_" when papa
+had driven out of Metz.  Upon the contrary, they had maintained
+silence, scowling or sneering covertly.  To-day, the meanest
+piou-piou had presumed to wink or grin.  More, voices from the depths
+of company-columns had called out horrible insults; things that had
+made the son's teeth set and his fists clench with the passionate
+desire to thrash the offenders, yet had not twitched one muscle in
+the father's impassive face....
+
+"Why do you look back so often, Louis?  What are you thinking about?"
+
+The Emperor's question brought the young head round.  He muttered,
+twisting the gold knot of his little sword:
+
+"I am looking at the Army, and at Metz--and at those Uhlan outposts.
+And I want to know why we are going away--just because the Prussians
+are coming?  Why cannot we stay--and fight?"
+
+The diplomatic, evasive answer came:
+
+"Because for the present it is more prudent that we should withdraw
+ourselves."
+
+The boy shrugged, almost imperceptibly, and his young face took on an
+expression of heavy obstinacy, bringing out, quite startlingly, a
+resemblance to the sire.  He muttered:
+
+"All very well....  But it isn't nice to--absquatulate!"
+
+The slang term _filer_ might be rendered as above.  The Emperor's
+gray face with the patches of rouge on the flaccid cheeks moved not a
+muscle.  Turning his hunched shoulders upon the scene of his horrible
+humiliations, he stared with fixed eyes along the road to Verdun,
+stretching away to the west between its bordering poplars, whose long
+blue shadows--the day being yet young--barred the white dust rather
+suggestively.
+
+At Etain, where the _cortège_ halted for breakfast, the Prince had a
+much nearer view of those ubiquitous horsemen in the dark blue
+uniforms.  Indeed, the Emperor and his suite barely escaped a
+surprise, and the escort of Cent Gardes, who were here replaced by
+some of MacMahon's Chasseurs d'Afrique, were hotly chased and sniped
+at on the way back to camp.
+
+Through the journey of that night, performed in the cushionless plank
+seats of a third-class carriage, his suite being accommodated in a
+string of cattle-trucks, of what did the sleepless Emperor think?
+What questions occupied that sick and sluggish brain?
+
+The question of returning to Paris, the refuge he longed for and yet
+dreaded inexpressibly.  The question as to whether the Empress Regent
+would welcome the Emperor who could no longer rule the State, and
+what kind of ovation the people would extend to the General who had
+deserted the Army of Metz before the advancing hordes of United
+Germany.
+
+Would not Rebellion, Anarchy and Revolution rear up their hydra-heads
+to greet the Third Napoleon, reëntering his capital?  Would his reign
+end in the explosion of a bomb, and a shower of torn flesh and
+scattered blood upon the paving-stones?  Would his son ever wear the
+Imperial crown, won by bribery, bloodshed, fraud and trickery?  Would
+the Church forgive the rape of temporal power?  Would Heaven succor
+one who had defrauded Her?  Was this the beginning of the end?
+
+Lugubrious doubts like these and many others haunted his sleepless
+pillow in the Imperial pavilion of the camp on the dusty plains of
+Champagne.  Dismantled at the close of the October maneuvers, and now
+hastily prepared for the Emperor's reception, the place was damp,
+dismal, and cheerless, as such places usually are.
+
+The newly levied troops were showing signs of insubordination; the
+Gardes Mobiles from Paris were in open mutiny against their generals.
+The great camp was a wasp's nest, which the presence of the Emperor
+stirred to frenzy; the lewd songs in which he figured, the yells of
+savage laughter greeting obscene jests leveled at him and his,
+reached him, pacing the mildewed carpets underneath the damp-stained
+draperies festooned from the claws of Imperial eagles, whose gilding
+was tarnished and discolored, like the Imperial central crown.
+
+All night he paced, on thorns.  With the dawn of day he had the
+answer to his questions.  From the Empress, who wished him to
+abdicate that she might reign for her son; from the new War Minister,
+a creature of his own aggrandizing, who by influencing the Empress,
+who detested him, dreamed of becoming another Richelieu; from the
+Prefect of Police--who indeed brought the warning in person--came a
+triple sentence of exile for the sick, dejected man.
+
+Spewed forth again upon the road toward the northern frontier, he was
+a clog upon the feet of the army that might, by a movement in which
+boldness combined with rapidity, have relieved Bazaine at the
+critical moment and changed the fate of France.  Thenceforth he was
+to be a passive witness, rather than a participator, in scene after
+scene of horrible disaster; disgraces, disillusions, defeats,
+crowding one upon the other, to be crowned by the unspeakable
+catastrophe of Sedan.
+
+
+
+
+XLI
+
+Three hours after the Emperor had driven out of Gravelotte the Red
+Prince had blocked the direct road to Verdun.  The First Army had
+crossed the Moselle.  Moltke and the Royal Headquarter Staff were
+already at Pont à Mousson, the Crown Prince was marching toward
+Châlons.
+
+At this stage of the game, the Warlock gave the signal.  Von Redern's
+guns opened suddenly on the French cavalry camp near Vionville.  You
+remember the squadrons were watering: Murat's Dragoons stampeded with
+their baggage-trains, De Gramont's troopers sent in a volley of
+carbine-fire, mounted and retired in less haste.  This was the
+opening figure of the three days of bloody conflict waged in the
+rural tract between the northern edges of the Bois de Vaux and the
+Forest of Jaumont.  The French call it the "Battle of St. Privat,"
+the Germans the battle of Gravelotte-St. Privat.
+
+The Great Headquarters of the Prussian Commander-in-Chief were at the
+riverside town of Pont à Mousson, some ten miles distant from the
+war-theater--whose stage occupied some six square miles of
+undulating, wooded, ravine-gashed country-side.
+
+And here, his possessing genius, or demon, prompting him, the tactics
+of Moltke abruptly changed.
+
+I have fancied the Warlock getting up at cockcrow on the day of
+Vionville,--he had a little folding camp-bed he always slept upon.
+Undressed to shirt and drawers, he would roll himself in a
+gray-striped blanket which did not reveal the fact when it needed
+washing, and cover himself on chilly nights with a big, shabby,
+military cloak.
+
+Beside the bed, with the extinguished candle-lantern, standing on a
+corner of it, was the little portable campaign-table, covered with
+faded green baize.  His maps were spread on this, and an Army
+revolver of large caliber lay atop of them, well within reach of its
+owner's practiced hand.
+
+He sponged his old face and sinewy neck economically in a basin of
+cold water, carefully washed his hands, rinsed his mouth and put on a
+clean white shirt.  A white drill waistcoat went on under the old
+red-faced uniform frock, with the distinctive shoulder-cords of
+Chieftaincy of the Great General Staff and the Order of Merit
+dangling from the silver-gilt swivel at the collar.  Then he polished
+his bald head with his silk handkerchief, reached his wig from the
+chest of drawers and assumed it, read a text in his Lutheran Bible,
+prayed a twenty-second prayer standing: lighted a thin, dry,
+ginger-colored cigar, such as his soul loved, and sat down to work at
+his maps.
+
+Bismarck might well have likened him to some bird of the predatory
+species.  With the rising furrows of his bald brow hitching up his
+wig, and his clear eyes, lashless with old age, crimson-rimmed by
+dint of fatigue and overstrain, his fierce hooked beak following the
+journey of his withered claw over the tough cartridge-paper--one can
+imagine him, very like an eagle, or a member of the vulture-tribe.
+
+It grew lighter as he worked with his old chronometer and well-used
+compasses and stumpy pencils; and the little thumbed table of
+distance-measures to which he sometimes referred.  He finished and
+rang his handbell for his orderly-servant; chatted with his Adjutant
+and secretary as he broke his fast on bread and black coffee.  Then
+at a great jingling of cavalry bridles and stamping of iron hoofs
+upon the cobblestones below, he went down, carrying his rolled
+map-case, mounted, and rode away with his following.
+
+The sun rising had found him, lean, inscrutable and silent, on the
+ridge above Flavigny, where he had told Prince Charles and Steinmetz,
+Moltke would be found that day....
+
+He had met and primed them with the result of his calculations, had
+seen a fierce engagement from his coign of observation.  By three
+noon, he was back at Pont à Mousson, had interviewed the King, dined
+frugally, and now stood chatting with the Iron Chancellor upon the
+steps of the Mairie.
+
+Guns were muttering in the distance as they had done all day at
+intervals.  There had been fighting, he answered mildly when
+questioned.  Quite a considerable battle one might call it.  The
+villages of Flavigny and Vionville were burning as he spoke.
+
+The potato-gardens of Flauville were thick-strewn with corpses of
+French and German foot-soldiers.  In a little, layer upon layer of
+dead and dying men and horses had been piled upon these.  Necessity
+knows no law; and it had been found necessary to interpose Prussian
+cavalry between the French Artillery and exhausted masses of German
+infantry.  Which accounted for a considerable thinning in the ranks
+of Rauch's Hussars.
+
+The sacrifice had been necessary.  He told himself so as he stood
+there smoking.  His high forehead was quite unclouded as he returned
+in answer to some reference to MacMahon's losses at Wörth:
+
+"It is one of the traditions handed down from the days of Murat and
+Kellerman and Lassalle--the French belief in the virtue of the massed
+cavalry charge...."
+
+The Minister to whom he spoke replied:
+
+"The English exploded the theory at Balaklava sixteen years ago, by
+their magnificent but useless sacrifice of Cardigan's Light Brigade.
+They learned then, and we have profited by the lesson that MacMahon
+has just been spanked for forgetting--and that Your Excellency will
+presently teach Bazaine...."
+
+The great strategist cupped his long chin in his lean hand, and said
+in his dry, thoughtful way:
+
+"Yes, yes.  We will drub this precept into his brain at cost of his
+breeches.  _Regiments of mounted men serve admirably for the
+protection of marching Army Corps--are priceless for reconnaissance,
+outpost and patrol-work, but when they are thrown against vast bodies
+of troops armed with the modern breech-loader, their use is
+unjustifiable, being nil._"
+
+"And when in addition, the unlucky horsemen are charged as at Wörth,
+over hop-poles and tree-stumps, open field-drains and shattered
+garden walls," said the Minister, "then they are worse than useless,
+I should add."
+
+The Warlock's thin-lipped mouth opened in a silent laugh that creased
+his lean cheeks and displayed the gums that were all but toothless.
+He rubbed his hairless chin and said:
+
+"Ay, unless from the point of view of that farmer of
+Schleswig-Holstein who said as our troops marched by his barn-yard:
+'Let us look on them as manure for next year's wheat!'"
+
+The Iron Chancellor's blue eyes hardened with sudden anger.  Imagine
+him in his great muddy jack-boots, with cord breeches not innocent of
+clay and soil, the black double-breasted frock with pewter buttons
+and yellow collar and cuff-facings, the white cap with the yellow
+band and the long, heavy, steel-hilted cavalry sword, puffing at a
+giant cigar as he stood on the doorsteps of the Mairie, over whose
+door drooped the Prussian flag, and the white Hohenzollern pennon
+with the Black Eagle and the gold blazoning, showing, like the
+bodyguard of Red Dragoons and White Cuirassiers, the numerous
+orderlies, and the double cordon of sentries placed about the
+building, that there lodged the King.  While the Red Prince's
+headquarters were distinguished in similar fashion at the National
+Bank of France.
+
+"I have not forgotten!"  The response came in Bismarck's grimmest
+vein of humor.  "Nor has the rascal either, if he happens to be alive
+still.  Our infantry taught him very thoroughly that there are more
+uses than one for a bundle of straw."
+
+"Some of our German Princes have mastered that lesson quite recently,
+Excellency," said Count Paul Hatzfeldt, First Secretary of the
+ambulatory Foreign Office, turning a handsome, humorous face upon his
+Chief.  "The Grand Duke of Mecklenburg slept in a barn at the last
+halting-place, and Prince Leopold of Bavaria in a loft over a stable
+yard, where, as he explained afterward, there were not only mice, but
+rats!"
+
+"I understand His Excellency to refer," said Moltke, taking a pinch
+of stuff, "to the Polish method of flogging, which is to tie a man
+face-downward on a truss and thrash him to a jelly with green
+birch-rods."
+
+"Precisely.  Only not having birch rods 'convenient' as Lever's
+Irishmen would say," returned the Chancellor, "our fellows used their
+belts--buckle-end preferably.  Then they pitched the farmer on his
+own dunghill, and left him to rot there for the land in spring."
+
+"Severe, but severe lessons are best remembered," said the Warlock,
+placidly.  "Thus MacMahon will perhaps throw no more regiments of
+cavalry away!  As for ourselves, we have hardly brought that arm of
+the Service to its present condition of usefulness to handle it
+wastefully.  Military science--true military science--does not allow
+of undue extravagance in the sentient material of war.  Nay,--it will
+never be said of me that I wasted blood prodigally!"  He curved his
+long thin hand about his large and beautifully shaped ear, and added,
+as the distant detonations of heavy artillery made the windows rattle
+in their sashes and the pavement quake underfoot.  "They are still
+fighting south and west of Metz.  In half an hour, if the firing has
+not abated, I am going to ride in that direction with the King."
+
+He glanced at his chronometer, then went down the side steps, and
+strolled, contentedly smoking, to where his own charger and his
+master's were waiting in charge of some orderlies near the Royal
+carriages and fourgons that occupied the center of the Market Place.
+While Count Hatzfeldt, glancing after the thin figure, shrugged and
+said to his Chief in an undertone:
+
+"Heaven send that by this time to-morrow we may not be deploring some
+tremendous holocaust of Prussian cavalry!  Do not ask me how the idea
+suggested itself...."
+
+"Possibly,"--the Minister slightly moved his hand toward a string of
+country grain-wagons, crowded with wounded, and drawn by farmers'
+horses, converging from the westward boulevard toward the Market
+Place--"possibly because so many of those fellows have been brought
+in here since twelve noon.  And in Moltke's very disclaimer of
+blood-waste, you find cause of suspicion.  In that case, our greatest
+strategist would be like the spider, who agitates her web to conceal
+herself before she has even been seen.  Moreover, they--I refer to
+our wounded--have been infantry of the Third Corps chiefly, nearly
+all Prussians from the Mark of Brandenburg.  The French prisoners
+were mostly horsemen; Light Blue Lancers and Cuirassiers of the Guard
+Imperial.  What fellows are these?"  Under his heavy brows he
+scrutinized the approaching train of sufferers, adding: "H'm!
+Marshal Frossard's chassepotiers have taken toll of Rauch's Hussars
+with a vengeance!  Where are you going, Count, in such haste?"
+
+Halfway down the steps Hatzfeldt halted, dropping his eyeglass and
+turning round an astonished face.
+
+"Going, Excellency?  Why, naturally, to speak to these wounded
+cavalry men.  My wife has a cousin, a captain in the Hussars of
+Rauch."
+
+The Chancellor said, bending his powerful gaze on the handsome face
+of the diplomatic dandy:
+
+"Let me counsel you to quench your desire for information.  The
+King's windows are overhead.  And the inquiries natural for you to
+make in your own character will be suspected, should His Majesty
+observe them--to have been prompted by me."  He showed a corner of
+the sealed dispatch he had thrust into his pocket.  "You recognize
+the Queen's handwriting upon this envelope?  Augusta will have
+written another such Jeremiad to her spouse.  Mercy and moderation,
+piety and philanthropy will be the headings of the sermon penned on
+my own sheets of letter-paper.  The test of the King's will be,
+'_Bismarck is alone to blame!_'  Fortunately my back is broad, and I
+have his entire confidence....  But if he once suspected me of
+getting what the Yankees call 'cold feet!'..."
+
+The hand that held the cigar indicated a stoppage of the foremost
+wagon.  "See!  Moltke is speaking to the officer in charge of the
+convoy.  I will wager you a case of champagne that his mouth is being
+corked up.  A wise proceeding too!  For, remember, the story of a
+wounded man is painted from his own wounds--always a red tale of
+disaster.  How can it be otherwise?  In the heat of battle, or
+perhaps without having fired one shot, or ridden one charge--he has
+been struck down, poor wretch! and carried, bleeding, from the
+field....  Has it occurred to Your Excellency that those guns are
+drawing nearer?"
+
+The query was addressed to Moltke, who had returned, leaving the
+wagon-train to jolt with its doleful load in the direction where the
+Flag of the Geneva Cross, hanging from doors and windows, announced
+the location of temporary hospitals.
+
+The expert listened as distant crashes of volley-firing were answered
+by the hyena-yapping of mitrailleuses, and answered, pointing to the
+weather-vane on the tower of the Market Hall:
+
+"Your Excellency is wrong.  The breeze has altered its direction.  It
+was northerly, and is now blowing directly from the west.  Yet if the
+action should assume grave proportions, it may prove necessary to
+shift Headquarters to some village further afield."
+
+"Heaven forbid!" murmured Count Hatzfeldt, expressively raising his
+fine eyebrows, "when one is able to get a decent dinner, and a daily
+bath at one's hotel!..."
+
+"Heaven generally ordains, through the mouth of Your Excellency, an
+exodus," said the Chancellor, laughing, "when a comfortable bed falls
+to my lot.  At Herny my couch had to be lengthened with chairs and
+carriage-cushions, and these kept parting company all the night long.
+My feet were on the floor when I awakened in the morning,--literally
+at cockcrow--for my window opened upon the dunghill where the lord of
+the poultry-yard sounded his reveillé.  Now here I am accommodated in
+quite respectable fashion; in a little red creeper-covered house at
+the corner of the Rue Raugraf, and three of the Councillors are
+stowed under the same roof with me."
+
+"While I," said the Warlock, "have my quarters at a cleanly bakery,
+where there is quite an excellent piano, by the way.  So that,
+to-night, unless Fate order otherwise, I shall hear my nephew Henry
+von Burt sing some of my favorite songs.  He is in voice for the
+first time since his attack of sore throat.  The King has been much
+pleased with his rendering of Herder's '_Volkslieder_' and '_Die
+Blumen_ of Heine, which doubtless Your Excellency knows."
+
+"I am acquainted with the song you mention.  Or I was," returned the
+Chancellor, "in my salad days.  They are over for me, unluckily! ...
+Only Your Excellency possesses the secret of perpetual youth."
+
+And he turned aside to receive a bulky sealed packet of dispatches
+from a green-jacketed Royal Courier, who had just driven into the
+Market Place in a farmer's gig, and now got down, tossing a fee to
+the scowling driver of the muddy, panting roadster.  While Moltke
+stood smiling and humming with characteristic untunefulness a stave
+of the tender, sentimental ballad:
+
+  "_If they knew it, the little flowers,
+  How she wounded this bleeding heart,
+  They would weep with me in bright dew-showers,
+  Healing, healing its anguished smart!_"
+
+
+Said the Minister in an undertone to Hatzfeldt, as he transferred to
+his keeping the bulky sealed envelope received from the courier:
+
+"Let his Excellency sing only loud enough, and neither Steinmetz nor
+the Red Prince will be able to prevent the music-loving Frenchmen
+from retiring upon Verdun."
+
+He had not meant the pungent jest to reach the ear of the great
+strategist.  But Moltke glanced round and answered mildly, if with a
+narrowing of his wrinkled eyelids, and a sardonic twist of his thin,
+dry lips:
+
+"Then all the more surely should we surround and annihilate them.  My
+second plan is usually stronger than my first.  And I have already
+issued instructions to Prince Frederick Charles and General
+Steinmetz, indicating the course they are to follow should Bazaine
+pierce our left wing.  Meanwhile let us listen to this fellow's
+singing.  It may please Your Excellency better than mine!"
+
+The arrival, a Captain of Dragoons of the Prussian Guard, acting as
+_aide-de-camp_ upon the staff of Steinmetz, had just galloped into
+Pont à Mousson, accompanied by an escort of half a dozen troopers on
+blown horses, and had little breath left even for speech.  But when
+he threw himself from his reeking beast, the dispatch he took from
+his belt-pouch and handed to the Chief of the Great Staff told of a
+huge expenditure of "the sentient material of war."
+
+
+At noon of the day, looking from his point of observation on the high
+ground between the Bois des Ognons and Gravelotte, short-legged,
+fiery-tempered Steinmetz had seen what seemed a weak spot in the
+French position.  Under cannon, mitrailleuse and chassepot-fire he
+had ordered several batteries of the 7th Corps and Von Hartmann's
+Division of Cavalry to cross the Gravelotte defile and plant
+themselves on the slopes south of the road.  Death had harvested
+redly from the extravagant movement.  The slaughter that ensued had
+shaken even the men who carried the needle-gun, their huge columns
+were giving ground.  General Steinmetz and his staff were under heavy
+fire.  Only the Prussian field-batteries, served and trained by
+gunner-sharpshooters, kept the German right wing from caving in.
+
+Heavy news, one would suppose, yet the Warlock read the dispatch to
+his master with as placid an expression as though he were at that
+moment seated beside the baker's excellent piano, listening to the
+tender warblings of the melodious Henry von Burt.
+
+"Steinmetz is over ardent, it may be, yet it is what I should have
+done, had I been in his place," he said in answer to some perturbed
+exclamation of King Wilhelm.  "Only, perhaps," he fingered his long
+chin thoughtfully, "I should have done it in a different way.  He is
+supported by now.  Stülpnagel will have thrown his Division forward
+and gripped the woods and heights upon the French left.  Your Majesty
+will see a change in our favor by the time we have reached the
+ground!"
+
+"Your Excellency should be there now and I with you.  Pray order the
+horses!" urged the agitated King.
+
+"They are waiting, sire!" said the Warlock, cool, calm, and
+inscrutable as ever.  In fact, he hummed another bar or two of the
+plaintive ballad about the weeping flowers as he followed his Royal
+master downstairs to the door, and the War Minister, Von Roon, who
+had been hastily sent for, rode up with his staff as the King mounted
+his steadiest charger, a powerful black horse.
+
+"The Federal Chancellor, Count von Bismarck Schönhausen, begs
+permission to accompany your Majesty!" said Hatzfeldt, gracefully
+approaching as the orderly of the Body-guard resigned the bridle-rein.
+
+He said to himself as he returned with the graciously accorded
+permission to where the Minister waited by the big brown mare that
+was held by an orderly of Cuirassiers:
+
+"How perfect is his discretion!  How completely he hides the iron
+grip of power under the velvet glove of diplomacy!  Roon is the
+King's quartermaster-sergeant, Moltke is his calculating machine,
+Bismarck is his ruler--but he will always seem his slave!  Wherever
+the King goes--on journeys, shooting excursions, visits to
+watering-places--he is always at his elbow; he rides with him to
+maneuvers, and reviews and parades.  Since the War began--and at cost
+of what exertion, mental and bodily, no one understands better than I
+do!--he has never left his master alone for long enough to further
+the intrigues and influence of other men....  Every battle-field the
+King looks on will be seen through the Chancellor's eyes.  For this
+War is _his_ War--and he knows it! ... Here come galloping the
+Royalties and Serene Highnesses, rabid to see some real fighting....
+Bismarck calls them the Tinsel Rabble,--if only they knew!"
+
+And Count Paul, smiling in his gently satirical fashion, strode back
+to his quarters to pen to his young, pretty, and exceedingly
+coquettish Countess, a marital letter full of tender expressions and
+requests for lots more cigarettes.  While their Highnesses and
+Mightinesses of the Royal Suite pranced away in the wake of the King
+and his three great servants, without the slightest idea that the
+Chancellor who rode on William's left hand held them in such contempt.
+
+The wounded men sitting or lying on hay in the grain-carts at the
+hospital door looked up as the Great Headquarter Staff rode by and
+gave a shaky Hoch! of greeting.  Heads of dressers, nurses, Knights
+of St. John, and surgeons appeared at windows from which projected
+the Flag with the Red Cross.  While a long train of haggard French
+prisoners, halted before the porch of the church that had been
+converted into a temporary prison, stared with lackluster eyes over
+the bowls of cabbage-soup and the huge hunches of bread that had been
+distributed among them by pitying ladies; and a battalion of little
+black-a-vised, green-coated Saxon soldiers who had marched in
+dead-beat and were dozing on straw under the Market Hall, lifted
+their heads from their knapsacks, saying: "There goes Moltke with his
+King, and the Big Pomeranian.  Something is up out yonder!" and
+rolled over to sleep again....
+
+The inhabitants and tradespeople of Pont à Mousson were too crushed
+to make any audible comments.  Within a fortnight they had had twice
+to feed and quarter a French Division.  Now here, as it seemed, was
+the whole Prussian Army poured out upon them.
+
+They were dumb and stupefied in the Babel of foreign dialects.  They
+could make no headway against the flood.  Everywhere were loud-voiced
+Intendants making requisitions and giving orders; officers and
+quartermaster-sergeants shouting for rooms, provender and stabling;
+the men, like the officers, insatiable in demands for meat, bread,
+forage, tobacco, flour and wine, liberal in oaths and blows to those
+who could not satisfy their needs.
+
+Tradesmen in gutted shops swore in whispers over basketsful of dirty
+little nickel coins with (to them) indecipherable inscriptions--all
+they had to show in return for one or two thousand francs' worth of
+stock.  To grumble brought retribution, swift, sharp and merciless,
+on the head of the grumbler.  To resist meant death.  Therefore they
+would be silent until the invader should have passed on.
+
+But when the wearers of the muddy blue uniforms and the riders of the
+muddy, well-fed horses did pass, fresh hosts came swarming after
+them.  There seemed no end to the brown-faced men in the loathed blue
+uniform....
+
+"Are there more to come?" those of them who understood French--and
+many did--were asked timidly, and they answered: "Naturally.  We are
+only the Advance.  To keep the roads by which we have passed open,
+and to guard the telegraph-wires we have left behind us there will be
+very many more required!"
+
+Germany was being emptied into France's lap, it seemed to the
+bewildered peasants leaning against the walls of their cottages or
+peering from the doorways, as had done the peasants of
+Alsace-Lorraine.  They, like them, were ruined, their crops
+devastated by cataclysms of armed humanity, their cellars emptied,
+their frugal stores devoured.
+
+"But where are we to find food for all these, we who had fared badly
+enough before they came?  And who will pay us for what they have not
+paid for, or give cash for this stuff called money that they have
+left behind?  Will it be the King or the Emperor?" some haggard man
+or woman, reckless with despair and misery, would demand with frantic
+gestures.  "And how shall we feed our children when they leave us
+nothing?  How live at all when they live upon us?"
+
+They asked this less often when the Flag with the Geneva Cross
+appeared above roofs and thrust out of windows of buildings
+appropriated as hospitals, and when long trains of German
+ambulance-wagons and hay-carts full of wounded men in blue uniforms
+began to pass by, as well as piteous processions of French wounded
+and French prisoners....
+
+"You see, they die!" they presently began to tell each other.
+"Frenchmen are being killed like flies out yonder where you hear the
+cannon, but not Frenchmen only.  These too, die....  MacMahon has
+failed us and the cursed Emperor has run away for fear of Bismarck,
+and Bazaine may prove a rotten staff for France to lean on.  But if
+our generals have forgotten how to lead, the Army of France has not
+forgotten how to fight, and thousands upon thousands of Prussians
+have been killed since the beginning of the War.  They dig their
+great trenches so quickly and bury the slain in such haste that the
+greatness of their losses will never be really known.  When they
+would hide them more completely, they heap up corpses in farmers'
+barns, and pile the farmers' straw and hay and faggots about them,
+and pour on petroleum and tar and set fire to it--and thus their dead
+are consumed to ashes--and sometimes the yet living with the dead!"
+
+
+As at Paris, spy-fever raged in cities, towns and villages, while the
+armies of the invader plowed bleeding furrows in the flank of
+prostrate France.  For the Prussian Secret Intelligence Department
+had its emissaries everywhere.  Hotels, public bureaus, railway
+stations, shops, offices, even clubs, had harbored them unknowingly.
+Now they cropped up on all sides, speaking French with the Gallic
+accent, their German brains full of neatly pigeon-holed and docketed
+information, ready to place themselves at the disposal of their
+friends.  Hence, patriotic Frenchmen, favored by chance or heredity
+with blue eyes, fair hair, ruddy complexions and the advantage as to
+inches over their neighbors, found themselves cold-shouldered by
+their intimates and subjected to unpleasantly suspicious scrutiny
+when consuming refreshment in _cafés_ and restaurants, or strolling
+with their acquaintances on public boulevards.
+
+English artists attached to illustrated newspapers, special
+correspondents, handicapped by blonde whiskers and an imperfect
+acquaintance with the French language, found themselves in many a
+tight place.  "_Mort aux espions!_" is not a cheering cry when some
+thousands of red-hot throats are uttering it, and half a dozen
+soldiers or gendarmes form the only barrier between the unlucky
+suspects and the furious mob.
+
+
+
+
+XLII
+
+A mud-bedaubed nondescript who toiled at the heels of the Great
+Headquarter Staff upon a huge velocipede of the big-wheeled,
+bone-shaker type prevalent at that remote period, met plenty of
+scowling glances from groups of peasants gathered at the corners of
+villages and listening by the wayside.  Even on territory occupied by
+German troops, it was not safe for lagging soldiers to drop behind
+upon the march.  To enter roadside taverns or farmhouses with a
+comrade was imprudent, to venture in alone was perilous, the sight of
+the German uniform, the sound of the Teutonic gutturals, were so
+fiercely abhorred.  Of the reason for this loathing the Englishman
+was not ignorant.  Marching with the infantry of the German army, he
+had followed where the Uhlans had passed.
+
+He had slept, the night before the Army of the Red Prince had crossed
+the river, in a little deserted country château,--an ideal honeymoon
+nest for lovers, standing in a high-walled garden full of fruit-trees
+and tangled roses in the middle of a sloping meadow on the banks of
+the Moselle.
+
+The butt of some Prussian soldier's rifle had served for key to the
+locked door in the high garden-wall.  Those who had gone before had
+stripped the bushes and espaliers.  The house had been entered, and
+the dainty silk-upholstered drawing-room chairs and sofas had been
+dragged out into the garden.  The piano--a tiny rosewood
+_bijou_--probably a wedding present--and the absurd little
+billiard-table with which Monsieur had disported himself, stood
+crookedly upon the gravel; a long tear in the green cloth of the one;
+prints of tumblers, marks of greasy fingers marring the shiny veneer
+of the other.  Bottles that had contained Champagne and
+Moselle--butts of cigars, empty tobacco-papers and match-boxes were
+scattered everywhere--over gravel, and grass-plot and the once trim
+garden-beds.  An impromptu _café_-concert had evidently formed a
+feature of the bivouac.
+
+P. C. Breagh had slept in a charming bedroom, under rosebud-chintz
+curtains looped with silken ropes, having carved wooden Cupids,
+painted pink, instead of tassels.  The bed was not as luxurious as it
+might have been, because the blankets and sheets had been carried
+off.  Opening his eyes in the gray of morning he had seen himself as
+he lay reflected in a long cheval-glass, and failed, for the moment,
+to recognize in the bronzed, shaggy, unclean tatterdemalion therein
+reflected the young Englishman of respectable appearance who had
+interviewed the German States' Chancellor in the Wilhelm-strasse.
+
+He was not alone in the room, that was the next discovery.  A woman,
+young and swarthy, dressed in the quaint costume of the country,
+stood upon the other side of the bed, with a kitchen chopper in her
+lifted right hand.  He took in the chopper at a glance, and promptly
+rolled off the bed upon the side facing the friendly cheval-glass,
+and stood glowering at the black-eyed girl.
+
+"I have startled Monsieur?  A thousand apologies!"
+
+She forced a smile with her curtsey and backed toward the door.  P.
+C. Breagh explained in his French that he was no robber but a
+harmless traveler, and that she need not be alarmed.
+
+"Monsieur is very kind!"  Her chopper-hand hidden under her apron,
+she explained that she had served as cook in the establishment.  Upon
+the news that M. de Bismarck was coming, _tout à coup_, Monsieur and
+Madame had gone away together to Paris.  They were noble and very
+amiable, but old, old, and feeble....  They had left the little
+château in her care....
+
+"Mademoiselle is not easily frightened?" P. C. Breagh hinted.
+
+Said the black-eyed, modestly:
+
+"I am Angéle--nothing of Mademoiselle.  A peasant--like my father,
+who was gardener for Monsieur and Madame....  I was alone here when
+the Prussian horsemen came, breaking the doors and shutters....
+Everything was spoiled, or taken, wine, linen, the fowls in the
+poultry-run.  Destitution, ruin everywhere!..."
+
+She accentuated her tale of loss by heavings of the bosom, shrugs of
+the fine shoulders, dramatic gestures.
+
+"Then my father returned and found ...  No matter!  Both he and I
+should have been silent and endured everything....  It was not wise,
+Monsieur, that the old man should have struck a Prussian, even for my
+sake.  For then he was beaten.  Whenever I shut my eyes, I see it....
+Therefore I have vowed not to sleep again until...."  She opened her
+eyes wide, and smiled, rather grimly, then changed the subject with a
+wave of the unchoppered and visible hand.  Was Monsieur hungry?  By
+searching, a crust of bread might be found in some cupboard, an egg
+or two--laid by one of the abducted hens in some private corner--a
+pinch of coffee and sugar sufficient for Monsieur!
+
+"I should be glad of it.  But--when you are in such trouble it seems
+unfair," protested Monsieur.  He added, reverting to the language of
+the country, that he would be happy to pay for the _déjeuner_.
+
+"But no!  A meal for a bird!--Monsieur and Madame will never miss
+it!" and Angéle curtseyed herself away, with forced smiles.
+
+Left alone, P. C. Breagh bolted the door and finding water in the
+bedroom jugs, and scented soap upon the washstand, enjoyed the luxury
+of a comprehensive wash, drying himself, in the absence of towels,
+upon a pillow-case.  A pot of cold-cream, tinted a delicate pink and
+bearing the label of Piesse and Lubin, he found, and anointed his
+blistered feet therewith, and not without pangs of conscience--tore
+up the pillow-case and bandaged them.  He would pay the girl for the
+damage done to her master's property, he told himself.
+
+He combed his shock of dusty hair with a tortoise-shell comb he
+picked up from the carpet, and went downstairs, knapsack in hand.  It
+was four o'clock.  The dusty, foot-print and wheel-marked highway
+beyond the broken door in the garden-wall was strangely bare and
+lonely.  The battalion he had marched with had bivouacked on the
+other side of the village.  The troops that would presently follow
+were not yet upon the road.
+
+The girl cried out that Monsieur's breakfast was ready.  It had been
+laid, looking quite tempting, on one of the little inlaid tables that
+stood upon the tiny lawn.  A truncheon of bread, fairly new, a pat of
+butter, two eggs, and a bowl of fragrant, steaming milk and
+coffee--such a meal as P. C. Breagh had not enjoyed for many a day.
+
+He begged Angéle to share.  She replied with a graceful wave of
+abnegation that she had already eaten.  P. C. Breagh expressed
+regret, muttered his old Rockhampton grace and savagely fell to.
+
+"Monsieur is Catholic?..."
+
+The movement of his hand, making the sacred Sign, had not escaped
+her.  He nodded, with his mouth full, and Angéle turned pale under
+her swarthy skin.  Her guest vigorously beheaded an egg and reached
+for the coffee-bowl.  The expression of the girl's eyes, as he lifted
+it to his mouth, brought something back to him.  He sipped
+cautiously--recognized the French equivalent for English
+rat-poison--spat forth what he had taken, with a hideous grimace, and
+poured the deadly stuff out upon the ground.
+
+Then he got up and looked for Angéle, whose white-frilled cap,
+crimson bodice, and striped stuff petticoat had vanished round the
+corner of the little hen-house.  He could hear the _klop-klop_ of her
+varnished cow-leather clogs receding along paths unknown.
+
+Said P. C. Breagh, speaking with mouth awry, for the intense
+bitterness of the alkaloid had dried up tongue and palate:
+
+"I'd like to follow that girl and shake her.  But more than likely
+her sweetheart and male relatives are lurking in the neighborhood
+with pitchforks, to speed the unwelcome guest."
+
+He went back to the breakfast-table, but the glamour had faded from
+the banquet, and the leathery dryness of mouth and throat foiled him
+in the effort to finish the egg he had begun.  He pocketed the other,
+abandoned the bread and butter as unreliable, strapped on his dusty
+knapsack, and was hobbling away upon the sticks that had lately
+served him as crutches, when he caught sight of an obviously new
+coffin of thin tarred planking, on the gravel near the conservatory
+door.  It bore a cross and an inscription roughly scrawled in letters
+of white paint:
+
+         |
+       --+--
+         |
+         |
+
+  JOSEPH MARIE MEUNIER,
+
+  AGED 80.
+
+  KILLED BY THE PRUSSIANS,
+
+  AUGUST, 1870.
+
+  ------
+
+  R.I.P.
+
+
+And then, with a stiffening of every muscle and a cold and deadly
+sinking at the heart, the English boy realized that Angéle's father
+had been murdered, and knew what had been the unendurable injury that
+had provoked the man of eighty to strike in his daughter's defense.
+Next instant a gun banged, but the charge of slugs that had been
+meant to lodge in P. C. Breagh's cerebellum merely smashed the
+conservatory glass and peppered the walls and trees.  The intended
+recipient of these favors had previously been lame.  Now, regardless
+of blisters and skin cracks, he cast away his improvised crutches,
+darted down the garden-path, nipped through the shattered door that
+hung upon one twisted hinge, and ran for dear life.
+
+Thenceafter our young friend did not stray too far from the column he
+temporarily marched with.  The secret of those haggard eyes and
+scowling looks was clear to him now.  And the discovery of a giant
+velocipede with the solid rubber tires of the period and a front
+wheel of four feet in diameter abandoned in a ditch, presently
+enabled him--previously schooled by Mr. Tickling in the management of
+a machine of similar construction to outpace the Red Prince's
+marching battalions; and--upon highways, keep abreast of his flying
+cavalry.
+
+Now, hugely daring, he pounded along in the wake of the Great
+Headquarter Staff, guided by the whipping flicker of the black and
+white lance-pennons of the Red Uhlans bringing up the rear.
+
+There were troops upon the road....  One or two stray batteries of
+artillery, and part of an Engineer Corps going the same way, halted
+to give a cheer for the King.  But the galloping dispatch-bearers
+with their guards of troopers, bound for Pont à Mousson, meeting the
+Great Staff on the way, turned back with it, adding to the clouds of
+dust in its wake.
+
+The Doctor had promised P. C. Breagh plenty of raw-head and
+bloody-bones whether he marched with the Advance or remained at the
+rear.  The prophecy had been verified.  He had not yet seen a battle
+or even a battlefield.  But thousands of wounded men, displaying
+every sickening mutilation that shot and shell and steel can inflict
+upon the human body; thousands upon thousands of prisoners, gaunt
+with fatigue, hunger and misery, had passed in an almost unending
+panorama before his sickened, pitying eyes.  Ruined châteaux, farms
+and churches, crops destroyed or rotting in the ground ungarnered,
+villages razed or burned, towns battered out of shape, and
+fortifications breached by heavy gunnery, were to become sights of
+common occurrence as he traveled the long red road that was to lead
+him home at last.
+
+
+Now he rode and odd lines of songs, comic or tender, fragments of
+Fleet Street talk, brain-pictures of things seen or persons
+remembered passed through his mind as he pedaled between long lines
+of roadside poplars, whitening in the hot breeze that carried the
+scorching dust along in clouds.
+
+The face of the peasant girl who had tried to poison him.  By George!
+if Mrs. Rousby or Miss Marriott or Mrs. Vezin could have seen her
+fierce, gleaming eyes, and her heavy black eyebrows lifted at the
+outer corners, and the way a white canine tooth had nipped her red
+underlip....  The voice of Mr. Knewbit barking, "Avoid Sham
+Technicality and Sentimental Slumgullion," the well-bred voice of
+Valverden dealing the unforgotten snub.  The fortune told him by the
+gipsy woman on Waterloo Bridge after that unforgettable January
+night's vigil: "Yer'll travel a long road and a bloody road; and
+yer'll tramp it with the one yer love, and never know it, until the
+end, when tute is jasing...."
+
+"When tute is jasing" meant "When thou art going" he had been told so
+by a man who knew a bit of Romany.  His imagination made a
+grasshopper-leap of years to the death-bed of a celebrated War
+Correspondent.--a grim, bronzed man who had followed his arduous
+calling in many quarters of the world, and had earned much kudos and
+a whole chestful of decorations, but had never married, and was
+understood to look with coldness upon the loveliest women, his heart
+having been irrevocably given in earlier days.  Juliette--still
+young, and ah! how exquisite in maturity--Juliette in widow's weeds,
+would hasten to the moribund's side and place her little hand in his,
+gaunt and damp with approaching death.  She would hear his story of
+faithful, hopeless passion, and close his eyelids for the last long
+sleep.  And standing by his pillow, looking pityingly at the dead
+face, she would realize that she loved--too late....
+
+He sniffed and gulped as the tears stung his smarting eyelids, so
+moving was the picture of that death-bed scene.
+
+A picture of the King of Prussia as he had seen him sitting at the
+open window of his lodgings at the Mairie of Pont à Mousson next came
+up, with faces of market-people and street-boys gaping round-eyed at
+_Le Roi de la Prusse_, who nursed his clean-shaven chin and stared
+unwinkingly before him.  Again, the old man, pale, square-shouldered,
+capped and tightly-buttoned, riding through the market-place with his
+Iron Chancellor by his side.
+
+Wiry, hawk-eyed Moltke and saturnine, shaggy-browed Roon clattered
+upon the heels of them, but P. C. Breagh had had eyes only for the
+great soldierly figure that bestrode the big brown mare.
+
+Did he not owe his life to the well-shaped hand that had rested on
+the thigh of the brown mare's rider, as the Minister bent to speak to
+the King?
+
+No common bond of confidence and friendship seemed to unite the
+master of seventy-three and the man of fifty-five.  The hard,
+somewhat vulpine face of the Hohenzollern, with its drooping,
+aquiline nose, narrow light hazel eyes, curled white mustache,
+precise, tight-lipped mouth and rounded chin projecting between the
+brushed back white whiskers, had been all alight with interest, and
+warm with kindliness.
+
+This is what the Man of Iron had said with his small square teeth
+showing laughingly under the heavy hair-brake, and his fierce,
+prominent blue eyes sparkling with humor and fun:
+
+"The final scenes of melodrama are always the most strenuous.  Your
+Majesty must regard the ridge over Flavigny as your Royal box on the
+Grand Tier, the occasion as a farewell performance of the French
+Empire--played for the benefit of United Germany, before the whole
+world!"
+
+Flavigny was a village....  But the flickering black-and-white
+pennons that tipped the dust-cloud ahead were slowing....  Three
+battalions of infantry, each with its band playing gaily at its head,
+the bronzed, healthy-looking, white-powdered men marching eight
+abreast, had halted and front-faced as the word of command followed
+the sound of the Great Staff trumpeter:
+
+"_Clear the way!  Clear the way!  Here comes the King!_"
+
+And now the scorching air vibrated with their vigorous cheering as
+the King cantered by and was gone with a shout and a wave of the hand.
+
+"Our old one takes dust and sun, saddle-blisters and short commons
+like any old trooper!" P. C. Breagh heard a Lieutenant say to a
+subaltern as the dusty ranks half-wheeled and fell into step once
+more.  "He's a precisian too....  _Zum Beispiel_, he called to a man
+in Vidler's company that he had got his 'needler' on the wrong
+shoulder.  Now that's another thing I like in the old man!..."
+
+"The Field Marshal is taking the Great Headquarters to where it will
+be hellishly risky," a Captain with Staff shoulder-cords was saying
+to another, as a new outbreak of cannon and mitrailleuse-fire caused
+his horse to start and rear.  He added: "They were hard at it at Mars
+la Tour, Vionville and Rezonville all day yesterday: the 5th Division
+were in action all round Moltke as he stood on the high ridge above
+Flavigny....  To-day our 7th and 10th are fighting between Gravelotte
+and St. Hubert, where the French have the devil's own array of
+battery-emplacements and rifle-pits--our guards are at Doncourt, our
+9th and 8th corps are at Verneville and Amanvilliers.  Now the
+fighting seems to have rolled down nearer the river.  I have
+certainly heard cavalry trumpets sounding the charge, and volleys of
+musketry--French, I judge!--coming from that direction.  I should
+judge that...."
+
+"Bazaine must have turned the handle in too much of a hurry!"
+retorted the junior, who enjoyed a regimental reputation for humor,
+and a volley of laughter rattled along the marching files, now
+breasting a steep and gravelly hill, half-way up which the rider of
+the giant-wheeled velocipede had been compelled to dismount.
+
+P. C. Breagh had seen, reproduced from the _Charivari_ in all the
+German illustrated papers, the famous caricature of Cham, over which
+King Wilhelm's brown-faced infantrymen were grinning as they climbed
+the hill.  Who does not remember the Count de Noë's memorable
+presentment of the field of war dotted with defunct Prussians, and
+the French mitrailleuse-gunner in the foreground who exclaims in
+astonishment: "_Sapristi!_ the battle is over.  I must have turned
+the handle too fast!"
+
+But more than the sardonic jest of Cham, the Captain's reference to
+the nearness of a possible action interested the would-be spectator
+of a battlefield.  The wiry, sun-bronzed young man in the broken
+boots and the dusty brown Norfolk jacket, now pushing the solid-tired
+giant-wheel up a steep and lung-testing hill which the bearers of the
+needle-gun took in a canter, had seen war-casualties in appalling
+numbers, but he had not yet beheld War.
+
+And now sharp bugles and piercing trumpets were clamoring of War all
+round one.  The musketry that one could hear at Pont à Mousson
+clattered in volleys among the neighboring hills.  The deep booming
+of heavy field-batteries persistently answered.  Every now and then
+the ear was violently assaulted by the hideous hyena-yapping of the
+mitrailleuse.
+
+These breasting hills, these deep-cupped valleys walled and ramparted
+with wood-crested hill-ranges, cut up the honest battle into a dozen
+skirmishes.  Oh! for an open, campaign and a vantage on some breezy
+hill-top whence one might see, as the King was seeing with Moltke and
+his Chancellor from the ridge above Flavigny!
+
+
+
+
+XLIII
+
+The ridge above Flavigny seemed farther off and more inaccessible
+than the Great Atlas.  One must get off the highroad to some elevated
+bit of ground, consult the Doctor's map, and use the Chancellor's
+binoculars.  Here was a broad track, green with grass grown over
+ancient wheel-ruts, leading off upon the left near the crest of the
+hill.
+
+The grass-road led to a stone quarry evidently long abandoned.
+Skirting the quarry, P. C. Breagh began to climb the grassy scarp of
+the hill.  It grew steeper, and presently he awakened to the
+difficulties of mountaineering with a velocipede, and hid away, with
+the intention of retrieving it later, his stolen giant-wheel in a
+clump of whins.  Alas! its bones, like those of many a sentient
+charger, were to rust in rains and blister in suns upon that hillside
+of the Meurthe Department for many and many a year.
+
+But not knowing this, P. C. Breagh continued climbing.  The ridgy
+backbone of turf-jacketed rock proved a natural buttress rising to a
+towering platform sparsely grassed, tufted with thorn and
+furze-bushes, stunted pines and dwarfy oak-trees, all mossy of stem
+and bending to the southwest.
+
+The afternoon sunshine was mellow rather than hot.  The pure dustless
+air was fragrant with hill-thyme and the meadow-sweet.  The
+autumn-tinted woods were golden, the hills hathed in clear blue air.
+The short herbage clothing the steep was warm, smelling like the
+clean hide of some great grass-feeding animal.  But for the restless
+bickering of trumpets and bugles, and the hellish noise that men with
+guns were making, it would have been sweet to be upon the hillside
+alone with God.
+
+There was a great view from the summit of the colossal limestone....
+You could see that bone of contention, the road leading to Verdun,
+stretching away southwestward, a dusty-white ribbon between its lines
+of whitening poplars, over the tops of three thick patches of
+rusty-golden woodland, and the bushy uplands above Gravelotte and the
+church spire of Vernéville.
+
+Dark blue Prussian columns showed on the grassy slopes traversed by
+the road that ran from Ars to Bagneux.  Near the Quarries of
+Rezerieulles was a huge French battery served by red-legged
+artillerymen, who ran about like ants.  But one could only guess at
+the fact that Germany and the Bad Neighbor were locked in the
+death-grips over six miles square of battle-ground, the breasting
+plumps of trees and towering bush-clad ridges hid so much away.
+
+Ah! but the din was hellish!  The woods vomited fire.  White balloons
+that meant shrapnel-shells described arcs against the hot blue sky,
+crossing and recrossing between Rezonville and Gravelotte.  When they
+fell upon the slippery grass slopes they exploded with fearful
+crashes, or became black balls that rolled merrily a while and then
+lay quiet.  In the grass near them were shapeless lumps and masses,
+red and blue, and dark blue; and things with stiff legs sticking up
+grotesquely,--the human and equine _débris_ of the morning's fighting
+and the battle of the previous day.  The soft westerly breeze brought
+an ugly taint upon it--less loathsome, but more horrible than the
+stench coming from the huge crowded camps of French about St. Quentin
+and Plappeville and Les Carrières and St. Eloy.
+
+Two great nations at each other's throats and God's image being
+shattered everywhere....  Blizzards of Lead and Iron, Steel and Fire
+raging over six miles square of ground.  Rivers of blood being poured
+out, and yet, in spite of the terrific din of War, the insects and
+birds and beasts went about their usual business.  The shrill laugh
+of the green woodpecker sounded in the copses, the jackdaws were
+gossiping as they darted in and out of the clefts of the gray rock.
+Two magpies were feeding a late-hatched fledgling among the dwarfy
+oak-scrub.  Rabbits were showing their white scuts on the edges of
+the oak-plantations; and the black and gray humble-bees were buzzing
+as they rifled the lavender scabious and the blue corn-bottles and
+the late white clover-blooms.
+
+Looking northeast toward the richly wooded hill where perches Fort
+Queleu, you could see the French flag flying from there, and from St.
+Privat, and the great cathedral of Metz sitting in the lap of the
+Moselle.  The railway bridge crossing the green, slowly rolling river
+above Ars was guarded by Uhlans and Engineers.  A stray outpost with
+half a field-battery held the island below the bridge, and the rear
+squadrons of a brigade of cavalry,--Blue Dragoons, White Cuirassiers,
+Uhlans, and Red Hussars, with two batteries of Horse Artillery, were
+traversing the iron roadway, the troopers walking beside the horses
+as they delicately picked their way along.  The Advance was almost
+out of sight, the midpost squadrons, remounted, were under the bluff
+that runs beside the river road from Ars to below Aney, and with the
+Staff of the Cuirassier brigade-commander--the dazzling
+scarlet-and-gold of his British Dragoon's uniform contrasting
+forcibly with the steel cuirasses and white coats, his red-plumed
+silver helmet shining like a miniature sun--rode Brotherton, on a
+powerful dappled-gray horse, his handsome face animated and eager as
+he replied to some remark addressed to him by the Brigadier.
+
+"Certainly, General, but I should think the sword could never be
+superseded.  It is, with the bow and spear, the traditional weapon of
+war."
+
+"You omit the sling, Colonel!" called out an officer who rode behind
+him.  And then the scrap of English talk was swamped in the clink of
+steel on steel, and the rhythmical trampling of the squadrons that
+followed.
+
+P. C. Breagh sat astride of a hot boulder, got out the Doctor's map
+and adjusted his cherished binoculars.  They showed him the battalion
+he had marched with halted by the side of the river road.  The bridge
+at Pagny showed black with solid columns of infantry, marching eight
+abreast; their sun-touched bayonets rippling lines of molten silver,
+each helmet-spike a flame of ruddy gold.
+
+The First and Second Armies of United Germany, hitherto compelled to
+a strenuous inactivity, were having their innings with a vengeance
+now....  Looking Metzwards, one could see that three new lines of
+pontoons were thrown across the river below Yaux.  A division of the
+dark-blue soldiers, with eight squadrons of cavalry and half a dozen
+batteries of mounted artillery, were crossing almost within range of
+the guns of Mount St. Quentin and Plappeville.
+
+How thickly the white tents were clustered on the green slopes about
+both fortresses, Red Breeches swarming in thousands without and
+within the walls.  Were the gunners of the huge bronze Creusots one
+had read of asleep, or lazy or indifferent?  The answer came in a
+spirt of white vapor from an embrasure of the middle salient of St.
+Quentin's long, eight-pointed star.  A white-hot flame leaped, a
+towering cloud of smoke soared, the roar of a heavy piece of
+artillery followed; and a shell of big caliber soared above Moulins
+and burst with a shattering explosion and an uprush of flame.  Some
+Artillery-horses on the nearest pontoon reared, causing a momentary
+confusion.  Their dismounted drivers quieted them, and the orderly
+crossing went on.
+
+_Boom-Boom!_  Crack!  A clatter like old iron and a heavy splashing
+and pounding of hoofs.  St. Quentin had got the range.--No! the
+shrapnel shell had been fired from a French field-battery placed
+behind earthworks above St. Ruffine.  Another shell hit the upper
+pontoon and must have smashed it adrift on the landing side.  For
+dark-blue men and struggling horses were drifting away in the
+direction of Metz, and the green river was tinged with red.  The
+wheelers of a gun-team, dragged downward by the weight attached to
+them, had gone to the bottom almost without a struggle.  The leaders,
+submerged all but their wild heads and splashing fore-hoofs, battled
+a while with the current before one of them vanished.  The other,
+whose rope-and-chain traces had somehow broken, swam gallantly
+down-stream, and finally landed on the farther bank.
+
+Further successful practice on the part of France's artillerists may
+have followed.  At this juncture the attention of P. C. Breagh became
+diverted by a curious fact.  One of the stone-pines seemed to be
+lobbing cones at him.  _Whiff-phutt!_ they were dropping on all
+sides.  Or could it? ... A shrill whistling sound close by his ear,
+and a simultaneous bristling of the hairs upon his scalp and body,
+told him that it could.  The missiles were bullets.
+
+They came, sometimes with a sharp whistle that told of unexpended
+energy, at others with the pleasant humming that had at first
+attracted him, from the woods that clothed the rising ground
+northwest and west of the platform he occupied.
+
+Were they Prussian bullets or French?  At the moment, the question
+did not interest him.  He had pocketed his map and crawling on his
+belly towards the southern edge of his platform, looked cautiously
+over, meditating descent.  Beyond was a sandwich-shaped stretch of
+woodland climbing to a ridge; and beyond the ridge a considerable
+expanse of bush-dotted common bordered by a stream and speckled with
+a few farm-buildings.  Quite a decent-sized town lifted its Norman
+church-tower nearly a mile away.
+
+The town must be Gorze.  Withdrawing his eyes from it, they dropped
+into a deep ravine or combe running parallel with the western and
+southern sides of the giant limestone rock he sprawled on.  Ferns
+clothed the deep, hollow sides, and oaks and birches, springing from
+the bottom, lifted their bushy heads to the level of his face.
+Spying between the branches, he saw that the ravine was full of
+garishly colored lights and shadows, and that a steady current of
+glittering white metal snaked in and out between the tree-trunks,
+setting from west to east.
+
+Bayonets, carried on the shoulders of red-breeched French soldiers,
+moving with startling rapidity over the dry leaves at the bottom of
+the ravine.  A battalion, at least, of wiry, active-looking
+Voltigeurs, a mitrailleuse-battery, each weapon hauled by a team of
+three gunners....  Green-coated Chasseurs _à pied_, with cocks'
+plumes shading the peaks of their _képis_ followed.  Would a surprise
+be intended for the cavalry-brigades that had crossed the
+railway-bridge and ridden eastward down the river-road a few minutes
+previously?  In that case, what ought one to do?
+
+Even as he asked, the advanced company of Voltigeurs discovered the
+Prussian squadrons.  He saw a ripple of excitement pass down the
+ranks, and the Voltigeurs hurry forward at the double.  He saw the
+mitrailleuse-batteries string out in line, push up the sloping sides
+of the ravine, and scatter among the trees of the plantation that
+climbed the ridge.  The Chasseurs followed.  Their intention was
+obvious.  They were going to enfilade the passing brigades from the
+cover of the wood.
+
+Even as the hounds of hell seemed to break loose, and a sheet of pure
+yellow-white flame ran from end to end of the ridge where the trees
+ended, the foremost brigade of three Hussar regiments came in view,
+trotting over a track that traversed the common, became a road, and
+plunged between deep woodlands trending west.  His map had told him
+that the road led to Rezonville and Gravelotte.
+
+He heard the Prussian trumpets sound through the ear-splitting racket
+of the French rifle-fire.  He saw through the thin haze of
+powder-smoke that hung above the wood, the massed columns split into
+squadrons, the squadrons divide into troops, the troops become
+units--scattered over the common, galloping to re-form again upon the
+road that led through the woods to Rezonville.
+
+They were two of the brigades forming Rheinbaben's Fifth Division,
+under Von Barby and Von Bredow, pushing forward to join General von
+Redern in the neighborhood of Mac La Tour.  Their mobility saved them
+from decimation on a grand scale, but they left dead horses and men
+and officers dead and wounded.  Their retreat was covered by one of
+their batteries of Horse Artillery, and two squadrons of a Uhlan
+regiment.
+
+In the distance a riderless gray charger galloped wildly over the
+common, and a prone figure in a brilliant scarlet coat lay motionless
+beside the track.  More could not be observed just then, for the
+battery of Horse Artillery got into position, while the Uhlans
+dismounted and coolly returned with carbine-fire the enfilade from
+the chassepots in the wood.
+
+They knelt, and aimed and shot without hurry, and that their shooting
+was effective was demonstrated to the noncombatant onlooker, by half
+a dozen French Artillerymen and Chasseurs _à pied_ who came
+staggering or limping back through the trees, and got down into the
+ravine.  One toppled over in the act of negotiating the descent, and
+lay sprawling and head downward.  Another, who kept putting a hand to
+his streaming cheek, and taking it away to stare at the blood upon
+it, was shot again in a vital part, spun around, and collapsed in a
+heap.
+
+"_Lee-ee eer!_"
+
+The wailing, stinging screech of a bullet that had shaved
+unpleasantly near was accompanied by the whisking of the sun-scorched
+straw hat from the head of P. C. Breagh, and an acute pang of deadly
+fear.  In the same instant the Prussian field-battery opened fire.
+Beyond the trees four puffs of white smoke went up, and four tongues
+of bright yellow flame preceded the quadruple crash of the
+driving-charges.  Lanes opened through the smoke-filled wood, as
+trees split into kindling and match-sticks.  And heaps of green and
+scarlet rags mixed with bloody flesh and shattered bones mingled with
+the _débris_.  And something that screamed like a devil unchained
+hurtled through intervening space, and plumped upon the limestone
+platform within a dozen feet of P. C. Breagh.  And he shrieked like a
+shot rabbit as it exploded with a splitting crash, and a spurt of
+evil yellow fire licked the skin off his ear and cheek.
+
+Dazed and stupefied, he removed himself to the farther and more
+sheltered side of the platform.  But the skirmish was over, the
+Voltigeurs and the Chasseurs _à pied_, with what remained of the
+mitrailleuse-battery, had not waited for the Uhlans to charge, but
+were in pell-mell retreat along the ravine.  He heard a French voice
+cry savagely:
+
+"We are cut off!  These woods are full of Prussians!"
+
+And in the same instant, through the lanes that had been hacked
+through the trees, P. C. Breagh saw the Prussian artillery limber up
+and ride off with what remained of the Uhlan squadrons.  They were
+wanted badly at the front, and the infantry-battalions with which P.
+C. Breagh had marched from Pont à Mousson, and the Division coming up
+from Pagny, striking into the Ars road, had crossed the upper end of
+the ravine.  The woods were indeed full of them.  And they also were
+wanted at the front and had no time to spare.
+
+As blue uniforms and crimson faces topped by gilt-spiked helmets came
+crowding through the trees, the human river, flowing along the bottom
+of the defile, rose in a wave and splashed back upon itself.  A
+red-haired young officer of Voltigeurs, drawing his sword, used his
+voice and the flat of the weapon to restore order; and succeeded so
+far that his company formed in straggling lines and began to send in
+volleys with the courage of despair.  The gunners of the mitrailleuse
+that was not smashed by the German shell-fire could not use the piece
+effectively at the bottom of the death-trap.  They were shot down in
+the attempt.
+
+It was cool, scientific slaughter--merciless carnage.  Before it
+began, a bugle cautioned attention.  A flat-capped field-officer
+pushed his horse to the front and cried in stentorian tones:
+
+"Aimed fire!"
+
+The men of the chassepot made a gallant stand, but the odds were
+heavy, and the men of the needle-gun did not waste a cartridge.  They
+loaded and aimed, fired and reloaded with machine-like precision.
+When the ravine was piled with bloody corpses the bugles sounded
+"Cease fire!"  Then the Prussian field-officer spurred to the edge of
+the red ditch and shouted, looking down:
+
+"Does anyone here ask quarter?"
+
+There was a laugh.  But something raised itself from a heap of
+bullet-pierced bodies.  A rattling voice cried:
+
+"No, dog of a Prussian!"
+
+A revolver cracked, and the speaker, a Voltigeur, was silent.  His
+voice had sounded like that of an old man, but he wore the epaulettes
+of a lieutenant and had carroty-red hair.  At this juncture, being
+overtaken by grievous retching and vomiting, P. C. Breagh's
+observations ceased.
+
+He sat up presently and wiped his dripping neck and mopped his
+forehead.  It seemed to him that he had seen the whole French Army
+exterminated, and yet he had witnessed but a skirmish ending in a
+battue.  He shook his wits into some order, and controlled the
+shuddering that took him in the pit of the stomach, when he
+remembered that in common decency he must go to Brotherton.
+
+The descent from the rock-platform was nothing more than a risky
+scramble.  There were plenty of pine and furze roots and jutting
+stones for holding to and clefts into which to thrust one's toes.
+But the crossing of that ravine cumbered with bloody corpses was not
+effected without revolt of body and soul.  He slipped once and fell,
+and struggled up all horribly besmeared and sick and shaking.  For
+the teeth of a head from which the face had been shot away had
+snapped close by his ear.  Then came the negotiation of the bit of
+woodland.  Here were more Voltigeurs and Chasseurs _à pied_ dead and
+horribly mutilated, and the wreck of a mitrailleuse, with two of its
+gunners.  Some of these poor wounded creatures were living, and
+moaned for water.
+
+"My God!--my God! how I suffer!" one feeble voice kept crying.
+
+Help was coming, for from the direction of the town some carts were
+being driven, one by a stout priest in cassock and broad-brimmed hat,
+others by men with Red Cross armlets.  Black-habited, white-capped
+Sisters of Mercy were in these vehicles, with baskets, and pitchers,
+and pails.
+
+Seven dead Hussars showing hideously the effect of
+mitrailleuse-fire,--a troop-horse or two, and a White Cuirassier shot
+through the body and swearing horribly in Low German, were the fruits
+of the French enfilade.  The fine gray charger had ceased careering;
+it grazed peaceably on the short herbage by the track that led over
+the common.  But Chris Brotherton would never sit in saddle again.
+
+P. C. Breagh turned him gently over and opened the gold-laced scarlet
+tunic.  There was no blood upon it, only clean dust, nor was the dead
+man bruised or cut, having fallen where it was grassy.  Upon the
+broad breast, under the white cambric shirt, was an oval miniature,
+pearl-set, of a pretty woman.  The handsome mouth of the wearer
+smiled under the drooping fair mustache, and his blue eyes stared
+glassily.  A bluish hole in the right temple and a bloody clot amid
+the hair upon the left side showed where the chassepot bullet had
+traversed the brain.
+
+He had been high-handed, arrogant, and domineering, yet the Doctor
+and the horsey Towers had seemed to love him.  No doubt that woman in
+the miniature had held Chris Brotherton dear....  P. C. Breagh would
+have left her fair face lying on the yet warm breast of her lover,
+but something he saw going on among the casualties upon the edge of
+the wood caused him to change his mind.
+
+That gaunt-eyed, greedy-fingered creature in the peasant's blouse and
+Red Cross brassard, who glided from body to body, rifling pockets,
+should not plunder the Doctor's friend.  With this determination,
+Carolan took away the portrait, a packet of letters, and Brotherton's
+watch and purse and pocketbook, then went forward to meet the
+Sisters, just descending from the foremost of the string of peasants'
+carts; and began:
+
+"My Sister..."
+
+The nun addressed turned a pleasant face upon him, and cried, with a
+sympathetic clasping of her small, work-roughened hands:
+
+"There is blood on Monsieur! ... He has been wounded."
+
+P. C. Breagh explained with economy of words how and where he had
+been watching the fighting, and whence came the ugly stains upon his
+clothes.  The nun glanced toward the wood, paled and shuddered, and
+said, making the sign of the Cross upon her starched, cape-like
+_guimpe_:
+
+"But all cannot be dead who lie bleeding in that _ravin_--the hollow
+where our poor school-children gather primroses in Spring?"
+
+"I think they must be.  The massacre was carried out deliberately.
+Aimed fire--and there is not a movement, not a groan...."
+
+P. C. Breagh shuddered, remembering the crossing of the red ditch.
+The nun said with energy, as other black habits and white guimpes
+came crowding round her:
+
+"We must make sure....  Each of those bodies must be lifted and
+examined.  Life often lingers, sir, when it seems to have fled.  We
+learned that in the Crimea, when we worked in the base-hospitals of
+Kamiesch.  What of these things?"  P. C. Breagh was holding out the
+portrait, purse, pocketbook, and letters.  "You wish our Reverend
+Mother to take charge of them?  They belonged to that dead officer
+yonder, in the scarlet uniform?  He was English, you tell me--and
+you, too, are of England?  Very well!  It shall be as you wish,
+Monsieur--I am free to decide, as I am the Superior of our community.
+But I will not receive the valuables at your hands until you have
+helped us to clear that terrible ravine.  We have only our good
+priest with a few peasants and one surgeon, and some charitable
+ladies and gentlemen of the Association of the Red Cross.  Everyone
+else is panic-stricken--they have barricaded themselves within their
+shops and houses, and taken refuge in the cellars....  The explosions
+of cannon have been so terrible--they are becoming yet more alarming,
+and when the fighting came quite close....  Our people are not brave,
+you think!--Still, everyone cannot be courageous....  But, Monsieur,
+who watches men being killed by guns to gain experience--we may look
+to Monsieur for help?"
+
+The clear woman-eyes went to the sun-browned, freckled face of the
+young man in the travel-worn, dusty, blood-stained clothing, and
+realized that a struggle was going on within him.  She said:
+
+"If Monsieur is of necessity compelled to go and leave us, I will
+take charge of the dead English officer's property for Monsieur.  But
+a great blessing is for those who succor the wounded.  Our Lord has
+always promised this!"
+
+No one listened to the little colloquy; some of the Sisters were
+already stooping beside the prone bodies, two of them were helping
+the vocal Cuirassier into a cart....
+
+With a great longing P. C. Breagh had longed to make the ridge south
+of Flavigny, and see with his own eyes how the Man of Iron comported
+himself in the clash of war.  And to stay behind and forego the
+possibility cost him poignant anguish, but one could not leave the
+Superior and the Sisters to dabble unaided in that ghastly ravine.
+
+"I will stay, Reverend Mother," he said, with a bow that might have
+been more clumsy.  Next moment Brotherton's property had vanished
+into a huge pocket hidden somewhere in the black habit.  The nun
+clapped her hands, crying to the peasants:
+
+"Thanks! thanks!  Come, Antoine, Pichegru, Eloi, Bénoit!  Dubois!  To
+the wood, my friends! and the hollow, where are many sufferers!  I
+place you under the orders of this English Monsieur."
+
+
+
+
+XLIV
+
+Upon that battlefield of Gravelotte, France, driven to bay, fought
+like a royal tigress.  How many times the dark blue Divisions were
+thrown back in their assault upon positions zoned with
+death-bellowing cannon and death-barking mitrailleuses, History
+relates.  So murderous was the fire of her chassepotiers from their
+densely manned rifle-pits that you could trace Moltke's plans of
+assault in mounds of dead Uhlan cavalry and long regular swathes of
+motionless blue objects that had been Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz....
+
+Yet if the Warlock had said within himself, "_This shall be above all
+a battle of cavalry_," it would seem as though the determination had
+been formed upon the other side.
+
+For this day that saw the death-charge of Von Bredow's brigade upon
+the Gorze Road--Uhlans, White Cuirassiers, and Dragoons of the Guard
+hurled in a solid column of shining steel against French
+field-batteries and battalions of riflemen--also saw the cavalry of
+Frossard, of Ladmirault, and Canrobert ride down whole squares of
+German infantry, who rose again and poured in volleys from their
+needle-guns, to be beaten down by the storms of leaden hail ground
+out by the mitrailleuse.
+
+A glowing, coppery sun looked down on those six square miles of
+fiercely contested ground.  Over its whole expanse there was not one
+patch as big as a National School playground without its _débris_ of
+arms and accouterments, its ghastly or ludicrous tokens of war.
+
+In an intermittent lull of the racket you could hear the dry earth,
+that had been pounded bare of verdure, sucking moisture as though
+after heavy rain.  Only the rain was red.  The faint, sour smell of
+it came to the nostrils mingled with the smell of burnt gunpowder,
+human and equine exhalations, and the acrid stifle of burning wood.
+
+For Flavigny was yet smouldering, the farm-buildings at Gorze were
+burning, Malmaison was a furnace; houses and barns at Verneville were
+wrapped in clouds of black smoke shot with lurid flame.
+
+Exhausted battalions, sick and stupefied with slaughter, were lying
+down among the dead and the wounded to snatch a wink of sleep.
+Others opened their haversacks to snatch a hasty mouthful, or drained
+their canteens of the last drop.  Surgeons were going up and down
+among them, patching up flesh-cuts with lint and diachylon,
+temporarily plugging bullet-wounds of the minor order.  "There!" they
+would say to the Schmidt, Kunz, or Schultz so treated; "now you are
+fit for fighting again!"
+
+Perhaps you can see the Man of Iron in his white Cuirassier cap,
+black undress frock with the pewter buttons, and great steel-spurred
+jack-boots, standing, grim-jawed and inscrutable, behind his King's
+camp-chair.  Through the stress and storm of two long days of hot
+fighting, that patch of high ground south of Flavigny had been the
+point to which orderlies and aides-de-camp furiously galloped from
+every point of the compass, and from which they galloped back in even
+more desperate haste.
+
+In the rear of the camp-chair, not so close to it as to draw fire,
+were the King's personal military staff, a bevy of Princes, and the
+representative of the British War Office, Colonel ----.  Several
+Councillors and Secretaries of the Chancellor's traveling Foreign
+Office stood about, stout, gray-haired, important-looking persons in
+semi-military uniform.  The carriages that had conveyed them waited
+at Tronville.  The King's charger and those of the other great
+personages were in the care of orderlies.  The Escort waited by their
+horses in the background.
+
+Moltke stood apart, taciturn and inscrutable, nursing his thin elbow
+and cupping his long chin.  Roon, who contrary to his custom was not
+wearing his helmet, gloomily champed his cap-strap, unable to
+disguise his anguish of anxiety.  He would have given a year of life
+to say:
+
+"Old man, so cool in the midst of this hellish slaughter, can it be
+that you do not know how things really are going?  Since two of the
+clock the French have had the best of it!  The chassepot you termed a
+'magnificent weapon' has justified your eulogism.  The mitrailleuse
+we despised, not comprehending its terrible capabilities, has
+revealed them to our undoing.  The Army of United Germany bleeds at
+every pore!"
+
+He tore his mustache, the dye upon which had not been renewed
+recently.  His heart swelled with the flood of pent-up speech.
+
+"The Commander-in-Chief's dispatches to the Queen have been cheered
+in Berlin.  Throughout Germany they are hailed with joy....  '_France
+now fights with her back to the Rhine_,' the people say.  '_Our Army
+stands arrayed between Bazaine and Paris!_'  Is it possible they do
+not realize that the situation is critical?  Have they no suspicion
+that the tables might be turned?"
+
+He wrung his knotted hands together in torment, and the sweat started
+in gouts upon his livid skin.
+
+"Before us the Army of Bazaine--behind us at Châlons the Army of
+MacMahon.  Were the Duke of Magenta with his recuperated Divisions to
+advance energetically and swiftly to the relief of his brother
+Marshal--could the Crown Prince hold him back?  And if he could not,
+what were our chance worth?..."
+
+The sentence had escaped Roon without his knowledge.  Moltke's
+wrinkled visage turned his way.  The scarlet-rimmed eyes glittered on
+him a moment.  Roon leaped as the dry voice said:
+
+"Not so much as a pinch of snuff!"
+
+The War Minister stammered:
+
+"Pardon, Your Excellency!  You spoke to me?..."
+
+Moltke answered quietly:
+
+"I asked if you could spare me a pinch of snuff.  My box is empty."
+He opened the little silver receptacle and turned it upside down,
+tapping it on his finger nail: "Neither have I a single cigar!"
+
+Roon had forgotten his cigar-case in quarters.  He fumbled for his
+snuff-box, thought it must be in his cloak.  A resonant voice said
+from behind the King's camp-chair: "Will Your Excellency take one of
+these?"
+
+"Why not? why not?  If they are not too strong for me...."  The
+Warlock smiled, showing his toothless gums.  The Chancellor said,
+opening and offering the plain green leather case with the coroneted
+B stamped in gilding on it:
+
+"It may be they are stronger than you are accustomed to smoke?"
+
+Moltke's keen, swift glance met the heavy blue stare of the
+Chancellor.  He returned:
+
+"I will answer Your Excellency when I have tested them."
+
+The case held three Havanas of varying merit.  Two were good, one
+super-excellent.  The withered hand hovered, paused above them, made
+selection, while the sharp, glittering glance seemed to say: "So! ...
+You are trying again the test you put me to at Königgratz!  See!  I
+am cool enough to choose the better creed!"  While Bismarck returned
+the case to his breeches-pocket, mentally commenting:
+
+"Excellent.  He has chosen the best one.  He is not flustered--he has
+yet a trump to play!"
+
+Believed, he returned to his post behind the King's camp-chair, a
+rugged, powerful figure, with the face of a thoroughbred mastiff,
+unwearyingly keeping guard lest meaner influences should undermine
+his power and topple his unfinished life-work down.
+
+Watching the battle through these noonday hours, he had, being a
+practical soldier as well as a consummate statesman, known some
+moments of horrible foreboding.  Now his courage revived.  The work
+would be completed.  The well-shaped, sun-browned hand lightly
+resting on the chair-back would hold all Germany within its iron grip.
+
+The thrill of conscious power transmitted itself to the King, it may
+be, for he moved impatiently in his seat.  Sometimes he must have
+chafed, the white-haired Hohenzollern chieftain, knowing himself a
+puppet in the hands of his powerful Minister.
+
+"How they fight!  How they fight!  _Ach Gott!_" he muttered.
+"Wouldst thou have credited, Otto, that such fire was left in France?"
+
+And the helmeted head of the old chieftain shook with an
+uncontrollable nervous spasm.  Over it came the scoffing retort:
+
+"It is the fire of fever, the fire of phosphorescence.  It will leave
+them weak and debilitated--it will glimmer out and go black.  And yet
+Bazaine, contemptible as a strategist, has his moments of
+inspiration.  The thrust of the skilled fencer will sometimes puzzle
+the master of swordsmanship....  Frossard and Canrobert are devout
+Catholics, and no doubt believe in guardian-spirits.  They have had a
+hint, it may be, from some celestial Field Marshal; St. Louis,
+possibly, or the Chevalier de Bayard."
+
+The King murmured, unheeding the jest, his eyes glued to the
+field-glasses that jerked in his shaking hands:
+
+"Even a victory could not bring my soldiers of the Guard to life
+again.  And there!  Dost thou see?..."
+
+The Minister turned his own binoculars in the indicated quarter.
+What remained of a Division of the Prussian 10th Corps, with a
+brigade of cavalry, Uhlans and Dragoons, was locked in the death-grip
+with a Cavalry Division of Bazaine's own corps, the Third, on the
+plain between the Bois de Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont.  And
+even the Chancellor's iron hand trembled as with ague, and his
+breathing harshened perceptibly as he carefully focused the glasses
+on the fight.  He said after a moment:
+
+"Those three regiments of cavalry on brown horses with green,
+silver-laced dolmans and red-bagged talpacks are Chasseurs of the
+Imperial Guard.  Fine fellows!  They have a man to lead them, it
+would seem, in that little Colonel with the big paunch."
+
+The Brigadier of the Chasseurs had been killed by a shell, and upon
+Paunchy had devolved the leadership.  Twice he had led the green
+dolmans in shattering charges, under the stress of which the dark
+blue islands of infantry had hollowed and caved in.  Twice he had
+fought his way out at the head of his shrunken and mutilated
+squadrons.  Now, sweeping round, the Dragoons and Uhlans had attacked
+the Chasseurs furiously in the rear.
+
+All that could be seen, even through the binoculars, was a shifting
+kaleidoscopic jumble of gay uniforms.  Men's heads and arms rising
+and falling, flashing swords, flickering lance-pennons, and the
+crests and hindquarters of plunging beasts....  Hence Kraus, Klaus,
+and Klein of the blue infantry could not fire into the _mêlée_ for
+fear of shooting their countrymen.  Red Breeches hesitated to use his
+chassepot on the same count.
+
+About a bushy knoll to the left of the struggle, the German cavalry
+circled like swallows, greedily assailing a swarm of green and red
+dragon-flies.  The chasseurs' cartridge-boxes being empty, they used
+their long sabers as they had used their carbines, coolly and
+effectively; and Paunchy, lifted above the press by the little knoll
+referred to, encouraged them with looks and gestures and words.
+
+"Courage, my children! ... Follow me! ... Bravo! ... One moment's
+breathing-space, and at them again!"
+
+He was only a green and scarlet speck in the midst of an aggregation
+of other specks on the vast battlefield, yet the King and the
+Minister watched him with fixed regard.
+
+"_Grosser Gott_!  How that man fights!" the King muttered at one
+point in the conflict, and the rejoinder came from overhead:
+
+"He is gallant, certainly, but a bit of an actor.  Would not one say
+that flourish was meant for the ladies in the orchestra-stalls?"
+
+"Because he has kissed a medal or a relic?" the King muttered,
+tugging at his white whisker.  "Doubtless he is Catholic....  We
+ourselves have many brave soldiers of the Roman faith!"
+
+
+For as his squadrons ever thinned and dwindled, every instant paying
+toll to the great swords of the Prussian Dragoons and the
+blood-thirsty Uhlan lances, they had seen the little Brigadier take
+from the breast of his green dolman something white and press his
+bearded lips to it, and thrust it back again, and sign himself with
+the Cross.
+
+"_Hurrah Preussen!  Immer vorwärts!_" yelled the Uhlans, as their
+dripping lance-points flickered in and out between the red-stained
+sword-blades, and the bodies of dead Chasseurs and dead horses rose
+in a mound about the knoll where stood the little Brigadier.
+
+Paunchy possessed a great voice.  His "_Chargez!_" had reached the
+ears of the King and his Chancellor through all the pandemonium of
+battle.  When his Staff trumpeter's instrument, bullet-pierced, gave
+forth no sound but a strangled screeching, the little Colonel's
+thundering "_Feu!_" needed no trumpet to make the order plain.  Now,
+his "_Vive la France!  Vive l'Empereur!_" boomed out like the roar of
+a dying lion.  His melting squadrons gave back the rallying-cry.
+
+But they were lost.  Prisoned within the ring of piercing steel that
+tirelessly revolved about them, they could kill, but they could not
+break through the barrier.  Fresh squadrons rushed with hoarse shouts
+to the aid of the German cavalry.  The Chasseurs were hopelessly
+outnumbered, and must inevitably be crushed.
+
+The subaltern who bore the Imperial standard got a lance-thrust in
+the shoulder.  At the same moment, his horse was shot dead.  As the
+beast reared in the death-throe and went down under the plunging
+hoofs of the maddened horses round him, the Colonel leaned from his
+saddle, seized the hand that gripped the staff of the standard, drew
+the fainting officer upward, and laid him across his own saddle-bow.
+Then, as his gallant horse braced itself to bear the double burden,
+the rider lifted high the glistening folds of the tricolor topped by
+the golden Imperial eagle, and as the Uhlans charged the knoll he
+shouted again in terrible tones the slogan of the dying Empire:
+
+"_Vive la France!  Vive l'Empereur!_"
+
+
+War has many of these sublime moments mingled with her squalid
+hideousness.  Upon this day many a soldier, French and German, died
+as finely as the father of Juliette.  You are to see him--bareheaded,
+for the fur talpack with the plume of green and scarlet had been
+sheared from his head by a glancing sword-cut--lifting a war-flushed
+forehead to the sky all sunset-red.  Then a mortal lance-thrust
+reached him over the body that lay across his horse's withers, and he
+reeled upon his saddle, and fell backward, partly swathed in the Flag
+for which so many heroes have died.
+
+Through the tricolored folds yet other Uhlan lance-points reached
+him.  Did any thought of his daughter pass through the brain of the
+dying soldier between the sharp pangs of the probing steel?
+
+"_My child ... safe ... neutral territory....  Charles ... honest man
+... protect my girl from Adelaide!  Now ... death!  Ah!--agony!
+Save, Jesu! ... Mary, help!_"
+
+A few of his gallant Chasseurs surrendered.  But these were only a
+handful.  Nearly the whole strength of his brigade of three regiments
+lay dead upon that patch of common that was cumbered with their
+corpses and those of their enemies.
+
+
+
+
+XLV
+
+Bismarck said, lowering his binoculars:
+
+"Lucky that war is so confoundedly expensive.  Otherwise, one might
+get too fond of it!"
+
+The King groaned:
+
+"My Dragoons of the Guard!--my Uhlans, slaughtered in regiments!  My
+infantry shattered--decimated--annihilated in Divisions.  The bravest
+blood of France--poured out upon French soil like water....  Great
+God!--how shall I defend this carnage to the Queen?..."
+
+The voice behind him said, ironically:
+
+"My wife writes me ten pages every three days, urging upon me in
+Biblical language the necessity for complete extermination of
+everything French!  Believe me, Sire, he who is guided by the advice
+of a woman follows, not a Jack, but a Jinny o' Lantern, that will
+inevitably lead him into a bog!"
+
+The King winced under the gibe, yet he said, striking his clenched
+hand passionately upon his knee:
+
+"And this shadow that we follow southward, this vision, of a Crown
+Imperial!  What is it but an _ignis fatuus_ that has plunged us to
+the neck in the morass of War?  If the whole Army of United Germany
+sink down in the death-sleep, for what have we offered up the
+sacrifice?"
+
+The answer came, prompt and authoritative:
+
+"Your Majesty may leave that question to be answered by the sons of
+these men who lie dead about us, and the sons they shall in their
+time beget.  If your Majesty's whole army must be sacrificed to
+insure German Unity, let it be so, in the name of Heaven!"
+
+The King tugged again at his white side-whisker and muttered
+something about "sinful ambition."  The hand that had wrenched the
+curb now offered sugar.  The voice said, mellowed and softened to
+persuasive tenderness:
+
+"I have served a great King.  I aim to serve a great Emperor.  If my
+ambition be sinful, it is at least not base!"
+
+"Ah, Otto!"  The King rose, and his hard, yellowish-hazel eyes were
+full of tears as they met the Minister's.  "You have no argument so
+strong as your disinterestedness.  For even your bitterest enemies
+have never questioned that!"
+
+Something took place in the brain behind the great domed forehead
+hidden by the Cuirassier cap, the fierce, almost challenging stare
+sank beneath the old man's tearful look of love.  The Man of Iron was
+asking himself: "Am I, then, so disinterested? ... If I am, why is it
+that these words have power to gall me so?  Can it be that I have my
+price as well as others?  I think myself repaid in Power for what
+other Ministers will only sell for gold."
+
+The momentary embarrassment passed.  He said, pointing to one of
+those long blue mounds of dead infantry:
+
+"And who could see our soldiers advance under the fire of these
+French chassepots and the terrible mitrailleuses, and doubt that they
+have understood the greatness of the issue at stake.  Excuse me a
+moment, Sire! ... What is it, Götzow?"
+
+The _aide-de-camp_, in the full uniform of the Chancellor's own
+regiment of Cuirassiers, was white as his own coat.  He gulped out:
+
+"Excellency, I am charged by His Highness, Prince Augustus of
+Württemberg, Commander-in-Chief of the Prussian Guard Corps..."
+
+The Chancellor's prominent blue eyes lightened so fiercely upon the
+speaker that he began to stammer and boggle in his speech:
+
+"Terrible intelligence ... only just received by His Highness....
+Yesterday Your Excellency's sons, Count Herbert and Count William,
+were in the general cavalry charge which took place at Mars la
+Tour..."
+
+The great soldierly figure standing with the huge spurred boots
+apart, the hands leaning on the long steel-hilted sword, might have
+been cast in iron or carved in granite for all the emotion conveyed
+by look or gesture.  The voice said stridently and harshly:
+
+"The First Dragoons of the Guard were not involved in the struggle.
+Only the brigades of Von Barby, the 4th Westphalian Cuirassiers, the
+10th Hussars, and the 16th Dragoons."
+
+The ghastly aide faltered, perspiring freely:
+
+"At the moment of General von Barby's charge, it has been
+unfortunately ascertained, a squadron of Prussian Guard Dragoons of
+the First Regiment--returning from a patrol, dashed into the
+_mêlée_..."
+
+The Chancellor drew a sharp breath, but stirred not a finger.  His
+fierce eyes, staring from dark pits that had suddenly been dug round
+them, paralyzed the wretched bearer of the tragic intelligence.  He
+asked in a tone that appalled by its tranquillity:
+
+"Have both my sons been killed?"
+
+The _aide-de-camp_ got out that it was feared so.  He was thanked and
+charged with a polite message to the Prince.  As he saluted and
+retired, lightened of his tidings of anguish, the Minister focused
+his binoculars with a steady hand upon that point toward the
+northward where the dark bulk of the fortress of St. Privat loomed on
+a hill-top covered with masses of troops and traversed by a straight
+white, poplar-bordered road, regularly trenched for musketry.  He
+said in the same tone of composure, though his set face and the hand
+that held the glasses were wet as though with rain:
+
+"St. Privat still resists.  General Pape, with the Guard's cavalry
+and the Saxons, will find their work cut out for them in driving
+those French battalions out of the village below the hill."
+
+He lowered and wiped the glasses with his handkerchief.  The King
+said entreatingly, laying a hand upon his arm:
+
+"Go, go!  Find out the truth about your sons, Bismarck....  Leave not
+a stone unturned, in God's name!"
+
+Even as the King spoke, German drums and trumpets sounded the charge;
+and there was a sudden shifting of masses of troops in the direction
+of St. Hubert.  Then as a wave of dark blue men began to roll out
+from the deep woods that flanked the village of Gravelotte, so fierce
+a storm of cannon and mitrailleuse and chassepot began to beat about
+their heads that the unseasoned horses of the Princes of the suite
+kicked and plunged and the Minister said:
+
+"It would be wise did your Majesty remove out of this neighborhood.
+These bon-bons thrown by Frossard's artillery are coming much too
+near."
+
+"I will ride back--I will move out of the way," said the old man in
+great agitation.  "But you, Bismarck!--you must go and see about your
+sons!"
+
+He answered, and his great bloodshot eyes and sagging jowl were more
+than ever those of a mastiff:
+
+"When I have seen your Majesty in a place of safety I will ask your
+permission to do so."
+
+An orderly from Steinmetz, who now had his field headquarters at St.
+Hubert, arrived with an urgent entreaty that the King would at once
+retire.
+
+The horses were brought.  King William and Von Roon mounted.  The
+Chancellor's mare had been sent to water; his orderly appeared with
+her as the King's party rode on.  With a hasty word of reproof the
+Minister swung his great figure into the saddle, but the brawn and
+bone of his beast had not carried him clear of the threatened spot
+before a retreating wave of German foot and horsemen swept over it,
+followed by the thundering gallop of a retreating battery.
+
+It was a _sauve-qui peut_, caused by the smashing fire from the
+French shrapnel and mitrailleuse batteries, and the practice of the
+French riflemen entrenched at the Moscow Farm.  A general officer
+rode through the rout, laying about him with the flat of his drawn
+sword and swearing horribly, to judge by his bloodshot eyes, and
+purple countenance.
+
+"Hares!  _Gottverdammt!_ hares!" he gasped breathlessly, finding
+himself face to face with a gigantic officer of Cuirassiers.  "A
+thousand pardons, Excellency.  I did not at once recognize you.
+Surely you will follow his Majesty to the rear?"
+
+"Willingly," said the Chancellor, as a brace of French shells
+exploded, digging pits in the sandy ground over which the Headquarter
+Staff had passed.  "Only, as shell does not fall twice in the same
+place, I am waiting to make sure."  And, with a knee-touch, he put
+the brown mare into her stride.
+
+There was a backward surge of disorganized infantry as the huge beast
+lifted herself over the yawning craters.  But she passed through the
+press by the bore and thrust of her great shoulders, and the beast
+and the big man she carried were swallowed up in the roaring dusk.
+
+Moltke, the bald-headed war-eagle, remained brooding his coign of
+observation upon the verge of the ridge south of Flavigny, his
+feathers drooping, his shoulders hunched, his sharp, hooked beak
+inclined toward his breast; his red eyes, burning with the
+battle-lust, staring fixedly from under the wide, hairless brows.
+
+
+The sun sank in clouds of smoky gold and crimson over that country of
+copses, ravines, ruddy brown farmhouses, and white villages.  Evening
+came down and dipped her wings in billows of salt-tasting gunpowder
+smoke, rose-tinged above and beneath by the reflection from the red
+sky and the red earth.  The green Moselle was tinged with blood.
+Little rivers ran blood, streams and springs became blood.  Wells
+were filled with blood, as in old time under the rod of the Lawgiver
+of Israel, and still the battle raged over hill and valley, common
+and highroad.
+
+Flavigny village still smouldered, Malmaison was burning, houses and
+barns at Verneville were wrapped in roaring flames.  Yet the gunners
+of the French batteries at Moscow, Point du Jour, La Folie, and the
+Quarries of Amanvilliers and Rezerieulles, continued to make practice
+of the deadliest; and still French cavalry charged the Teuton's
+dwindling infantry-squares.
+
+Had not a comparatively fresh and vigorous Prussian Army Corps
+dropped in at the crucial moment success had hardly crowned the arms
+of United Germany.  They had been marching every day since they
+quitted the Saar, those solid-thewed Pomeranians of the 2d Corps, but
+at Puxieux they had cooked and eaten, and now appeared like giants
+refreshed.
+
+Not only Steinmetz rode at their head, with their commander Von
+Fransecky, but the Warlock in person directed their attack.
+Battalions that had retired in disorder reformed and rushed back to
+meet afresh the brunt of battle.  Wherever the red eye glittered and
+the withered finger pointed, fresh swarms of fierce assailants were
+hurled against the dwindling hosts of France.
+
+Down came the dark, and now St. Privat was burning; the village under
+the lee of the fort was burning--sending up great columns of livid
+smoke shot with licking tongues of flame.  The day was over.  But
+crackling lines of fire outlined the position of the rifle-trenches;
+the mitrailleuse batteries still spat death unwearyingly, as what
+remained of Bazaine's Army retired in comparative safety to the
+Fortress of St. Quentin under cover of that fiery screen.
+
+There the shattered brigades and mutilated divisions clung like
+swarming wasps "with plenty of sting in them yet," said Moltke, "and
+the hive"--meaning the huge Fortress of Metz--"handy in their rear.
+But, on the whole," he added, "I am excellently well satisfied.  My
+calculations have worked out correctly.  Those Pomeranians of the
+Second Corps arrived just in time!"
+
+And the veteran galloped joyously as a young trooper of twenty-five
+to cheer his King with the good news.
+
+
+And can you see that other man, to whom Emperors and Kings and
+Ministers referred when they mentioned Prussia, who outwitted nations
+in policy and made wars at will, spurring the great brown mare wildly
+through the weltering darkness, with salt drops of mortal anguish
+coursing down his granite cheeks?
+
+"Bazaine's right has been turned by the Saxons, the Guards have
+smashed his center, and the Pomeranians of the Second Corps have
+taken St. Privat and forced him to retreat, leaving Germany master of
+the field.  Success has crowned beyond hope the arms of the
+Fatherland, but where are the sons who called me father? ... Is this
+Thy judgment upon one through whom so many fathers are sonless, O my
+offended God?"
+
+Perhaps he groaned forth such words as these, as he bucketed the
+great brown mare through the perilous darkness, over roads bestrewn
+with helmets, swords, and cuirasses, knapsacks, talpacks,
+forage-caps, and schakos, needle-guns, and chassepots, and camp
+kettles, as well as the human _débris_ of War.  The flare of a
+lantern tied to and swinging from one of the great steel stirrups
+threw a treacherous and fitful light upon his road.
+
+Follow him as he ranged from camp to camp, questioning,
+investigating....  It was black night and raining heavily when a
+gleam of hope dawned upon the man.
+
+The cavalry piquet-officer who had given the clue beheld the great
+brute and her huge rider vanish in a cloud of their own steam.  A
+furious clatter of hoofs came back out of the welter ing darkness, as
+the flaring lantern, gyrating like some captive fiend at the end of
+its tether, dwindled to a dancing will-o'-the-wisp and vanished, the
+officer exclaimed:
+
+"_Kreuzdonnerwetter!_ he must have a neck like other men.  Yet he
+rides as though it were forged of tempered steel!"
+
+"Who rides? ... What was that?" asked a brother officer, waking from
+a doze of exhaustion beside the hissing logs of the rain-beaten
+watch-fire.  He got reply:
+
+"Only the Pomeranian bear ranging in search of his lost cubs."  He
+added: "I was able to tell him that he would find the eldest of them
+at the field-hospital of Mariaville, upon which he galloped away like
+mad."
+
+"The field-hospital of Mariaville" proved to be a farmhouse on a
+hill-top near the battlefield of Mars la Tour.  Candles stuck in the
+necks of empty wine-bottles revealed, through the open, unblinded
+windows, the figure of the surgeon in charge and those of his
+orderly-assistants passing to and fro.
+
+"Have you a Bismarck here?"
+
+The stentorian shout from the yard made wounded men turn upon their
+improvised pillows, and brought the head and shoulders of the bibbed
+and shirt-sleeved surgeon thrusting out of a window on the first
+floor.  A colloquy ensued between the unseen and the medical officer.
+Presently the arbitrary voice interrupted:
+
+"What do you call not seriously wounded, man?  Describe the casualty
+clearly, without professional Latin, or too many crackjaw words."
+
+The dressers winked to each other behind the back of the surgeon.  He
+said, supporting himself with one hand against the crazy window-frame
+as he thrust his head and shoulders forth into the dripping darkness
+and gesticulated with a hand that held a probe:
+
+"Excellency, your elder son has received three bullets.  One lodged
+in the breast of his tunic, another hit his watch, and the third is
+at present in the upper part of his thigh.  I was about to place the
+patient under chloroform when Your Excellency's call summoned me from
+his side."
+
+The voice said, with a clang of anger in it:
+
+"You should not have left him had it been the King who called.  Go
+back to him instantly.  I am coming up."
+
+And he came striding in his great boots up the crazy one-flight
+stair.  Ghastly faces of wounded soldiers turned upon their pillows
+of straw as that gigantic figure filled up the doorway.  His shadow,
+thrown by the flaring tallow-candle flames, loomed portentously on
+the whitewashed walls.  He wore no cloak or overcoat and dripped as
+though he had swum, not ridden, through water to his finding; the
+peak of his field-cap discharged quite a little deluge upon his son's
+white face as he stooped over the stretcher where the young man lay
+and touched his hand, and kissed him on the cheek.
+
+"Never mind.  Clean water does no hurt," he said, for he had drawn
+out his handkerchief to wipe the splash away, and finding it soiled
+with dust and powder-grime had returned it to his pocket.
+
+The surgeon returned:
+
+"I wish we had clean water--it would be above price.  But all the
+springs are fouled with blood, and there are dead French in the
+courtyard-well."
+
+"They must be got out and the well cleansed, if possible," said the
+Chancellor.  "Meanwhile, a temporary supply must be found....  What
+nourishment have you, fit for wounded men?"
+
+The surgeon responded, busy with a cotton-wool chloroform pad:
+
+"Nothing, Excellency, except wine and a little Extract of Liebig."
+
+The Chancellor said harshly:
+
+"Yet this appears to be a farm-house, and I heard the clucking of
+fowls down below!"
+
+The surgeon, who was a bullet-headed, obstinate East Prussian, and
+did not relish this sort of hectoring, returned, thrusting out a
+stubbly under-jaw:
+
+"Excellency, there are certainly fowls in the farmyard.  But they are
+not mine, nor have I money to buy.  They belong to the unhappy wretch
+who owns this place, and has lost everything else."
+
+And he gave back the stare of the fierce eyes that raked him.  The
+Minister began to lisp, an ominous sign:
+
+"Ah, indeed! ... May I--may I ask where you--where you gained your
+notions of the code of ethics that should prevail in warfare?"
+
+Said the surgeon, fronting him fairly and squarely:
+
+"Excellency, from my father, who was an honest man!"
+
+Straw rustled under heads that slewed to look at the blunt speaker.
+There was a long instant's pause.  Then the Chancellor thrust his
+hand into his breeches-pocket, pulled out a gold coin, and said,
+tendering it to the medical officer:
+
+"Kindly pay this to the object of your pity for twenty fowls at a
+mark apiece.  Now I will keep you no longer from your patient.  Good
+night to everyone here."
+
+"Good night, Excellency!" came in chorus.
+
+He gave his brusque salute and had already reached the threshold,
+when his son, a colossal, black-haired, brown-skinned young trooper,
+who lay back upon his stretcher, staring sulkily at the
+smoke-blackened rafters, or contemplating the twitching bare toes of
+the leg that bore a tourniquet above the plugged and bandaged wound,
+started slightly, looked round, and called:
+
+"Father!"
+
+"What is it, my dear fellow?"
+
+His great stride took him back to the prone young giant on the
+stretcher.  Count Herbert said, barely removing his eyes from the
+ceiling, and speaking in a studiously indifferent tone:
+
+"If you are upset about Bill, sir, there's no need to worry.  His
+horse was shot under him, but he got hold of another.  I saw him ride
+off all right with a wounded comrade behind him.  That's all.
+Goodnight!"
+
+The son nodded surlily and resumed his inspection of the ceiling.
+The sire, who had received the news in silence, went out at the door,
+stooping under the lintel, his great shoulders rasping the posts on
+either side.  They heard his heavy footsteps pass down the crazy
+staircase.  A curt sentence or two reached them, spoken as he went
+through the kitchen on his way to the door.  Then he was in the yard,
+loudly calling for an orderly to bring a lantern.  An instant, and
+three revolver-shots cracked in rapid succession, each followed by a
+significant cackling and squawking.  The surgeon, now fitting the
+cotton-wool pad upon the wire mouthpiece and signing to his assistant
+to hand him the chloroform, clapped the pad upon the mouth and
+nostrils of young Bismarck, and said, with a dry chuckle as he poured
+the pungent anaesthetic upon the wool:
+
+"His Excellency is having a little sport.  All the same, without
+water, one cannot cleanse wounds or boil hen-broth."
+
+Water arrived an hour later, two barrelsful upon a hand-cart drawn by
+terrified peasants, behind whom rode a trooper of Uhlans,
+accelerating their movements with prods of the lance.  A general
+officer had sent the barrels for the use of the wounded at
+Mariaville.  This service rendered to his son, he rode in search of
+his King.
+
+
+
+
+XLVI
+
+He found him, with his Staff, not far distant from Rezonville, having
+returned there when the French cavalry of the Left withdrew after
+their tremendous charge.  The King was reading dispatches, seated on
+a saddle thrown across a wet faggot, beside a smoky watch-fire.  The
+farmstead of Malmaison, now sending up showers of sparks like a
+set-piece at the end of a display of fireworks, gave light enough by
+which to read.
+
+Persuaded to take shelter, the old man found it in a deserted hamlet,
+of which the very name was uncertain, so sorely had it been mauled
+about.  A crust of stale bread and a mutton-chop grilled on some wood
+embers furnished his supper.  Water fit for drinking being
+unattainable, he tossed off a nip of sutler's rum out of a broken
+tulip-glass, and lay down in his clothes to rest upon the royal
+ambulance, within four walls and under a roof holed and gapped by
+shot and shell.
+
+The Princes of the Suite, much to their Highnesses' chagrin, were
+compelled to subsist on fragments of stale sandwiches from their
+holster-cases.  The escort bivouacked about the Royal lodging.
+Troops, wearied to exhaustion by the two days' continuous fighting,
+lay down to sleep in the pouring rain.
+
+The Warlock supped with his personal Staff on ration-biscuit and raw
+bacon, and spent the night by a bivouac-fire, among the living and
+the dead.  Can you see him sitting on the empty ammunition-box,
+buttoned in his dripping waterproof, his scanty meal eaten and his
+cigar well alight? ... How contentedly he listens while the bulbul
+Henry sings, without notes of accompaniment, his moving ballads.  How
+piously he rises, bares his old head, and joins in the robust hymn
+sung by his battered but victorious legions, "Now thank we all our
+God..."
+
+Or, with the mind's eye, one can follow the Man of Iron as, having
+bidden his master good night and left the young Hereditary Grand Duke
+of Mecklenburg to keep guard over the royal carriage, he set out, in
+company of his cousin Bismarck-Böhlen, a lieutenant of Dragoon Guards
+and one of the minor Councillors of the Embassy, in search of a
+lodging until break of day.
+
+Sheridan, the famous American General, representing the United States
+with the Prussian Headquarters Staff, a short, alert gentleman of
+forty-five, with a dark mustache and chin-tuft, and a pronounced
+Yankee twang, followed, begging leave to accompany the expedition.
+The first cottage approached as likely to afford a night's shelter
+was found to be on fire.
+
+"Too hot, though I like warm quarters!" the Chancellor commented.
+The next house was found crammed with wounded soldiers, all suffering
+from the excellent shell-practice made by the gunners of General
+Frossard.  The next house and the next had also been converted into
+field-hospitals.  The fourth yielded to the Minister's personal
+investigations a vacant attic, with three truckle-beds, provided with
+straw palliasses, tolerably clean.
+
+Sheridan and Bismarck-Böhlen threw themselves upon their rude beds
+and very soon were soundly sleeping.  For a little while the Man of
+Iron stood beside the narrow unglazed window in the attic gable, his
+great arms folded on his broad breast, his eyes, bloodshot and
+strained with gazing through the fire and smoke of bombardments,
+looking out into the wild black welter of the rainy night.
+
+Those torn-up pastures and plow-acres, those devastated cornfields
+and woodlands, those burning farms and villages of Lorraine lay in
+comparative quiet now....  The hellish roar and crash and tumult of
+War had ceased for the time being.  Its ghastly sights were veiled,
+for the most part, by merciful darkness, though the innumerable
+little sputtering fires kindled by the soldiers threw fitful
+illuminations upon grotesque, or strange, or terrible, or
+indescribably hideous things....
+
+Hungry, thirsty, weary, and saddle-sore as any trooper of his own
+White Cuirassiers was the Man of Iron, having broken his fast at dawn
+upon a hunch of bread and bacon-fat, and supped upon a couple of raw
+hen's eggs, broken on the pommel of his big steel-hilted sword.  But
+as his bloodshot eyes looked upon his handiwork, he was contented.
+This huge, vehement, and bloody conflict had established the mastery
+of Germany: France was outnumbered, out-generaled, and out-fought.
+
+With frightful loss Moltke had attained his premier object.  The Army
+of MacMahon had been driven in rout to Châlons, the retreat of
+Bazaine's Army westward had been effectually checked.  The South road
+from Metz to Verdun, hitherto lightly held by the advance-patrols of
+the Prussian Crown Prince, was now blocked by the whole effective
+strength of two out of the three armies of Germany; weakened,
+wounded, and bleeding after the two days of desperate fighting, but
+still powerful, menacing, and grim.
+
+One desperate effort made at this juncture might have broken through
+the barrier of living flesh and steel.  Would it be made, or would
+the French Army of the Rhine fall into the snare so cunningly left
+open, and retire within the fortified area of Metz?
+
+The gable-attic looked toward the great fortress.  In vain his
+glasses swept the formless blackness.  The sparkle of a moonbeam on a
+bayonet-point--the green or crimson ray cast by a Staff lantern
+moving over the ground, yet screened by the French batteries, might
+have cleared the point in doubt.  Save for the sputter of German
+watch-fires over the recent field of battle, and the yellow
+candle-flare in the windows of half-ruined cottages and outbuildings,
+where wounded men lay on straw or the bare earth, no light showed, no
+life seemed to be....  He swung the shattered casement wide, and
+thrust his head out, gripping the window-sill, intently listening....
+No distant roll of iron-shod wheels, no reverberating tread of
+countless footsteps; no other sounds, such as might betray the
+retreating movement of an armed host, broke the silence of that
+tragic night.
+
+Only the sob of the wind and the dripping of the chill rain from the
+overflowing roof-gutters, came to him, with the deep ruckling snores
+of exhausted Divisions, and the strangling coughs and hollow groans
+of mangled and dying men and beasts.
+
+All would be well, he told himself, as he shut up the glasses,
+unbuckled his sword-belt, and unhooking his collar stretched himself
+in his great boots upon the groaning truckle-bed, his heavy revolver
+ready to his hand.  Moltke's great plan would be successful....  The
+King would once more prove his Chancellor a true prophet....  The
+hand that could build up Prussia from a fourth-rate State into a
+world-power, would yet hold the German Empire in its grip of iron,
+and through that Empire rule the world!
+
+If He Who created the World had been displeased by Bismarck's
+ambitions, things would have gone less smoothly from the outset....
+If He Who wrought Man in His Image had been moved to wrath by all
+this bloodshed, He would have shown it by letting something happen to
+the boys....
+
+But Bill was safe, while Herbert was only slightly wounded.
+To-morrow he should be brought back to the hospital at Pont à Mousson
+and thence invalided home.
+
+Reverting to Bill, secretly the father's idol, in whose person he saw
+his own lost youth renewed, the Chancellor smiled now, painting in
+imagination on the darkness a picture of that charge of the French
+square at Mars la Tour.  According to Herbert, who had put the thing
+badly, Bill had had his horse shot, and jumped on another, taking a
+comrade behind him as he rode off the field.
+
+A fine story to write home to the boy's mother....  How her deep eyes
+would glow and kindle as she read....  An exploit with which to
+dazzle fat Borck, hated keeper of the King's Privy Purse....  Nor
+must one omit to embody the incident in the next official
+communication penned to Count Bernstorff, Prussian Ambassador in
+London, who would be sure to retail it to some Lady-in-Waiting
+possessing the ear of the Queen.  Lastly, what a magnificent anecdote
+for the convivial stage of a Foreign Office Staff dinner, or an
+official banquet, related with spirit garnished with exaggerations of
+the pardonable harmless kind.  Indeed, with such embellishments he
+subsequently related the slight episode, proving himself capable of
+the very folly of paternal tenderness.  The picture cropped up
+constantly among his dreams on this wild night of Gravelotte.  And
+when the wan-faced Dawn peeped shuddering between her blood-stained
+curtains, and the reveillé sounded, waking the living from their
+sleep among the dead, so that their haggard uprising seemed as though
+in answer to the trump of the Archangel of the Resurrection--he
+heaved his giant's frame from the squalid bed to learn, with a savage
+thrill of exultation, that Bazaine had fallen into the trap.
+
+In the dead of night, behind the screen of the unsilenced French
+batteries yet emplaced behind the high-walled farms of Montigny la
+Grange, La Folie, and from thence to Point du Jour, the bleeding Army
+of the Rhine had retreated to the treacherous shelter offered beneath
+the guns of Metz.
+
+Said the Warlock, smiling in his sunniest manner as he made his hasty
+morning toilet in the shelter of a baggage-wagon tilt:
+
+"Three French Marshals are twittering in this birdcage on the
+Moselle--one Army has been shut up with them.  Another yet remains at
+large, with Paris and the huge resources of France in rear of it."
+He paused to absorb a pinch of snuff and extract a clean white shirt
+from a small and shabby japanned tin field-case, then added: "A
+France on the point of Revolution--an Army commanded by MacMahon, who
+has been badly beaten, and has that Old Man of the Sea, the Third
+Napoleon, sitting on his back wherever he goes!"  He put on the shirt
+and emerged from temporary obscurity to finish.  "If the spirits of
+the just be permitted knowledge of earthly matters, my beloved wife
+Mary is pleased with her old man!"
+
+And he equipped himself in his old war-harness, and crowned his old
+wig with his battered war-helm, and got on his fine charger and rode
+off to meet and confer with his King, the Chancellor, and the War
+Minister, and issue instructions to his Chiefs of the various Staffs,
+trolling even less tunefully than usual, another verse of his
+favorite song:
+
+  "And knew they, the shining stars above me,
+    Of the bitterness of my woe,
+  They would come down and bid her love me,
+    Pleading: 'Ah! do not scorn him so!'"
+
+
+
+
+XLVII
+
+Rumor had it that the King, the Chancellor, Roon, the Royal Staff,
+and the Tinsel Rabble, with the escort of red, blue, and green
+Hussars, Guard-Dragoons and Uhlans, had ridden toward Flavigny.
+
+The Warlock placidly followed, traversing the battlefield near
+Rezonville.  Here bearer-parties of the German Ambulance Service,
+with Red Cross helpers, Knights of St. John, volunteers and French
+and German surgeons wearing the Geneva badge, were now arriving; and
+some progress had already been made in the gigantic task of
+separating the wounded from the dead.
+
+The Iron Chancellor was found here, attended by his shadow,
+Bismarck-Böhlen, sometimes dubbed "The Little Cousin," other whiles
+"The Twopenny Roué," according to the humor of his powerful relative.
+The Minister was glancing through the morning's letters, his cousin
+was reading him extracts from the _Daily Telegraph_, a parcel of
+English papers having arrived.  Hard by, squads of fatigue-men, aided
+by bloused peasants, were working to finish the second of two
+parallel trenches, in length some three hundred feet, near which had
+been collected a huge mass of French and German corpses, many
+half-naked, the majority of them still in uniform.  Carts lumbering
+up with fresh loads to discharge continually, augmented the terrible
+mound of bodies, a huge percentage hideously displaying the effects
+of shell-fire, many in the initial stages of decomposition, hastened
+by the sweltering and oppressive heat.
+
+Soldiers went about with huge canvas sacks, filling these with zinc
+identification-tags taken from the necks of their dead comrades,
+gathering a harvest of watches and purses, the former sometimes of
+such value, and the latter occasionally so well-filled with French
+money as to suggest that they had previously been taken from the dead.
+
+"_Ach Gott!_" the perplexed officer of Pioneers in superintendence of
+the trenching-party kept saying: "More, more, and still more....
+What is one to do with so many dead men?"
+
+Some utterance of this kind reaching the ears of the Chancellor, he
+turned in his saddle and called to the officer:
+
+"Your trench is too deep, sir, and not half wide enough.  Three feet
+is sufficient.  Lay them in as cooks dispose herrings in oil-pickle,
+across in layers and not singly and lengthways--labor and space will
+be economized thus."
+
+"Alas, Excellency!" protested the officer, "will not such a method be
+very unwholesome?  The churchyard at Flauville is already raised four
+feet above the pavement of the church."
+
+"Let them lay on fresh dead," said the Chancellor, smiling grimly,
+"and stop when they reach to the level of the window-sills.  Thus our
+good fellows will be able to listen to the Curé's Sunday address.
+Meanwhile, bury thick."  He added, as Moltke rode up, pointing to the
+ground now trodden into mud and littered with French schakos and
+_képis_, Prussian helmets and schapkas, knapsacks, arms,
+under-clothing, accouterments, brushes, razors, and shoes: "Would not
+one call this 'Death's Rag Fair'?"  He added as the wind, blowing
+over a battery of dead horses, brought with it an odor that made the
+senses reel: "Or 'Death's Perfumery Shop' would be as appropriate a
+title....  I must advise the King not to breathe this atmosphere
+longer, fasting.  It might result in dysentery."
+
+Moltke agreed, expanding his thin nostrils: "Truly, the effluvium is
+exceedingly bad!"
+
+"Hypocrite!" said the Chancellor, openly laughing.  "Do we not all
+know that the bouquet of a battle-field covered with slain enemies is
+sweeter to you than November violet-blooms."
+
+"Both may be agreeable," said the old war-eagle, "in different
+fashion; as the partition of a conquered province, and the
+dismemberment of a truffled capon might afford pleasure of two kinds
+to Your Excellency."
+
+Said Bismarck, as his cousin reined back and joined the modest
+personal staff of Moltke, following at some distance in the rear of
+the Commander-in-Chief:
+
+"I prefer the first, if the second appeals to my empty stomach.
+Though we must not sell the bear's skin before we have killed the
+bear!"
+
+He went on, patting the sweating neck of the brown mare, who had
+winced and started as yet another dead-cart shot out its dreadful
+load to windward....
+
+"The King has been in favor of keeping the country up to the Marne.
+I have yet another idea, which may be too Utopian to realize.  A kind
+of German colony--a neutral State of eight or ten million
+inhabitants, free from the conscription, and whose taxes should flow
+to Berlin.  France would thus lose a district from whence she draws
+her best soldiers--one would cut her claws thus!"
+
+Said Moltke, his clear eyes narrowing in merry wrinkles:
+
+"And draw her teeth as well!"
+
+The Chancellor went on:
+
+"That the annexation of the piece of territory will give jaundice to
+the French is a matter of no consequence.  Revenge should be made
+impossible.  Even without annexation we must render them permanently
+harmless before we risk their bite.  The surrender of the eastern
+fortresses of France can alone serve our purpose.  We have bought
+them with the best of our German blood!"
+
+Agreed the Warlock: "Many noble Prussian families will be plunged in
+mourning.  Wesdehlen and Reuss, Wedell and Finkenstein have been
+killed--Rahden is most grievously wounded, and a whole crowd of
+officers commanding regiments or battalions are either badly hurt or
+dead.  I can but thank Divine Providence that I have suffered no
+personal bereavement."
+
+"I echo your thanksgiving," responded the Minister, "though some
+pints of my own blood have vicariously been shed."
+
+"I had heard--I had heard somewhat, but feared to touch upon the
+matter," said the Warlock.  "With the younger olive-branch they tell
+me all is well!"
+
+The Chancellor answered, stammering slightly and looking straight in
+the other's eyes:
+
+"Bill rode off the field in safety, carrying two unhorsed comrades
+out of the leaden hailstorm, one in each stirrup, Cossack-fashion,
+and accommodating a th--a third on the crupper of his horse!"
+
+"_Ei--ei_!  I had not heard these interesting particulars," exclaimed
+Moltke, raising his hairless brows in apparent astonishment.  "I did
+not know the brave young man had distinguished himself so much!  The
+Countess will overflow with pride and gratitude....  She writes
+regularly, I think Your Excellency told me?  Naturally she would be
+solicitous for your health."
+
+"I had a letter from her yesterday," returned Bismarck, "in which she
+mingles, in equal doses, stern admonition and affectionate advice.
+Thus, I am to avoid the French wines, which are known to be
+gout-provoking, and be sure to return in time for the celebration of
+our wedding-day....  While, remembering, however strongly Paris may
+be fortified, that the walls of Jericho fell down when the trumpets
+of Joshua were sounded--I am to give Your Excellency no peace, 'until
+the modern Babylon is utterly destroyed.'"
+
+"Ha, ha, ha!"  The Warlock laughed with boyish merriment, until the
+water stood in his clear, keen eyes.  "Her Excellency, as I have
+often told thee, Otto, possesses a personality of the antique order.
+She is of the breed of Judith and Zenobia....  I would also say
+Boadicea, but for the Countess's known antipathy to the British race.
+So we are to destroy Paris, and what of the Bonapartes and Bourbons
+and Orleans?...  Have we, then, no cut-and-dried instructions as to
+what is to be done with these?"
+
+The Chancellor returned, with immovable gravity of tone and feature,
+belied by the amusement dancing in his eyes:
+
+"We are to purge France of the whole lot of them.  Though--supposing
+the Prince Imperial were to complete his education at a German
+University, and thus attain to manhood surrounded by German
+influences--Monseigneur Lulu might one day become a subaltern in our
+Prussian Army--subsequently to completion of the customary period of
+service in the ranks!"
+
+"Capital.  Her Excellency is indeed a woman in a thousand."  And
+Moltke fairly rocked in his saddle with laughter, finally having
+recourse to the frayed cuff of his old uniform field-frock for the
+mopping of his overflowing eyes.  "Thou must paint for the King," he
+gasped, "that picture of Lulu as a Prussian private soldier.  Do not
+fail to tell him--it will be sure to make him laugh."
+
+Said the Chancellor, shrugging his great shoulders:
+
+"He has ridden with Von Roon and the Tinsel Rabble in the direction
+of Flavigny, where the French bombardment so greatly endangered him
+yesterday.  Von Roon will be pouring into the royal ear dismal
+details of our losses, which are to be estimated for the Berlin
+newspapers at something under twenty thousand, including officers."
+
+"Seventy thousand would be nearer the mark," said the Warlock
+placidly.  "Nor do I regard it as a heavy price for such a victory as
+we have won.  Roon, however, is not to be envied an unpleasant duty,
+which, for my own part, I prefer, when possible, to leave to other
+mouths than mine."
+
+And leaving the battle-field they struck into a road in a cutting
+leading east toward Flavigny, and bordered with cottages shattered
+and scorched by shell-fire, most of them standing in gardens gay with
+dahlias, sunflowers, snapdragons, marigolds, lavender, and phlox.
+Every house that boasted a roof was full of wounded French and German
+soldiers, most of them lying on bare boards or earthen floors.  Oaths
+and cries of anguish came from kitchens that in virtue of their solid
+tables had been converted into operating theaters;
+ambulance-assistants emptied buckets of ensanguined water over the
+gaily-colored flower-beds, while bare-armed surgeons, in
+blood-stained aprons, came to the doors every other moment to cool
+themselves, or fill their lungs with draughts of cleaner air.
+
+"It is sad to see all this suffering," remarked the Chancellor, "or
+would be, did one not know it unavoidable!"
+
+Said the Warlock, smiling cheerfully:
+
+"Blood and wounds, dying men and dead men, are the inseparable
+concomitants of War.  One takes them then as natural, and pays no
+heed to them.  Did armies fight with truncheons of sausages, and
+dumplings stuffed with plums instead of iron shells full of shrapnel,
+there would still be deaths in plenty."
+
+The Chancellor said, laughing heartily:
+
+"And the Field equipment of our Army surgeons would consist of
+calomel and rhubarb-pills.  Here now are a collection of soaked
+macaws and paroquets.  The fine feathers of the Napoleon's Guard
+Imperial have suffered badly from last night's rain."
+
+In two fields right and left of the road they followed were crowded
+nearly four thousand French prisoners, under a heavy guard of
+Mecklenburg infantry.  The Mecklenburgers were drinking their morning
+coffee and munching Army bread and raw ham rations.  The emerald,
+pale blue, and scarlet Imperial Dragoons and Cuirassiers, the
+white-mantled, red-fezzed Chasseurs d'Afrique, the green-coated
+Chasseurs à cheval, the gorgeous Guides and Lancers, the Voltigeurs,
+and the red-breeched, blue-coated grenadiers belonging to individual
+regiments, standing as if in the ranks, or lying down in groups upon
+the muddy ground where they had spent the last night, looked with
+hollow eyes of famine, upon their munching jailers, but disdained to
+ask for food.
+
+"They are wet," said Moltke, "for few of them have got their
+greatcoats.  It is the love of display that leads the French soldier
+to throw away what extra weight of covering he carries when he is in
+the thick of a _mêlée_, or suddenly called upon to charge.  While our
+stout fellows will come out of an assault with what they carried into
+it."
+
+"Or perhaps a little more!" hinted the Chancellor.
+
+"It may be--it may be!" admitted the Field Marshal.  "The French love
+for gold-carrying is the cause of that enrichment.  Hence most of
+their Guard Cavalry officers carry beneath their tunics or in the
+pockets of their tight pantaloons netted purses given them by their
+women, that stick out in a tempting style.  A prod of our German
+lance, or a rip from the bayonet, and out pops the purse into the
+soldier's fist.  You would not call him a thief for taking what he
+finds in this manner?"
+
+"I cannot answer for myself," said the Chancellor, turning a laughing
+look upon the speaker, "but I can safely predict that my wife would
+exonerate him upon Scriptural authority.  By the way, I see that your
+brigadiers have not thought it worth while to place the French
+wounded under surveillance."  He pointed to a halting procession of
+roughly bandaged casualties in torn and muddy uniforms.  "I have
+already passed at least a thousand of these limping fellows in red
+breeches, and of course there must be thousands more."
+
+"How could they escape?" asked the Warlock, turning his ascetic,
+hairless face upon the speaker.  "And did they succeed in doing so,
+of what use would they be as combatants?  All these you see, have
+they not been wounded by shell-splinters in the head or arms, or hit
+in the legs and feet by our rifle bullets?  Why should we burden
+ourselves with the maintenance of men who cannot fight against us?
+and must be helpless burdens upon their country even were they within
+the French lines?"
+
+"I admit the clearness of your Excellency's judgment," said the
+Minister, "even while I doubt whether, if some of these red-breeched
+rascals happen to be in possession of concealed weapons--there would
+not be an excellent opportunity, at this moment, for ridding France
+of Bismarck or Moltke."
+
+"Or both," the Warlock amended, "with the aid of a double-barreled
+pistol.  Look here!  Was ever a more startling likeness between a
+dead man and a living, than is presented at this moment before Your
+Excellency and myself?"
+
+And returning the salute of a young soldier in the white-faced blue
+uniform of the Guards Infantry, who in the act of galloping past upon
+a powerful if wearied beast, had checked his stride so as not to
+splash mud upon the Chancellor and the great Field-Marshal, Moltke
+signed to him to halt.
+
+"That he is a relative of Max Valverden's," said Bismarck, "I would
+have wagered you a dozen of Moselle, of Comet vintage, if Your
+Excellency were not already inclined to bet on the relationship."
+
+"I never bet," chirped Moltke, "except in boxes of chocolate and
+gloves with my nieces, and then it is a matter of certainty
+beforehand that the little girls are going to win!"  And he turned
+his narrow, glittering gaze upon the object of his curiosity, who was
+now fixed in the front attitude of attention, immovable as an
+equestrian statue of painted stone.
+
+"I will not detain you upon what is no doubt a pressing errand," said
+the Chief of the Great Staff, smiling amiably in the Guardsman's
+rigid countenance.  "I merely wished to ask your name, and why it is
+that a private soldier of Guard Infantry happens to be riding an
+officer's horse?"
+
+"Pardon, General Field-Marshal!"  The statue blushed becomingly.  "My
+name is Carl Bernhard von Schön Valverden, at the service of Your
+Excellency.  Of my rank in the Army I am hardly at this moment
+certain, as I was promoted Corporal and Sergeant yesterday, during
+the action of the Guard at St. Privat and Amanvilliers, and am now
+acting temporarily as junior Captain of my company, nearly all our
+officers having been killed."
+
+"I congratulate you, Sergeant!" rejoined the Field-Marshal cordially,
+"and am glad that you, as successor to the family honors of an
+officer who served the Prussian Army with distinction, seem likely to
+follow in the steps of your relative.  Prut!--that was a close thing!"
+
+"Hellishly so!" agreed Bismarck.
+
+For the flushed and laughing face of Valverden had suddenly hardened
+and sharpened.  With lightning quickness he had drawn a revolver from
+a pouch strapped to his belt and fired across the withers of the big
+brown mare bestridden by the Iron Chancellor.  As the single shot
+rang out, another followed almost instantly, and the midmost of a
+knot of three dismounted Lancers, their heads, legs, and arms swathed
+in clumsy, blood-stained bandages, who had halted to rest by the side
+of the muddy road, yelled shrilly and pitched heavily backward,
+dropping, with the broken pair of clothes-props that had served him
+as crutches, a cavalry holster-pistol that had exploded as it fell.
+
+Said Valverden, stiffening his features in the endeavor to disguise
+his almost passionate elation: "Your Excellencies will pardon me, but
+I saw the fellow was dangerous...."
+
+"He might with reason," the Chancellor answered, "have entertained a
+similar idea of you!"  He turned to Moltke, saying:
+
+"Will not Your Excellency give orders that the companions of these
+would-be assassins--all upon the road who have witnessed the
+attempted outrage--shall be shot without delay?  It strikes me also
+that more stringent precautions must be taken with regard to
+disarming wounded prisoners.  The man had a pistol--that goes for
+much!"
+
+"Certainly--certainly!" agreed Moltke, beckoning to an aide of his
+small Staff, who followed at some distance.  He issued some brief
+directions, speaking in an undertone, then said, smiling and turning
+to Valverden:
+
+"The late Count Max was an excellent marksman with the pistol.  You
+seem to have inherited this talent of his!"
+
+The Chancellor added, looking at the still smoking revolver: "You
+have there a pretty little weapon, apparently of American make!"
+
+"It is one of Colt's six-shooters," said Valverden, smiling.  "I
+bought it from a non-commissioned officer quite recently, and have
+practised with it in the trenches at the animate mark.  But of the
+ammunition I got with it all has been expended save six cartridges,
+one of which I have had the honor to dedicate to the service of Your
+Excellencies."
+
+Both the Excellencies laughed, Moltke saying:
+
+"It would be a pity to spoil your shooting, Sergeant Count von Schön
+Valverden, for want of a few cartridges.  Give me the caliber of your
+weapon and I will engage to supply you with a few hundred.  And, as
+to your promptitude may be owed the priceless life of Count Bismarck,
+the silver-sword-knot must be the reward."
+
+"Thanks, thanks!  Your Excellency!" stammered Valverden, grasping the
+offered hand of the old warrior.
+
+"And the King shall hear how important a service his newly promoted
+officer has rendered him," appended the Chancellor, "in preserving to
+the Throne and nation of Prussia the greatest of living strategists!"
+
+"Under Divine Providence," said Moltke, devoutly raising his
+forage-cap.
+
+"Under Divine Providence," repeated the Chancellor, touching the peak
+of his own.
+
+He added, as Valverden, dismissed by a wave of the Chief's finger,
+his blue eyes blazing, his blond face aglow with triumph, set his
+borrowed spurs to the flanks of his late Captain's charger, and with
+a showy bound and demi-volte, galloped furiously away:
+
+"He is as vain as Count Max, but seems to possess more character.  I
+prophesy he will go far!"
+
+Moltke agreed, slightly glancing after the flying horseman:
+
+"Far--if Heaven preserve him from the clutches of such women as
+Adelaide de Bayard.  Wouldst thou believe, Otto, the she-fiend spread
+her nets to catch that youngster, who out of dare-devilry prevailed
+on an officer of her acquaintance to take him to her house?"
+
+"So!"  Bismarck turned his large eyes on the withered eagle-face.
+"Did the meeting ripen into intimacy?"
+
+Moltke replied:
+
+"Sufficiently so to cause Valverden's family acute apprehension.  One
+would suppose that she first revolted, then attracted, then
+charmed....  The Countess in the anguish of maternal solicitude wrote
+a letter to the Colonel of Valverden's regiment....  Fortunately the
+call to Active Service diverted the young man's thoughts elsewhere."
+
+Bismarck said, smiling and smoothing his heavy gray mustache with his
+ungloved right hand:
+
+"And, happily for her intended victim, an accident befell the
+sorceress, which blunted some of the arrows in her quiver of
+irresistible charms!"
+
+
+
+
+XLVIII
+
+"Sad, sad!  I had not heard.  How did it happen?" asked Moltke,
+elevating his hairless brows inquiringly.
+
+"Briefly, the affair, as its details have reached me, sums up in this
+way: Straz, the Roumanian agent of the Emperor Napoleon, having
+performed his mission to Prince Antony of Hohenzollern, met Madame de
+Bayard at a Sigmaringen hotel....  She is as clever and
+light-fingered as she is, or was, beautiful----'
+
+"I know, I know!" said Moltke.  "She sucked Straz dry of his store of
+Imperial secrets, but how, I did not hear from Your Excellency."
+
+Returned the Chancellor:
+
+"By drugging him--or so he vows!--she obtained those copies of his
+instructions from the Emperor (with copies of his copies of the
+telegrams sent by Prince Antony)--which I was privileged to show you
+later on.  Subsequently, and in floods of artificial tears, she
+awakened her victim, declaring she must return that instant to
+Berlin.  Which she did--a special engine having been kept under steam
+at the Sigmaringen railway station--in time to place the papers in
+the hands for which they were destined.  The exquisite point of the
+jest is that Straz accompanied her--subsequently discovering how
+roundly he had been befooled!  But upon this point I am not
+certain....  I only argue from the premises that when Delilah was
+subsequently found gagged, half-strangled, and robbed in her bedroom
+at the hotel where she and her Roumanian had put up--Straz--who had
+vanished--was the perpetrator of what Madame has since termed 'a
+mysterious outrage.'"
+
+"He took the money?" Moltke queried.
+
+"Undoubtedly he took the money, which Bucher had paid her a few hours
+previously.  Twenty thousand marks in honest Prussian bank-notes.
+Some of them Straz changed before he left Berlin.  He is now here in
+France, and that is all I care to know of him at present.  But in the
+eyes of every man she now encounters, Madame will read something that
+will keep her animosity alive."
+
+"So changed, is she?" asked Moltke, with interest.
+
+"So changed is she, in spite of the aid of cosmetics, that as I
+looked at her I was minded to exclaim with the Prophet Ezekiel:
+_Devourer of men ... thou shalt devour men no more!_"
+
+The speaker added:
+
+"Unless vicariously, for the De Bayard has a daughter--not destitute
+of charms, if there be truth in the description given me by her
+mother, when the woman offered, for a consideration, to sell the girl
+to me!"
+
+"Prut!" said Moltke, reddening angrily and frowning.  "Decency
+demands that such vileness be kept hid!"
+
+Said the Chancellor, shrugging indifferently:
+
+"Decency and such women as Max Valverden's ex-mistress have long
+ceased to be on nodding terms.  To do Madame justice, she flew at
+higher game than a mere Prussian Minister.  Her idea was to influence
+a future Emperor, in the person of Badinguet's heir."
+
+Moltke wrinkled up his transparent, arched nostrils, as though an
+unpleasant odor had afflicted them:
+
+"_Pfui!_--what beastliness! what abomination!  And the boy but
+fifteen, and childish for his age!"
+
+"And cleanly of habit and thought," added Bismarck, "considering his
+paternity, and the sort of people who habitually surround him."  He
+turned slightly in his saddle as carbine-shots rang out, followed by
+oaths, shouts, and in the distance behind them muscular blows: "The
+gendarmery of the Württembergers are carrying out your orders in a
+general _battue_.  It should be enforced as an iron rule never to be
+infringed or departed from, that not only those soldiers, reduced to
+the level of non-combatants--who attempt to revenge the misfortunes
+of their Army by acts of violence--but those who witness such acts
+are to be instantly shot.  More, the rule should extend to private
+persons: I would without mercy shoot or hang all those who do not
+treat as sacredly inviolate the persons of their conquerors!"
+
+His deep-cut nostrils expanded, his blood-tinged blue eyes blazed
+under the heavy eyebrows, the corners of his mouth clamped downward,
+giving to the thick mustache a certain appearance of solidity,
+typical of the man, and suggesting a human mask carved in granite, or
+cast in bronze and colored with the hues of life.  His resonant voice
+had the clang and timbre of a war-gong, forged of metal tempered by
+Pagan priests in blood of human victims.  And he went on, his
+clenched right hand beating the measure of his words upon his solid
+thigh:
+
+"I speak from the inner depths, at the promptings of a profound
+conviction.  Strictness--unmerciful strictness--should be wielded, to
+bring home to the innocent and the guilty, the feeble as well as the
+powerful, the horror and hideousness of War.  And yet"--his voice
+assumed a milder tone, the somber frown relaxed, and the tense
+corners of the deep-cut mouth twitched a little: "And yet wilt thou
+credit that during the frightful carnage of the last two days--there
+have been moments when my bowels melted to water--when Pity and
+Compunction have gripped me by the throat?"
+
+"_Ach-ach!_" ejaculated Moltke, turning his clear red-rimmed eyes
+wonderingly upon the heavy features whose ruddy color had faded to
+grayish: "Thou wast unfed, or hadst made some rough soldier's meal
+that disagreed with thee.  Man's stomach will upon such occasions
+chide with the very voice of conscience.  Unavoidable horrors need
+not cause twinges.  Besides, pity and compunction are felt by my
+niece Gusta when she has trodden upon her lapdog's tail....  I am
+myself agitated by these sentiments when Gusta exhibits to me her
+chilblains....  In War--especially a recklessly provoked war of
+attack, such as this--neither pity nor compunction can be tolerated.
+Grief of heart, I have been hitherto spared by Heaven's gracious
+preservation of those dear to me.  Thou art nearly as favored, for
+the wound of Herbert is comparatively slight, and Bill--the hero of
+the astonishing episode thou hast related--has come off the field not
+only with four--I think Your Excellency mentioned four--rescued
+comrades, but without a scratch upon his skin?"
+
+The simple, serious, almost childish tone of his harangue brought
+back the thunderclouds to the forehead of the Man of Iron.  His grim
+mouth set, his bulldog jaw thrust forward, a dull cloud of red swept
+upward to his temples, chasing the sickly grayish hue.  He said,
+stammering in his characteristic manner:
+
+"Your Ex--Your Excellency and myself have, as you say, been spared
+the bereavement which will presently plunge the noblest Prussian
+families into mourning.  But Heaven--looking down upon the Gorze
+Road, now white with the bodies of Von Bredow's Cuirassiers--or
+contemplating the field of Mars la Tour, heaped with the corpses of
+our Guard-Dragoons and Uhlans--might be inclined to disclaim
+arch-responsibility for the orders that in one instance hurled
+suss--six Prussian squadrons upon a French Infantry Division and the
+combined strength of Frossard's batteries, and in the other, pitted
+against eight regiments of French Imperial Guard Cavalry Von Barby's
+Heavy Brigade."
+
+"_Ei!_" said Moltke, placidly ignoring the irony, but with a rosy
+heightening of the color in his wrinkled cheeks: "And Heaven would be
+in the right of it.  Von Alvensleben in the first case, General
+Voights-Rhetz in the second, had been told in such and such an
+emergency to do thus--and thus.  In the Wars of Joshua and David, as
+recorded in Holy Scripture, Heaven assumed the chief generalship.  In
+the War of Germany with France, in this year of 1870, Heaven is
+pleased to let Moltke have his own way."
+
+Verbal thrusts and riposte had the grind of edged steel on steel.
+
+The Chancellor returned with elaborate suavity:
+
+"And yet--I quote Your Excellency's own utterance, such use of
+cavalry as I have quoted has been condemned by Moltke as
+unjustifiable."
+
+"And Moltke was right," trumpeted the indomitable veteran, "only you
+have not quoted me right.  Such use of cavalry by a general is
+unjustifiable.  Unjustifiable--absolutely--unless he wins!"  He
+added, rather nettled by the Chancellor's criticism:
+
+"Here we part, as I ride toward Gorze to visit the scene of Von
+Bredow's brilliant exploit, in the course of which, though Your
+Excellency has omitted to mention it, the French battery was cut to
+pieces, and an infantry column ridden down.  Thus the loss of life in
+a military sense weighs nothing against the advantage!"
+
+And stiffly returning the Minister's salute, the Warlock galloped
+away.
+
+
+"I have trodden on Moltke's corns," said Bismarck, laughing, as his
+cousin Bismarck-Böhlen rode up to join him.  "He grew testy on being
+twitted with our losses in cavalry."  He added, as the low hedges
+bounding the road vanished, and the arena of the previous afternoon's
+conflict opened before them: "There is the King, whose face Roon has
+lengthened with tremendous lists of losses on our side.  It will now
+be my business to shorten the royal countenance again.  Roon and I
+resemble Ixel and Axel in the child's story-book, only that we manage
+better on the whole!"  He explained as his cousin professed ignorance
+of the legend: "Ixel and Axel were possessed of a magical birth-gift,
+which worked in the same way, but differently....  Thus, Axel had a
+little finger that stirred sweet, while Ixel's stirred sour, only
+neither could remember to use his gift properly.  Thus, Ixel would
+sour the coffee in the pot, spoil the beer, and turn the jelly in the
+house-mother's pipkins, while Axel would stir the sauer-kraut sweet
+and make sweet calf's head with cabbages!"  He added, laughing: "If a
+dish thus flavored were now set before me, I should certainly make
+short work of it.  Save for a bowl of the soldier's pea-soup given me
+by General von Goeben this morning--my stomach would now be as empty
+as the inside of Louis Napoleon's head!"
+
+
+The scene of the Homeric battle of the previous afternoon, watched by
+the King, Bismarck, Roon, and Moltke from the ridge south of
+Flavigny, was indescribable.  Blue Prussian infantry, mingled with
+Uhlan lancers, Dragoons, and mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard,
+covered the wide stretch of level common-ground between the Bois de
+Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont.  So high were piled the bodies of
+dead men and dead horses, mingled with that sorrowful _débris_ of
+shattered arms, scattered accouterments and ownerless headgear, that
+live men walked through narrow lanes and crevasses opening here and
+there among them, and failed to reach the surface at the full stretch
+of the arm.
+
+Bearer-sections of the German Ambulance were looking for survivors,
+burial-parties were collecting the German dead.  Here and there the
+narrow lanes that ended nowhere had become crooked thoroughfares,
+owing to these efforts and the labor of bands of volunteers and
+peasants working under the Red Cross.
+
+P. C. Breagh was one of these toilers.  On the previous day he had
+helped the peasants clear the Red Ravine under the direction of the
+Gorze Sisters of Mercy, and darkness falling before the gruesome task
+was ended, he had kept on by torch and lantern-light until brain and
+muscles gave in.  Then, staggering with weariness, he had gone back
+with the Sisters to their convent--had been dried and warmed, fed
+with soup and bread, stewed fruit and coffee, and had slept
+dreamlessly in the clean spare bed at their gardener's cottage--to
+wake, refreshed, in the light of a new day.
+
+Morning had found every house in Gorze crammed with French and German
+wounded, and every able-bodied resident, willingly or otherwise,
+impressed into the service of the Red Cross.  One single lady of the
+Sister's acquaintance, whose villa had been forcibly turned into a
+hospital, had retired to sleep off a nervous headache, setting her
+maid to guard her bedroom door.  Which door, after an interval of
+trampling and violent argument, had been kicked open, revealing the
+kicker in the person of a Prussian General, muddy to the whiskers,
+hoarse from exposure and shouting, and red-eyed from the lack of
+sleep, who there and then forcibly ejected the hapless spinster from
+her bed, and telling her go and nurse the wounded, pulled off his
+spurred boots, and promptly installed himself in her place.
+
+This was mild treatment, even tender, to the usage received by many
+other harmless non-combatants.  P. C. Breagh had seen an elderly
+priest savagely hit in the face by a dismounted Uhlan, whom he had
+unintentionally jostled in helping to lift a disabled French soldier
+into a cart.
+
+And he had been witness of other outrages.  He had seen a wayside
+cabaret gutted, and the casks hauled up from the cellar, set up on
+end, unheaded, and emptied by a party of blue infantry-men.  When
+they had dipped in and filled their water-bottles, they had drunk out
+of their helmets, and when they could drink no more, they had emptied
+out the wine upon the ground before the bush-decorated doorway, and
+with brutal jests and laughter watched the red stuff trickle away.
+
+To this senseless waste the host had offered no objection.  A blow
+from a gun-butt had previously knocked him senseless, and his wife,
+with her black hair hanging wildly over her shoulders, and her face
+blurred with tears and pale with terror, was trying to bring him
+round again.
+
+
+
+
+XLIX
+
+The sight of the battle-field blotted out that brutal picture--made
+him clench his hands until the nails dug deep into the palms, shut
+his eyes and set his teeth, fighting down the deadly qualm....  It
+was worse than the Red Ravine a hundred times magnified.  It was
+awful--inconceivably awful....  He found himself muttering:
+
+"I wonder how God can bear to look down on it all!"
+
+With difficulty he controlled his ardent desire to remove himself as
+far as possible from this attained vision of his great desire, by
+using the legs that had brought him to this hideous scene:
+
+"If some of the fellows who gas about wanting to see War--as I
+gassed--not twenty-four hours ago--could be set down where I stand
+now, they'd find out, as I have found--that they didn't know what
+they were talking about....  Oh, God! ... suppose one of them saw
+that German Hussar without a head, sitting upright on a dead horse,
+curiously caparisoned with its own intestines, would he go sheer
+crazy or tumble down in a swoon?"
+
+He who saw the thing kept on his legs and did not lose his mental
+equilibrium.  We are so weak to our own knowledge that it is always a
+marvel when we find ourselves strong.  He found the nausea going and
+the dimness clearing from his vision.  He could even breathe the
+dreadful air, and, standing on the limber of a broken gun-carriage,
+stare out over the rigid billows of that silent sea of death and tell
+himself that a not inapt comparison would have been Deal Beach, with
+ridges of dead men and beasts instead of ridges of pebbles, and
+flocks of carrion crows instead of gulls--flapping heavily from one
+place to settle down in another and renew their dreadful banquet,
+between hoarse croakings that sounded like "More, more, more!"
+
+Starlings in myriads were there, reveling in blood and fat like the
+titmice and robins, who manifested predilections calculated to divest
+P. C. Breagh of the last remnant of belief in the tender fable of the
+Babes in the Wood.  Butterflies, Royal Peacock, and Purple Emperor
+greedily sipped blood in preference to honey-dew.  Hares, rendered
+tame by bewilderment and terror, couched among the corpses of men,
+their natural enemies.
+
+Toward the northeast rose a knoll, about which the battle seemed to
+have raged desperately.  For it was high-heaped with bodies of the
+green-jacketed Chasseurs on the bony brown horses, and ringed about
+with Red Uhlans and Dragoons in blue coats.  The black and white
+lance-pennons were whipping and flickering in the morning breeze that
+brought with it the appalling savor of death....
+
+One had come to work, not to make notes.  P. C. Breagh got down from
+the limber into the trough between two towering wave-crests and
+looked about him helplessly, not knowing where to begin.  A
+bearer-party of the Prussian Ambulance Service pushed by him.  They
+were hard-bitten, brown-faced men, who joked and laughed freely.  A
+scared band of peasants followed, carrying auxiliary stretchers made
+of hurdles and sacks and poles.
+
+Upon the heels of these tottered a single figure.  Was it a young
+girl, or an old woman, so slight and frail, so bowed and blackly
+clad?  A black silk veil covered the bent face, the small white hands
+were knitted across the narrow bosom.  A white linen armlet with the
+badge of the Red Cross showed vividly against the sleeve of her plain
+black merino dress.  The little, daintily shod feet that showed under
+the dabbled hem of the skirt had red mire upon them.  Through the
+veil her great eyes gleamed, haggardly moving from side to side,
+restlessly seeking....
+
+P. C. Breagh was becoming familiar with that look of strained
+apprehension and bleak anxiety, stamped upon the sharpened faces of
+those crowds of black-clad men and women who hastened from all
+quarters to seek amid the brute and human waste and wreckage of
+battle, their own wounded or dead.
+
+She moved with the irregular gait of one walking in a fog, looking
+from side to side, questing amid blue and livid or waxen faces for
+the face, it was quite plain.  Her look passed over bodies that did
+not wear the dark-green, silver-laced dolman, and silver-striped red
+pantaloons of the mounted Chasseurs of the Guard Imperial.  She
+ignored faces that were young, and unadorned with the crisp mustache
+and the Imperial tuft.
+
+For whom did she seek?  A husband, uncle, father? ... What lay in her
+path?  Something that, did the little foot strike it unwarily, might
+bring to an end that anguished search....  The impact seemed so
+imminent that his voice died in his throat when he strove to call to
+her.  He got out in a gasping croak:
+
+"Stop! ... Look! ... Right in your path there! ... For God's sake,
+don't touch it--it's a live shell!" ...
+
+She swerved blindly aside in obedience to the warning, though he who
+uttered it had spoken in his own tongue.  The edge of her skirt
+brushed the unexploded shrapnel, a potentiality fraught with hideous
+death.  But she struck her knee against the wheel of the broken
+limber--would have fallen but for P. C. Breagh.  Even as the slight
+figure stumbled against him, he knew the veil screened the face of
+Juliette.
+
+"Mademoiselle de Bayard....  Madame..."
+
+"Ah, it is you--it is you!" she said gaspingly.
+
+And she would have dropped at his feet had he not thrust out strong
+hands and caught hers that were still knitted over her breast.
+
+They were so cold, so cold and tiny.  They stirred in his grasp like
+little half-frozen birds.  She freed one, and put aside the heavy
+veil, and showed him what havoc Grief can make in loveliness....  She
+said--in the toneless wraith of the crystal voice he remembered:
+
+"When you spoke to me in English, I knew Our Lord had not forgotten
+me.  Ah, Monsieur Breagh, for the love you bear your sister!--for the
+love of charity--do not desert me!  Me, I am in the greatest
+extremity, or I would not venture to appeal to you now.  In the midst
+of these appalling cruelties and terrors I seek the body of one who
+is all the world to me....  For that I may find him living I do not
+dare to hope..."
+
+P. C. Breagh choked out, crimsoning and stammering:
+
+"Not your husband? ... You don't mean your husband...?"
+
+She said, with a wonderful, pure dignity:
+
+"Not my husband.  My father, sir.  It is since a week that I returned
+from Belgium upon receiving news of his captivity in the hands of the
+Prussians.  The intelligence was false--I afterward learned.  How--I
+cannot now tell you.  At this moment, and in the presence of all
+these poor corpses, of odor so terrible, of appearance so frightful,
+I can remember nothing very well.  But this--that I have come from
+Rethel since yesterday, and that I have come altogether alone."
+
+"Alone! ... without a guide, or protector of any kind? ... Without
+papers?..."  His face expressed the blankest surprise.
+
+"A passport was obtained for me," she told him, "by whom I will not
+say now, so that from the Belgian frontier I might reach Rethel.
+When I quitted Rethel, I was given a military permit by the aid of
+which I returned to Verdun.  From Verdun, in a train full of French
+wounded--in a _fiacre_ part of the way--in a peasant's cart the
+remaining distance--I traveled: hoping to reach the Camp of the
+Imperial Guard Cavalry at Châtel St. Germain.  But at Plappeville
+they detained me.  A great battle was raging....  What thunder of
+guns, what fire and smoke, what terrible confusion, devastation,
+wounds, and death did I not behold!..."
+
+She unknitted one of the little rigid hands that he had let go, felt
+for her handkerchief, and wiped away the cold drops of anguish that
+stood upon her blue-veined temples and about her colorless lips.  And
+P. C. Breagh could only look at her in an agony of pity, and wonder
+at the courage that bore the frail creature up.
+
+"Last night the frightful explosions of cannon ceased A poor peasant
+woman had afforded me shelter in her cottage, and shared with me the
+milk of her goat and her last loaf of bread.  News came before day,
+brought by a wounded soldier, whose comrades had been killed, that
+the battle had been won by the Army of France, but that M. de Bazaine
+had withdrawn our forces for rest and shelter to the Citadel of Metz.
+I asked this poor soldier for intelligence of my father's regiment,
+the 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Guard.  The reply was: 'Three
+regiments of Mounted Chasseurs lie dead on the field of honor.  You
+will find them south of Flavigny, between the Bois de Vionville and
+the Bois de Gaumont.'  I cried out then, for the words had pierced me
+like sharp iron.  I would have run out of the house to find my
+father, like a creature distracted, but that an ambulance of the Red
+Cross, accompanied by two English Protestant Sisters, passed through
+the village on the way to this terrible place.  They brought me with
+them--'You cannot seek among the dead,' they told me, 'without the
+brassard of the Rouge Croix.'  This they put upon me, and then they
+bring me with them.  Now I know not where they are, but I have found
+you.  Help me, monsieur--and I will pray for you until I die!"
+
+She gave him one wild, supplicating look, put her little frozen hands
+together--would have knelt down on the bloody grass to plead with him
+the better, if he had seemed to delay.  But he caught fire at her
+flaming eagerness, and snatched at the wallet of Red Cross
+necessaries he had unslung when he had climbed upon the broken limber
+to gaze over that sea of Death that spread to the horizon, crying:
+
+"Of course I'll help you look for your father! ... But how to search
+for him--and where? ... Tell me ...  the regiment and the color of
+the uniform?"
+
+Shuddering, she pointed to the green, silver-braided dolman clothing
+of one of the rigid figures near them.  He noted the red and green
+plume of the sealskin talpack, cut through, perhaps, by a stroke of
+the heavy saber yet gripped in the stiff right hand of a Prussian
+Dragoon.  He muttered, even while mentally registering other details
+of the Chasseur's uniform--noting the crest embroidered on the green
+schabraque of the brown charger whose inert weight rested on its dead
+rider's thigh:
+
+"777th Chasseurs ... I've heard German officers telling each other
+that they fought like devils yesterday....  Half a dozen regiments
+might have been cut up here!  And we have to find one man somewhere
+in a square mile of piled-up bodies....  If one only had a bloodhound
+and one of De Bayard's gloves!..."
+
+Love has a scent as keen as the great dun hound of the hanging
+dewlap.  The issue of the search was to prove this.  For an hour, as
+it seemed, they traversed narrow lanes that wound between walls of
+dead men.  Then the ground rose to a knoll, topped with three
+scorched oak-trees that had been stripped of their leaves and lopped
+of their branches by the blizzard of metal and fire, still burning,
+the air expanding in their sap-channels, exploded with the detonation
+of musketry.  Charred cinders dropped from them; they gave forth
+clouds of acrid-smelling whitish smoke.
+
+About and upon this knoll of the three oak-trees the battle of the
+previous day had raged--the billows of the sea of Death had beaten
+fiercely.  The lane became a crevasse, the floor of which sloped
+sharply--from the sides of which projected rigid limbs, human and
+equine.  But the slender figure in black moved between them--stooped
+to pass under them, seldom faltering.  When the young man who
+followed begged her to turn back, she shook her head without
+answering, and kept on.  The silent gesture meant:
+
+"Not yet!  A little farther still!...  Be patient with me, I beg of
+you!"
+
+For it seemed to Juliette's tense nerves and overstrained brain as
+though those white or blue, or darkly-discolored faces, hideously
+distorted or wearing an unnatural expression of calm, were all
+staring with their glassy eyes in one direction, pointed out by
+myriads of stiffened arms.
+
+She said, tottering with sheer weakness, and turning upon her
+companion colorless, black-ringed eyes set in a face most strangely
+peaked and shrunken:
+
+"Here where these trees are I will turn, because my strength is
+failing....  See, see!  O Mother of God!...  O Jesu!... HE IS THERE!"
+
+The scream that tore through her slender throat turned P. C. Breagh's
+blood to snow-water.  He could only gasp, clutching at the folds of
+her black school-dress with a vague idea of holding her back from
+some sight of intolerable horror:
+
+"Wait!  For God's sake!  Wait!...  Let me!..."
+
+She shook off his unconsciously violent grasp as though it had been a
+baby's.  She was gone, wading through a languid runnel of
+fast-congealing blood, stepping over a broken lance-shaft and a
+horse's rigid hind-limb.  When P. C. Breagh reached her, she was
+crouching on a patch of hoof-torn earth through which the limestone
+core of the knoll showed in places, hugging to her bosom a stiff blue
+hand.
+
+It wore a familiar ring, that brave right hand, from whose grip the
+long cavalry sword had dropped when the Uhlan gave the death-thrust.
+But I think, even without the crested sard, his daughter would have
+known....
+
+Madness was near enough in that fell hour to brush the bowed veiled
+head of Juliette with her tattered mantle of imaginary enemies.  She
+saw nothing and knew nothing but that her father was there.  She
+kissed the stiff blue hand, and sang to it and cuddled it.  Ophelia
+was not more tragic than this Convent school-girl, squatting in the
+chilly shadow of a heap of dead horsemen, lavishing futile, foolish
+tendernesses on that piece of insensible clay:
+
+"My father, now that I have found thee, we must never be parted
+again--never!  Indeed, I have tried to obey thee--but I could not
+help coming back because I love thee so!...  Thou hast been wounded,
+but I will nurse thee and cure thee.  When thou art well again we
+will find a quiet home together, where my mother shall never come.
+For she is not good as my grandmother was, and as thou art, my own
+father!...  I have fear of her, now that I have seen and known!..."
+
+She broke off and listened, as though an answer had come from under
+the blood-stained Imperial eagle and the corpses that hid De Bayard
+from her view.  One of them was the body of the young subaltern who
+had borne the standard.  Over him sprawled the colossal form of a
+German officer of Dragoons.  He was not dead, for he moved, and blood
+was yet trickling from a sword-cut that had bitten deep into his
+shoulder through the cuirass, and a deep gash in the close-cropped
+scalp of his unhelmeted head.
+
+"Help!  Some drink!  _Donner!_ how my head hurts!" he groaned faintly.
+
+P. C. Breagh, judging it a case for practical Samaritanism, got to
+him by skirting the heap of dead and scaling it from the opposite
+side.  Reaching the summit, he dosed the Dragoon with cognac, and was
+about to apply a first-aid bandage to the damaged shoulder, when the
+red-banded forage-caps and bearded faces of a burial-party of
+Prussian Guard infantry strung through the narrow alley below the
+level of his operations, and an unforgotten voice said in rough
+Teutonic gutturals:
+
+"Hereabouts or near.  Begin this--widening the way until carts can
+get through to be loaded....  _Kreuzdonnerwetter!_ is that a dog up
+there?"
+
+Another voice answered:
+
+"No, _Herr_ Sergeant.  It is either a nun or a woman!"
+
+The Sergeant thundered:
+
+"You silly sheepshead!  Aren't nuns women?  But you _verdammte_
+Catholics think such wenches are angels out of the sky.  Turn her out
+of that--nun or woman!"
+
+With a savage rush of scalding blood to his sun-bronzed cheeks and
+temples, P. C. Breagh realized that they meant Juliette.  He thrust
+his head forward, peering down from his eyrie.  The crouching little
+shape in black looked no bigger than a big dog.  Near her stood a
+soldier in the white-faced dark blue uniform of the Guard Infantry.
+It was the spectacled ex-chemist Kunz, who had nodded him civil
+farewell.  Staring up from below was the copper-colored countenance
+of the too-zealous Sergeant Schmidt, not rendered more amiable by
+mud-splashes and powder grime, in combination with a stitched-up scar
+across the bridge of the nose, and a flamboyant overgrowth of beard.
+He bellowed to the ex-chemist:
+
+"Speak to her!  Ask what is her business."
+
+The spectacled Kunz stooped over the little bowed head, and seemed to
+put a question.  She lifted her drained white face, shuddered, then
+resumed her previous attitude.  Interrogated from below, Private Kunz
+responded:
+
+"She is deaf, or mad.  She only shakes and stares at one!"
+
+The Sergeant bellowed:
+
+"Shout in her ear, fool!  You are not courting your sweetheart!  Tell
+her to get up and move out of this!"
+
+Thus urged, the ex-chemist approached his lips to the little ear
+shaded by the black silken tresses, and bawled the order of his
+superior.  She gave no sign of having heard.  Copper-red with
+indignation, the Sergeant commanded:
+
+"Turn her out, then!  Promptly up with the baggage!"
+
+Kunz, thus adjured, gripped the slight arm, not brutally.  At the
+touch, Juliette gave a faint cry, and crouched lower, hiding her face
+upon the rigid hand she held.  And P. C. Breagh saw red, abandoned
+his groaning cavalryman and leaped for it, slithering down from the
+summit of his dreadful eyrie with a roll of four-inch bandaging
+trailing in his wake.  Casting caution to the winds, he shouted
+savagely to the ex-chemist:
+
+"Let the lady go!  Take your hand off!  Damn you!--do you hear?"
+
+The words, being English, were not comprehended by the Sergeant.  For
+an instant he stared open-mouthed at the unexpected apparition.  The
+next he had bawled out an order to his men, and P. C. Breagh found
+himself looking down the long brown barrels of a couple of Prussian
+"needlers," accurately covering the exact area of waistcoat behind
+which his heart hammered and bumped.  There was a creaking of leather
+then--and with the jingle of steel on steel, the snort of a horse
+reluctant to be ridden into an alley without turning-space.  Over the
+heads of the Sergeant and his party rose the pricked ears, sagacious
+eyes, and broad frontlet of a great, gaunt brown mare, ridden by a
+gigantic field officer, wearing the flat white, yellow-banded forage
+cap, black pewter-buttoned frock, white cords, and immense spurred
+jack-boots of the Coburg regiment of White Cuirassiers.
+
+"Whom have we English here?  Who called out 'Take your hands off!'"
+
+From under the peak of the white forage-cap the rider's heavy
+domineering stare took in the huddled feminine figure, the disheveled
+young man menaced by the Service rifles, and the truculent attitude
+of Sergeant Schmidt.  He lifted a finger, and the "needlers" became
+vertical.  He beckoned with the authoritative digit, and P. C. Breagh
+drew near.  And the sickening horrors of the battlefield faded
+suddenly from about the Englishman....  He was back in the
+tobacco-scented study of a house in the Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin.  And
+the resonant tones of the man who stood for Prussia in the mind's eye
+of the world were saying, in Bismarck's well-phrased English:
+
+"Even though you belong to a neutral nation, you should not presume
+upon the fact too rashly.  Had I not been within earshot just now,
+you would have paid with your life for your interference.  German
+military authority is supreme, and in the execution of its duty not
+to be turned aside."
+
+P. C. Breagh retorted, tingling to the very finger-tips:
+
+"Your Excellency, I interfered to save this lady from ill-usage."
+
+"She is a Frenchwoman? ... Explain to her," said the resonant voice
+coldly and brutally, "that even to reach the side of a fallen lover,
+too much may be risked and lost!"
+
+P. C. Breagh said, meeting the imperious stare with yellow-gray eyes
+that blazed tigerishly:
+
+"Excellency, the dead man is her father, Colonel de Bayard, 777th
+Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard."
+
+"Stand back," said the domineering voice, "and I will speak to her!"
+
+At a touch of the spur the great brown mare moved forward, breasting
+a lance-shaft that barred the narrow alley, terribly squeezing the
+Sergeant and his men.
+
+"Mademoiselle de Bayard!" said the authoritative voice.
+
+"Excellency, she does not hear you!  The shock has been too
+terrible," Carolan was beginning.  He was brusquely interrupted with:
+
+"People usually listen when I speak to them."  And the curt command
+was issued--in French, suave and polished:
+
+"Be good enough, Mademoiselle de Bayard, to stand up and listen to
+me!"
+
+The big brown mare snorted angrily and fidgeted.  He turned her head
+with an iron hand on the curb-bit, looking steadily at the other
+female thing.
+
+"Mademoiselle de Bayard, do you hear?"
+
+This time she lifted her sunken head, and turned her small pinched
+face his way.  In the haggard young mask of frozen anguish two wild
+eyes glittered, tearless and stony-hard.  Then slowly, as though his
+powerful will impelled her, she rose to her knees, and stood upon her
+feet before him.  He said, in cool, incisive accents:
+
+"Young lady, your father was a gallant soldier.  I myself had the
+privilege of seeing how he died.  I wish such a man had served a
+better master!..."
+
+She answered, her white lips barely moving as they framed the
+sentence:
+
+"He served the Master of Kings and Emperors, before Whom he stands
+now!"
+
+His somber eyes lightened suddenly as though in irritation.  He said
+in tones that had the clang of overbearing authority:
+
+"I cannot enter now into a theological discussion.  The battle-field
+is no place for debate, or for unprotected women and young girls....
+In your own best interests I counsel you to return home."  He
+added--and there was no flicker of recognition in the passing glance
+vouchsafed to P. C. Breagh: "Alone, if you prefer--or under the
+escort of this young Englishman....  I will promise you that your
+father's body shall be treated with respect!"  His heavy eyes fell on
+the stiffened face of the Sergeant, standing rigidly in the attitude
+of salute.  "Where is the officer in charge of this burial-party?" he
+added, grimly enough.
+
+"Here, Excellency!" came from behind him.  He glanced over his
+shoulder and said to the flurried under-lieutenant who had hurried up
+and was standing in the alleyway:
+
+"A separate grave, distinguished by some mark that is recognizable by
+the daughter."  He looked back at the daughter, saying curtly: "Your
+veil!"
+
+She removed it in silence, and handed it to the ex-chemist, who
+received the frail fluttering cobweb between his finger and thumb.
+Then the brown mare, in obedience to the iron hand upon the bridle,
+backed out of the alley of silent witnesses, baring her long,
+vicious-looking yellow teeth and showing the whites of her savage
+eyes resentfully.  From the florid bull-dog face of her rider, barred
+with the heavy mustache of iron gray, all memory of the little drama
+just enacted had been effaced, as the outlines of a sketch in
+charcoal are wiped from wood or stone.
+
+But as the alley widened and his great beast surged round, switching
+her tail, putting back her ears and lashing out with her heels so as
+to nearly brain the officer, P. C. Breagh thought he caught the words:
+
+"Separate grave ... marked to find easily.  All respect ... answer to
+me!"
+
+More he might have heard, but for Juliette's sobbing.  For God had
+remembered her, and sent her tears at last.
+
+She had suddenly seen, lying at her feet, a frayed and crumpled
+envelope bearing the Belgian postmark, and addressed in her own
+handwriting to M. le Colonel H. A. A. de Bayard, Headquarters of the
+777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Guard Imperial with the Army of
+France, at Metz.  And the intuition of love told her that the dead
+man must have carried this, the last message received from his
+daughter, hidden in his bosom; and have drawn it forth and kissed
+it--as in very truth we know he had--shortly before he died.
+
+"See, see, my friend!  Behold my own letter.  His sacred blood has
+stained it....  His lips perhaps have pressed it!--it well may be
+that tears of his have fallen here also! ... Never shall it leave me
+until my hand is cold as this is!  Adieu, dear hand!"  She knelt down
+to fondle it, had to be raised almost by force--would have returned
+for a last caress--a final prayer, but that P. C. Breagh, rendered
+desperate by the evident impatience of the officer and the scowling
+looks of the Sergeant and his merry men, lifted her bodily in his
+arms and carried her away.
+
+"I pray you put me down! ... Me, I am not an infant!" she protested.
+"See you well, Monsieur Breagh, I do not think it _convenable_ that a
+gentleman should carry a lady so!..."
+
+Then her strength ebbed from her and she became in truth, an infant.
+As her frail body yielded to his clasp, as her head sank down upon
+his shoulder, she sighed, a long, quivering sigh.
+
+What of the youth who waded through the frozen sea of Death, bearing
+in his arms his worshiped lady?  He was footsore and aching in every
+bone and muscle from long marches and desperate exertion.  His heart
+pounded so beneath her cheek that it seemed to him she must hear it
+and be frightened, or that he must suffocate and die outright.
+Terror and rapture, exquisite pain and exquisite pleasure, mingled in
+the draught now held to his lips by Fate, Life's cup-bearer.  And as
+he drank, with what strange birth-pangs, his budding manhood
+burgeoned into flower.  He might look back upon his boyhood with
+regret, contempt, or tenderness....  He would never be a boy again.
+
+
+
+
+L
+
+The smallest and slenderest of women can be surprisingly heavy, when
+carried in the arms of a lover who long has borne her in his heart.
+
+Thus to P. C. Breagh, stumbling with his burden over roads strewn
+with weapons, accouterments, mess-tins, and water-bottles, boxes of
+biscuit and halves of sugar-loaves discarded by troops retiring in
+haste, the appearance of a very tall peasant leading a little
+white-faced donkey came as an unspeakably welcome relief.  For a
+franc in good French money the owner of the donkey was more than
+willing to hire out his beast.  Thus, seated on this humble animal,
+P. C. Breagh's Infanta returned to the cottage where she had passed
+the previous night.
+
+It was one of a hamlet boasting the name of Petit Plappeville.  To
+reach it they skirted the frightful carnage at St. Hubert, threaded
+the wood of Châtel St. Germain, crossed the railroad, unmolested by
+the Prussian patrols, and, following narrow lanes hidden between
+copses, came at last upon its single street.
+
+Madame Guyot, stout, hospitable, and voluble, received Juliette with
+cries of welcome and open arms.  Mademoiselle should have something
+better than dry bread on this occasion, for a neighbor had that
+morning killed a calf.  Hence veal cutlet, fried in batter--for some
+of the hens, scared by yesterday's bombardment, had already begun
+laying--and an omelette with fine herbs.  No less than young
+demoiselles, wounded soldiers require nourishment, and here behold,
+English Monsieur accompanying Mademoiselle, here upon the pallet-bed
+in the corner of the kitchen one of France's brave defenders in the
+person of my Cousin Boisset.  Pardon that he cannot rise to salute
+you, for the Prussians have made it impossible.  During the battle of
+St. Privat yesterday, my Cousin Boisset was twice wounded while
+serving with the Eighteenth Field Battery of the Sixth Army Corps....
+
+Thus introduced, the gunner told his story, and told it with vivacity
+in spite of his evident pain.  His bandaged head and the useless leg
+roughly swathed in a homespun towel of Madame Guyot's told their
+story no less than his nimble tongue and vivacious eyes and hands.
+
+"We were overcome by force of numbers....  The Germans know nothing
+of scientific warfare....  Believe me, Mademoiselle and Monsieur, we
+swept them down in rows like ninepins painted black.  At twelve
+hundred yards, and again at fourteen hundred--and the more we killed
+the more there were to kill.  Name of a pipe!--pardon,
+Mademoiselle!--it was inconceivable!  We were compelled at length to
+cease our fire because our ammunition failed us, and it was not
+possible to butcher any more!--Worst of all, our generals lost their
+heads, and issued contradictory orders!--Commissariat broke down
+before the ammunition-service--we had had nothing to eat for two
+days--then we ceased to have shrapnel with which to feed our guns....
+So we stood in front of a wood in which we might have taken cover,
+being peppered by Prussian fire of infantry and artillery, for three
+whole hours!--Three solid hours, Monsieur and Mademoiselle--until we
+were remembered, and ordered to retire.  When the order came, few
+officers remained, and not a single non-commissioned officer was left
+to us.  Of the three batteries of our brigade Division, two-thirds
+lay dead upon the field.  With my wounded leg trailing behind me, I
+crawled over rank after rank of bodies, pausing over many of my old
+comrades....  Then I lay in the wood till dusk, and made crutches of
+saplings I cut down with my penknife.  With the day I reached my
+cousin's house....  You may say 'All this is War'--but what kind of
+War? is what I ask you....  I--a soldier when has fought and bled for
+France!"
+
+It was the voice of Juliette that answered from the corner of the
+blackened oaken settle, where she sat huddled in the leaden stupor
+that is born of grief and fatigue:
+
+"Soldier of France, I will try to answer your question....  I am
+young and ignorant, but I have read and thought much.  And now I have
+experienced what never can be forgotten....  I have sat by the corpse
+of my father on the battlefield....  I have looked in the face of the
+great man who is my country's cruel enemy...."
+
+Madame Guyot, who was frying a panful of veal cutlet, started and
+looked round from her sputtering, savory-smelling cookery.  The
+wounded gunner, propped up on the pallet-bed that stood in the corner
+of the low-ceiled, stone-built kitchen, turned keen dark eyes and a
+resolute bearded face toward the quarter whence came the silvery
+voice:
+
+"It is Bismarck's War," she said.  "Stone by stone he has built up
+Prussia until her vast shadow has swallowed up all Germany.  He has
+seen--this huge man of colossal ambitions--that the road to Power
+greater still leads through the gate of France.  And Diplomacy could
+not steal the key, so War is the lever with which he opens it."
+
+"Alas, Mademoiselle," returned the gunner sorrowfully, "it would
+never have opened while a French soldier was left alive--if we had
+not been betrayed!  Have you seen the picture of Cham in last week's
+_Charivari_?  It reached my battery through one of our officers.  It
+is true--_mon Dieu!_--it is desperately true.  There is the Little
+Napoleon of To-day dressed up in the old cocked hat and the tattered
+rags of the capote that used to be worn by the Great Napoleon.  He
+begs at the street-corner for sous--and even the prostitute turns
+away from the impostor.  'The End of the Legend!' is written
+underneath.  It is furiously chic and terribly clever--and
+frightfully true, Mademoiselle.  For the Napoleonic legend is done
+with--finished, for good and all!"
+
+She did not answer, the momentary flash of interest had died out.
+With her sad eyes fixed upon the ebony and silver crucifix of her
+rosary, she was murmuring a prayer--doubtless for her father's soul.
+Seeing her thus absorbed, the soldier glanced at her companion,
+shrugged significantly, and tapped his own forehead, as though he
+would have said:
+
+"It is well that women have faith in Heaven.  See!--she turns to her
+beads, the poor little one.  She is able to pray!--that is
+fortunate....  Otherwise, grief would turn her brain!"
+
+Meeting no response from P. C. Breagh, who sat upon a backless
+straw-bottomed chair in the chimney corner, raptly contemplating the
+small, sorrowful face, the gunner shrugged again, and exchanged a
+wink of intelligence with Madame Guyot, as she took the bubbling pan
+from the fire, proclaiming the cutlet cooked to a turn.
+
+Who has loved and does not remember the first meal partaken in the
+company of the beloved.  To one guest at Madame Guyot's board, the
+fried cutlet and tomatoes eaten from her coarse platters of
+red-flowered crockery, the home-baked loaf, the jug of thin red wine,
+the country cheese and the dish of purple plums that served as
+dessert, made a banquet worthy of the gods.  To sit opposite that
+little drawn, white face with the lowered, swollen eyelids, and watch
+her brave pretense of relishing their hostess' victuals, would have
+been torture had it not been bliss.
+
+When the homespun cloth had been drawn, the crumbs shaken out upon
+the threshold for the hungry poultry, the cat accommodated with a
+saucer of scraps, and the hearth swept, P. C. Breagh, glancing at the
+cuckoo-clock that had hiccuped twelve, and now pointed to the
+half-hour, got up and reluctantly tore himself away.
+
+"You are going?...  Back to _him_?...  To make sure that those
+soldiers have obeyed the orders of M. de Bismarck?  Ah! that is what
+I have been praying for!  Our Lady has put it into your head."
+
+She said it eagerly, with her hand quieting the flutter in her bosom.
+Of what else should de Bayard's daughter have been thinking, P. C.
+Breagh asked himself.  He entreated, his troubled gray eyes wistfully
+questioning:
+
+"You won't leave this place until I come back?  Pray do not!...
+Promise me!"
+
+The soldier, chatting in low tones with the good woman of the
+cottage, pricked his hairy ears at the unfamiliar accent of the
+English words.  Juliette answered in the same tongue:
+
+"Monsieur, I give you my _parole_ of honor.  When you come back to
+this house, if I am alive, you will find me here, under the _manteau_
+of Our Lady.  May she protect and guard you.  _Au revoir!_..."
+
+P. C. Breagh echoed the final words, and held out his big hand.  She
+considered it a moment, hesitated, then laid her own in the broad,
+blistered palm.  As he shut his strong fingers over the fragile
+captive, it struggled, then lay still, throbbing like some small
+imprisoned bird.  And a dimness came before his eyes, and he
+hurriedly released her, stammering:
+
+"Take--take care of yourself, won't you?  I'll--not be very long
+away!"
+
+She called him back.  He knew a shock of joy and hurried toward her.
+She slipped her Rosary into his hand with a gold coin, faltering with
+eyes brimful, and quivering lips:
+
+"This ... to be buried with him!...  This--for a priest to read the
+Office and offer Mass ... if one can be discovered!...  Oh! if I
+might come with you!... but no!--I will not be unreasonable.  Again,
+it must not be that you carry me, as you did to-day!"
+
+He trembled at the poignant recollection.  She went on, breathing
+fast and eagerly, lifting her eyes, poor rain-washed scillas, to
+his--laying her small hand timidly on his shabby sleeve.
+
+"Me, I have an idea!...  There is now in Heaven a great saint who was
+priest of a little village that lies not far from here....  Since he
+died, it is eleven years....  I speak of M. Jean-Baptiste Vianney,
+the Blessed Curé of Ars...."
+
+P. C. Breagh nodded recognition of the shining name she mentioned.
+She went on, her small fingers pinching a fold of the rough brown
+sleeve:
+
+"Sacrifice--mortification--the Cross--these things to the holy Curé
+were the Keys of Heaven.  The poorest and simplest of his peasants
+was not poorer or simpler than he.  Even before his death Our Lord
+gave him the grace to perform miracles, and always did Our Lady
+regard him with tenderness....  See you well, I will pray to the
+Blessed Jean Vianney to intercede for me, that God may send a holy
+priest to read the Office for the dead!"
+
+Her voice broke, and the bright tears brimmed over her pure
+underlids.  At the sight a wave of tenderness surged up in him, pure
+of all sensuous passion, knowing only the overwhelming desire to
+serve, and comfort, and protect....  He bent his head, and kissed the
+little hand, before he turned and went from her.  When he glanced
+back, midway clown the wide dusty street of the hamlet of scattered
+cottages, Juliette was standing in the sunshine, looking earnestly
+after him.
+
+
+
+
+LI
+
+She could think clearly and remember again.  The confusion in her
+overwrought brain gradually subsided.  She went back to the fatal
+days when the news of the defeats of Wörth and Spicheren rushed
+shrieking through France and Belgium, and the 16th of August brought
+word of Bazaine's intercepted retreat from Metz.  That day a young
+girl, sitting under the grisly wing of Madame Tessier at the _table
+d'hôte_ of the Hôtel de Flandre, in Brussels, had risen up as pale as
+death and hurried from the room.
+
+The picture was clear-cut, definite as a photograph.  She saw the
+tables in confusion....  French guests uprising, the men exclaiming,
+and the ladies in tears,--Belgians sympathizing--Teutons exchanging
+congratulatory eye-glances, and smiles not at all concealed.  As the
+white girl passed the chair from which a German cavalry officer had
+risen, he whipped the obstacle out of her way with an ogle and a bow.
+And Juliette, covering her eyes as though the sight of him scorched
+them, had fled past him....  As she quitted the _salle à manger_, the
+voice of Madame Tessier had reached her, saying grimly to the dandy:
+
+"A civility from one of your nation at such a moment is an insult,
+Monsieur."
+
+And Madame, with bristling mustaches, had also risen, and gone in
+search of her daughter-in-law elect, to be arrested at the foot of
+the grand staircase by a waiter with the intelligence that
+Mademoiselle had gone to her room to lie down, and begged not to be
+disturbed....  To which apartment, it being on the third floor,
+Madame Tessier--having wound up the twelve-o'clock _déjeuner_ of hot
+meats and vegetables and salad with coffee and pastry,--did not
+follow her.  Had she braved the ascent, this story would have ended
+in quite a different way.
+
+Upon this day, that saw the battle of Mars la Tour, Juliette would
+not have met the elegant, self-possessed, ingratiating lady who had
+spoken to her so amiably on the previous afternoon.  When--Madame
+Tessier being engaged in changing a French _billet de banque_ into
+Belgian money--Juliette had inquired for letters at the bureau.
+
+"'Mademoiselle de Bayard.' ... Unhappily there is not a single letter
+for Mademoiselle de Bayard..." had said the curled and whiskered
+functionary, taking an envelope from compartment "B" of the green
+baize-covered letter-rack, and handing it to this lady, who stood
+immediately behind.
+
+Juliette had found it impossible not to see the address upon this
+letter:
+
+  "To MADAME DE BATE,
+    "HÔTEL DE FLANDRE,
+      "BRUSSELS,"
+
+written in rather a vulgar scrawl.  It carried extra stamps, and
+looked bulky.  And the elegantly-gloved hand that was extended to
+take it, recoiled from the contact as though the envelope had
+concealed a scorpion.
+
+The owner of the hand had regarded Mademoiselle de Bayard with a
+piercing and exhaustive scrutiny, even as she slipped the letter into
+a gold-mounted reticule, and snapped the spring tight.  She had
+observed in soft and well-bred accents:
+
+"Letters from one we love are enhanced in value, when the writer must
+lay down the sword to use the pen...."
+
+Through a black lace veil so thickly flowered as to suggest a mask, a
+pair of brilliant eyes glittered at Juliette.  What dazzling teeth
+were revealed by the crimson lips that smiled....  The well-bred
+voice added, with an entrancing touch of melancholy:
+
+"Under other circumstances, to address Mademoiselle would be held a
+liberty--the speaker being a stranger.  Yet as the wife of a French
+officer of the Imperial Guard,--I may be pardoned for presuming in my
+young country-woman an anxiety similar to my own?..."
+
+"Ah, Madame," Juliette had said impulsively, "who is there would not
+pardon you?"
+
+And she had looked with a young girl's honest admiration at the
+sumptuous form in the perfectly-appointed dress.  When the lady had
+said, with brilliant eyes fixed on her:
+
+"Were this letter not from my husband, I could wish it had been for
+you," she continued: "Does Mademoiselle know M. de Baye's regiment?
+The 777th Mounted Chasseurs...?"
+
+"My father commands it, Madame," Juliette had proudly answered.  And
+an animated conversation would have sprung from this answer, but
+Madame Tessier turned round rather sharply, and the lady, with a
+slight, graceful inclination, had glided rather rapidly away.
+
+Later, Juliette had encountered Madame de Baye upon the staircase,
+and had received another of her brilliant glances, and another of her
+entrancing smiles.  And, being lonely in this strange land, and
+athirst for interest and companionship, the young girl had woven a
+little romance out of this passing acquaintanceship.
+
+Now as she reached her room, trembling and ready to sink with
+excitement and agitation, a woman stopped her in the corridor, who
+looked like a lady's maid of the better class.  Well mannered, smart
+and discreet, she dropped Mademoiselle de Bayard an ingratiating
+curtsey, handing her at the same time a little three-cornered note.
+
+As the messenger plainly waited for an answer, Juliette unfolded the
+delicately perfumed cocked-hat.  This is what she read in a
+finely-pointed feminine caligraphy, with lasso-loops to all the
+"g's," "y's," and "h's," and "s's" of the prolonged, old-fashioned
+kind.
+
+The maid had penned it at the dictation of her mistress, who for an
+unexplained reason preferred another hand to bait her hook.  This is
+what Juliette read between her heart-beats, striving to check her
+flowing tears, and the sobs that rose in her throat:
+
+
+"_To you, Mademoiselle, so spirituelle, gentille and amiable, I am
+fated, alas! to cause the greatest grief.  I have received the most
+terrible news of my husband's regiment.  The reports of the Emperor's
+resignation are false from the beginning.  The Army of Metz,
+Mademoiselle, has encountered Prussian forces....  Where I know not,
+but with terrible loss!  My Victor has been dangerously wounded and
+conveyed to hospital at Metz.  I fly thither on the wings of anxiety
+and tenderness to receive too possibly! his final kiss.  Also I learn
+that M. le Colonel de Bayard has been taken prisoner....  My pen
+trembles as I write the words._
+
+"_Since I may not tender them personally, receive, Mademoiselle, my
+condolences and farewells.  May Heaven protect you!_
+
+  "_Distractedly and devotedly,_
+        "A. DE BATE."
+
+
+Madame was packing, said the maid upon whom Juliette turned with a
+breathless inquiry.  Without doubt Madame would receive
+Mademoiselle....  And, having previously been primed with
+instructions, Mariette, whom not so long ago we encountered in
+Berlin, conducted Mademoiselle to a door upon the lower landing, and
+having knocked discreetly ushered the young lady in.
+
+It was a bedroom crowded with trunks and imperials, none of which
+seemed to have been unpacked.  The lovely lady of the veil was
+standing near the toilette-table in a thoughtful pose which did
+justice to her figure and the beauty of her profile.  She had removed
+her veil and held it in her hand, as she changed the position of a
+jeweled comb in her hair....  She looked round as the door opened.
+Her brilliant eyes, ruddy-brown as Persian sard or Brazilian
+tourmaline, encountered the tearful eyes of Juliette.  She advanced
+to meet the girl with effusive tenderness, crying:
+
+"Alas, poor little one!  From my heart I pity you!..."
+
+She was not so beautiful, unveiled, as she had appeared behind her
+mask of black lace flowers.  The handsome eyes were bloodshot and too
+prominent.  There were faint dusky-red streaks showing through the
+purchased roses and lilies of her complexion; horizontal marks,
+resembling the congenital disfigurement known as "port-wine stain."
+And withal she was an attractive woman of fascinating manners.  And
+her sympathy seemed genuine, and yet--for some incomprehensible
+reason, Juliette trembled at and shrank from her touch....
+
+"You are too good to receive me--you who are also suffering!..."  She
+tried to collect herself, and not cause distress.  "How I pity you I
+cannot tell you! but at least you have the knowledge that you are
+returning to your husband's bedside.  You will have the sad
+consolation of seeing him, while I..."
+
+She broke down and sobbed, and the sympathetic Adelaide administered
+red lavender on sugar, while her maid kept guard on the landing to
+intercept Madame Tessier should she appear.  The cock-and-bull story
+told the girl would hardly have borne the test of recital before a
+third person.  But Juliette was young, and innocent and unsuspecting,
+and Adelaide was experienced in the ways of the world, and very old
+in guile....
+
+"Courage, my child, and above all, have faith in Heaven!"  It did not
+at all suit her voluptuous type, the heroic-pious tone....
+"Naturally you will, knowing M. le Colonel a prisoner, leave nothing
+undone to assuage the miseries of his situation!...  Have I guessed
+right?  I venture to think I have!"  She patted Juliette's hand and
+smiled in the drowned blue eyes, from which she gently drew the
+little soaked handkerchief.  "Accompanied by your venerable
+protectress, you will instantly return to France.  You will leave no
+stone unturned to obtain an interview with the Emperor--you will
+implore him on your knees to obtain M. le Colonel's exchange....
+Presto! the Emperor will set the machinery in motion.  He will give
+back three Officers to the King of Prussia--and Mademoiselle will
+have her father again!  Is it not so, tell me, my little one?"
+
+She held the girl's small hands in hers, and as she marked off each
+item of her program, she gently clapped the hands together, as in
+approval or consent.  It was a characteristic trick with Adelaide
+when she meant to be playfully coaxing, and there was imprudence in
+employing it now.  But with the first inchoate stirring of memory in
+Juliette, caution reawakened in Madame de Bayard.  She released the
+hands, and said in a graver tone:
+
+"Your _gouvernante_ will not object to return?"
+
+Juliette responded:
+
+"Dear Madame, that lady is not my instructress.  She is the excellent
+Madame Tessier, my grandmother's oldest friend."
+
+Adelaide's lip wore the expression of one who sniffs at physic.  Had
+she not been deafened with the recounted virtues of this very Madame
+Tessier!  As she racked her memory for the date of a possible
+meeting, Juliette continued:
+
+"She is very kind to me.  But I fear she will not consent to return
+to France immediately.  She is now upon her way to Mons-sur-Trouille
+to attend the wedding of her only son.  All has been arranged.  It is
+to take place upon the 22d."
+
+A sigh heaved her breast, and her eyelids sank under the burning gaze
+of Adelaide.  But Adelaide was still engaged with Madame Tessier:
+
+"_If she has seen me once--and it may well be once!--she certainly
+has forgotten me!_" she commented mentally.  Aloud she said:
+
+"But you, Mademoiselle--you are free to return to our beloved
+country.  Under my own guardianship if you will.  Do not refuse!...
+Grant me the privilege!"
+
+Juliette panted:
+
+"Oh, if I might accept!...  But this marriage is the obstacle!
+Because M. Tessier could not return to France for it, my father
+commanded that I should go.  All the more urgently that War had been
+declared with Prussia, and the regiment had been ordered to join the
+Imperial Army at Metz."
+
+Madame Adelaide repeated scoffingly:
+
+"This marriage ... this marriage....  Is your presence necessary to
+legalize the ceremony?"
+
+Juliette cried, opening wide her eyes:
+
+"Alas! yes, Madame!--for I am to be the bride!..."
+
+A shock visibly passed through the nerves of the woman who heard her.
+She started in her chair and grew livid underneath her powder and
+rouge.  And the dusky marks on her fair skin started into sinister
+prominence.  She was suddenly terrible, and haggard and old....
+
+"So, that was de Bayard's plot....  To marry her!" Adelaide heard an
+inward voice saying.  "Why did you not foresee that, knowing her of
+age?  Nineteen--though she looks like a child, almost....  Her
+grandmother possessed that physique of an infant, in combination with
+an iron determination, and a regard of truth that robbed Life of
+every alleviation, deprived conversation of grace and
+versatility--reduced the very language of Love to the level of a
+notary's _précis_...."
+
+All this passed through her brain in an instant.  She controlled
+herself, rose, took the girl's hands again, and kissed her on the
+brow, saying with sorrowful melodiousness:
+
+"My child, I comprehend!  But while I rejoice at the happiness that
+awaits the daughter, I weep--forgive me that I weep!--for the father
+in his prison-cell.  He is handsome, thy betrothed--and brave--and
+not a soldier?  In a day like this when our France cries out for men?"
+
+Juliette clenched her little hands as the languid irony stabbed her.
+She cried out, almost beside herself:
+
+"Oh, that is what I feel, and for that I cannot pardon him!  Why is
+he not a soldier?  One could esteem him if he were!  But oh!
+Madame,--I despise him, and that makes it the more terrible....  This
+marriage with a husband whom I have never even seen!"
+
+"_Ah, ha!..._" she heard a strange voice scream through peals of
+laughter.  "Ah, _la, la!_--what a clumsy game to play!...  _Fi donc,
+M. le Colonel!_...  So we were to be married in the style of the Old
+Commander....  '_Pas files a droite!_...  To the church, quick
+march!'  _Mon Dieu!  Mon Dieu!_ how droll!..."
+
+She dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief, and said, controlling her
+frantic merriment:
+
+"Sweet child, forgive me, I am a little hysterical....  The shock of
+Victor's wound ... my sympathy with your cruel situation....  How
+could M. le Colonel subject you to a trial so severe?"  Feeling
+herself upon unsafe ground, she dried her eyes again and amended.
+"That, I comprehend, is a question between yourselves....  When this
+wedding was arranged M. le Colonel had no comprehension of what would
+befall him.  Yet, for his sake, would it not be wise to delay?
+Engage the interest of the Emperor before it is too late to reach the
+beloved captive.  Should he be interned in some fortress of East
+Prussia, how will even a daughter's tenderness reach him amidst those
+desolate plains--in those caverns of freezing stone!..."
+
+She used her fine voice like a consummate artist of the theater....
+Juliette had a vision of her father dying, fettered, ghastly and
+gaunt with famine, as an engraving of Count Ugolino in his dungeon
+she remembered to have somewhere seen....  And her secret horror of
+Charles Tessier, wedded with the feverish longing to return to France
+and work for the release of her dear prisoner, prompted her to
+decision now....
+
+"I will go with you, since you are good enough to propose it.  But
+Madame Tessier will never give her consent.  Therefore, we must leave
+here without consulting her, and secretly....  I will write a letter
+explaining all.  Money I have for the railway charges, not much, but
+I think sufficient!"
+
+Said Adelaide, barely able to hide her triumph:
+
+"Leave the purchase of the tickets to me, _ma mignonne_!  I have a
+pretty little score to settle with M. le Colonel.  We will settle our
+accounts presently, I promise you!  What is the matter now?"
+
+Juliette gasped:
+
+"Alas!--I have no passport!  At least, Madame Tessier has both
+ours...."
+
+"Ah, bah!" said Adelaide.  "We will borrow Mariette's....  She can
+remain here at pasture, and amuse herself with the waiters!..."  She
+burst out laughing at Juliette's look of astonishment, and tapped her
+under the chin, telling her to go to her room, pack a small hand-bag
+with necessary articles, change into a dark, plain walking-dress, and
+rejoin her as soon as might be.  She showed a small watch, its back
+thickly crusted with emeralds, saying:
+
+"Hurry!...  You have barely a quarter of an hour."
+
+Then she opened the door, sped her capture with a beaming smile,
+beckoned Mariette, and this strange colloquy took place between Circe
+and her tirewoman:
+
+"Did the old woman come nosing upstairs after the little Mademoiselle
+joined me?"
+
+Mariette replied:
+
+"She did, Madame, but I had locked both Mademoiselle's doors--that
+leading into the old lady's room, and the one that opens on the
+corridor,--and put the keys in my pocket.  Here they are!"
+
+She held them up, her sallow features expressive with the expectation
+of a reward earned by intelligence.  Said Adelaide, impatiently
+tapping her handsome foot:
+
+"And then?...  And then?..."
+
+"Then I accidentally encountered Madame on the threshold of
+Mademoiselle's apartment.  Seeing her about to knock, I told her that
+I had seen the young lady descend the stairs, carrying a letter,
+which I supposed Mademoiselle intended to post at the pillar in the
+vestibule....  Hearing this the old lady thanked me, and bundled
+downstairs.  She is asthmatic, judging by her wheezing....  She will
+wait a bit before she climbs up all these flights again."
+
+Adelaide thought a moment, and then gave orders.
+
+"Run you down, hunt up the old woman--help her to search everywhere
+for the little thing--you understand!...  Half an hour will be
+sufficient to detain her below stairs.  In less time Mademoiselle
+will be safe with me in my apartment....  Then you will give Madame
+these keys and a little note written by Mademoiselle....  Or--do you
+know of a waiter who would undertake to do this and hold his tongue?"
+
+Mariette's expression became sentimental.  She said, with her head
+tilted on one side:
+
+"There is one, a Swiss youth, handsome and with the form of an
+athlete, upon whose fidelity and silence Madame can implicitly
+rely...."
+
+"For how much?" Adelaide demanded, having no illusions as to the
+permanence of an unpurchased silence.
+
+Mariette answered:
+
+"I will guarantee Adolphe Madame's for the sum of twenty francs!"
+
+Adelaide gave her a bank-note, and the faithful creature tripped away
+to split it.  Despite youth, beauty and muscles, her Adolphe only got
+ten francs.  But he carried out his instructions and handed Madame
+Tessier the keys, with a little envelope, containing a hasty line in
+the handwriting of Juliette:
+
+
+"_Dearest Madame,_" it said.  "_This moment I have received grave
+news of my father, compelling me to leave your side.  This marriage
+must be deferred.  Entreat M. Charles to excuse me!  I embrace and
+pray you to pardon._
+
+  "J. M. De B."
+
+
+The little note was penned on the corner of Adelaide's
+toilette-table.  While Madame read it and fainted,--was revived by
+Mariette and the athletic Adolphe,--scolded herself into hysterics,
+came out of them and dispatched telegrams; tore the telegrams up and
+wrote letters,--Juliette was safely hidden in Madame Adelaide's room.
+
+Later on, when Madame Tessier had left the hotel, with her luggage
+and the trunks and bandboxes of the vanished bride-elect--this time
+containing the marriage robe, crown and so on,--Madame de Baye sent
+for her bill and paid it--ordered a _fiacre_ and drove to the
+station, accompanied by her maid, and her maid's sister, a demure
+little person in black merino, cut convent-style, whose head was
+draped, after the fashion of some lay novices, with a black silk veil.
+
+
+The abduction was effected in the simplest fashion....  Not a soul
+turned to look at the dowdy little figure carrying the hand-bag, its
+slight proportions half hidden in the sweeping folds of Adelaide's
+silken train.
+
+The station was crowded with newly-arrived French officers, men of
+MacMahon's defeated army, who wore their swords, having given their
+_parole_ to their captors not to serve again in the War.  Belgian
+officers fraternized with them,--Belgian ladies of the Red Cross were
+busily engaged in making much of those who were wounded....
+Juliette's heart swelled at the sight of the bandages and crutches,
+and when the laden stretchers were carried past, the hot tears
+streamed down her white cheeks behind her screening veil.
+
+The train carried a great many French passengers, as well as an
+English Red Cross column and a Belgian one.  When the engine
+shrieked, Juliette started as guiltily as though it had been the
+voice of Madame Tessier, shrilly lamenting an absconding
+daughter-in-law.
+
+They were off--launched upon the iron road that led back to France
+and freedom.  The excellent Mariette remained behind.  She would
+sleep at some hotel, procure a passport, and join her mistress later.
+Madame de Baye took the trouble to explain.
+
+From the shrinking little figure in the corner of the carriage came a
+muffled sound in answer.
+
+"Let her mope," Adelaide said to herself.  "Thought is necessary to
+carry out my plan!"
+
+You are to see her as Juliette saw her, leaning her fair round elbow
+on the padded window-ledge, and thinking, as the rolling plains in
+the vicinity of Brussels gradually gave place to valley and hill.
+All of fierce and sensual and treacherous that mingled in her complex
+nature with how many nobler qualities,--showed now in the beautiful
+mask of Adelaide, even as she sat brooding there.
+
+She had knotty problems to decide, it must be admitted....  How best
+to play this marvelous trump, her daughter thrown in her way by
+chance, was one of these.  That plot of Straz, for bringing the girl
+into contact with the Heir Imperial, might be combined with
+Adelaide's own original notion of employing the girl's influence to
+bring about a reconciliation with M. de Bayard.
+
+The indifference of M. de Bismarck had quashed her tentative
+approaches on the one subject.  The silent contempt of de Bayard had
+thrown the other affair out of gear.  To score off both would be
+magnificent....  As for Straz ... she lost grip of herself when she
+thought of the Roumanian, murmuring:
+
+"For revenge on him, who has robbed me of my beauty, how cheerfully I
+would give my soul!"
+
+Juliette, from her corner, saw the change and shuddered.  Adelaide
+turned sharply, to read terror in the girl's face.
+
+"What is it, my chicken?  Has anything frightened you?" ...
+
+The terrifying Medusa turned to a maternally-smiling Cybele.  She
+leaned across the intervening space of cushion, to playfully pat the
+knee of her charge.  But the answering smile was as faint as the
+scent of frozen violets....  The spell of her beauty had been broken
+when her demon had looked out of her eyes.
+
+"My nerves are not as strong as they were before--what happened in
+July," she told herself.  "And that is another debt I owe to Nicolas.
+He would be wiser to let me forget him--if oblivion be possible."
+
+Her looking-glass bore out each day what the Roumanian had said to
+her.  "_Never will you be able to look in your mirror without
+remembering me!_"
+
+And to keep her smart alive, the Slav had adopted a method of his own
+invention.  Peculiarly ingenious and characteristic of Straz.
+
+At intervals Adelaide received anonymous letters, containing
+inclosures, wherever she went and by whatever alias she passed.
+Envelopes directed in varying hands would contain doll's mirrors
+costing but a sou or two.  Pinchbeck-framed ovals or circles of tin
+or glass, always reflecting the same thing.
+
+A livid face of hate, streaked with those faint brownish red marks
+left by the tightened folds of the silk scarf that had so nearly
+strangled her.  She had tried to laugh at this childish form assumed
+by the malice of the Roumanian.  But the deadly cleverness of the
+thing lay in the fact--that it did what it was meant to do.  The
+medieval torture of the falling drops of water was equaled by this
+Ordeal of the Penny Looking-Glass.
+
+"_Look, see, and think of me!_" sometimes ran the doggerel rhyme
+scrawled on the paper wrapping of the doll's mirror.  At other times:
+
+"_Charms that are spoiled hold no men entoiled!_" would be the motto,
+or something equally stupid, dull and banal.  The stupidity was
+becoming unbearable by its very repetition; by the certainty and
+regularity with which the laden envelopes arrived.  Sometimes
+Adelaide felt entangled in a cunningly woven network ... surrounded
+by spies, sleepless and unseen....  Yet in the maid Mariette the Slav
+had found an accomplice clever enough to carry out his purposes
+single-handed.  The cream of the thing was--Adelaide never suspected
+Mariette.
+
+Treacherous herself, she believed in the devotion of this woman, who
+watched her anguish grimly, planting fresh thorns in her mistress's
+shuddering flesh.  And every day or so brought another doll's
+looking-glass.  The jeer that accompanied the last had been a vilely
+parodied verse of the child's dancing-song:
+
+  "_Ma commère était belle!
+  Helas! dans le temps!
+  Ma commère était belle!
+  Helas! dans le temps!  Hélas!
+  Pousser un soupir!
+  A vue de ma commère:
+  L'Amour n'a qu'à mourir!
+      Hélas!_"
+
+
+One may imagine the curl of Adelaide's lip on reading rubbish like
+this.  But she read it more than once, and when she finally burned
+it, the accursed jingle, burr-like, stuck in her memory: for she it
+was who had been beautiful in the time that had passed for
+evermore--the gossip at the first sight of whose damaged, unveiled
+charms Love sighed and gave up the ghost.
+
+
+
+
+LII
+
+Meanwhile Juliette, nestled in her corner, stared from the window as
+Belgium hurried by.  Bouillon, at whose station they left the train,
+showed a platform crowded with swaggering Prussian officers of the
+Crown Prince's army--some of them wounded, all upon _parole_.  French
+ladies, entering and leaving the carriages, looked daggers at their
+enemies.  Poisoned daggers at Adelaide, who, to her secret annoyance,
+was recognized and familiarly greeted by two of these Teutonic
+warriors, one a tall and red-whiskered Bavarian Light Dragoon, the
+other a brown-coated Hussar of von Barnekow's Brigade.
+
+In vain Adelaide ignored the pair and redoubled the directions she
+was giving to a porter.  The Bavarian coolly thrust the man aside,
+opened the carriage-door and jumped upon the steps.
+
+"_Meine gnädigste_ ... loveliest Countess, you won't give the go-by
+to your old comrade Otto?  Here also is von Wissman, who claims a
+greeting from you!"
+
+There was no gainsaying the boisterous good-fellowship of the
+officers.  They superintended the removal of the luggage from the
+van, engaged a pair-horsed _fiacre_, and advised as to its loading.
+When Adelaide and her charge entered they followed uninvited, and
+deposited themselves on the front seat, incommoding the ladies with
+their long spurred boots and filling the vehicle with the odor of
+cigars and wine.  Both talked much; the Hussar chattered incessantly;
+giving details of the various actions he had been engaged in, the
+chance by which he had been taken prisoner, the irksomeness of being
+interned in Belgium until the ending of hostilities:
+
+"Not that it will be long before the War is over.  We now hold Alsace
+Lorraine and the country north and east of Metz.  The Crown Prince is
+making for Châlons; that will give the French Emperor an attack of
+hysterics.  He has handed over the supreme command to Bazaine, and
+yesterday left Gravelotte for Verdun.  That means Châlons, and after
+Châlons will be Paris.  Badinguet has had enough of campaigning to
+last him the rest of his reign."
+
+Adelaide asked:
+
+"And the Prince?"
+
+The brown Hussar puffed out his cheeks and squinted like a
+pantomime-mask.  The Bavarian replied:
+
+"Lulu went with papa, though we heard they had trouble to make him.
+He wanted to stop and kill Prussians--they're such horrible beasts,
+you know!"
+
+"You droll beggar, Strelitz, shut up with your mummery," said the
+Hussar, leaning across him to pitch his cigar-butt away.
+
+"Madame is fire-proof, why waste the stump of a three-mark Havana?"
+chuckled Strelitz, keeping his own weed alight.  He went on, drolling
+for the benefit of his companion:
+
+"This meeting, loveliest Countess, makes me feel a youth
+again--garlanding the grim temples of Bellona with the roses of the
+goddess of Love.  You remember the classical lessons you used to give
+me only last winter, in your charming flat near the Linden Strasse?"
+
+He ogled Adelaide with comic sentimentality:
+
+"And the jovial supper-party at which I was present, when von Kessel,
+of the Guards Infantry, had the presumption to bring an uninvited
+guest!"
+
+"Why apologize!" laughed the Hussar.  "The pleasantest
+acquaintanceships are made by chance!"
+
+"Ah, but this was not chance!" said the Bavarian, with mock
+solemnity.  "It was one of those accidents that only happen by
+design.  Von Schön-Valverden bored von Kessel frightfully to take
+him--left the fat fellow no peace until he gave in.  The Count is
+reported to have paid the penalty."
+
+"Aha!  I can imagine what happened to the youngster!" giggled the
+Hussar.
+
+Replied the comedian:
+
+"He had three losses that evening.  Each one more serious than the
+last!"
+
+Adelaide shrugged, but she did not look angry; indeed, through her
+veil her disdainful beauty assumed a smiling cast.
+
+"Three losses," the comedian repeated, "exactly as in my own case.
+For he first lost his money--so did I!--we were playing baccarat that
+evening--then he lost his head, and finally his heart!"
+
+"Otto, thou wert always a tease!" protested Madame, but her ill-humor
+had softened into conscious coquetry, and her eyes beamed radiantly
+through the flowers of her masking veil.
+
+"Or he would have!" continued Otto: "had not his mother, the
+Countess, come flying to the rescue and carried him off, nobody knows
+where!..."
+
+Adelaide's eyes blazed.  She said in a tone of haughty nonchalance:
+
+"Count Valverden is now with the first Army, advancing toward
+Metz....  He says he hopes to win the silver sword-knot before the
+close of the campaign."
+
+"You correspond?" the Hussar asked, grinning, as the driver signified
+impatience by kicking the back of the box-seat.  Both officers got
+out of the carriage as Adelaide answered coldly:
+
+"He often writes to me."
+
+The driver, ignored, opened a little padded trap-hole in the front
+part of the vehicle.  He clapped his mouth to it and shouted in the
+Flemish tongue:
+
+"_Geef my U address!_"
+
+Adelaide gave the name of the Hôtel des Postes.  The officers kissed
+her hand and said they would call there on the morrow.  They waved as
+the _fiacre_ rumbled out of the station.  Adelaide waved back, and
+issued quite another direction through the driver's trap-hole.  And
+the _fiacre_ went jingling through the old-world streets of the
+castled town that sits on the broad flowing river whose bridge was
+crowded with French and Belgian officers, chatting, smoking and
+discussing the news of the War.
+
+Presently they were free of the streets, roaring with the tongues of
+many nations, choked with trains of French wounded, Red Cross
+columns, Sisters, surgeons, bearers, carriages full of visitors, and
+more processions of officers on _parole_.  The _fiacre_ lumbered at a
+good pace behind its pair of heavy-hocked Flemish horses along a
+wide, straight road, with plains on either side.  And presently tall
+black wooden observation-towers marked the frontier where Belgian
+videttes and outposts amicably fraternized with French.
+
+Kilometer posts of wood instead of stone....  The dear French
+language in the mouths of people.  Breasting hills covered with
+woods, instead of fallow plains, intersected with level roads
+bordered with eternal poplar-trees.
+
+With the joy and relief of the return, Juliette's heavy heart grew
+lighter.  Her muscles relaxed.  She could unclench her hands again.
+For the horror she had felt at the contiguity of the German officers
+and the loathing their familiar address had inspired in her had been
+well-nigh unbearable, though she understood their language but
+imperfectly.  And this strange woman, her self-chosen protectress,
+who greedily fed on an admiration so coarse, Who was she?  What was
+she?  The poor girl shuddered as she wondered.  Of women like
+Adelaide she had no experience, and yet she could not silence the
+voice of her doubt.
+
+When Madame good-humoredly bade her unlock traveling bags, unstrap
+baskets and serve both with the food and drink she had lavishly
+provided, Juliette, declining all offers of refreshment, waited upon
+her, in silence so frozen that the patience of her protectress was
+severely taxed.
+
+Unaided, Madame emptied a pint bottle of champagne, a fluid which
+temporarily elevates the spirits, and consumed the greater part of a
+cold _pâté_, with pastry and fruit, winding up the repast with a
+Turkish cigarette and a thimbleful of cognac from the silver flask in
+her traveling-bag.
+
+"How dull you are--how cold, you tiny creature!" she grumbled.  "Is
+it blood that runs in your veins, or melted snow?  From whom do you
+inherit this torpid nature--without vivacity, warmth, or gaiety?
+Your father was not lacking in fire and passion....  Your mother----"
+Her long eyes laughed wickedly.  "A feminine volcano, shall we say?"
+
+A shock went through the girl.  She visibly quailed and shuddered.
+Through the rumbling of the _fiacre_, she heard herself speaking in a
+voice she hardly recognized:
+
+"My mother....  Did you know my mother?  And--knowing her--dare you
+speak of her to me?..."
+
+"Dare!..."  Adelaide threw back her handsome head in a gale of
+laughter, curling back her crimson lips, lavishly displaying her
+splendid teeth.  "I dare do many things," she said, still laughing.
+"Conventionality ... timidity ... these are not characteristics
+distinctive of me!  Nor were they ever, to do myself justice....  Why
+are we stopping at this miserable place?"
+
+Juliette, rendered dumb by growing fear of her companion, did not
+answer.  The carriage drew up at a crossroads where a bridge arched
+the Givonne.  They were upon the fringes of the village, near a
+country inn and posting-house.  The driver had an ancient
+understanding with the proprietor of this hostelry that his beasts
+should break down here.
+
+He now got down from his perch.  Adelaide lowered the window.  The
+man explained by the aid of signs that the horses were quite
+exhausted and they were yet three miles from Sedan.  The proprietor
+of the inn assisted at the colloquy, extending the distance by
+another mile--hinting at possible dangers after nightfall.  He could
+supply an excellent supper, a comfortable double bedroom--coffee at
+the peep of day, a vehicle and horses to take Madame and Mademoiselle
+to Sedan, or wherever they chose....
+
+Finally the driver was paid enough to satisfy even his cupidity.
+Madame's luggage was taken upstairs, the ladies mounted to their room.
+
+It was a low-ceiled, dampish apartment containing two bedsteads of
+uncomfortable aspect, with flock beds and dusty chintz draperies.
+Candles were lighted, put on the chimney-piece....  A fire of damp
+billets was set smoking by the efforts of the chambermaid, who was
+not disinclined to talk.  French troops were encamped near.  Let the
+ladies look from the window.  Those lines of red and yellow lights
+glaring through a rising fog marked the sites of the soldiers'
+watch-fires.  There were officers down below drinking wine and
+playing cards in the _salle à manger_.  Also soldiers were drinking
+cider in the yard.  It made one feel more safe, the presence of so
+many warriors.  Indeed, Sedan was full of them, and all the country
+round about....  At Metz also, even more, with guns enough to kill
+all the Prussians in existence.  The chambermaid felt confident that
+they would soon be driven out of France.
+
+Still talking, she supplied hot water, and laid a little
+supper-table, the ladies preferring not to descend.  A smoked
+omelette with herbs, some stewed pears, and a seed-cake furnished the
+supper, with a decanter of thin red wine.
+
+Adelaide nibbled and sipped discontentedly.  Juliette, being
+famished, made a meal.  The billets refusing warmth Madame unrobed
+her sumptuous person, arrayed herself in lace and lawn, enlisting the
+services of her charge as lady's maid, and gracefully betook herself
+to bed.  There she leaned on her white elbow, chatting while Juliette
+made her own preparations for the down-lying....  Her tigerish mood
+was past.  She was amiable--almost affectionate....  She even praised
+the girlish charms reluctantly unveiled in the process of undressing;
+remarking:
+
+"After all, you only want style and more _tournure_ to do execution
+among the men.  Some of them actually prefer coldness.  They say it
+gives the illusion of innocence.  Have you locked the door?  Yes!
+Then double-lock and drag a trunk before it, and shut the window and
+slide the bolt....  Pull down the blind and draw the curtain....  One
+cannot be too careful in places like these!..."
+
+"But we shall be suffocated!" Juliette cried in consternation,
+forgetting her deadly fear of Adelaide in her craving for fresh air.
+And then in the ghastly face the other turned upon her, she saw the
+unmistakable stamp of Fear.
+
+"What have I said?...  What has frightened you?  Are you ill?  Pray
+tell me!" she begged.
+
+But Adelaide waved her off, biting her pale lips to bring the blood
+back to them, saying harshly: "It is nothing!  A spasm.  I have
+suffered from them of late....  Do not stare at me as though I were
+hideous.  Give me my reticule....  There! on the toilette-table.  How
+clumsy you tiny things can be!..."
+
+Trembling, Juliette handed her the gold-mounted bauble.  She took a
+little phial from it and a measuring-glass.
+
+"Now place one of those candles on the night-stand, beside me.  One
+will not do--give me both!..."
+
+There was laudanum in the little crystal phial.  When Adelaide had
+measured and swallowed her dose she breathed more easily, stared less
+fixedly, and those disfiguring reddish-purple streaks of Straz's
+handiwork showed less vividly against the creamy skin.  Her suffused
+eyes regained clearness.  She lay back among her pillows and declared
+herself better ... laughed at the terror still visible in Juliette's
+face....
+
+"Now give me the little pistol and the pearl-handled dagger out of
+the inner compartment in my traveling-bag....  The large, deep pocket
+that fastens with a snap.  What! you would rather not!...  You do not
+like to handle them....  _Fi donc_, Mademoiselle!  A soldier's
+daughter--and guilty of such cowardice!..."
+
+Juliette winced at the thrust.  It was her turn to bite her lips.
+She steadied them and mastered her voice sufficiently to say:
+
+"I dislike to touch such weapons, because I have never learned to use
+them.  And I will ask you, Madame, not to speak jestingly of my
+father to me!"
+
+"Give me the pistol and stiletto, then!" stipulated her tormentress.
+
+In silence Juliette took one of the candles, and set it near the
+traveling-bag upon the table near the supper-tray which the
+chambermaid had neglected to remove.  She dived into the deep pocket
+as directed, and drew out a double-barreled pistol, mounted in ebony
+and silver, and the dagger, a costly toy of Indian workmanship.
+Something else fell upon the floor with a faint tinkle.  It was a
+miniature set with pearls, that had rolled under the table.  She laid
+the pistol and dagger there, took the candlestick and stooped to pick
+the miniature up.  The portrait within the oval of pearls and gold
+was that of a girl-child of some five years.  In the pictured face
+that smiled up at her with eyes as deeply blue as the spring skies of
+Italy, Juliette with a thrill and shock indescribable, recognized
+herself....
+
+
+"_It was the August of 1856.  Thou hadst five years, and thy curls
+were as soft and yellow as chicken-down....  Thy mother used to say:
+'Juliette will never be black like me!_'"
+
+
+The beloved voice was in her ears, with the very throb of his aching
+heart in it.  De Bayard's daughter knelt so long upon the floor,
+motionless, staring at the horror, that Adelaide accused her
+jestingly of having fallen asleep.
+
+"Get up!  Wake!  Give me my pistol and the dagger.  I call them my
+babies--they sleep under my pillow ever since--never mind!...  Ah!
+You have blown out the candle....  Light it at this one!--or perhaps
+you will have light enough without it?...  Ugh! how cold your hand
+is, you chilly little frog!"
+
+Juliette had blown out the candle so that she might unseen return the
+portrait to the dressing-bag.  Had Straz's Sultana not been heavy
+with laudanum, she would have perceived this.
+
+Now she yawned, stretched, smiled, declared herself actually sleepy,
+in spite of a mattress apparently stuffed with potatoes and stones....
+
+Juliette was kneeling by the other bedside, a slender, rigid little
+figure in a white night-robe, striving to collect her whirling
+thoughts sufficiently to say her prayers.  When she rose up, Adelaide
+asked her drowsily:
+
+"Do you pray always?...  And what do you pray for?  And for whom,
+tell me, you secret little thing!"
+
+The low answer came:
+
+"I pray for the living, Madame, and for the departed....  For my
+father and--others who are dear to me; for myself and for my
+grandmother's soul!"
+
+"For your mother?" Adelaide queried curiously.
+
+"I pray that my mother may repent and be forgiven!"
+
+"Ah-h!"  Adelaide's inflection was sleepily scornful.  "So you think
+her a terrible sinner, eh, Mademoiselle?"
+
+The white-robed figure palpably shuddered, yet the answer came
+unfalteringly:
+
+"It is not for me to judge--you, Madame!"
+
+The clean riposte pierced the consciousness that had been dulled by
+the opiate.  There was a dreadful silence, during which the girl
+could hear her own heart drumming, and through the noise it made, the
+hiss of her mother's sharply intaken and expelled breath.  Then
+Adelaide shrugged, saying in a tone of drowsy irony:
+
+"That is the most sensible utterance I have yet heard from you, ma
+mignonne.  Well--the discovery was inevitable!  Now, with your leave,
+I am going to sleep!..."
+
+And she did, while the girl sat huddled among her scanty bedclothes,
+clasping her knees and praying for day.  Torn between unconquerable
+aversion toward this bold, audacious, worldly woman, and the old
+yearning toward the beautiful lost mother, enshrined as a
+demi-goddess in a young child's recollection, you may imagine
+Juliette's mental and physical plight.
+
+That one should shudder at the touch of her who stood in so sacred a
+relation was inconceivable....  That one should welcome it was
+inconceivable also.  Dim conjectures as to her mother's past, as to
+her present mode of life, were evolved from the depths of the
+daughter's Convent-bred ignorance....  Would those German officers
+have looked so boldly, conversed so coarsely and familiarly, if they
+had not had reason to believe such approaches welcome, even
+agreeable?...  The lives of Phryne, Thaïs and Aspasia were missing
+from the pages of Juliette's School Dictionary of Classical
+Biography.  Yet when Cora Pearl had flashed past her in the Bois, or
+upon the Champs Élysées, driving four mouse-colored ponies in silver
+harness--wielding a jeweled parasol driving-whip--she had
+instinctively averted her gaze from the face of the courtesan.
+
+Was Juliette's mother a woman like that woman?  And why, within a few
+hours from their chance, accidental meeting, had she inveigled her
+daughter into a snare?...  For that some sinister purpose had
+prompted the proceeding began to be clear to the poor young girl.
+
+
+Love....  Oh, Heaven! was the look in those hard eyes born of the
+divine tenderness that a mother feels for her child?  Was it not
+hatred that glittered from them?  Was it not revenge that had
+concocted the plot?
+
+The marriage with M. Charles Tessier, so keenly desired by the
+Colonel, had been quashed by his wife's kite-like swoop upon the
+bride.  Was that story of de Bayard's having been made prisoner by
+Prussians true or invented?  If false, whither were they now
+bound?...  "Oh, help, Mother of Mercy, Mary most pitiful!  Pray for
+me that light may be given me!--teach me what I ought to do!..."
+
+Growing calmer the reflection occurred to Juliette that this mother
+so strangely encountered could not be all untender toward her
+daughter, or the pearl-set miniature would not have been kept....
+This brought tears to her aching eyes, and some relief to her
+apprehensions.  She determined, remembering that token of lingering
+kindness, that she would yield duty and obedience to her mother now.
+Until she found her all untrustworthy, she would trust her....  She
+had invented freely, in setting her springes--and yet not altogether
+lied....
+
+
+Sleep did not come to Mademoiselle de Bayard that night, or for many
+nights after.  She lay staring at the curtains that met across the
+blinded window, until the dawn edged them with a line of glimmering
+gray.  As the streak encroached, she rose noiselessly, and silently
+as the dawn itself approached her mother's bed.
+
+Adelaide lay upon her back with her head thrown back amid its wealth
+of rich black tresses, her arms tossed out and upward, the hands
+clenched, one knee a little raised.  The unfastened robe of lawn
+disclosed the creamy beauty of her throat and the swelling contours
+of her magnificent bosom.  The sight sent an exquisite pang to the
+heart of her sorrowful child.  Oh, God! if beauty so divine had been
+but chaste, what pride, what happiness to call this woman mother!  To
+lay one's head upon that breast and weep all griefs out there!...
+
+The sleeper stirred beneath the wistful gaze of her daughter.  Violet
+shadows were round her sealed eyelids and about her nostrils and
+mouth.  She moaned a little and murmured brokenly:
+
+"Nicolas ... Monseigneur ... insult ... never pardon!...  '_Only a
+woman of fashion would be capable of such infamy...._'  Ah, _mon
+Dieu!_..."
+
+She cried out, and her eyes opened, staring about wildly.  She asked
+suspiciously as they fell on Juliette:
+
+"Have I been talking?...  What was I saying?"
+
+Juliette answered simply and literally:
+
+"That only a woman of fashion would be capable of such infamy."
+
+
+
+
+LIII
+
+They broke their fast on rolls and coffee, dressed and demanded, with
+the bill, the promised carriage.  This was not so quickly forthcoming
+as the landlord of the _Coup d'Épée_ had prophesied.  Indeed, the
+debilitated conveyance of the wagonette type, drawn by one promoted
+cart-horse, could only be had by grace of the traveler by whom it had
+been previously engaged.  He proved, when Adelaide swept her charge
+downstairs, to be a _Monsieur Anglais_, traveling for pleasure.  A
+middle-sized, clean-shaven, inconspicuous, elderly man, in an
+ill-fitting suit of drab-color.  He sported a sealskin vest in spite
+of the oppressive heat of the weather, and spoke the French of the
+conversation-manual with the accent it inculcates.  His baldish
+grizzled head was covered with a straw hat bound with a preposterous
+light-blue ribbon.  His luggage consisted of a brown calfskin bag, a
+portable easel, sketching-block and color-box, and a violin-case, of
+which articles he took the most excessive care.  Nothing could well
+be more respectable, or appear more harmless.  Juliette breathed more
+freely at the sight of the elderly drab-clothed man.
+
+He professed himself happy to accommodate the ladies with a share in
+the wagonette as far as Bazeilles, where he meant to take train for
+Verdun.  Interpreting for Adelaide, who possessed no English,
+Juliette learned that their own destination was not Metz, but Châlons.
+
+That drive to Bazeilles in the freshness of the morning would have
+been delightful under other circumstances.  The night-mists yet hung
+white as milk over the valleys, while the breasting rises crowned
+with woodlands were golden in the sun.  Tents of French brigades
+snowed over the countryside.  Bugles and trumpets sometimes drowned
+the rushing of the Givonne, beside whose stream their road conducted
+them.  The stubbles were full of grain-devouring wood-pigeons, too
+heavy even to rise and take wing when peasant-lads threw stones.  The
+drab Englishman praised the view in the set terms of the manual,
+until discovering that Mademoiselle had command of the tongue of
+Albion, he reverted to that language with evident relief.
+
+"For I won't deny it comes easier, though I manage to get on with the
+other when necessary.  And since I left England--seven months ago--my
+poor health requiring a holiday from business--it has been necessary
+most of the time."
+
+"Ask the hideous animal in the ugly clothes whether he has seen a
+newspaper this morning," instructed Madame.  "And find out if he
+knows anything of the movements of the Emperor.  Those miserables at
+the inn were absolutely ignorant, or else they would not tell!"
+
+The drab English traveler had reason to know something of his
+Imperial Majesty, having recently encountered him with his suite at
+the village of Gravelotte, eight miles from Metz.  He explained in a
+rambling manner, and with many divagations, that he himself had been
+surprised by the intrusion of War at the outset of a sketching-tour
+in the northwest of France, which was to have realized the ambition
+of his life.
+
+"Painting from Nature and playing on the violin....  Those are what I
+may call my weaknesses," he told the ladies by-and-by.
+
+He was moist-eyed and red-nosed and shaky-handed, which must have
+interfered with his brush-work and bowing.  An odor of strong waters
+exhaled from his person and clothes.  You, had you been there, could
+have imagined him making an inventory, serving a summons, or, mounted
+on a Holborn auctioneer's rostrum--knocking down second-hand works of
+inferior Art to imaginary bidders, and vaunting the qualities of
+sticky-toned violins.  Save for his garrulity, he was inoffensive;
+though his open conviction that his fellow-travelers were mother and
+daughter caused Juliette infinite anguish and disquiet of mind.
+
+"With regard to His Majesty the French Emperor, I was brought into
+contact with him unexpectedly," said the drab man.  "You can picture
+me, young lady, in the enjoyment of my well-earned holiday,
+strolling, as one may say, from village to village, enjoying the
+fresh air and the scenery, such a change after five-and-twenty years
+of Camberwell, the Courts of Law, and Furnival's Inn."
+
+Adelaide complained:
+
+"He bores me horribly, this red-nosed imbecile!  Cannot he answer the
+question?  What is he saying now?"
+
+The drab man prattled on:
+
+"For from the cradle, as one might say, I have been the vassal and
+slave of Business, having been sent by my father to a Mercantile and
+Legal Training College at Bromersham when only seven years old.  At
+fifteen I was office-boy and under-clerk in the old gentleman's
+office.  Believed in beginning at the bottom of the ladder, you see!
+At eighteen, articled--again to the old gentleman!  He being a
+solicitor and attorney with a good old-fashioned family practice, and
+naturally being desirous to see his son a full-blown partner in the
+Firm!..."
+
+He sighed and shook his head sentimentally.
+
+"No use to tell the old gentleman I had been born with other
+ambitions.  That Art had a fascination, and the voice of Music
+called....  I used up reams of office wove-note in making pen-and-ink
+designs for illustrations to the books I'd read on the sly, and the
+plays I'd seen on the quiet....  I'd render popular airs on the
+mouth-organ to the admiration of all the other clerks.  'Now, Mr.
+William, let's have a Musical Selection!' they'd say whenever the old
+gentleman popped out....  I saved up my money to pay for a course of
+tuition in Drawing from the Round and Life Model at a Night School of
+Art in Soho.  But I never got time.  The old gentleman must have been
+more knowing than I suspected, for he always managed to keep my nose
+to the grindstone.  Will you believe that I bought this box, and this
+easel, and the violin twenty years ago--and never got a chance to use
+'em, until now?  To such a degree was my liberty hectored over, and
+the talents that might have made me the center of a circle of
+admirers, blighted by the Senior Partner and Head of the Firm...."
+
+Adelaide, growing more restive, interrupted:
+
+"Does this fatuous person who talks so greatly afford any
+information, or does he not?"
+
+"--Yet I could show you a sketch of the Roman Aqueduct at Ars that
+would surprise you," went on the drab man, addressing Juliette,
+"regarded as emanating from the pencil of a simple amatoor.  Also I
+could touch off a French chansong on the violin in a style equally
+creditable and gratifying--and justifying my retirement from Business
+in the interests of Music and Art.  But----"
+
+He took out a plaid silk handkerchief and wiped his moist eyes with
+it, and wagged the grizzled head that wore the absurd blue-ribboned
+straw hat in a maudlin, despondent way.
+
+"But just as I'd settled to the roving life, tramping from inn to inn
+and finding 'em comfortable, the country cooking tasty, and the
+country vintages nice--War breaks out and spoils everything!  Another
+week, and I should have bought a Bit of Ground!"
+
+He mopped his eyes and snuffled a little, and put away the
+handkerchief.
+
+"It was going cheap--the Chatto and farm and wine-plant and
+vineyards.  I had a good look at the title-deeds--everything was in
+order there, even to a professional eye....  All I had to do was to
+put down the money.  I'd have painted and fiddled, made wine and
+drunk it--sold what I didn't drink, and branded the vintages:
+'Château Musty, Dry, Sparkling ... Château Musty, Special Still.' ...
+Château Musty, sweet, preferred by ladies....  Stop, though!  It
+wouldn't have been that name!  My name is Furnival!  Excuse me,
+Mam'selle, but I think your lady-mother is making some remark to you.
+At least she impresses me with that idea."
+
+"Madame is greatly desirous of intelligence with respect to the
+Emperor," Juliette explained.  The talkative traveler looked
+aggrieved:
+
+"Pray tell the lady I am coming to him presently.  After the War
+broke out--Lord! what a hurrying and scurrying of soldiers....
+Bugles blowing your head off at four o'clock in the morning--all the
+wagons taken to carry baggage--all the farm-horses whipped off to
+drag cannon ... no more sensible business done anywhere!...  And when
+the shooting began, it was a scandal!  Positively perilous to
+visitors!  Why, I've been absolutely in danger of my life!..."
+
+Adelaide's foot tapped impatiently on the floor of the wagonette.
+Her fine eyes shot forth indignant sparks.  She bit her crimson lips.
+The drab Englishman regarded her mildly, commenting:
+
+"If I wasn't accustomed by this time to French ways and manners, I
+should take it that your mamma had a temper of her own.  But it's the
+national method of over-working the features....  Not that your
+Emperor is given to too much expression.  Heavy, he struck me as, and
+puffily low-spirited!  And even a worse sleeper than myself, if you
+ask me!  For I spent the night in a room over His Majesty's, the
+night he stopped in the inn at Gravelotte, and didn't shut my eyes
+for an instant with his groanings and his moanings and his tramp ings
+to and fro...."
+
+He wagged his head, and pursued with solemnity:
+
+"In the morning I peeped out of the window and saw him drive off.
+All sorts of French Nobs bowing and scraping....  Orders and Stars
+and shiny carriages, and silver-mounted harness on prancing bays....
+Yet if he had asked me, I wouldn't have changed places.  Thinks I,
+'How much better to be Me, plain William Furnival, an honest English
+Commoner, than an Emperor whose crime-stained conscience keeps him
+broad awake o' nights!'"
+
+Said Juliette, her eyes blue fire, two angry roses in her usually
+pale cheeks:
+
+"But you, Monsieur--who also sleep badly--is that because you have
+crime upon your soul?"
+
+"What have you said to this creature that has frightened him?"
+Adelaide demanded, as the drab traveler's jaw dropped, and his red
+nose glowed brilliantly in a visage of dingy-white.
+
+Juliette translated.  Said Madame, regarding the perturbed Mr.
+Furnival, with a glance of superb indifference:
+
+"He is a runaway husband of some Englishwoman who keeps a _pension_.
+Or the absconding clerk of a London notary."
+
+
+Whatever he may or may not have been, he fell silent after the little
+passage here recorded.  At Bazeilles, where the driver was paid, and
+the wagonette dismissed, though he entered the same train of vilely
+dirty third-class carriages and goods-trucks, he traveled in a
+compartment remote from that selected by his companions of the drive.
+
+At Verdun they learned that the railway bridge below Metz had been
+blown up by M. de Bazaine's Engineers, the line beyond being in
+Prussian hands....  And at this point the drab gentleman got out,
+hugging his violin-case, bag, and artist's fit-out.  Juliette saw him
+swallowed up in a roaring crowd of mobilists from the Ardennes, who
+rushed upon and instantly crammed solid every corner of the train.
+
+A good-looking officer, entering with the deluge, apologized to the
+ladies in a well-bred, easy way:
+
+"It is inconvenient, Mesdames, but at the same time necessary....  I
+take these little ones to Châlons to be incorporated in the New Army
+of MacMahon....  They are rough, as you perceive, and very few are
+yet in uniform.  But blue cloth and red cloth are less important than
+chassepots, and they have them and can use them--these little ones of
+mine!  And when they receive orders to march north and give a helping
+hand to M. de Bazaine--I prophesy that, boots or no boots, they will
+keep up with the best!"
+
+Adelaide smiled witchingly on the speaker, plied the archery of her
+fine eyes, evoking admiring glances from the officer and his uncouth,
+half-clad, half-trained mobilists.  She said she had no doubt of the
+courage of these sons of Western France.  She had heard, she added,
+that the Emperor was at Châlons, but that H.I.M. intended to resort
+to Paris, having surrendered to another the _bâton_ of supreme
+command.
+
+"'To Paris'!"  The officer shrugged.  "Alas! at such a crisis in the
+affairs of the nation, Paris would be the last shelter for the French
+Emperor.  It is no longer a secret that the Emperor has already left
+Châlons with the Grand Headquarters Staff and the First Corps of the
+Army of MacMahon....  Rheims is the destination--that intelligence is
+also public property...."
+
+"And the Prince?" Adelaide asked eagerly.
+
+"Monseigneur the Prince Imperial left for Rheims with the Emperor,
+but will be sent on from there to Rethel, with his carriages, and an
+escort of Imperial Body Guards under Colonel Watrin.  His three
+_aides-de-camp_, Colonel Lamey, Colonel Comte Clary, and Commandant
+Duperré of the battleship _Le Taureau_, attend him.  Comte d'Aure is
+equerry now instead of old Bachon!...  Pardon, Madame?...  You
+descend here...?  But I thought you were traveling to Châlons!...
+Permit me to open the carriage door!"
+
+And the prattling officer, who had promised himself a charming
+_vis-à-vis_ upon the journey, must needs leap out upon the platform,
+arrest the guard's arm in the act of signaling the start....
+Adelaide was handed down....  Juliette followed with an avalanche of
+Madame's traveling bags and parcels ... a discontented porter was
+called upon to rescue her trunks and _portmanteaux_ from the van....
+
+The signal fell, the train steamed out of the station.  Juliette,
+white and fagged, sitting on an up-piled luggage truck, was asked by
+Adelaide:
+
+"Where do you think we are going now, Mademoiselle?"
+
+Came the weary answer:
+
+"I do not know, Madame....  First, it was to Metz, and then to
+Châlons.  Now, it may be to Rheims, as the Emperor is there."
+
+Adelaide returned tormentingly:
+
+"But we are not going to Rheims."
+
+A thrill passed through Juliette.
+
+"My father is not a prisoner, then?"
+
+"My faith!" said Adelaide, shrugging with ostentatious indifference.
+"He is as he was yesterday.  But all the same, my little one, we do
+not go to Rheims, but to Rethel....  Tell me--you have brought with
+you a walking-costume that is tolerable?  Something more becoming
+than this lugubrious garment you have on!"
+
+Juliette replied in the negative.  Adelaide's look was coldly
+scornful as she scrutinized the little figure before her.  Could this
+really be her daughter, this pale, peaked, elfish thing?...
+
+What sloping shoulders, what tragic, haunted eyes, what a long upper
+lip, what lack of vivacity and elegance....  Her grandmother--that
+well-loathed woman, lived again in de Bayard's child.
+
+Monseigneur the Prince Imperial must have curious taste in feminine
+beauty to have been smitten with this stiff little white-faced
+mannequin.  Whom de Bayard worshiped ... whom even Straz had
+admired....  What were his words ... "_A little Queen of Diamonds,
+fresh as a rosebud!_"  Grand Dieu!... how comical!  "_A rare
+jewel....  A chic type....  A pocket edition of Psyche, before that
+little affair with Cupid._"
+
+Well, Cupid waited at Rethel....  Her red lips writhed with the
+jeering laughter she stifled.  Two devils of mockery looked through
+the windows of her eyes.  And with the swift understanding of this
+stranger that came of their close, intimate relationship, Juliette
+encountering that look, said mentally:
+
+"She hates me!  My mother hates me!  For that reason she sought me
+out and told me that false tale....  Because of that she lured me
+away with her from Brussels!  Because of that she has planned to do
+something....  Oh, my father, if only you knew!..."
+
+
+
+
+LIV
+
+The Hope of a tottering and crumbling Empire was installed at the
+Prefecture of Rethel, a picturesque, old-world river-town of many
+bridges, and houses with quaint carved gables, slanting floors, and
+low ceilings crossed by heavy beams.
+
+He had arrived late on the previous evening.  There had been no
+flags, no bands, no popular ovation, no delirium of enthusiasm in
+greeting the Imperial heir.  Press organs were now telling
+incredulous Parisians that in consideration of the Prince's weariness
+the people had foregone their privilege of welcome.  In honest truth,
+the unlucky townsfolk were too sad and sick-hearted to cheer.
+
+A great battle was impending in the neighborhood of Metz.  The First
+and Second Armies of United Germany had crossed the Moselle, wheeled
+right-about-face, and were closing in on Bazaine, who had failed in
+his attempt to retire upon Châlons by the Verdun Road.  The Prussian
+Crown Prince had come out of the Vosges, and was marching North
+instead of moving upon Châlons.  If his vanguard clashed with
+MacMahon's patched-up Army there would be trouble....  Everyone
+expected trouble, the soil of France had been sown so thickly with
+the bad seed from which great national disasters spring, even before
+it had been plowed by German shells....  The coming tragedy chilled
+and numbed as the iceberg chills the senses of the passenger in the
+Atlantic liner's warm deck-cabin, long before the keel grates, and
+the white fog lifts, and shows the towering Death on which the doomed
+vessel is being hurled.
+
+The deep dejection of the officers around the Heir Imperial could not
+be covered by any well-meant attempts at disguise.  The rumors that
+came through the fog into which Bazaine had vanished were horribly
+disquieting.  They waited upon thorns, for a telegram from the
+Emperor, conveying intelligence on which they might rely.
+
+There was something in the situation of the lonely, proud young
+creature they surrounded that made the heart bleed as you looked at
+him.  So helpless and yet so representative of unfettered Power, so
+ignorant in the ways of the world, and yet so conversant with its
+outward forms and ceremonies, so palpably the last frail link upon a
+chain that was being hacked through by the Prussian sword.
+
+He had grown older and thinner since the days of July, and his fresh,
+fine color had faded to paleness.  There was a frown upon the open
+forehead now, the gay, confident regard had changed to sullenness.
+The blue eyes were less lustrous.  The silky chestnut hair was
+rumpled and duller.  Care had overshadowed the boyish head with her
+heavy sable wing.
+
+The arrival of the previous night had been sudden and unexpected, the
+startled authorities had been rarely put about to find fitting
+accommodation for their Emperor's son.  This morning Monseigneur had
+been hurried out of his bed at the Prefecture to receive the
+apologies of the Prefect, an Imperialistic vine-grower, who had been
+absent in the interests of his affairs.
+
+"Your Imperial Highness will be aware that this is a critical month
+with owners of vineyards.  The vines have borne well and the grapes
+are ripening magnificently.  Next month the champagne-making ought to
+be in full progress.  But the lack of hands terribly hampers us....
+Women cannot replace the men who are skilled in the various
+processes.  And who knows----"
+
+The Prefect broke off, for the Sub-Prefect had nudged him openly.
+Even if the tide of War should turn, and France be freed from her
+invaders, who knew whether any of those grape-pickers and sorters and
+pressers, Reservists and volunteers and conscripts who had been
+called out to carry the chassepot against the Prussians, would ever
+return to their countryside again?  Who knew whether they would not
+be thrown as ripe grapes into Death's huge wine-press?  Perhaps their
+red blood was foaming in the vat even now.
+
+Who knew whether those rich, prosperous vineyards on the Aisne would
+not be trampled into sticky mashiness under the ruthless feet of
+Prussian Army Corps?  If the rumors were correct, an advance upon
+Paris might take place at any moment.  True, MacMahon's Army was said
+to be covering the road to the capital.
+
+But MacMahon had been already beaten terribly....  Recollecting it,
+the Prefect shuddered in his well-polished shoes.
+
+But he said his say and shook the young hand graciously offered him,
+and got out of his own wife's drawing-room as awkwardly as though he
+had been one of his own clerks.  While the Sub-Prefect, a
+sharp-visaged little man, who combined the office of public notary
+with the trade of wool-stapler, trotted after him, very much at his
+ease.
+
+"How you sweat!  Wipe your head and your neck too," counseled the
+notary.  "Otherwise your cravat will be a perfect wisp and Madame
+will certainly take you to task!"
+
+"You have such _sangfroid_, my good M. Schlitte.  I envy you; I do,
+positively!" stuttered the Prefect, puffing and blowing and mopping.
+"Royalty invariably dazzles me....  I tremble ... I blunder....  In a
+word, I make a fool of myself!  At this moment I am tortured by the
+weight of my responsibilities....  True--His Highness is well
+guarded--true, the Army of Châlons is somewhere or other in the
+neighborhood!...  But the daring of these Prussian horsemen ... the
+danger of a surprise!..."
+
+"A surprise....  Nonsense, my dear sir.  The thing is impossible!"
+
+And M. Schlitte, who was said upon the strength of his queer French
+accent to be a native of Strasbourg, soothed the Prefect, and grinned
+like a rat-trap as he betook himself home.  Inhabiting a riverside
+villa in the neighborhood, from which residence--we may suppose for
+the better conduct of his extensive business--a private telegraphic
+installation connected him with Rheims, Paris, Brussels,
+Luxembourg--and, when necessary, Berlin--it would have been possible
+to have made arrangements for that very contingency.  His suggestions
+were not adopted at the Prussian Headquarters, but his zeal was
+approved in the right place.  He became Prefect of Rethel a little
+later, when Berlin was settled at Versailles.
+
+
+He stopped now, on his way back to his villa, to send the town-band
+round to the Place of the Prefecture and to bribe some loafers with
+small silver to mix with the crowd and cheer for the Emperor and the
+Prince.  Consequently, a drum, trombone, cornet, and ophicleide
+shortly made their appearance before the Imperial lodgings....  _La
+Reine Hortense_ and _Partant Pour La Syrie_ entertained Monseigneur
+while he breakfasted.  Since then he had thrice been summoned out
+upon the balcony to acknowledge the acclamations of the loyal
+populace of Rethel.
+
+It was pouring rain, and the knots of spies, loafers, and genuine
+enthusiasts were sheltered by umbrellas.  The very fowls that pecked
+between the cobbles had a listless and draggled air.  The boy
+shivered as he turned from the dismal outdoor prospect to contemplate
+the Empire hangings, ormolu girandoles, and obsolete, scroll-backed
+chairs and claw-foot tables, gracing the Prefect's wife's
+reception-room.  He told himself that it was horrible, even when one
+waited for the news of certain victory, to be shut up in a beastly
+hole like this.
+
+He nearly jumped for joy when the name of M. de Straz was brought him
+by his equerry.  He remembered the Roumanian agent, who had
+previously been presented to him.
+
+"Pray bring him quickly, M. le Comte," he said eagerly to M. d'Aure,
+who had replaced old M. Bachon.  "It is possible that he may bring a
+message from the Emperor."
+
+He colored, and his eyes regained a little of their old brightness.
+The green-and-gold equerry, who loved him, as did every member of his
+household, was glad to see him, interested, for more reasons than one.
+
+Straz, known to be a secret agent of the Emperor, and hailing from
+Rheims, where his employer was now--Straz might well amuse the Prince
+while his protectors waited for an Imperial telegram.  Meanwhile, the
+bodyguard about the Prefecture was unostentatiously doubled, the
+carriages and the baggage were secretly held in readiness for a move.
+
+You can imagine Straz, with his profile and beard of a courtier of
+old Nineveh, bowing over the boyish hand, and rolling his jet-black,
+glittering eyes.  He had looked better in his Astrachan-trimmed
+traveling jacket than in the tight-waisted, closely buttoned, black
+frock-coat and pearl-gray trousers of ceremony, and the inky river of
+black silk cravat that flowed over the expanse of white shirt-front
+now covering his Herculean chest.
+
+He wore white spats, which made his short legs appear shorter.  A
+bouquet adorned his buttonhole--pink carnation and tuberose.  Its
+cloying fragrance hung heavily on the damp air of the Prefecture
+reception-room, as the boy pleasantly said:
+
+"Good-day, M. de Straz; do you come to us from the Emperor?"
+
+"Yes, my Prince, and no!..."  Straz had long ago got rid of his cold,
+yet a certain thickness characterized his consonants.  He shrugged
+his great shoulders and smiled, showing his dazzling double curves of
+solid human ivory.  "I come from Rheims, where His Imperial Majesty
+is making history....  I am not charged with any message from him!"
+
+The boy's face fell.  He said, with a brave effort to conquer his
+disappointment: "I am impatient, Monsieur, for news of another
+victory.  It is so long since the engagement of Saarbrück, and that
+was only a little one.  You are an officer in the Army of Roumania,
+you have told me.  You are aware, even better than I, that military
+plans take time to develop ..  and that Papa has every confidence in
+the generalship of M. de Bazaine....  If I were five or six years
+older, I should be admitted to the Councils of the Imperial État
+Major....  I should understand the reasons for these changes which
+puzzle me....  But one thing I should like to ask..."  He flushed and
+glanced round nervously.  "They do not believe in Paris or London
+that we are being ... beaten?...  I beg of you to answer me candidly!"
+
+Straz drew himself up dramatically, expanding his huge chest, and
+curling his parted mustache.  His fierce black eyes, staring from
+their great curved arches, glittered like balls of polished jet....
+
+"They do not, my Prince!  They wait for the Star of the Bonapartes to
+rise resplendent from a sea of gore shed from Prussian veins....
+They wait, as the world waits, for the Empire to emerge more glorious
+than ever from this conflict, which will restore to her forever her
+lost Provinces of the Rhine.  It may be that the Coronation of
+Napoleon IV. will be solemnized in the Cathedral of Cologne....  Aha,
+my Prince, have I won a smile at last?"
+
+
+He looked, despite the frock-coat, more than ever like some ancient
+warrior of Assyria, marching in a carved and painted procession along
+the walls of some unearthed palace of Nineveh or Babylon.  And so
+admirable an actor was he that the sick heart of the boy now warmed
+at his simulated fire, and gladdened at his deceptive words of hope.
+
+"I had pictured my Imperial Prince," he went on, "in brighter and
+less gloomy surroundings, with sympathetic and delightful companions
+to alleviate his exile from home."
+
+He had touched the wrong chord.  The slender, well-made figure was
+drawn up proudly.  The delicate brows frowned, the lips quivered as
+the boy said:
+
+"Monsieur, it is not 'exile' when an officer is ordered on Active
+Service....  And I am with the French Army, whose uniform I wear.
+For the moment the Emperor, my commanding officer, has ordered me to
+remain here....  I did wrong to grumble--I shall do so no more!"
+
+Straz grinned and bowed to cover his momentary confusion.  Why had he
+used the indigestible word?  He touched his buttonhole bouquet and
+said with a treacly inflection:
+
+"There are no violets--it is not the proper season....  Does
+Monseigneur remember when the purple blooms reached him regularly at
+intervals, one timid scrap of paper hiding among the slender stems?
+... And would he, did he know how the sender languished for news of
+him--entrust me with one penciled message of kindness that might
+restore the rose to a fading cheek?"
+
+The clear-eyed, fresh face of the boy he harangued underwent several
+changes during this windy apostrophe.  For one brief instant it
+flushed and brightened eagerly, then it frowned with perplexity, then
+it twitched with the evident desire to laugh.
+
+He said, controlling his amusement with his grace of good-breeding:
+
+"Monsieur, if it was a lady who sent me those violets, pray tell her
+that she was very good to do so, and that I thank her very much.  And
+since she asks for a message--perhaps this will do as well?"
+
+He turned to the writing-table, where some sheets, covered with
+clever pen-and-ink caricatures, lay on the blotter, and took up a
+rough little outline drawing of a landscape, marked with lines of
+dots and written over with notes.  He said ingenuously, offering this
+to the Roumanian:
+
+"See, Monsieur, this is a mere sketch of the affair at Saarbrück.  I
+did it to send my tutor at Paris, but M. Filon shall have another
+one....  If the lady has sons of my age, no doubt they will be able
+to draw far better.  Nevertheless, here it is!"
+
+Under the date of August 2nd, he had signed it, with a touch of
+boyish vanity:
+
+  "_Under fire for the first time.
+      "Your affectionate
+          "Louis Napoleon._"
+
+
+"What genius!--what a gift!  How gracious an act of kindness on the
+part of your Imperial Highness!"
+
+Straz grabbed the little scrawl eagerly, pressed his moist scarlet
+lips to it with theatrical devotion--made a tremendous flourish of
+putting it away in a pocketbook, and bestowing this receptacle near
+the region of his heart.
+
+"Though the lady has no sons--she is not even yet married," he
+hinted.  "Dare I confide a secret to Monseigneur?--she is a young and
+beautiful girl!"
+
+Monseigneur had been promising himself to caricature Straz at the
+next opportunity, not forgetting to make the most of his profile,
+hair, and beard.  Young and beautiful girls were no novelties to
+Louis Napoleon, accustomed to do the honors of Versailles and Saint
+Cloud to the muslin-clad daughters of the sparkling coquettes who
+frequented the Imperial Circle.  He began, struggling with the
+boredom that began to oppress him:
+
+"If the young girl is your _fiancée_, Monsieur, or your daughter----"
+
+The speaker broke off at the sound of hoofs and wheels on the
+cobblestones of the Place, the bump of a carriage-step let down,
+hitting the curb before the Prefecture....  Someone had arrived with
+a message from the Emperor; or perhaps it was only the Prefect's wife
+returning from an airing....  Straz would have been other than
+himself had he failed to seize the opportunity.
+
+"Monseigneur, Mademoiselle de Bayard is not affianced.  She has
+hitherto declined all alliances proposed as advantageous--it is said
+her affections are secretly engaged!..."
+
+His smirk revolted even while it fascinated.  He said, rolling his
+glistening black eyes about the apartment--shrugging his great
+shoulders, laying a thick white squat-nailed finger mysteriously
+against his carmine lips:
+
+"Engaged since a little _rencontre_ that took place in the month of
+January....  There were disturbances in Paris--which the troops had
+been called out to quell.  Riding with M. de Frossard in the Avenues
+of the Champs Élysées, your Highness passed close by a young girl in
+a cab.  She cried out, '_Vive le Prince Impérial!_' ... She threw a
+knot of violets, which struck your horse on the shoulder....  You had
+the flowers in your hand, Monseigneur, when you rode away."
+
+"Ah, now I remember!"  The boy's blush became him.  "Or I should say
+I have not forgotten.  And where is she now, Monsieur?"
+
+"Where is Mademoiselle de Bayard?  Your Imperial Highness would like
+to know?"
+
+Straz, who had thrilled with a sportsman's joy at the curtsey of the
+float betokening a nibble, would have given his soul to know
+himself....  Now, as he delayed, with the air of one who momentarily
+holds back something eagerly waited for, the equerry knocked and
+entered, approached and whispered to the Prince.
+
+
+
+
+LV
+
+"But surely, M. le Comte, it would please me to receive these two
+ladies.  M. de Straz has just been speaking of Mademoiselle de
+Bayard."
+
+And he dismissed Straz, who for once had been stricken speechless;
+giving his hand to him and saying: "I am very much obliged by your
+visit, Monsieur!"
+
+The equerry retired, shepherding the unstrung Roumanian.  The Prince
+waited, looking at the door.
+
+He heard footsteps descending the stairs, a slight bustle in the
+hall, or so it seemed to him.  Once a raised voice cried out
+something, drowned in the buzzing of the crowd that now gorged the
+Place of the Prefecture.
+
+It still rained.  The brass helmets of the Fire-Brigade and the black
+shakos of the local police strung out along the edge of the pavement,
+showed as fringing a solid mass of dripping umbrellas; there were
+clumps of more privileged umbrellas in the middle of the Place, where
+a hackney-carriage now stood, doubtless the vehicle that a moment
+previously had stopped before the door.  The Cent Gardes had their
+undress cocked-hats on; their blue-caped mantles, pulled out in
+cavalry fashion over the hindquarters of their tall brown horses,
+shed off the merciless downpour like penthouse roofs....
+
+Brr!  It was chilly.  Why did not Mademoiselle come?  Such delay was
+rather a breach of etiquette.
+
+Meanwhile, there upon the blotter lay a sheet of paper, with an
+unfinished caricature upon it--masterly, considering that a mere boy
+had drawn it--representing M. Thiers, bald, spectacled, oracularly
+smiling, in the guise of a gobbling turkey-cock.
+
+M. Thiers would keep.  The Prince chose another sheet, and began his
+portrait of the Roumanian, humming a song, popular with the African
+infantry-regiments, in capital tune and time.  "_Gentle Turco_" had
+been half sung through when the door opened.  The crisp grizzled
+curls, tanned soldierly face, waxed mustache, and green-and-silver
+uniform of the equerry reappeared upon the threshold, ushering in a
+small young lady....  D'Aure said, as the boy laid down his pen, rose
+and came toward them:
+
+"Monseigneur, I bring the young lady of whom I spoke to you, daughter
+of Colonel de Bayard, 777th Chasseurs of the Emperor's Guard.  She
+has convinced me of her identity by showing me a portrait, and a
+letter from her father....  She begs me to assure you that she will
+not detain you longer than ten minutes.  For that space of time I
+will return to the lady downstairs."  He added at the Prince's glance
+of inquiry: "The lady is the wife of a French officer, and
+accompanied Mademoiselle de Bayard.  As I went downstairs just now
+with M. de Straz, we encountered both ladies in the vestibule.  A
+giddiness seized the elder, she cried out, and swooned away."
+
+The Prince said:
+
+"Pray give orders that the sick lady is to have every attention!"
+
+D'Aure answered that the wife of the Prefect was with Madame even
+then.  He saluted, and repeated with an accent of finality:
+
+"For the space of ten minutes, Monseigneur...."
+
+Then he bowed to Mademoiselle de Bayard, and went quickly out of the
+room.
+
+The Prince began, with a touch of boyish pompousness:
+
+"We have met before, Mademoiselle.  My thanks for the violets!"
+
+For he knew this face with cheeks so fairly rose-tinted, with eyes
+that shone brilliant as blue jewels from their covert of black
+lashes, with the softly-smiling mouth.  The dull moth shone out a
+butterfly in the radiance of the joy that overbrimmed her.  She was
+near her Prince Imperial, Juliette de Bayard, who was not so much
+loyal as Loyalty incarnate, to whom the tawdry figure of the Emperor
+was invested with godlike splendor, in whose esteem the Empire was
+France--her France....
+
+
+She was attired as she had been when she left Brussels with Adelaide.
+Only a fichu of black and white Malines lace that she had brought in
+the handbag containing linen and toilet requisites, had been pinned
+about her narrow, sloping shoulders, and a tiny bonnet matching this
+was perched upon her magnificent coils of cloudy-black hair.  Her
+deft fingers had fashioned it in a few minutes out of the long ends
+of the over-ample fichu.  A bunch of fragrant red roses had been
+pinned upon her bosom by Madame.  She had purchased out of her own
+slender resources a fringed gray silk parasol and a pair of little
+gray kid gloves.  And in this hastily arranged toilette she looked
+elegant, refined, exclusive as any slender aristocrat of the Faubourg
+St. Germain.  You would never have suspected the tumult beneath her
+sedate composure.  Yet she thrilled in every fiber as she swept her
+stateliest curtsey before the slender boy in the unassuming uniform
+of a subaltern of infantry.
+
+"Monseigneur is too good to remember so infinitely trifling an
+occurrence ... more than gracious to consent to receive me now!  But
+that my dear father is a prisoner in the hands of the Prussians, I
+would not dare to intrude upon the privacy of my Prince.  Oh,
+Monseigneur! of your pity prevail upon the Emperor to obtain the
+exchange of my father for some German officer of equal rank in his
+Army!  Think, oh, pray!--think how I..."
+
+She stopped to control herself ... felt for her handkerchief to dry
+the tears that were blinding her ... dropped the scrap of cambric
+upon the Aubusson carpet gracing the drawing-room of the Prefecture.
+The Prince picked the handkerchief up as Mademoiselle hastily stooped
+to recover it ... their heads encountered in the act.  The bump was a
+hard one--Juliette could have sunk into the earth with confusion....
+But the Prince rubbed his forehead, grinned, and called out like any
+other schoolboy:
+
+"My word! that was a stunner!  I do hope you're not hurt?  Are you,
+as it happens, Mademoiselle?"
+
+"No, no, Monseigneur!  But you?..."
+
+"I am all right!  Saw lots of stars, though!"
+
+He burst out laughing.  And so infectious was the peal of merriment
+that for one blissful moment of forgetfulness Juliette joined in.
+
+"To laugh does the heart good," the boy assured her.  He went on: "Do
+not be unhappy, for I will telegraph to the Emperor.  He never denies
+me anything I ask him....  Depend upon it, he will do everything in
+his power for your father, Mademoiselle!"
+
+She looked all thanks, saying in her voice of silver:
+
+"I shall pray with redoubled fervor for His Imperial Majesty.  And
+for you, Monseigneur--be well assured of it!  Now, with all my
+gratitude, I will retire if your Highness permits?"
+
+She swept her curtsey, and would have withdrawn then had not
+Monseigneur called out eagerly:
+
+"No, no!  We have still eight of our ten minutes!  Don't go!...  I do
+so like the way you talk....  Mon Dieu!  What would the Empress say
+to me if she knew that I had left a lady standing!  Pray sit down
+here, Mademoiselle!"
+
+He turned round the writing-chair in which he had been sitting, made
+her take it--perched himself upon the corner of the writing-table, a
+schoolboy of fifteen in spite of his uniform, pouring out his heart
+to a girl older than he.
+
+"It was horrible here until you came!...  I was so lonely!  Everybody
+looks so strange, and no news comes through.  It would have been
+better to have stayed at Metz, where there is fighting.  But no!  We
+were compelled to return to Châlons....  On our way we were nearly
+caught by the German cavalry.  They are terribly daring ... they even
+ventured into our lines at Longeville....  But we got to Verdun and
+traveled to Châlons in a third-class carriage.  Frightfully dirty,
+and full of things that bit....  And I washed my face in a thick
+glass tumbler, out of which I had drunk some wine they brought me....
+Fact, I assure you!...  But we soldiers don't mind hardships....  We
+get used to them, Mademoiselle!"
+
+She looked up at the brightened face with the tenderness of an elder
+sister.  He went on with increasing animation and growing confidence:
+
+"Do you see that little black box standing there in the corner?
+That's my officer's kit--all the baggage we're allowed to have on
+Active Service.  There are other boxes with other things..."  He
+blushed.  "The valets look after them....  But this I keep under my
+own eye.  And here!...  This I hold as a great treasure.  Do you
+think I would show it to everyone?...  _Non, merci!_ ... Behold,
+Mademoiselle!"
+
+He took from a pocket beneath his tunic and showed her a splinter of
+rusty iron wrapped in an envelope.
+
+"Guess what this is!  A bit of a real German bombshell....  It burst
+quite close to the Emperor and me....  I thought a lot of old iron
+was being shot out of a cart, there was such a racket....  This
+should be a keepsake for the friend one loves above all, should it
+not?  Otherwise I would give it you, Mademoiselle!"
+
+She said:
+
+"Monseigneur is too generous....  I need no token by which to
+remember him!...  Have I not the remembrance of the sympathy and
+condescension with which my Prince has listened to a daughter's
+prayer?...  Now, indeed, I must take leave of Monseigneur!..."
+
+He persisted with boyish eagerness:
+
+"No, no!  M. d'Aure will certainly return at the end of our ten
+minutes.  And I do like you so much, Mademoiselle!...  Will you write
+and tell me when the Emperor obtains the release of M. le Colonel?
+... Will you let me hear how you liked the little sketch I gave M. de
+Straz for you?"
+
+She was puzzled, and looked it:
+
+"Monseigneur will pardon me, but the name of M. de Straz is that of a
+stranger....  Yet he has received from Monseigneur a message for
+me?..."
+
+Louis Napoleon explained.  She listened with a gravity that chilled
+his amusement over the message he had sent to the supposedly elderly
+sender of the violets.
+
+She said, looking at him steadily with her sincere eyes:
+
+"I sent Monseigneur no violets, with messages written or otherwise.
+To have done so would have been presumptuous, and lacking in
+delicacy....  If this M. de Straz were but here....  If Monseigneur
+could but describe him!..."
+
+Monseigneur caught up the unfinished caricature:
+
+"Look, Mademoiselle!  This is he!"
+
+It was he....  The Assyrian head, great torso, and short legs had
+been grotesquely exaggerated.  But the ferocity, sentimentality, and
+sensuality mingling in the exotic temperament of the Roumanian, had
+been conveyed with a mastery of technique and a grasp of character
+astonishing, considering the artist's youth.  And seeing, Juliette
+recognized the man they had encountered in the vestibule.  Just as he
+had passed them, Adelaide had cried out, and sunk down helplessly in
+a genuine swoon.
+
+"Ah, yes, Monseigneur, I have seen this gentleman, but a few moments
+ago.  We encountered him at the instant of entering the house.  But I
+do not know him--I have never before met him!  Why, then, should M.
+de Straz speak familiarly of me?"
+
+The boy said, with a tactfulness that was ingratiating:
+
+"Never mind!...  He was playing some stupid trick!...  He shall be
+punished if he offends you.  See!  I am tearing up the ugly picture!"
+
+"Oh, Monseigneur!"
+
+She was too late to save the drawing.  He went on, tossing away the
+bits:
+
+"Meanwhile--since the sketch I meant for you has been given to this
+person, you shall have my shell-splinter, though at first I meant it
+for--Cavaignac."
+
+He had never uttered this name, about which so many lonely day-dreams
+clung, in the hearing of any second person.  He could hardly believe
+that he had done so now as he went on:
+
+"Take my souvenir, and shut your hand over it, and promise me you
+will never part with it.  If you will, I can tell you about
+Cavaignac--my friend, Mademoiselle!"
+
+She complied with his wish, smiling at the tone of authority.  She
+thought, looking in the beautiful frank blue eyes, that Cavaignac
+must be proud of his high place in this princely young heart.
+
+"He is brave, Mademoiselle, and handsome and wonderfully clever.
+Once he gained the second prize for Greek translation at the Concours
+General.  And Greek is horribly difficult.  M. Edeline could never
+teach it me.  I find the grammar so dreadfully dull!  And yet
+Alexander the Great was a Greek general, and would have told me all
+about his campaigns in the Greek language....  I think I must find it
+hard to study because the figures of people mean more to me than
+letters and words!...  I like better to draw caricatures of my
+masters than to listen to them!"
+
+Juliette said, with something maternal in her accent:
+
+"That is unwise, Monseigneur....  For the better we learn, the sooner
+we part with the teacher, do not we?"
+
+He said, in a tone of wounded pride rather than vanity:
+
+"I have always attended carefully to my Military Governor when he
+gave us lessons in scientific warfare.  For a Napoleon must always be
+a soldier and a strategist....  Riding came easily--anybody can learn
+to ride well!...  When I have pleased my tutors most, my reward has
+been--unless it was in July or August--a day with the stag-hounds at
+Fontainebleau, or St. Germain or Compiègne....  The Emperor has given
+me two magnificent Irish hunters...."  He added with naïve boyish
+vanity: "And the uniform of our Imperial Hunt is splendid, you
+know....  Gold-laced cocked hat with white plumes, green coat with
+crimson velvet facings, white leathers and jack-boots.  Last night I
+dreamed I was hunting with Cavaignac ... the brown forest flying by
+as we galloped through the frosty fern....  The sky was pale red, and
+a diamond star hung just under the tip of the new moon of November.
+We were foremost of all when the stag turned to bay at the Pools of
+Saint Pierre....  Then the horns sounded the _hallali_, the Chief
+Huntsman offered me the knife, and I said to him: '_M. Leemans, you
+will give it to my friend, M. Cavaignac!_' ..."
+
+"And then, Monseigneur?..."
+
+He had told the dream with unexpected spirit and fire.  That gallop
+through the wintry forest-rides had been stimulatingly real to
+Juliette.  She had thrilled as the hard-pressed buck had leaped into
+the pool, and turned with antlers lowered against the ravening jaws
+of the pack.  Now, though she shrank from the thought of the spilled
+blood--she wanted to hear the rest of it.  She wished always to
+remember this story, told solely for her, by the son of her
+Emperor....
+
+"Shall I tell you?  The end is not as nice as the beginning or the
+middle...."  He hesitated, frowning a little, then took up the broken
+thread: "I thought I took the knife and held it out to him, and he
+suddenly snatched it and I felt the blade pierce my heart right
+through....  He said, with his dark, bright eyes on mine: '_Son of my
+father's enemy, I slay despots, not animals!_' ... And I felt the hot
+blood bubbling in my throat as I answered: '_You have killed a great
+faith and a great love!_'"
+
+It was rhetoric of a bombastic, youthful kind, but not without
+pathos.  His lips quivered.  He nipped them together, and blinked
+away the stinging salt moisture that had risen in his bright eyes.
+Juliette said, aching to console him:
+
+"Dreams go by contraries, according to my schoolmates of the Convent.
+Your friendship with M. Cavaignac will not be severed by the blade of
+a hunting-knife."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Or rather it is by my hand that the stab will be given....  Yet how
+could that be, when I like him so very, very much? ... Is it not
+strange, I have never spoken to Cavaignac, and yet I would have
+chosen him for my companion above all others, before even Espinasse
+or Chino Murat!..."
+
+"I think I understand..." Juliette said, feeling the tug of his
+craving for affection and sympathy, realizing the loneliness that had
+found relief in hero-worship, and heartily pitying her Emperor's son.
+"When the heart speaks, one cannot shut one's ears; one must listen
+always....  Among hundreds of faces there is one that paints itself
+upon the memory ... there is one voice that makes good music when
+others only tire the ear....  There is one nature that seems more
+open, fresh, and candid than others....  Without knowing that you do
+so, you continually compare it with them....  And when you are sad or
+lonely, you would wish that person to be near you....  You remember
+his gray eyes with specks of brown and golden in them, and the curly
+hair, and the pleasant lips.  You regret that when you met him you
+were not more charming, more amiable....  You feel chagrin to
+remember that you were neither of these things....  You would like to
+hold out the hand as they do in England, and say, 'Pardon, pardon,
+that I misunderstood you, my friend!'"
+
+The boy's blue eyes rounded.  His fair brows puckered in perplexity.
+Too well-bred to interrupt, he listened with increasing surprise.
+
+"Pardon that I regarded you as a brusque, untidy boy, when you had
+been robbed, and were homeless, and suffering from hunger.  For
+Monica's sake, you hid it.  And I applaud that noble silence!  I
+admire you with all my heart!..."
+
+The Prince broke in:
+
+"But Cavaignac has not been robbed, and who ever said he was hungry?
+He lives with Madame, his mother ... they are not rich, certainly!
+As Madame is a widow and he an only son, he is exempt from military
+service.  He is to embrace the profession of Literature--he will
+write great books or great plays, or edit a newspaper....  And I
+would like to help him to climb to the very top of the ladder....
+Secretly--because he would never accept anything that came from
+me!...  Am I stupid, Mademoiselle?"
+
+She said with warmth that covered a slight confusion, caused by that
+slip of the tongue an instant before:
+
+"Ah, no, indeed! but very kind and generous.  Perhaps, if it were
+possible, M. Cavaignac would be proud and glad to know you were his
+friend.  It may be that the affection he inspires in you, he returns,
+though he does not own it.  There can be no harm in thinking this, at
+least!"
+
+The Prince said, with animation:
+
+
+
+
+LVI
+
+"I saw him, I am convinced, when we left Saint-Cloud, outside the
+station near the Gate of Orleans.  He stood apart from the soldiers
+and the people....  He was all in black, and had grown older and
+taller.  He looked at me earnestly, and slightly raised his hat as
+the carriage drove up.  I saluted in answer, and the Empress asked
+me: '_Who is that grave young man?  Do you know him?_'  I said: '_My
+mother, I have never spoken to him in my life!_' ... You would have
+thought the Empress very brave, if you had seen her, Mademoiselle.
+Nobody could have guessed she had been weeping.  Though the night
+before we left for Metz ... when she came to me in my bed..."
+
+His lips twitched, and one big tear brimmed over and splashed on the
+sleeve of his piou-piou's uniform.  He flushed bright red, and
+whisked it off as though it were a wasp that would have stung.
+
+"She brought me a new medal to hang on the collar I wear always."  He
+slid a finger inside the edge of his stiff military stock, and hooked
+up an inch of gold chain.  "It has on one side a figure of Our
+Blessed Lady crushing the head of the serpent, and on the other there
+is the Cross with two hearts.  The Holy Father has blessed it; it was
+sent to Rome purposely....  Mothers are anxious when their sons are
+called upon Active Service....  It is natural, is it not?"
+
+Juliette's eyes were wet with pity for the Empress.  She bent her
+head in assent.  The boy went on, shrugging his slender shoulders:
+
+"For me--I like better to have soldiers about me than a lot of people
+in embroidered tail-coats.  If I had been twenty, I should have been
+at Wörth with the Duke of Magenta....  I would have died at the head
+of my troops rather than have consented to that shameful retreat....
+'_Over my body!_' ... that is what I would have said to them....
+'_Do you wish me to dishonor the blood of Napoleon the Great?_'"
+
+He crossed to the fireplace and stood upon the Turkey hearthrug, a
+boyish figure reflected in the great Venetian mirror that hung above
+the carved stone mantelpiece.  The outpouring had relieved the
+nervous tension; the red flush had died out of his fair temples, the
+smooth forehead was no longer disfigured with a scowl.
+
+"If I might only have remained with the Army at Metz, I would have
+asked nothing better.  But instead of staying to fight the Prussians,
+we drove away when they came in sight.  It was ignominious....  It
+made me feel horribly!...  And the Emperor would not show it, but I
+know he suffered, too.  Then the camp was beastly....  There was no
+pretense of discipline.  Their officers could hardly restrain the
+mobilists.  There was even mutiny among those who had returned from
+Alsace-Lorraine--the Algerian troops of the Army of MacMahon!"
+
+His agitation made him stutter as the words came pouring from him.
+
+"They wanted to be led once more against the Germans!--to be avenged
+for all their losses and misfortunes!...  I understood why they were
+difficult....  They did not understand why we did not march at once
+to the northeast frontier.  No more did I....  I was unreasonable,
+like them!  But now we are advancing--soon, soon, you will hear
+something!...  We will effect a junction of our Army with M. de
+Bazaine's, and sweep the Prussians out of France!"
+
+He was walking up and down, swinging his arms, gesticulating,
+grinding his heels into the arabesques of the Aubusson carpet at
+every turn.
+
+"Then there will be great popular rejoicings--the Emperor will
+receive his due--there will be no more misunderstandings.  For the
+Emperor is terribly misunderstood, Mademoiselle, and he is no longer
+young or strong....  He has so many bitter enemies....  I have heard
+him say so, weeping--the Emperor, Mademoiselle!..."
+
+"Oh, hush, Monseigneur!"
+
+But he did not heed Juliette's entreaty.
+
+"I have heard him crying out to God in his room at midnight, when he
+thought everyone was asleep, and he was quite alone: '_My God! is
+this the beginning of the punishment?  Must the price of my success
+be ruin, defeat, disgrace!_'...  Then I stole away and made a prayer
+for him and for myself, Mademoiselle....  I say it regularly every
+night since then."
+
+His boyish pompousness, pride, and vanity had fallen from him like a
+tinsel diadem.  Chivalry and loyalty, unselfishness and devotion
+shone from and irradiated the child.
+
+"'_My God, if Thou dost save up happiness for me, I pray Thee to take
+it away, and give it to my father, who needs it so badly....  And, my
+God, if Thou indeed art angry with him, I beseech Thee to grant him
+Thy pardon, and punish me, instead.  All I ask Thee for myself is
+that I may know Thy Will, and obey It, that I may do my duty bravely,
+and die when the end of my life comes without dishonor and without
+fear!_'  Is that a good prayer, do you think, Mademoiselle?"
+
+Before she could command herself sufficiently to answer, there was a
+knock at the door, and the equerry came in.  He looked eager and
+vexed, excited and disappointed.  Varying emotions seemed to clash in
+him.  But he said, smiling and saluting as the Prince turned toward
+him:
+
+"The ten minutes are over, Monseigneur!"
+
+"Ten minutes ago, Monsieur, to speak correctly," said Monseigneur,
+with a mischievous look.  Then his face changed.  "News!" he called
+out eagerly.  "You have dispatches from the Emperor!...  Don't play a
+farce with me, Count, I beg of you! when there is the telegram
+sticking out of your cuff!"
+
+And with the nimbleness of a gamin and the audacity of a spoiled
+princeling, he threw himself upon the equerry and captured the prize.
+
+"From the Emperor at Rheims--no! don't retire, Mademoiselle!  You are
+discreet--not like women who talk! ... You shall share my good news
+with me....  He says: '_There has been furious fighting at Mars la
+Tour.  Battles are raging at Flauville, Flavigny, and Vionville.  The
+Prince will remain for the present at Bethel, where the Emperor will
+rejoin him on the 27th.  As it is not considered advisable to effect
+a junction with Bazaine, the march of the Army of Châlons is directed
+upon Sedan._'"
+
+The mischief died out of the dancing eyes, the mobile face whitened
+with disappointment.  He repeated, staring blankly at the paper:
+
+"For what did we leave Châlons, if not to assist Bazaine?...  _Mon
+Dieu!_...  What infamy!...  Why am I not a man?"
+
+He grew crimson and burst into a tempest of sobbing.  He tore the
+pale green paper into fragments and trampled them beneath his feet.
+His eyes blazed through the tears that streamed from them as he
+stammered between his gasps and chokings:
+
+"Cowards!...  Traitors!...  Disgraced forever!...  Is there no honor
+left in France?"
+
+"Come, Mademoiselle, in pity!" entreated the equerry, as deadly pale
+as Monseigneur was red.  He held open the door with a shaking hand,
+and Juliette hurriedly quitted the drawing-room.  The door shut upon
+the sobs and outcries.  The Count said, with a sigh of relief, wiping
+the perspiration from his face:
+
+"You will not speak of this?  His Imperial Highness is overwrought
+and excited.  It will pass presently.  Let me conduct you downstairs!"
+
+The hall of the Prefecture reached, a servant in the livery of the
+establishment approached the equerry.  It appeared that the lady who
+had accompanied Mademoiselle had recovered from her indisposition,
+and departed, leaving no message for her young friend.
+
+"Madame will have returned to her hotel," said the equerry.  He
+added: "By chance, Mademoiselle, the dispatches we have just received
+contain proof that your friend has been misled by false intelligence.
+Colonel le Bayard has not been taken prisoner.  He is now in command
+of his regiment with the First Brigade of Cavalry of General
+Clérambault's Division, now engaged with the Third Corps in the
+neighborhood of Metz."
+
+Then as Juliette turned red and pale, and looked at him in breathless
+questioning, he added, pulling a vestibule-chair from its place near
+the wainscot and making her sit down:
+
+"Rest there one moment....  I will speak to Colonel Watrin.  He is
+now at mess with his officers in the Prefect's billiard-room."
+
+Watrin of the Bodyguard, Chief of the Prince Imperial's escort, came
+clanking and jingling from his dinner to confirm the fact as stated
+by the equerry.  The 777th Chasseurs, belonging to de Clérambault's
+Division of the Third Corps of the Army of Bazaine, were certainly
+now engaged in the neighborhood of Gravelotte.  But as certainly they
+had not come into contact with the enemy previously to the fifteenth
+of the month.
+
+The fifteenth!--the very day on which Adelaide had baited her trap
+with an imprisoned father....  Joy at the discovery, indignation at
+having been so easily cajoled into captivity, brought back the red to
+Juliette's pale cheeks and the light to her sad eyes.
+
+This strange, wayward, mysterious mother might exercise over her
+daughter a certain degree of maternal authority.  The supreme
+obedience, the first duty was to the father, that was clear.  Now she
+was going straight to him, wherever he might be.  She was strong
+enough, for his dear sake, to take whatever risks were involved.
+
+Suppose Adelaide insisted on accompanying her?  It was unthinkable
+that even so hardy an offender should venture into the presence of
+one so wronged....  Meet his look!...  Read in his face his scorn of
+perfidy!  Juliette put away the possibility from her with both hands.
+
+We know that Madame Adelaide had contemplated this very move upon
+occasion.  But she had not met Mademoiselle de Bayard then.  Since
+the encounter had taken place she had realized that the establishment
+of maternal influence, strong enough to make of her daughter a
+confederate and ally, was a task beyond her powers.
+
+Her grace, her charm, were lost upon this pale, frigid, obstinate
+little being, in whom she saw her mother-in-law over again.  For than
+this girl, sprung of her own flesh, whose veins were filled with her
+blood, nothing could be more unlike Adelaide, that magnificent
+creature of impulses and desires and appetites....
+
+Dominion over de Bayard could never be regained and established while
+his daughter sat by his hearth a virgin unwed.  Why had Adelaide
+hindered her marriage to M. Tessier?  Pacing the Turkey carpet of the
+Prefect's library, Madame admitted that she had acted inadvisedly.
+That the plan of bringing Juliette into contact with the Prince
+Imperial would be discounted by the innocence of the girl and the
+inexperience of the boy.
+
+She could imagine the dialogue they were holding at that moment, all,
+"_Oh, Mademoiselle!_" and "_Ah, Monseigneur!_"...  The girl should
+have been permitted to celebrate her nuptials with this dull young
+husband of her father's choosing....  Then a few years later would
+have come the opportunity.  She ground her teeth, thinking how her
+precipitation had spoiled everything ... thrust her....  Ah, Heaven!
+how one shuddered at the recollection, almost into the clutches of
+the Wielder of the Bowstring, the ingenious inventor of the Ordeal of
+the Looking-Glass....
+
+Straz....  At the sight of him her heart had stopped beating.  In
+imagination those strangling silken folds had closed, shutting out
+light and breath....
+
+How he had leered, rolling those fierce black eyes of his.  "_So,_"
+his jeering smile had said, "_my Sultana and her slave have met
+again.  Did I not prophesy truly, sweet one, tell me? when I said you
+would never again look in your toilette-mirror without remembering
+me!_"
+
+Her nerves were raveled to threads--her will was weakening....
+Despite her hatred and her overwhelming fear of the man, she knew
+that he was her master.  That if he fixed those eyes upon her and
+beckoned _Come!_ she would have to obey....
+
+Was he still here?  The book-lined walls seemed closing in on her.
+The atmosphere was suffocating ...  she must escape from this place
+or go mad.
+
+The Prefect's wife had been called away, after kindly ministrations
+with smelling-salts and red lavender.  Adelaide opened the library
+door a little way, and looked forth cautiously.  Except the two Cent
+Gardes on duty at the foot of the principal staircase, there was
+nobody stirring in the hall or vestibule.
+
+As she told herself so, a red baize-covered door at a flagged rear
+passage-end was opened.  The Prince's equerry came out with the Chief
+of the Bodyguard, an oblong pale green paper was in the equerry's
+hand.  Both officers' faces were pale.  Colonel Watrin's was livid
+and distorted with emotion.  He said to his companion in a low voice,
+and with a despairing gesture:
+
+"It needed but this to hasten the catastrophe!...  All is over!...
+The Empire is lost!"
+
+Then he went back.  The red baize door shut upon him.  The equerry
+came through the passage, entered the hall, and went quickly up the
+stairs.  He was going to break to the Emperor's son the news of some
+terrible disaster ... to say to him, as Watrin had said: "_All is
+over!...  The Empire is lost!_"
+
+With all a woman's intuition, Adelaide leaped at the truth and
+comprehended the situation.  What did she in the galley of a ruined,
+sinking Empire?  What advantage was to be gained by reconciliation
+with Henri de Bayard now?  And with Straz in the neighborhood, what
+madness to remain here....
+
+As for the girl, she was possessed of money.  Let her go to her
+father, or to her friends, or elsewhere....
+
+So Adelaide went out into the hall, still haunted by horrible
+memories of the Roumanian.  She found the porter.  He hailed her
+_fiacre_ from its waiting-place.  Madame stepped in gracefully, and
+was jingled away, straight into the jaws of Straz!
+
+"Mademoiselle is courageous," commented the Chief of the Escort when
+Juliette's determination to seek the shelter of her Colonel shaped
+itself in a request for a military pass, a thing without which nobody
+could penetrate the immediate area where the dreadful thing called
+War was actually going on.  The speaker resumed:
+
+"The Cavalry Camp of the Third Corps is at present at Châtel St.
+Germain....  Provided Mademoiselle gets there without accident, and
+can endure the noise of the bombardments--Mademoiselle may be quite
+as safe"--he shrugged and twirled his imperial--"there as anywhere
+else!..."
+
+A little vague, more than a little doubtful, considering the huge
+conflict then waging, that was to wage until nightfall of the morrow,
+between the Imperial Army of Metz and the First and Second Armies of
+Germany.  But the permit was written and signed with a flourish, and
+gracefully handed over to the keeping of Mademoiselle.  Then she
+thanked Colonel Watrin and went away, declining the attendance of the
+servant whom the officer would have sent with her, and descended the
+steps of the Prefecture under the raking eyes of the crowd....
+
+For, owing to a mysterious leakage in Imperial dispatches, something
+approaching to a panic was brewing....  The Place of the Prefecture
+was packed with people ... the news of the frightful struggle near
+Metz was buzzing from mouth to mouth.  It was whispered that defeat
+was certain, that M. de Bismarck had a secret understanding with M.
+de Bazaine....  Later on, when peasants who had hurried in from
+villages on the outskirts, stragglers who had quitted the Army at the
+commencement of its misfortunes, soldiers who had deserted from the
+Colors in action, came flocking into the town; despite the presence
+of the Bodyguard and the gendarmerie, and the local Fire-Brigade, an
+attack upon the Imperial party at the Prefecture was anticipated; so
+threatening became the attitude of the people, egged on by those
+among them who were agents and spies of the enemy.
+
+Perhaps the arrival of the Emperor would throw oil upon the troubled
+waters.  Perhaps it would be wiser to warn him not to come.  Well
+might the officers who guarded the person of the Heir of a crumbling
+Empire groan under the burden of their responsibilities.  Well might
+the Prefect perspire, to the ruin of his collars and cravats.
+
+
+It may be imagined that the lack of Adelaide's company did not
+greatly depress Mademoiselle de Bayard, as, cheered by her interview
+and armed with her permit, she tripped through the crowded streets to
+the Hotel of the Crown, where they had spent the previous night.
+
+"Madame had already returned," said the respectable Frenchwoman in
+charge of the bureau.  "She gave notice of departure, and asked for
+the account.  Then the gentleman arrived--a handsome man with
+splendid eyes, brilliant as carbuncles, and hair and beard--my faith!
+what hair and what a beard!  Madame cried out with ravishment upon
+his entrance, for he would not be announced--he went up at once.
+Possibly it was Madame's husband, or some near relative?"
+
+Juliette made some ambiguous reply to the question.  She was intent
+upon the problem of rescuing her traveling-bag.  Without money one
+could not reach Châtel St. Germain, and in the bag was her little
+store of cash.  Trembling, she crept upstairs to the room she had
+slept in, a dressing or maid's apartment, opening out of Madame's.
+The discovery that the door was locked and the key in Adelaide's
+possession was appalling.  She was delivered from the dilemma by a
+chambermaid with a master-key.  As she stole in and seized her bag
+she heard voices in the next room.  Certainly one was Adelaide's and
+the other male.  A thickish voice, speaking with a drawl and a
+muffled softness that somehow recalled the Assyrian hawk-features and
+fierce black eyes of Straz.
+
+"_When the little Queen of Diamonds comes,_" the voice said, "_you
+shall present me!_"  And a chuckle followed on the words that made
+her cold.  Fortunately, some noise in the corridor covered her
+retreat with her rescued property, and facilitated her departure
+unobserved from the Hotel of the Crown....
+
+The station was near enough to be reached in a few minutes.  She
+learned there that a train would leave in ten minutes for Verdun.  At
+Verdun she would have to change, provided the branch-line trains were
+running, or proceed to Châtel St. Germain by road.
+
+Those ten minutes expanded into hours as the girl sat in the dirty
+station, waiting.  She was escaping from even greater perils than she
+had feared, and yet when she found herself actually in the train, and
+the train moving out of Bethel, she knew a moment of passionate
+regret.
+
+She had been so happy there....  She would never forget, even though
+she lived to be an old, old woman, that half-hour spent in easy,
+confidential talk with her Imperial Prince.
+
+The littered third-class carriage expanded, became the formal
+drawing-room of the Prefecture....  Lingeringly Mademoiselle went
+over the interview, and the parting--ah, me! there had been no
+farewell!...  And yet, upon the step of departure, standing upon the
+muddy curbstone of the Place, full of soldiers and scowling people,
+she had looked wistfully up at the row of four big round-topped
+shining windows on the balconied first floor of the Prefecture and
+seen...
+
+Only a boy's face, blurred and stained with crying.  Only a boy's
+hand, waved behind the pane.  As she whispered "_Adieu!_" looking up
+at him with passionate love and loyalty, she wondered if ever they
+two would meet on earth again.
+
+It was to be never again for the boy and girl whose chivalrous and
+noble natures had struck out, at first meeting, the white spark that
+kindles to Friendship's sacred flame.
+
+What misfortunes were coming, thick and fast, upon the luckless child
+of the Empire!...  What a cup of dreadful judgment was to be offered
+to those guiltless lips!...
+
+So young, so noble, so unfortunate!  The pity of it!...  He who might
+have breathed new life into the dry bones of the Napoleonic Legend,
+and given France an Emperor without fear and without reproach.
+
+
+What a string of waking nightmares, the days that were to follow!...
+That journey by road to Mézières ... that brief sojourn at Sedan.
+The sudden flight to Avesnes, where the guns could be heard
+thundering, betokening the defeat of a demoralized, dejected army,
+conquered almost before the shock of battle, paralyzed by the
+premonition of inevitable disaster, as much as by the perfect
+preparedness, the masterly strategy, and the overwhelming numbers of
+the enemy....
+
+From Landrécies to Maubeuge follow the boy sorrowfully....
+
+What an hour was that when his protectors stripped him of his darling
+uniform, dressed him in civilian garments, took him out by the hotel
+back-door, and smuggled him into the omnibus that was to convey him
+to Belgian ground.
+
+His father a prisoner, his mother a fugitive, crowds hustling him in
+their curiosity to see the son of the toppled Napoleon, what wonder
+that the memory of that journey haunted him his brief life long.
+
+He was to attain manhood in exile.  Transplanted to the soil of a
+foreign country, he was to develop into the _beau-ideal_ of a
+youthful King among men.  High-minded, pure-hearted, excelling in
+manly sports and martial exercises, the soul of honor, the fine
+flower of French chivalry.  And in the spring of his manhood he was
+to die by the assegais of savage warriors, leaving nothing behind him
+but the broken heart of a mother, some fragrant memories, and the
+undying story of that lion's life-and-death fight among the trodden
+grasses on the banks of the Imbazani.
+
+
+
+
+LVII
+
+Following the devious route of narrow paths by which the peasant had
+guided them, P. C. Breagh made his way back to the battle-ground
+between the Bois de Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont.
+
+Prussian spade-parties had made good progress during the three hours
+of his absence.  Part of the field had been cleared, long parallel
+trenches dug at twelve-foot intervals in the soft, soaked ground, and
+German bodies decently interred therein.  Huge canvas sacks crammed
+with identification-tags, papers and purses removed from these stood
+ready to be carted away.  Volunteers and Red Cross helpers had
+rendered like services to dead Frenchmen.  And at the head of a
+trench, marked by a board on which was chalked in awkward letters:
+
+  "CHASSEURS OF HORSE OF THE IMPERIAL GUARD.
+  OFFICERS, 6;
+  TROOPS, 200."
+
+a single widish grave had been dug, in which had been deposited the
+body of de Bayard.
+
+The place was marked by a cross made of the broken, halves of a Uhlan
+lance lashed with a fragment of cavalry picket-rope.  About the cross
+Mademoiselle de Bayard's veil had been loosely tied, and the vertical
+shaft topped, grimly enough, with M. le Colonel's talpack.  None of
+the heavy clay soil had been thrown back.  Waiting some hand to draw
+Earth's rude coverlet charitably over him, de Bayard lay, staring
+back in the brazen face of the sun.
+
+His green silver-braided dolman had been torn open--the
+blood-drenched ceinture cut, showing the mortal lance-thrust.  The
+red, silver-striped pantaloons had been slashed at the hips, no doubt
+in search of pocket-book and purse.  It was difficult to credit that
+the sternly extended right arm, and the determined frown graven deep
+between the eyebrows, did not mean that Life was extinct, but merely
+in abeyance; that the cold glitter of the bold dark eyes and the grim
+setting of the pale mouth under the martial mustache would not warm
+and soften and relax into a smile.
+
+He was so disdainful in his rigid silence, so much a chief of men,
+even in death, that the disheveled scallawag who dared to love his
+daughter winced at the cold stare of those dark, glittering eyes.
+But for Juliette's sake P. C. Breagh nerved himself to the sticking
+point--got down into the squashy clay beside de Bayard, and took his
+medals, and Cross of the Legion of Honor, giving him Juliette's
+Rosary instead.
+
+"You know, sir, I don't intend to take a liberty," he felt like
+saying: "I'm only carrying out what I've given my word to do.  If I'm
+not quite up to your mark, please overlook it!  As to being worthy of
+_her_--_is_ any man breathing?  Ask yourself the question, and the
+answer will be No...."
+
+Save the Algerian, Crimean and Sardinian medals, and the Cross,
+nothing of value remained upon the Colonel....
+
+Some soldier having left a spade sticking in the clay at the head of
+an unfinished trench, P. C. Breagh possessed himself of the utensil,
+and began to fill the grave in, though the dead face looked at him so
+haughtily that until he had covered it with the black silk veil, he
+boggled hideously at the task.
+
+Winking away the tears that blinded him, and gulping down the lump
+that stuck in his throat, he finished.  Remained but the need of a
+Catholic priest to read the Office.  You saw the caped cloak, and the
+broad-brimmed hat, or the cossack and biretta of the Roman
+ecclesiastic, working side by side with the Jewish rabbi, the English
+Protestant clergyman, and the Lutheran pastor, in these
+harvest-fields of death.  The secular priest and the tonsured
+religious were to be found with the Red Cross Ambulance-trains and in
+the temporary hospitals; doing their best for the souls and bodies of
+their broken fellow-men, now that War had done the worst.
+
+To whom should one appeal?  Hardly to the burly, bearded Franciscan,
+who passed supporting a laden double-stretcher at the upper end.  You
+saw his brown robe hitched up under his white girdle, and his
+muscular bare legs, ending in boots of the elastic-sided description,
+stained as though he had been treading out ripe grapes in the press.
+An Army chaplain succeeded the monk, upright and thin, in a dark
+military frock and black-banded forage-cap, half leading, half
+carrying a French corporal of infantry, who had received a bullet
+through both eyes.  Farther off, a gray-haired ecclesiastic, whose
+dress betokened his episcopal dignity, was administering the Viaticum
+to a dying Mecklenburg Hussar.  Even as the sublime Mystery of Faith
+was uplifted--even as the Englishman bent the knee in adoration--his
+glance fell upon the kneeling figure of an old man a few yards away.
+
+Undoubtedly a priest, the poor shepherd of some poverty-stricken
+country parish, for the cassock that covered the frail, wasted body
+was threadbare, green with wear and heavily patched.  Absorbed in
+devotion, his broad-brimmed hat lying on the ground before him, his
+thin hands crossed upon his sunken breast, his white head erect, his
+rapt gaze fixed upon the Host, he remained immovable, until the brief
+but solemn rite was at an end.  Then he looked up at the sky--shaking
+back the long white hair that had fallen about his peaked and meager
+features--making three times rapidly the sign of the Cross.  And the
+serene and beautiful peace that rested on that broad furrowed
+forehead, the radiant smile upon the toothless mouth, and the beaming
+kindliness in the brilliant dark eyes that rested on P. C. Breagh's,
+told him that here was the needed man.
+
+Yet he hesitated to speak to the priest, who rose and moved a few
+steps farther to where a shell-torn horse, tangled in the
+rope-harness that had attached to it a smashed artillery caisson, lay
+groaning and thrashing its long neck and tortured head to and fro.
+
+Parties of Uhlans told off for the purpose, were even then shooting
+such hopelessly wounded victims.  But no merciful bullet had ended
+the pain of this suffering beast.  It groaned again, and coughed up
+blood as the old man stopped to look at it, and fixed its haggard
+eyes almost humanly upon his face.
+
+The appeal went home.  Stepping over the prone body of its dead
+comrade, the old man bent over the horse and gently stroked its neck.
+He said, and the words came clearly to Carolan:
+
+"Poor creature of God! be thy sore anguish ended.  In the Name of the
+Father ..."
+
+As he ended the Triune Invocation, the horse's head sank down
+heavily.  A deep sigh heaved the creature's sides, and exhaled in a
+gasp.  The hind legs contracted sharply toward the body, and then
+jerked out, heavily hitting the axle of the ammunition-cart.  All was
+over.  The Samaritan moved away, but P. C. Breagh followed and
+overtook him, crying:
+
+"My Father..."  And the old man halted and turned himself, leaning
+for support upon a knotted ash-stick and saying:
+
+"Surely, my child.  Do you need my poor assistance?"
+
+A lisping voice, speaking with a country accent.  And with that smile
+of radiant kindness making it angelic--the face of Voltaire.
+
+There were the features of the Philosopher of Ferney, rendered
+familiar to this later age by many portraits and busts.  The broad
+and lofty brow, the great orbital arches, the mobile expressive eyes,
+wide-winged, sensitive hawk-beak, thin-lipped mouth, with the
+subtly-curving corners and the deeply cleft humorous chin, were all
+there.  The face lacked nothing of Voltaire but cynicism and devilry.
+In place of these imagine a Divine simplicity, and a tenderness so
+pure that the young man was abashed....
+
+"My Father," he got out: "in charity to the dead and pity for the
+living, will you consent to read the Office of Burial by a Catholic
+soldier's graveside?"
+
+"Surely, surely, my child," nodded the wearer of the threadbare
+soutane.  And pulled out of his pocket a red-cotton handkerchief,
+wrapped about a battered Office-book and a shabby stole, and trotted
+back beside the Englishman.  Then, standing opposite to where the
+green and red-plumed talpack topped the broken lance-shaft, he read
+the Absolution, the _Libera me_, _Paternoster_ and Collects, and with
+a wide and sweeping gesture, solemnly blessed the grave and the
+trenches it neighbored, saying, at the close of the _De Profundis_
+that followed, with one of those rare smiles that made the old face
+beautiful exceedingly:
+
+"My poor prayers are for all my children.  Now kneel and make your
+confession.  No one will hear you--it is as though we were together
+in my poor little church."
+
+"But, my Father!..." P. C. Breagh protested.
+
+The old man said, looking at him penetratingly:
+
+"My child, you would tell me that not so very long ago you discharged
+your religious obligations.  But to-day is the Octave of the
+Assumption of Our Blessed Lady, and you have not confessed or
+received Communion since Whitsuntide.  Will you tell me that your
+conscience is clear enough to meet death without apprehension, when
+Saints at the moment of dissolution tremble, anticipating the terrors
+of the Divine Judgments of God!"
+
+Tears stood in the radiant eyes, brimmed over and ran down in two
+channels worn by that sorrowful-sweet smile of his....  He clasped
+his hands entreatingly, then threw them wide, crying in a very
+passion of pity and love:
+
+"My poor child, with Death on every side of you, will you turn from
+Him Who is Lord and Giver of Life?  And what shall I say to Him when
+I stand before Him, and He asks me: '_Didst thou suffer a sinner to
+depart whom pleadings might have won?_'"
+
+There was no resisting that passionate entreaty.  Another instant,
+and the barrier of pride broke down.  P. C. Breagh knelt in the raw,
+moist clay by Henri de Bayard's graveside, and poured out his full
+heart under the light yet thrilling pressure of those thin old hands
+upon his head.
+
+With the murmured blessing that followed the Absolution the hands
+were withdrawn and their owner went away.  How he went and whither he
+betook himself, his penitent never knew.
+
+
+
+
+LVIII
+
+The hamlet of Petit Plappeville lay strangely still and silent in the
+westering sunshine.  Hitherto a small oasis of untouched ordinary
+life situated on the edge of a vast area of blackened devastation, it
+now partook in the general aspect of upheaval and ruin.  The doors of
+the dozen cottages forming its single street stood wide open.
+Household!  goods, furniture, clothing, broken loaves of bread,
+smashed and empty wine-bottles were strewed upon the street and in
+the little, flowery front yards.  All the doors stood open, some that
+had been locked and driven in hung crookedly on twisted hinges, the
+broken windows displayed shattered splinters edging gaping holes.
+Not a human being showed, not a fowl pecked among the litter.  The
+hand of the marauder had plainly been at work.  P. C. Breagh groaned
+as he crossed the threshold of Madame Guyot's cottage, such a scene
+of domestic chaos housed between its denied walls.
+
+Chests of drawers and cupboards had been ransacked of clothes and
+linen, these, hideously befouled, had been rent into rags and thrown
+upon the floor.  The fragments of the Englishman's knapsack,
+temporarily left in Madame Guyot's keeping, the ruins of his
+shaving-tackle, and some stray leaves of filled note-books,
+deplorably appealed to their late owner's eyes.  But P. C. Breagh's
+eyes were busied elsewhere.  With the ripped-up feather bed from the
+inner chamber, where Juliette de Bayard had passed the previous
+night.  With the soiled and trampled remnants of some delicate
+articles of feminine underwear--a lace-frilled night-robe, a filmy
+chemise.  He took them up with reverent, shaking hands--looked
+instinctively for an initial....  There were letters embroidered in
+dainty Convent-taught stitchery--"J. M. de B."
+
+He would have cried out, but the cry stuck in his throat, and a
+chilly sweat broke out upon and bathed him.  He had glanced toward
+the corner occupied by the truckle-bed whereon my Cousin Boisset had
+lain.  Covered with a sheet dyed partly red, something long and stark
+and still lay outstretched upon the palliasse.  And a lance driven
+home to the shaft stuck upright in the body, from whose drained-out
+veins the last drops splashed heavily into a dreadful pool that
+slowly widened on the stone-flagged kitchen floor.
+
+Something snapped in P. C. Breagh's brain at that sight.  His
+under-jaw wrenched to one side and dropped idiotically.  He yelped
+out wildly the name of his Infanta, and went on yelping, and could
+not stop:
+
+"Juliette!  Juliette!  Where are you?  What have they done?...  Oh,
+Juliette!..."
+
+And then the piercing agony of his loss and the certainty of a fate
+of nameless horror for her, were lost in an immense relief.
+Underneath the bed of death something moved and rustled.  The slender
+thread of a voice replied:
+
+"Monsieur Breagh, I am here!  Do not be so alarmed, I beg of you!
+Terrible things have happened, but I am not hurt at all!"
+
+And the ensanguined pall was pushed aside and the little figure crept
+out from its hiding-place.  Dust and cobwebs could not dim her in the
+eyes of her true worshiper.  He choked and made a dive to help her,
+stumbled and fell upon his knees as she rose to hers.  And then she
+was in his arms, not clinging to him, but leaning against his broad
+chest, and shivering as though she were perishing cold.  And through
+the chattering of her teeth he heard--did he really hear her falter:
+
+"I knew--I knew that you would come!  When a priest had been found to
+bless the grave of my father.  Not before!...  You would never have
+returned before!"
+
+Her faith in him filled him with a joy that was anguish.  He rose up,
+lifting her toward the light, but not at all releasing her.
+
+"I came as soon as I had done my best to keep that promise.  Shall I
+ever forget what I felt when I set my foot in at the door?...  Oh,
+Lord!...  Ten million times worse than when that luckless Angéle
+poisoned me!...  Didn't I make sure you were dead or worse than dead!"
+
+"It is he who is dead!"  She drew her small, cold hands from his that
+were as icy, and went to the bed and turned back the upper end of the
+sheet that covered the still form.  "Monsieur Breagh, you look upon a
+noble soldier, who gave his life for me," she said proudly, and
+showed the snow-white face of my Cousin Boisset.
+
+"Wouldn't I die for you?  If I got the chance!...  Don't you know
+it?...  No--how can you know it?"
+
+Carolan clenched his hands in jealous misery, and she looked back at
+him to say:
+
+"I do know it!  To-day you placed yourself between me and the
+violence of those Prussians.  I have no words to thank you for your
+courage, sir!  Had I words for _him_"--she looked back at my
+"cousin"--"he would not hear them....  Nor can he be sensible of
+this----"  She stooped and kissed the dead man's forehead between the
+boldly arching eyebrows.  "Yet with all my gratitude I place it
+there!"
+
+P. C. Breagh said, flushing scarlet to his hair-roots: "I would
+change places with him to get that--and I believe you know it!  Cover
+him up and let me take you away from here...."  He added, as she
+looked at him in breathless questioning, "Somewhere where you'll be
+safe.  There must be somewhere!"
+
+"Until night comes to cover us," she told him, "we are more safe here
+than anywhere.  You do not think the comrades of those savage men who
+made this scene of desolation would halt in passing to ravage a
+plundered nest?"
+
+"But here ... you can't stay here ... in all this--beastliness."
+
+His gesture of repugnance was as forcible as the word.
+
+She thought, and said as the outward shadows lengthened, and a deep
+red sunset streamed through the shattered window-panes:
+
+"Behind the house there is a little cabane ... I should say, 'a
+shed,' where Madame kept her firewood.  We will hide ourselves in
+there until the dark.  For what are you looking?"
+
+He answered, stirring the _débris_ on the flagstones:
+
+"For a comb and a razor for choice, out of my knapsack.  No!...
+Except the rags of a spare jacket--they've left me nothing but this."
+
+One stout clasped notebook had suffered little.  He thrust it into
+his pocket and turned to Juliette.  She said, with a rueful catch of
+the breath as she regarded the wreckage of her own property:
+
+"Me they have not left anything at all of luggage.  The little
+_portemanteau_ and the _sac de nuit_ I brought with me from Belgium
+... behold their contents destroyed by those most wicked men!  Is it
+not deplorable?  Pray look, Monsieur!"
+
+But Monsieur, suddenly seized by an attack of ultra-British prudery,
+had turned away to rummage in the corner of a cupboard, where
+perchance might lurk a loaf.
+
+Nothing was there but a little knitted white shawl, which Juliette
+recognized as her own, and claimed gladly....  She threw it about her
+head and shoulders, and they passed out cautiously together by Madame
+Guyot's back door, as destitute a young couple as ever tramped.  But
+not before Juliette de Bayard had replaced the sheet over the face of
+the dead gunner, and sprinkled it with holy water from a crockery
+stoup that hung above the bed.
+
+"He was so good....  He should now be safe in Paradise.  But we must
+always remember him in our prayers!..."
+
+
+It would not have been wise to move about, but they could talk in
+whispers, partly buried in the heap of clean dry dead leaves filling
+half of the lean-to.  Thus P. C. Breagh learned the story of the
+death of my Cousin Boisset, and told in return his own tale.
+
+"You had departed, it might be one-half hour, when a man came running
+down the street, who cried: 'Hide!  Run!  The Uhlans are coming!
+They have plundered the Château Malakoff, and drunk M. Bénoit's _eau
+de vie_ and wine!'
+
+"This Château Malakoff is the house of a rich peasant whose vineyards
+have suffered much by the German guns.  You will remember Madame
+Guyot saying so, and M. Boisset responding, full of gaiety, 'He will
+get all the better prices, my cousin, for the old vintages he has in
+store!'  Naturally the outcry made much confusion, one peasant
+running this way and one that....  Madame Guyot caught hold of me and
+would have forced me to accompany her, saying that in the quarries
+beyond the village would be found a refuge.  But I refused to leave
+the house!"
+
+He broke in:
+
+"Think what you risked!  Why didn't you escape with her?"
+
+She looked at him wonderingly:
+
+"Why, do you ask me? ... Had I not given you my _parole_ to stay?"
+
+He could not speak.  She went on quickly:
+
+"So I said: 'I will remain, wearing my brassard of the Croix Rouge,
+and the Prussians will take me for the nurse of M. Boisset.'  But
+when Madame and the villagers had gone, hearing the galloping of
+horses approaching and a howling as of wolves, that brave soldier
+said to me: 'Mademoiselle, when men like these are mad with wine,
+they care nothing for the Red Cross!  Cover me over with a sheet, and
+hide underneath the bed I lie on.  Thus they will think me dead, and
+possibly go away.  The good God may let me save you, though I have
+often sinned against Him!'"
+
+A tear brimmed over and fell on her white cheek.  She brushed it off
+and went on:
+
+"I obeyed, Monsieur; I locked the door, taking out the key and hiding
+it.  Then I covered M. Boisset with the sheet, took a crucifix from
+the wall, and laid it on his breast.  Then I got under the bed, for I
+heard men at the door.  There was the 'tinc' of spurs and the sound
+of breathing.  Then heavy blows struck on the door until the lock
+gave way....  They entered....  Monsieur Breagh, that noble man had
+said to me, '_For your life, do not make a sound!_'  For my soul,
+more precious than life, I could not have spoken or moved!..."
+
+Above the narrow band of black velvet that clipped it, P. C. Breagh
+could see her little throat swelling.  Her tragic eyes seemed to have
+no room for him.  He waited, possessed by a strange hazy feeling that
+this meeting with her amidst surroundings so frightful must be taking
+place in a dream of uncanny vividness.  That he must wake up next
+moment in the clean spare bedroom of the gardener's cottage, to find
+his garments, cleansed of soil and stain, brushed and repaired by the
+deft hands of the charitable Sisters, and a battered tin bath of
+genuinely hot water, waiting to receive the Englishman.....
+
+"They came in," said Juliette, "talking in their guttural language.
+Me, I could never learn more than ten words of German at school....
+But I comprehended that they were angry at finding so little in the
+cupboards and closets of my poor Madame Guyot.  That was why they
+tore up clothes and linen--broke the dishes and glasses--behaved as
+wild beasts, rather than men.  That they were drunk, I knew, though I
+saw their boots and not their faces.  The smell of wine and brandy
+made me desire to be sick....  But when they approached the bed, with
+what anguish of apprehension I waited....  If I could have screamed,
+it would have been in that moment, when they pulled back the
+sheet...."
+
+Her eyelids shuddered over trembling eyeballs.  Her nostrils quivered
+with each sharply-taken breath.  Her tragic upper lip shut down upon
+its neighbor as though it would never relax in smiles again:
+
+"I heard my own heart beat--so loud it was like thunder.  I felt M.
+Boisset trying to hold the breath....  I prayed to the Mother of God
+to cover us with Her _manteau_.  I think she has certainly heard me
+when the Uhlans put back the sheet....  Alas, how terribly I am to
+find myself mistaken!  When the Uhlan moves from the bed I believe he
+is about to go.  Then--there is a savage cry!--a groan, hollow and
+terrible....  The lance comes plunging through the body of M.
+Boisset, through the palliasse--through the sacking that is
+underneath--through the sleeve of my dress, which is soaked with
+blood....  See!..."
+
+And she drew out a fold of the loose sleeve, and showed the rent made
+by the steel in it and the wet red patches fast drying into brownish
+stains.  And he who saw could only choke out, as his brows scowled
+and his yellow-flecked eyes burned tigerishly:
+
+"The brutes!...  The cowardly beggars!  Oh, if I had only been there!"
+
+"Of what use?" she said.  "They would only have killed you!"
+
+"An Englishman," he blustered: "I'd like to have had them try!  Why,
+we're neutral.  No Germans would dare----"
+
+She said, bending her great black brows upon him, and sternly drawing
+down her upper lip:
+
+"Monsieur, they would have killed you, as they killed my father.
+They have no pity, these men with panther hearts.  How should they,
+when he has none--that soldier-Minister whom Germany worships to
+idolatry.  Contradict me--say that I am wrong--to convince me would
+be impossible.  For I read the soul of Count Bismarck when I looked
+him in the face."
+
+For the owner of the domineering voice that had roused her from her
+stupor of misery was for Juliette de Bayard a very Moloch, ravenous
+for flesh of men, insatiable in thirst for blood.  And comprehending
+this, P. C. Breagh put forth no plea for a more tolerant judgment of
+his erstwhile hero, beyond lamely saying:
+
+"He's a great man--a terribly great man, however you look at him.
+And he--do you know, he saved my life once!"
+
+She said, with her deeply cut nostrils swelling and quivering:
+
+"Our Lord will say to him upon the Day of Judgment, 'You saved this
+one.  How many others have you given to death?'"
+
+Then, as P. C. Breagh winced at the brief, semi-contemptuous 'This
+one,' Juliette healed the wound with one gentle glance.  The delicate
+voice crept to his sore heart soothingly:
+
+"But for that rescue, I should now be quite alone in my great misery.
+I think that God permitted it, knowing this day upon its way to me."
+
+P. C. Breagh said, tingling all over:
+
+"Do you really believe that?..."
+
+She answered simply and directly:
+
+"If I did not, I would not say it....  Now I will shut my eyes and
+rest a little.  I am so very tired, me!"
+
+And she leaned back with lowered lashes on her rustling pillow of
+last year's dead leaves.  He asked himself what had she not gone
+through on this day, poor fragile, tender child!
+
+Had the news of her father's death been brought to her in London or
+Paris, there would have been closed doors, a darkened chamber for the
+mourner, the presence of some well-loved consoler, the counsel of her
+director, the silent sympathy of understanding friends.
+
+But here, where every custom and conventionality was suspended or
+shattered--where human life was bared to the bedrock by the furious
+struggle of nations in War, she had sought for a wounded warrior, to
+find a bloody corpse amidst a jumble of other corpses, and returned
+from that overwhelming experience to sit with strangers at a
+peasant's board.
+
+No wonder Juliette was very tired.  Would her reason suffer from the
+results of this shock?  Would she droop and die of the horrors
+undergone?  Was it possible that in a body so frail there dwelt an
+indomitable and unconquerable spirit?  It had looked out of her stern
+eyes, it had sat upon her lips when she had spoken of the Iron
+Chancellor.
+
+Even as P. C. Breagh leaned toward the small white face, brooding
+over it, breathlessly studying it, she opened sapphire eyes upon him,
+to say, with the suddenness of a child:
+
+"I have been told that the Crown Prince of Prussia is good and has a
+noble nature.  Do you not think that if he knew how wickedly those
+Uhlans have killed the poor M. Boisset he would without mercy have
+them shot?"
+
+P. C. Breagh, caught staring, confusedly opined so.  She said, her
+heavy eyelids weighed down with drowsiness:
+
+"They were cowards, for they took the alarm and mounted and rode away
+calling that the Franzosen were coming....  Yet when they had gone
+and I crept out from my concealment, what do you imagine is all that
+I view?  In effect, nothing more terrible than an old, bent,
+white-haired priest in a ragged soutane, who was walking through the
+village saying his Rosary...."
+
+She went on, as P. C. Breagh pricked his ears, and opened his eyes
+widely:
+
+"He looked so good and like the pictures of the holy Curé d'Ars, for
+whose intercession I had been praying, that I cried to him: 'Help, my
+Father!  Help for one dying!  Help for another in misery!'  But he
+must have been less holy than he looked, or very deaf, for he passed
+on.  Then I crept back under the bed, and then--at last, you came to
+me.  What should I have done if you had not come, Monsieur?..."
+
+For once Carolan did not hear her.  His thoughts were busy elsewhere.
+He was asking himself if the old priest in the patched cassock who
+had shown himself to Juliette, could be the Curé who had read the
+Office at the grave of de Bayard?
+
+And if that priest were mortal man, how had he covered the distance
+between the battlefield and Petit Plappeville, and what had scared
+the drunken marauders from their prey?  And was it not strange that
+the resemblance to the saint of Ars had appealed to both Carolan and
+Juliette?...  The problem must remain unsolved for all Time, it might
+be.
+
+Yet this fact had stamped itself on P. C. Breagh's consciousness,
+deeply as his own heavy nailed boots had bitten into the clay by the
+Colonel's graveside.  On the moist surface of the spot where the
+Servant of Heaven had been standing, the clumsy iron-buckled,
+wooden-soled shoes had left no print at all.
+
+
+An interesting illusion, bred of the exaltation of the senses under
+emotion, produced in part, says my friend the Physiologist, by
+subconscious Memory.  A significant phenomenon, remarks my other
+friend, the student of Psychology, testifying to the thinness of the
+Veil dividing the Visible World from the Unseen.  While my Catholic
+terms it a rare but not isolated or uncommon revelation, pointing the
+stupendous truth contained in that clause of the _Credo_ referring to
+the Communion of Saints and illustrating the dynamic force of Prayer.
+
+
+
+
+LIX
+
+Juliette breathed so evenly, and lay so long without moving, that P.
+C. Breagh believed her asleep.  Twilight showed nothing but a black
+shape, vaguely feminine, a pale oval patch represented her face....
+
+Suddenly as before, her eyes opened and met his.  She said, following
+up some previous train of thought:
+
+"It is nobler than the portraits, and yet more pitiless.  I speak of
+the face of my country's enemy....  See you well, Monsieur Breagh ...
+if I were Our Lady, I would never rise from my knees until Our Lord
+had saved France!..."
+
+"What would save France?" Carolan asked her.  She answered, turning
+in her rustling couch of leaves:
+
+"Death, striking the hand that slowly strangles her....  Death,
+freezing the brain that plans her fall....  Death, overtaking the
+merciless giver of Death to her children....  Nothing else could now
+save France!..."
+
+He who heard was dumb, knowing that this harping was the very note of
+madness.  She went on, speaking with somber earnestness:
+
+"Always is it that women are accused by men of weakness.  Frenchwomen
+are, in addition, termed 'timid and frivolous.'  Yet France has twice
+been saved by the courage of her daughters....  Remember the holy
+Jeanne d'Arc, beloved of God and Our Lady ... and Charlotte Corday
+also, Monsieur!--the courageous citizeness of Caen....  At school I
+learned her words, spoken before the Revolutionary Tribunal....
+'_Me, I have slain one man to save a hundred thousand!..._'  Why has
+not France a Charlotte Corday now?"
+
+There was something in her tone that menaced like the flicker of
+lightning, seen through a rent in stormy wrack.  That a creature so
+frail and slender should dream of heroic vengeance was incredible.
+One would have expected it from a heroine of the Krimhilde-Brünhilde
+type.  To divert her from the dangerous theme by changing the
+conversation was impossible.  The only thing to do was to feign to
+doze.
+
+He yawned, stretched his aching body on the clean dry litter, shut
+his hot and sandy eyes, seeing rings of green-blue fire.  Oblivion
+descended on him.  Pretense became reality.  He sank into a very gulf
+of sleep.
+
+
+Long after her comrade's heavy respiration had told her that he was
+wrapped in slumber, Juliette Bayard sat staring out into the
+deepening dusk.  Insomnia born of nervous strain and mental shock
+claimed her as a victim.  She was far more near to madness than
+Carolan had dreamed.
+
+It was a night of chilly breathings from the northwest, and violent
+contrasts in light and shadow; a high bright moon making black
+silhouettes of hills and trees, and bottomless infernos of hollows
+and ravines.  Gigantesque clouds up-piled monstrous ramparts on the
+southeast horizon, others topped these with the strangest
+sculpturesque shapes....  An iceberg with a veiled crouching figure
+on it; a mammoth with elevated trunk and great curved tusks,
+bellowing in dumb show; wrestling shapes of Titans prone or erect;
+lovely children playing in meadows of asphodel; vast winged shapes of
+genii with hidden faces, speeding across unthinkable distances of
+cold, crystal-blue atmosphere.
+
+But the cloud-shape that most persistently recurred was that of a
+heavy-browed, mustached Colossus, who sometimes was helmed and
+cuirassed, and bestrode a monstrous horse of war.  In other vaporous
+pictures he addressed great multitudes from a high rostrum, or from
+some fantastic hill-peak urged on rushing armies; or sometimes
+counseled a crowned figure that sat upon a high-placed throne.
+
+Yet whatever the giant was, there was sure to be another figure,
+slender, weak, fragile, a mere vaporous wisp of mist.  And the
+watcher had strange cognizance that this was the appointed Fate of
+Colossus, and that her constant presence was an augury of ill for him.
+
+He walked amid trees in a wood, and his Fate dogged his footsteps, a
+pistol or poignard ready for her country's enemy....  He ate at a
+daïs-table in a banqueting hall--she served him a golden cup of wine
+iced and poisoned. ... He lay down to sleep on a lordly bed, the
+frail shape glided in with a torch and fired the curtains....  He
+dreamed of Power on the brink of a precipice, and his tiny Fate crept
+near unseen, and thrust him screaming down.
+
+The moon had long southed, the cloud-shapes were growing vaguer, the
+eyes of the stars looked through their thinning veils.  The wind had
+fallen, the silence was profound and awful.  She shuddered, thinking
+of the battlefield....
+
+What of de Bayard lying under his clay coverlet?  What of the
+thousands of bodies buried in the newly-dug trenches?  What of the
+myriads yet unburied, lying stark and awful under the canopy of Night?
+
+Did they understand, the Dead, whose hand had really poured red life
+from them, and thrown them like empty, broken vessels abroad upon the
+trodden fields?  Did they curse him with their stiff, silent lips,
+and point at him with their rigid fingers?  Would they know, in
+Paradise or Purgatory, if anyone avenged them?  In Hell they would be
+sure to know, because their murderer would be there....
+
+"_Ting...._"
+
+What was that faint approaching sound, drawing nearer and nearer
+through the darkness, that banished the haunting, dreadful images
+that crowded in her brain?  It loosed the iron band that was bound
+about her aching temples.  It melted the icy armor that was riveted
+about her torn and sorrowful heart....
+
+"_Ting-ting!_"
+
+She turned her head to the quarter whence it came, and listened,
+breathing quickly.  Again came the silvern tinkle.
+
+"_Ting-ting-ting! ..._"
+
+Now the sound of heavy approaching footsteps came with it, and Fear
+fell from her like a pall all snow-wet.  She rose up among the
+rustling dead leaves, bent, laid her hand on the shoulder of the
+sleeper, and roused him cautiously.  He awakened, and said through
+the fingers she laid in caution on his lips:
+
+"Who is it?..."  And then instantly remembered, and passionately
+kissed the warning hand.
+
+"_Ting-ting, ting-ting!..._"
+
+"Do you hear, Monsieur?" she panted.
+
+She snatched away the hand.  He rose to his knees and listened....
+Dawn, creeping into the hovel, painted their hands and faces gray.
+White teeth flashed in the gray of his, as he said to her joyfully:
+
+"It is a priest, with the Blessed Sacrament!"
+
+No more was said.  They took hands and went out of the hovel, and
+passed round and through the little flowery front yard into the
+littered street of Petit Plappeville.
+
+At its upper end two black figures, encircled by the yellow halo of a
+lantern-flame, moved toward them.  Their shadows were thrown sidewise
+upon the littered road and the whitewashed garden walls.  The bell
+tinkled, telling of the coming of Him Who is the Light of the World.
+The wheezing of someone troubled with asthma accompanied the clumping
+of wooden-soled country shoes.
+
+Presently came in sight an old woman in sabots, carrying an immense
+umbrella, and a huge and antique lantern with horn slides.  The stout
+figure of an elderly priest followed her, covered with a biretta,
+wearing a wide black mantle, and walking at a slow and decent pace.
+
+At intervals he tinkled the small hand bell he carried in his left
+hand.  His right arm was folded over his breast.  As Juliette sank
+down in the dry dust, her companion hesitated an instant, then knelt
+down beside the girl.
+
+The priest stopped as he neared the kneeling pair, and blessed them
+in silence.  His round face looked puckered and anxious.  He said, as
+his glance took in the bareheaded young man and the slender young
+woman, and their environment of ruin and desolation:
+
+"My children, are you the only living creatures remaining in this
+unhappy village?"
+
+Juliette was praying.  P. C. Breagh answered in a reverent whisper:
+
+"Yes, my Father.  The Prussian horsemen came, and the villagers left
+their houses....  There was a wounded soldier in the cottage of
+Madame Guyot.  He feigned to be dead, and the Uhlans ran him through
+with one of their lances.  He lies within there!  May his soul rest
+in peace!"
+
+The priest solemnly raised the Host, and blessed the house of death.
+Then he said to Carolan and Juliette:
+
+"It will be best that you should follow me to the place where I am
+going.  A person lies there in extremity, to whom I carry Our Lord.
+Your presence will be something of an additional protection, in case
+any of these foreign soldiers should offer insult to Him I bear."
+
+He rang the bell, and moved on along the street that was cumbered
+with the wreckage of humble households.  The old woman in sabots
+preceded him, assiduously lighting his path.  And the boy and girl
+came after the priest, walking side by side decorously.  But
+presently, when Juliette stumbled, Carolan took her hand.
+
+"_Ting!_"
+
+They might have been walking to the Sepulcher on that earliest Easter
+morning, when He Who wrought man in His Own Image broke asunder the
+bonds of Death.  The air was sweet with a wonderful reviving
+fragrance.  Their pulses throbbed calmly, their blood flowed through
+their veins smoothly as new milk.  Presently the old woman who walked
+before them began in a monotone to recite the Rosary.  They answered,
+murmuring the sacred words in unison, moving on as though in a dream.
+
+Over the smoldering villages in the southeast the August moon was
+setting, hanging like a great ripe glowing fruit against a background
+of translucent silvery hue.  A broad band of primrose-yellow banding
+the purple blackness in the East betokened daybreak.  Above, there
+hung one star of blazing emerald.
+
+When they turned out of Petit Plappeville into a lane that trended
+upward, they could see upon the right the long lines of Prussian
+watch fires twinkling like rubies out of a mist that covered the
+low-lying country like a shallow, milky sea.  Upon the left rose the
+ivied stone wall of some orchard or chateau garden.  Steps rose to an
+archway in which hung the fragments of a door that had been battered
+in.
+
+"_Ting!_"
+
+As the priest rang his bell a bareheaded man appeared in the doorway.
+He was very pale, his dress was disordered, and his eyes had a
+strained and anxious look.  He bent the knee and crossed himself,
+then stood aside as the Curé mounted the doorsteps.  His wild eyes
+questioned the faces of the strangers who followed the
+lantern-bearer.  He seemed reassured by what he saw there, and said
+to the priest in a muffled tone, loud enough to be heard by his
+companions:
+
+"Take care ... there is broken glass strewed everywhere about here.
+Do not put out the lantern; it will be safer walking with more than
+one light!"
+
+Then he took up a heavy silver candlestick he had set down upon a
+sort of rustic flower stand.  The candle wax had guttered all down
+one side, making what old women call a winding sheet.  He glanced at
+this as he took it up, and then at Mère Catherine.  Then he moved
+forward, taking her place as guide, and the glass of smashed wine
+bottles that covered the ground cracked and crackled under his own
+boots, and the Curé's wooden-soled shoes.  The huge sabots of Mère
+Catherine made short work of the splinters.  Following in her
+Brobdingnagian footsteps, Juliette's small feet took no hurt.
+
+A long, low house rose up before them.  Its rows of barred basement
+windows indicated an extensive cellarage.  Many of the windows were
+broken, and some of the ground-floor shutters had been wrenched off.
+Shattered furniture was thrown about in confusion, shrubs and rose
+trees had been ruined, broken bottles were here, there, and
+everywhere.  And as a slight sound of astonishment came from
+Juliette, the priest having mounted some red-brick steps and entered
+after his guide at an open hall door, the old woman, to whom silence
+was evidently a sore penance, glanced back at the young one and said
+to her in a whisper:
+
+"This is the Château Malakoff.  Perhaps you remember?...  And all
+those broken bottles....  The soldiers drank the wine...."
+
+Then she hung her old white-capped head, and hurried after the
+Father, finishing the last decade of the Rosary as she went.
+Juliette and Breagh would have waited in the square hall on which the
+front door opened, but from the landing immediately above the aster
+of the house looked back frowning, and imperatively beckoned them to
+ascend.
+
+They went upstairs.
+
+The door of the death chamber stood open.  From within, came the
+murmuring sound of the priest's voice.  Red-eyed servants knelt in
+prayer about the threshold.  The master of the house was just within
+the door.  His square black head and vigorous shoulders looked angry
+and wrathful.  Old Catherine whispered to Juliette as she beckoned
+her to kneel beside her:
+
+"It is his wife, Madame Bénoit....  They were only married a year!"
+
+Then she clashed her great Rosary and joined in the prayers
+vigorously, while the thin crying of a baby in an adjoining chamber
+pierced the sudden, deep, profound silence that fell upon all present
+when the priest elevated the Host.  A little later she broke down
+again, and hissed in Juliette's ear that Madame was dying, that the
+baby had been born too soon, because the mother had been frightened
+by the Prussians ... that M. le Curé would give the Holy Oils after
+administering the Viaticum.  And then in a gray pool of quiet that
+ensued some moments later, a woman's voice cried out with
+astonishment and terror and anger in it:
+
+"_Mon mari!...  Mon mari!...  Au secours!...  Les Prussiens----_"
+
+And the cry broke off short with a horrible suddenness; there was a
+momentary confusion, and then the priest came out, looking stern and
+sorrowful.  He opened the door widely, beckoning in several of the
+women.  And Juliette, rising to make way for him, saw the wavering
+flames of tapers burning on either side of a Crucifix on a
+white-draped table, and the figure of the house master, with a face
+of ashen grayness turned toward her, leaning over a white bed,
+clasping something even whiter in a desperate embrace.  Only two
+great hair plaits that flowed over the bosom of the dead woman
+glittered like solid bands of burnished copper in the wavering
+candlelight.  And Dawn crept in through the open window, with the
+scent of the crushed and trampled roses, and the smell of wine
+spilled and staling, and the uneasy twittering of frightened birds.
+
+And then--they were picking their way over the broken glass-covered
+gravel walk, and the priest, released from the obligation of silence,
+was eagerly asking for more particulars of the death of my Cousin
+Boisset.
+
+"For the villagers of Petit Plappeville are hiding in the quarry of
+Seulvent.  They will not return until the Prussians have left the
+neighborhood; they have learned what they have to expect from these
+men when they are full of wine....  We will stop as we pass, and tell
+them what has happened....  Then you had better come back with me to
+my presbytery.  The soldiers have not left us much, but there will be
+coffee and bread!"
+
+"But for me," said Mère Catherine, clumping along stoutly, "there
+would not be even bread and coffee.  But I have my hiding holes of
+which I tell nobody.  And as Monsieur le Curé did not know, he could
+not say where they were!"
+
+That was a pleasant meal in the little deal-shelved study that had
+somehow escaped when the presbytery was turned upside down.  It stood
+next the church, a little ancient plain stone building with a square
+belfry tower and a spire covered in with blackened slating, and two
+recumbent effigies of the twelfth century, that were dear to the good
+Curé's heart.  After _déjeuner_ he explained that he was going to
+visit these treasured relics for the purpose of ascertaining whether
+they had suffered damage at the Germans' hands.
+
+He carried a basket with him when he trotted away on his errand.  P.
+C. Breagh, as he leaned by the open casement of the little
+ground-floor study, rather wondered why it should contain a corked
+bottle and a biggish loaf of bread.
+
+Juliette had gone to help Catherine restore order in the kitchen.
+The young man's hand was in his trousers pocket as he wondered,
+staring after the stout retreating figure in its cassock of rusty
+black.  Suddenly he uttered an exclamation, and pulled out the hand
+with something shining in it.  The piece of gold given him by
+Juliette.
+
+He put a hand on the sill, and was out at the window in time to see
+the priest unlock the heavy sunken door that led into the belfry
+tower, and vanish into the dusk of the sacred place.  He followed, to
+find the Curé struggling with a heavy ladder that led up to a trap
+hole in the huge-beamed, plastered ceiling of the belfry--a ladder
+that was evidently seldom shifted from its cobwebbed place against
+the whitewashed wall.
+
+"Couldn't I do that?  I'm a good deal stronger than, you are....
+Halloa!...  Lucky I was there!"
+
+P. C. Breagh had thoughtlessly spoken in English, and the priest, who
+had not seen him enter, had nearly dropped the ladder.  He said quite
+reproachfully, as the young man caught and steadied the ponderous bit
+of timber:
+
+"Why have you followed me?  Is it that you wish to speak to me
+privately?  If so, pray do not do so in your English, which is
+sufficiently like German to give me an unpleasant agitation of the
+nerves!"
+
+P. C. Breagh explained, exhibiting the golden coin, that it had been
+given him by Mademoiselle to secure a Mass.
+
+"But certainly she shall have a Mass.  Though five francs will be
+more than sufficient.  Retain the coin, Monsieur, until I can find
+the necessary francs of change.  You see, we are poor in this
+neighborhood ... it is to be expected!"  The good Curé smiled, and
+added: "As you see me, I am rich compared with many of my
+_confrères_--even richer than some of my superiors.  Therefore, if
+you will describe to me the features of the priest who read the
+Office, it may be arranged with more propriety that he shall offer
+Mass."  He added, seeing the young man hesitate: "Recall his
+features.  Describe his person, if you can!" ...
+
+P. C. Breagh recalled and described.  When he had done, the Curé
+said, in a tone of quiet conviction:
+
+"That priest will not need Mademoiselle's five francs! ... And he is
+not only my superior....  He ranks above the angels....  Monsieur has
+spoken face to face with a glorious Saint of God!"
+
+Something like an electric shock tingled from the roots of P. C.
+Breagh's hair down his spine, and passed out by way of his heels into
+the worn flagstones.  He tried to speak, but his palate and tongue
+were stiff.  The priest went on:
+
+"Upon earth he was the Curé of Ars.  As a Catholic, Monsieur has
+learned of him.  But that he foretold this War, possibly Monsieur
+does not know?...  A year before his holy death....  Since it has
+happened ... this War that the holy Curé prophesied, he has revisited
+the earthly places where he prayed and labored and suffered....  He
+has succored the wounded....  He has appeared, just as he was when
+alive, to the dying, and cheered and consoled them so that they have
+departed in joy and peace....  In the world this will not be
+credited.  It does not matter!...  What matters is, that those who
+perhaps asked the Saint of Ars to intercede for them in their hour of
+desperate need have received proof that in heaven, where he now
+dwells, he is still what he would have wished to be: a worker on
+behalf of souls....  He said this to me, twelve years ago, with that
+smile that the good God had given him, to make poor doubters sure
+that He Himself will one day smile on them in heaven----"
+
+He stopped and wiped his face with a handkerchief that was
+unaffectedly a blue duster, and, noticing the sweat that had started
+on the other's face, interrupted himself to cry:
+
+"But Monsieur is still holding that heavy ladder!...  How could I be
+so forgetful!...  No! it is not to be replaced against the wall.  It
+is to be attached by the rings in the uprights to those hooks at the
+edge of that trap-door....  Since Monsieur has been favored with a
+vision of the Saint of Ars, he is worthy of all trust and confidence.
+Let Monsieur but fix the ladder while I turn the key in the door, and
+then he shall see a pigeon that I keep in the belfry tower!"
+
+And the good man bustled to the door and locked it, and then came
+back to test the steadiness of the ladder, and mounted with asthmatic
+wheezings and much display of darned socks and venerable carpet
+slippers, and tapped three times at the trapdoor.
+
+It was lifted at the signal, and P. C. Breagh beheld the gaunt and
+sunburnt face of a French Cuirassier, peering down out of the gloom
+of the spire that was faintly lighted by delicate lines of morning
+sunshine, gilding the upper edges of the shingle boards that roofed
+it in.
+
+"Thanks, thanks, my Father!" the Cuirassier muttered, as the bottle
+of coffee and the loaf were handed up into his eager, shaking hands.
+
+"Did you sleep?" the priest asked him, and the soldier answered in
+the affirmative, adding that he had been awakened by footsteps in the
+church below him at the earliest break of day.
+
+Said the Curé:
+
+"My child, it was I.  A member of my parish was dying--I came to the
+church to take the Blessed Sacrament from the Tabernacle....  I
+forgot that you would probably awaken and suppose that your presence
+here had been betrayed!...  But all is well! and a cart of brushwood
+will stop before the presbytery this evening and carry more than its
+load when it is driven on.  It is going to a farm near Audun--from
+there you will be able to escape into Luxembourg, and from thence
+rejoin the Army when your wounds are sufficiently healed.  It is said
+that the Army of Châlons, with the Duke of Magenta and the Emperor,
+now marches north from Rheims toward Sedan."  He added as white teeth
+flashed in the dark face, and the sullen eyes gleamed scornfully:
+"You will please yourself as to serving again!  You have already
+suffered greatly for our country!"
+
+The soldier said roughly:
+
+"I would die for her with a good heart!...  But I will not fight
+again for this Emperor and his Marshal, by whom France has been sold
+and betrayed!"
+
+"Well, well!...  _Au revoir_, my child, and may Our Lord protect
+you," said the priest, sighing and beginning a puffing retreat down
+the ladder.  "Shut the trapdoor down carefully, keep perfect silence,
+and remember that it is very dangerous to smoke.  The curls of vapor
+can be seen rising between the shingles.  I observed it when we had
+workmen here in Spring!"
+
+Then he descended, and with P. C. Breagh's aid put back the ladder,
+unlocked the belfry tower door, and they went out into the clear
+bright autumn air.
+
+"That soldier came last night," the Curé whispered, as they stopped
+to lock the door with the heavy iron key that was corroded with rust
+where use did not maintain its brightness.  "He was taken prisoner in
+yesterday's battle, found to be wounded, disarmed, and left to shift
+for himself, with others in the same condition.  One of them--in
+whose company this man was--had concealed a pistol, and had the
+daring to attempt the life of M. de Bismarck--or General Moltke--I am
+not sure which!  But the shot missed its mark, and instantly all
+those who had seen it fired, with others who knew nothing, were
+massacred in cold blood.  This man by a miracle--escaped!...  How, I
+know not!  He says he fell into a pit full of dead, and lay there
+expecting to be buried with them, until the darkness came to cover
+his resurrection from the grave."
+
+They went back into the presbytery.  The priest went to look for the
+fifteen francs of change out of Juliette's gold piece.  She came out
+of the kitchen, from which Catherine's bedroom opened, and showed
+herself freshly laved, and attired in spotless neatness, her face no
+longer swollen with weeping and weariness, her superb hair brushed to
+dull cloudy silkiness, and newly coiled upon the summit of her little
+queenly head.
+
+Her eyes shone brilliant and hard as blue jewels, as she said to her
+friend in a low, vibrating tone of excitement:
+
+"Mère Catherine says that yesterday a French prisoner tried to shoot
+M. de Bismarck, and nearly succeeded....  See you well, I would like
+to meet that man!"
+
+"Why, Mademoiselle?"
+
+"To kiss the hand of one so brave, Monsieur!"
+
+He regarded her in silence.  She went on almost with hardihood,
+throwing back her head, and looking at him with eyes that gleamed
+between their narrowed lids.
+
+"See you well--if I were only beautiful, I would give my beauty to
+the man who saved France!"
+
+Her hearer's heart began to pound violently, and a dimness like mist
+came before his sight.  Through it he was aware of long eyes that
+gleamed like wonderful azure jewels, and a small red mouth that
+pleaded for the soul of P. C. Breagh....  He saw that the underlip
+was like the bud of a pomegranate, and that the curve of the upper
+disclosed teeth as white as curd....  Then he heard the silver voice
+say with a sigh in it:
+
+"But I am not beautiful ... not even pretty.  Ah, Monsieur, if I but
+were!..."
+
+She was hating herself as she saw his look respond to hers.  As the
+amber sparks in his gray eyes leaped into fire and his under jaw
+thrust out savagely, she thought:
+
+"There is something of my mother in me--more than a little!  How
+dared I scorn her--I, who can speak and look like this?"  And she
+repeated with a plaintive, lingering inflection: "If I were ... if I
+but were!"
+
+For the primal Eve is in all women, believe me.  When the first Woman
+bowed herself in her apron of leaves to strike out between the lump
+of iron ore and the flint flake, the spark that, blown within its
+nest of dried moss, begat Fire, she laughed and then wept; for she
+remembered how she had learned of old from the Serpent, wise Teacher
+of guile and evil! to kindle the hot spark of Desire in the hearts of
+men.
+
+This knowledge would have come to Juliette as a legacy from Eve, her
+earliest ancestress, even had she not been born of Adelaide.
+
+Meanwhile Breagh saw nothing but the little red mouth with the subtly
+wooing smile on it ... the gleaming jewels that were shadowed by
+their covert of black lashes....  Her will bent heavily on his,
+weakened by his worship of her.  In another instant he would have
+asked what she wanted him to do.
+
+But the heavy footsteps of the priest, clumping on the little crazy
+stair, recalled Breagh from the rapids toward which he had been
+drifting.  In another moment the Curé came into the room.  He had a
+knotted blue handkerchief in his hand, which weighed somewhat
+heavily.  He said with a good-humored smile as he untied one of the
+knots, and took out a little pile of silver:
+
+"Here behold my savings bank!  Your fifteen francs, Mademoiselle!"
+
+He was earnest to count them out and return them to her, and she was
+as earnest that the coins should not be given back....  But she could
+not deny her poverty when the good man charged her with it, saying:
+
+"Accept the return of this money as a mortification salutary for the
+health of your soul!"
+
+Then he tied up the handkerchief and stuffed it away under his
+cassock, and asked them:
+
+"Where are you journeying together, my children?  I have a reason for
+wishing to know!"
+
+He had turned to P. C. Breagh, still thrilling with the memory of
+that strange look Juliette had cast upon him.  The young man
+answered, glowing through his sunbrown:
+
+"Wherever Mademoiselle de Bayard is desirous to go!"
+
+The Curé pursed his mouth and turned to Juliette; and then sabots
+clumped in the passage, and a cracked voice cried from the door:
+
+"'Mademoiselle' and 'Mademoiselle,' when she is no more
+'Mademoiselle' than I am! ... Why not 'Madame'? ... Call things and
+folks by their right names!"
+
+There was a terrible pause.  Juliette was enduring agonies.  The Curé
+pursed his mouth, and rounded his mild eyes behind their iron-rimmed
+spectacles.  Mère Catherine went on triumphantly:
+
+"It was her father's dearest wish that she should marry his old
+friend's only son.  She told me that when we were washing up the
+coffee bowls, out in the kitchen there....  When the Prussians came
+to France, she went to Belgium with the young man's mother.  '_To
+celebrate my marriage,_' she told me, '_because M. What's-his-name
+was there!_'"
+
+P. C. Breagh had a sensation as of a weight of cold lead in the
+stomach.  His feet seemed shod with lead, his arms hung down inertly.
+His tongue might have been turned to lead, so impossible was
+utterance.  "_Married!..._" kept on ticking inside his head.
+"_Married!..._"  and with maddening iteration, slowly as the clapper
+of a tolling bell.  "_You knew it ... She knew it ... Married all the
+time!_"
+
+His dull stare was set upon the face that had smiled on him so
+wooingly.  It was snow-white now, and the eyes were hidden beneath
+their heavy fringes of black.  The eyebrows were knitted, the pale
+lips set rigidly.  The Curé looked at them a moment, and then asked,
+plump and plain:
+
+"You are really married?  My good Mère Catherine is not deceiving
+herself?"
+
+Juliette shut down her stern upper lip upon its little neighbor, and
+raised clear, sorrowful eyes.
+
+"As she says, I went to Belgium to celebrate my marriage.  Now that I
+have returned, I shall await my husband here in France.  My father
+esteemed him highly.  He is M. Charles Tessier.  He lives in the Rue
+de Provence, in the town of Versailles."
+
+Whether the good Curé scented the quibble, we are not at all inclined
+to ask.  We are concerned with P. C. Breagh, whose enchanted castle
+had crashed into dust and brickbats.  One glance at his face, sharp
+as a wedge of cheese, and bleached under its wholesome freckles and
+sun-tan, told his Infanta what ruin she had wrought.  But if he had
+seized and shaken her and cried: "You lie!" she would have lied
+again, defiantly.  Was she not married, when her Colonel had believed
+so....  She would be, from now, in thought and word, the wife of
+Charles Tessier.  Ah, Heaven!...  The thought was more unwelcome than
+ever it had been.
+
+Ah, Heaven! if that dear dead father could but have known this brave
+young Englishman.  Would he have been in such haste to break his
+daughter's heart?...  And--ah, Heaven!--again, if this burning of her
+boats meant parting, how could one live without one's comrade now?
+
+He was so simple, and Juliette adored simplicity.  He was so
+straightforward and honest, one could not guard the heart.  When he
+had thought her dead, how piteously he had cried to her, "Juliette!
+Juliette!..."  When she had crept from under the bed the lance had
+plunged through, barely missing her, and Breagh had dived at her and
+caught her up and hugged her, despite her terror and misery, she had
+known a wonderful thrill....
+
+"Mine!" those fierce young arms conveyed, as they had strained her to
+his broad breast.  Was it wicked, was it unnatural in one so newly
+bereaved of the noblest and dearest of all fathers, to have been
+taken by storm in those moments of desolation--to have dreamed since
+then of the rapture of being able to answer: "Yes, yes!...  If our
+very own!...  Never anyone's but yours...."?
+
+
+Alas! if Juliette had been unnatural in yielding to such thoughts,
+was she not now punished?  She had dealt with her own slight arm the
+blow that had shattered the fabric of her dreams as well as his....
+She would never again see that light in the eyes of Monica's brother;
+never--against all the accepted traditions ruling the pre-matrimonial
+affairs of a young French girl of good family--be hugged in that
+rude, possessive, British way.  But what loneliness, what terror,
+what danger had driven her into the arms that enfolded....  Besides,
+she would atone by marrying Charles Tessier.  A tepid future passed
+by the side of the young cloth manufacturer extended before her....
+She could not restrain a shudder at the thought, even while she
+mentally renewed her vow that, for the sake of him who had planned
+it, she would embrace such a future with resignation....  It flashed
+upon her now, with blinding clearness, that not only must the future
+be embraced, but the man....
+
+"_Tear the picture....  Forget the dream!_"  The words; of de
+Bayard's letter came back to her.
+
+Ah, well!--she had done with pictures and dreams....  For her,
+realities.  The comrade looked as though Reality had hit him
+smashingly.  She barely recognized his cheerful voice as he answered
+to some leading question put by the Curé:
+
+"I am ready and willing to act as escort to Madame.  It would be
+risky for her to attempt to return alone to Versailles."
+
+She tried to meet his sorrowful gray eyes and succeeded.  She bent
+her little head and said with an admirable assumption of newly wedded
+dignity:
+
+"Monsieur Breagh is very amiable.  I will accept his offer with
+gratitude.  When my husband learns of his great goodness, he too will
+thank him.  Alas! at this moment my poor Charles is far away!..."
+
+She sought for a tear, and found more than she had expected.  For a
+whole thunderstorm of big, bright drops burst from those wonderful
+eyes.
+
+She fell into a Windsor armchair polished by the worthy Curé's stout
+person, and dropped her arms upon the table, and her head on them,
+and sobbed, sobbed, sobbed....  The priest beckoned Breagh from the
+study.  They were going to make arrangements for the journey.
+Horrible Mère Catherine, cause of all the misery, came and cackled
+over the prone, abandoned head....  Madame was going to start early
+to-morrow morning....  Allowing for the disorganization of the
+railway service, Madame would reach Versailles by noon of the same
+day.  The husband of Madame would presently arrive to find her
+waiting for him.  Heaven would shed blessings on their joyous
+reunion.  Let Madame take her occasion of soliciting the patronage of
+St. Christopher, patron of all travelers.  The first little male
+cherub that should bless the union of Madame and Monsieur would
+naturally be christened by the name of the good Saint.
+
+
+
+
+LX
+
+They drove in a country cart to Etain over roads bestrewn for the
+most part with the _débris_ of the falling Empire, and there caught a
+train starting for Verdun.  It was crammed with wounded French
+soldiers lying on straw in trucks and horse boxes.  Women jostled one
+another at the doors of these, to supply the poor sufferers with soup
+and fruit, bread and coffee.  The news of the retirement of Bazaine
+upon Metz was in every mouth, although, thanks to the cutting by
+Uhlans of the telegraph line between Metz and Thionville, the Emperor
+did not receive the Marshal's wire until the 22nd.
+
+The Warlock had lost no time.  Already the blockade of the doomed
+fortress city was so far completed that only the most daring French
+scouts were able to worm their way through the enemy's investing
+lines.
+
+For, even as the octopus, desirous of increasing his family, throws
+off a spare tentacle which becomes another octopus, from the First
+and Second Armies of United Germany had been evolved a Fourth Army of
+Six Corps under the command of the Crown Prince of Saxony, whose
+Advance of Guard Cavalry were already over the Meuse.
+
+The Army of the Prussian Crown Prince had traversed the roads south
+of Toul and entered the basin of the Ornain.  The King of Prussia,
+with Bismarck and Moltke, had started to march on Paris through the
+dusty white plains of Champagne.
+
+His Great Headquarters had already reached Bar-le-Duc.  One of his
+scouting squadrons of Uhlans had captured a French courier at
+Commercy.  Thus Moltke had learned that the mounted regiments of
+Canrobert's Corps had been left behind at the Camp of Châlons, and
+that Paris was being placed in a state of defense to resist an
+investment expected hourly.
+
+On this very day the vast Camp had been abandoned, the Imperial
+pavilions, the mess houses, officers' quarters and kitchens were
+blazing merrily, the lines of rustic baraques usually occupied by the
+troops were marked out by crackling hedges of fire.  While MacMahon,
+at his camp near Rheims, was torn between Ministerial orders
+emanating from the Empress, insisting on the immediate relief of
+Bazaine, and his own conviction that the order of march should be
+back by the directest route to defend the menaced capital.
+
+Said the Man of Iron to Roon, whiffing a huge cigar as the steady
+downpour of rain swirled down the gutters and drenched the Bodyguard
+on duty outside the King's Headquarters at Bar-le-Duc:
+
+"We barricade the straight road that leads to Metz.  Will the fellow
+face the risks of a circuitous march leading him near the Belgian
+frontier?  I should be personally obliged to him to decide
+quickly....  One does not desire to linger in a Capua as dismal as
+this."
+
+Bismarck-Böhlen brought him a telegram.  He was about to open it when
+the Warlock hastily entered the sitting room that served as
+ante-chamber, flourishing a copy of _Le Temps_, issued in Paris on
+the previous day.
+
+"A Uhlan of the Advance has got me this paper.  He took it from the
+person of a respectable bourgeois at whose house in Cligny he and his
+comrades called to drink a drop of wine.  Judging it a welcome gift
+to me, the brave fellow rode here to bring it."
+
+"There is wine of another kind on those pages," said the Minister,
+pointing to the journal with a smile.
+
+Moltke read from the blood-stained paper:
+
+"'_The speeches delivered yesterday at the Chamber are unanimous in
+the declaration that the French people will be disgraced forever if
+the Army of the Rhine be not relieved.  The dispatches received
+during the sitting of yesterday's Privy Council, from the Prefecture
+of Police, the Ministry of War and of the Interior, were of a nature
+to cause apprehension of the keenest.  But the disposition of the
+people of Paris can be ascertained by any person whose ears are not
+stuffed with Court cotton-wool.  Do not these shouts of
+"Dethronement!"--these cries of "A Republic!  A Republic!" become
+louder every day?_'"
+
+He added:
+
+"This bears out the text of Palikao's intercepted wire of yesterday
+to the Emperor; and the second from the Empress, virtually saying:
+'Abandon Bazaine and Paris is in revolt!'..."
+
+Commented the Minister:
+
+"The Empress-Regent talks like a young woman.  Palikao argues like an
+old one--the speakers in the Chamber gabble like a pack of old
+gossips, not one of whom looks beyond the end of her own nose.  Paris
+was in revolution at the beginning of August.  She will be a
+full-blown Republic before Christmas, whether Bazaine be abandoned or
+not."
+
+Moltke said, helping himself from his silver snuffbox:
+
+"MacMahon has not the courage to resist a consensus of quackers.  He
+will march east and uncover the Paris road.  I may say I had already
+drawn out private tables of marches which would thwart him in any
+case.  What have you there?  A wire in Secret Code?"
+
+Bismarck answered:
+
+"It is in Russian, with which language the sender knows me to be
+acquainted.  He is an agent of our Secret Service, who combines the
+trade of wool stapler with the profession of notary, and holds the
+post of Sub-Prefect in the town of Rethel.  He communicates by
+private wire that the Emperor has telegraphed the Prince Imperial
+that the junction with Bazaine will not be attempted, and that the
+march of the Army of Châlons will be directed upon Sedan.  He states
+that when he quitted Rheims to-day the Imperial Headquarters had left
+for Tourteron...."
+
+"_Ei, ei_!  Is he trustworthy?" asked the Warlock, putting away the
+silver box.
+
+The Minister answered succinctly:
+
+"The intelligence he supplies is usually worth the money he is paid
+for it."
+
+He went on:
+
+"He has got into touch with the Roumanian Straz, who has not received
+cash for some dirty work he did in July at Sigmaringen, and who
+judges it advisable--Napoleon Bonaparte Grammont & Co. being
+insolvent--to transfer his services to the opposite firm....  He adds
+that Straz possesses, or says that he possesses, free access to the
+Prince Imperial.  He appears to think our interests would be served
+by kidnapping the boy."
+
+"Would they?" asked Moltke.
+
+The Minister raised his shaggy brows, and answered smilingly:
+
+"You are acquainted with the Countess's views in connection with the
+youngest Bonaparte.  If the Queen does not want him to hand her tea
+and comb her lap dog, why should I not take M. Lulu home as a present
+to my wife?"
+
+"You are jesting!" said the Warlock, shaking the wise old head in the
+scratch wig.  "You have told this stinking rogue that decent German
+men make not war upon women or children....  When the time comes that
+we are guilty of such things, United Germany will be near her fall."
+
+"Her barometer predicts a rise," said the Minister dryly, "at this
+particular moment."
+
+"With God's help, we shall fulfill the prediction!" returned the
+Warlock, going to a table where lay spread a map on a comprehensive
+scale of an inch to a mile.  "We will talk over this with the King,
+when the Crown Prince and Von Blumenthal come over from Ligny.  It
+will be wiser to delay the movement on Paris, and hit this weather
+cock of a Marshal with all our forces.  So, he marches his Army on
+the Meuse!  _So'o!_..."
+
+And he hummed a bar of the little song about the weeping flowers and
+the shining starlets, as he set the mental machinery in motion that
+resulted in the Grand Right Wheel.
+
+
+
+
+LXI
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+LXII
+
+How strangest of the strange, to love a person so nearly a
+stranger!... What had Monica's brother been thinking of?  In January
+they had met, and parted coldly ... in August they had met again, and
+had spent together not quite three days....  But what days! to brand
+themselves upon the memory.  After that morning on the bloody field
+of Gravelotte--that night spent in the woodshed behind the cottage of
+Madame Guyot--that gray dawn when they had walked, hand clasped in
+hand, behind the bearer of the Blessed Sacrament, could He and She be
+ever anything but friends?...  Close friends ... dear comrades,
+linked by indissoluble bonds of memories ... of perils shared, of
+experiences unforgettable by both....  What would Life be like when
+one had to face it shorn of the sympathy and companionship of
+Monica's brother?...  Juliette did not dare to question.  The thought
+of such loneliness was enough to freeze the heart.
+
+Meanwhile, here was Madame Potier, heated and triumphant, proclaiming
+Madame served with the best that could be got.  A lentil soup--an
+omelette with ham, coffee, and fruit from the garden.  One would do
+better later, let Madame only wait....  The apartment of Madame
+Tessier had been got ready for Madame ... the small room usually
+occupied by M. Charles might be prepared for the Belgian
+gentleman....  Or--since that room was dismantled for cleaning
+purposes, and Madame Potier herself occupied the apartment adjoining
+... would Monsieur mind sleeping at the garden cottage?  She would
+guarantee there cleanliness and more than comfort.... Was not the
+bedroom hers and her poor Potier's?...  Had they not slept in that
+bed for ten years past?...  Ah, wherever her poor Potier might now be
+sleeping, he would never find the equal of his own bed....
+
+The proposal, possibly prompted by discretion on the part of the
+excellent Madame Potier, was gratefully accepted by Breagh.  And from
+that hour, under the sheltering wing of the hectic little caretaker,
+began a little idyll of happiness for two young people, who asked
+nothing better than that it should last.
+
+It was exquisite autumn weather.  They rose early, and passed out of
+the iron gate together, and so through the quiet streets to Mass at
+the great church of Notre Dame in the Rue St. Genevieve.  Or they
+would attend it at the Chapel in the Convent of Carmelites that is
+now the Petit College in conjunction with a colossal Lycée.  Then
+they would come back to _déjeuner_, laid on a table under the trees
+on the lawn, and afterward they would work in the garden, or read, or
+talk.  But they read no newspapers, and for the best part of two
+months they never exchanged a word about the War.
+
+It was the treatment devised by P. C. Breagh, who had failed of his
+practicing degree in Medicine, and under this _régime_ the shadow
+that had rested upon Juliette lifted day by day.  He had taken Madame
+Potier into his confidence, and she entered into a conspiracy for the
+better nourishing of one whom she firmly believed to be the wife of
+her master.  She dragooned Juliette into drinking a vast quantity of
+milk, and the girl's haggard outlines began to fill out, and her
+dreadful dreams ceased to haunt her.  Sleep returned, strength
+revived, her grief for the lost father, unassuaged, became less
+poignant.  She could look back upon the happiness of their old life
+together without the anguish that rends the heart.
+
+Daily she doled out to Madame Potier the small sum necessary for
+housekeeping.  Under the able management of the hectic little woman,
+a very little money went a long way.  Such butter, such cheese of
+Brie, such excellent bread, milk and cream, such country chickens,
+such fruit, and vegetables from the garden, were daily set upon the
+table, that a honeymooning Prince and Princess could not have been
+better served.  The reward of Madame Potier was to see her handiwork
+vanish under the combined onslaughts of Madame Charles and
+Monsieur....  She waited upon them at table, and joined in their
+conversation, after the inconvenient habit of her simple kind.
+
+As, still after the habit of her kind, she conceived an affection for
+her young mistress, she developed cunning of a wholly lovable sort.
+The first time she heard her idol laugh, she clapped her hands with
+rapture.  Another day, in pursuance of a stratagem she had
+elaborated, she placed upon the dinner table a dish, with the blatant
+boast:
+
+"My poor Potier used to declare by all that is sacred that no living
+woman could cook _ragoût_ of veal except his wife!"
+
+She whipped off the cover.  Madame Charles helped Monsieur in
+silence, and unwittingly P. C. Breagh played into Madame Potier's
+hands.  For he sniffed approval, and said, as she set his sizzling
+hot plate before him:
+
+"M. Potier was quite right!  If the woman lives who can cook a better
+_ragoût_, I've never met her, Madame!"
+
+Juliette's eyes sent forth blue sparks as she sat erect at the head
+of the table.  Her sloping shoulders sloped terribly, her upper lip
+was preternaturally long.  She helped herself to a very little of the
+dish before her, and began to eat without perceptible enthusiasm.
+Madame Potier stood back and watched her, her red hands on the hips
+that were embraced by her apron of blue stuff.  She said:
+
+"Madame Charles will perhaps have forgotten the _menus_ she used to
+prepare for Madame Tessier and M. le Colonel."  She crossed herself
+at the mention of the dead man's name.
+
+Juliette's blue eyes filled, and the stiffness went out of her.  She
+laid down her knife and fork.  P. C. Breagh scowled savage reproof at
+Madame Potier.  But Madame, at first overwhelmed, recovered herself.
+She went on, as though she had never broken off:
+
+"_Menus_ composed of excellent--but excellent dishes!...  What a pity
+to think that Madame Charles cannot make them now!--Look you, to cook
+well is an art that may be easily forgotten!...  Hey, Madame is not
+eating to-day!"
+
+Madame said in accents that were dignified and frigid:
+
+"There is a little too much sugar in the _ragoût_, dear Madame
+Potier; otherwise it is, as Monsieur says--excellent!"
+
+"'Sugar.' ... But one doesn't put sugar----"  P. C. Breagh was
+beginning, when both the women turned on him and rent him,
+figuratively.
+
+"Who does not put sugar?  Will Monsieur answer me?"
+
+The piercing shriek was Madame Potier's.  And the silvery accents of
+Madame Charles took up the burden, saying:
+
+"Dear Monsieur Breagh, the delicate brown of coloring that pleases
+you--the suavity that corrects the sharpness of the salt--these are
+due to sugar--burnt and added at the last moment.  But one should use
+it with delicacy, or the effect is absolutely lost!"
+
+"Can you really cook?" he asked, in his senseless, masculine fashion,
+smiling rather foolishly and staring at her with his honest gray eyes.
+
+And Juliette answered with a trill of delicate, airy laughter:
+
+"Do you find it so incredible?  Well, I will not boast now, but
+presently--you shall see!"
+
+Next morning, when Madame Potier returned from market, with an
+unusually heavy basket, Madame Charles donned a stuff apron of the
+good woman's, and vanished with her into the kitchen, whence their
+voices could be heard chattering as though a particularly
+shrill-voiced pea-hen were singing a duet with a reed warbler or
+crested wren.  The twelve o'clock _déjeuner_ was memorable, the five
+o'clock dinner a marvel, from the _croûte au pot_ to the _sole au
+gratin_, and from the sole to the _filet aux champignons_!  There
+were _beignets_ afterward--crisp, adorable, light as bubbles.  P. C.
+Breagh ate hugely, and praised, while the excellent Potier chuckled.
+Her work, she told herself, sat at the head of the table, in this
+slender creature with the wild-rose cheeks and the beaming, sparkling
+eyes.
+
+Juliette had found in a trunk full of garments that had been
+committed by her to Madame Tessier's keeping a simple dinner dress of
+thin filmy black.  Jet gleamed in the trimming of the skirt and
+polonaise, and upon the elbow sleeves and about the V-shaped neck of
+the bodice, the somber gleam of it threw into marvelous relief the
+ivory whiteness of the young, fresh skin.  Her dainty slimness was
+emphasized by the absence of all ornament.  Her marvelous black hair,
+fine as cobweb, silky without glossiness, crowned her chiseled
+temples with its dusky coils.  When she lifted a slender arm to
+thrust in a hairpin more firmly, the sunset reflection from the sky
+caught the fragile hand and reddened the delicate palm of it, and the
+tiny nails that shone like rosy, polished shells.
+
+She did not look as though she had been toiling in a kitchen among
+casseroles and stew pots.  Rather an elfin Queen of Faerie--a Titania
+robed in cobweb and moonbeams, whose smile sent a breeze of happiness
+flowing through the sad, empty places in one's heart.  For the heart
+of the young man who loved her grew the emptier the more her
+sweetness filled it, and realized its own sorrow the more she showed
+herself to be naturally a daughter of joy.
+
+She belonged to Charles Tessier, and all these sparkling looks and
+lovely flushes, these sweet, unconscious provocations of gesture and
+tone and inflection were for him--and no other man....  This
+remembrance was always alive in Breagh to rear a barrier between him
+and his Infanta....  And other knowledge, too, was his, held in
+common with Madame Potier and many thousands of other people, that he
+had not dared to share with Juliette.
+
+But to-night he had realized that the truth could no longer be kept
+from her.  She was cured.  There could hardly be a relapse into the
+old conditions, even when she learned the dreadful truth.  And even
+if risk there were, she must be told that truth by him to-night, or
+hear it from the lips of some stranger.  It was a miracle that she
+had remained so long in ignorance of the fate of France--her beloved
+France.
+
+"For seven weeks we have played together like two children on the
+brink of an open grave!" he said to himself.  "Have I been right or
+wrong?  Only Time can tell!"
+
+Madame Potier had clattered out of the room, and across the hall, and
+down the kitchen stairs to make the coffee.  Behind those little
+black beady eyes of hers she hoarded the knowledge of well-nigh
+unspeakable things.  She had been faithful in guarding them from the
+knowledge of Juliette.  But now she had said to P. C. Breagh: "You
+must speak to-night, Monsieur!  We have done our best, but we two
+cannot keep from the poor little lady that to-day the King of Prussia
+will enter Versailles!"
+
+She had given him a look as she had left the dining room that had
+said: "Remember!"  P. C. Breagh, nerving himself to the ugly task,
+felt like one who seethes the kid in its mother's milk.
+
+As he pondered, something cool and fragrant struck him on the
+forehead.  He picked up the red carnation that had fallen upon the
+dessert plate before him.  He inhaled its fragrance lingeringly,
+holding it so as to hide his mouth.  Over it his troubled gray eyes
+scanned the face that was all alight with sparkling gayety.  Why had
+Juliette thrown the flower?  Why had she challenged him?  She, who
+had up to this moment been decorous and reserved almost to stiffness.
+Was it true that in every woman lives a coquette?
+
+She was asking herself the same question, pierced by the conviction
+that her grandmother would have been horrified.  But it had been
+impossible not to hurl the perfumed missile at the brooding face with
+its smear of dark-red meeting eyebrows, and the short, square nose
+and the pleasant lips.
+
+He had on the shabby suit of brown, for his funds did not permit of a
+visit to the tailor.  His new linen was spotless, and under the
+narrow turned-down collar he wore a loose-ended black silk tie.  The
+bow was pulled out upon one side so much longer than upon the other
+that Mademoiselle's feminine fingers itched to adjust it.  How
+careless he was in matters of dress, this adorable young Englishman!
+
+She was restless this evening.  He had aroused her curiosity.  Some
+hours after she had retired upon the previous night she had risen,
+and stolen barefooted to the open window that looked upon the moonlit
+garden, and parted the thin curtains that hung before it, and peeped
+out....
+
+There was not a breath of air to bring the autumn leaves down.  A
+white dew sparkled on the turf that Breagh kept closely cut.  The
+countless clocks of the white town of royal palaces tinkled and
+chimed and belled and boomed out the witching hour of two.
+
+Her room was on the east front, facing the garden....  A downward
+glance showed her that Breagh was pacing there.
+
+Up and down, backward and forward, leaving black prints of footsteps
+upon the lawn that was all be-gemmed with dewdrops.  The presence of
+so many reservoirs makes Versailles more than a trifle damp.
+
+How rash!...  How unwise!  Did the young man desire a fever?
+Juliette, accustomed of old to subject her Colonel, for his health's
+sake, to a daughterly surveillance, had a lecture ready on the tip of
+her tongue.  She might have spoken, had not the patroling figure come
+to a standstill, and looked up wistfully at her shrouded window, and
+said something in a low, dogged, dejected tone, and shaken his head
+and gone away.
+
+"I've got to tell!--and I don't want to tell!--and I don't know how
+to tell, that's the bother of it!...  Give it up!...  For another
+night!"
+
+Without the muttered words, the glance and the headshake would have
+conveyed his doubt and his perplexity, to the subject of his sore
+reflections, returning in a flutter of strange, sweet wonder, and
+expectation, to her recently vacated couch.
+
+You may imagine how she tossed and turned, seeing his miserable gray
+eyes looking at her out of the shadows in the corners.  Those eyes
+could blaze in tigerish fashion when he was angry, for she had
+seen....  When she had crept from under my Cousin Boisset's death
+bed, they had flamed with a wonderful light of joy and triumph, and
+when he had caught her fiercely to his breast....
+
+Oh! to be snatched again into those strong young arms, and held
+against the heart that shook one with its beating....  Was it wicked
+to feel that one hated Charles Tessier?  Was it unnatural, in these
+days of mourning, to think of anyone except her lost Colonel?...  Was
+it not exceedingly unmaidenly to determine that Monica's brother
+should say whatever it was he had got to say, and did not want to
+say, and did not know how to say, no later than the following
+night?...
+
+True--she had purposefully conveyed to him the impression that she
+was married, but she would explain that she had meant that she would
+be by and by....  Alas! what would her grandmother, that sainted
+woman, have said regarding this lapse from the way of truth?
+
+
+
+
+LXIII
+
+But she certainly had not planned to throw the carnation.  The
+missile hurled, she had been seized with paralyzing fright.  The
+shade of her grandmother seemed to rise, appalling in its shocked
+propriety.  One could almost hear her saying: "_My unhappy child, you
+have become more like your mother than I could have believed, had I
+not seen!..._"
+
+Now in sheer desperation she mocked on, dissembling her terror.
+
+"What is the matter?  Why are you so dull and _distrait_?  Are you
+tired of living shut up in a garden?  Answer me, I pray you,
+Monsieur!"
+
+He looked at her, and his cleft chin squared itself, and his broad
+red eyebrows lowered into a line of determination.  He said doggedly:
+
+"The happiest time of my life has been spent shut up in this garden!
+I believe you know that very well!"
+
+She burst into silver laughter and cried to him teasingly:
+
+"But you did not look at all happy when I peeped at you in the night
+from my window.  See!  Thus, with the hands miles deep in the
+pockets, and the shoulders elevated to the tips of the ears!"
+
+She jumped up and mimicked the slouching gait of the midnight
+cogitator, brilliantly and with fidelity, parading between the dinner
+table and the long windows that opened toward the lawn.  He
+recognized himself, and reddened, while he laughed with vexation.  He
+had never before seen her in this mood of Puck-like mischief.  He had
+yet to become acquainted with another phase of Juliette.
+
+"Did you learn to act so well at your Convent?" he asked her, and she
+answered with sudden gravity:
+
+"Acting can never be learned, Monsieur....  It is a gift, of the good
+angels or the bad ones, which can be brought to perfection by use.
+To 'make' an artist of the stage is not possible.  He or she is born
+... and that is all I know...."  She added: "When I make my
+appearance at the Théâtre Français, they shall send you a _billet de
+faveur_.  Then you shall see acting.  I promise you!"
+
+She was more like Queen Titania than ever as she held up her fairy
+finger, and smiled and sparkled at the bewildered young man.
+
+"For example, if MM. les Directeurs assign to me the part of a
+grandmother of sixty, do you think I shall put on wrinkles with
+paint? ... _Non, merci_!  The true artist says to herself, '_I am
+old!_' and she is old....  '_I am ugly!_' and she becomes hideous.
+'_I am wicked!_'  See here!...  Is this a face to regard with love,
+Monsieur?"
+
+The last sentence had been croaked, rather than spoken.  No Japanese
+mask of a witch could well have been more furrowed, puckered,
+scowling, or malignant than the face that had been Titania's a moment
+back.  Breagh called out in protest, half angry, half amused, wholly
+fascinated; and Oberon's bright Queen came back again to say:
+
+"Or I can be stupid, very stupid--if that will please you!...
+Gentlemen sometimes admire stupid girls....  We had one at the
+Convent--your countrywoman and a great heiress.  Miss Smizz--the
+daughter of Smizz and Co., Tea Merchants, of Mincing Lane."
+
+She banished all expression save a smile of absolute fatuity, puffed
+out her cheeks, narrowed her eyelids, permitting her eyes to twinkle
+through the merest slits.  She giggled inanely, and said, combining
+the consonantal thickness of catarrh with the gobbling of a
+hen-turkey...
+
+"All the eggstras....  Whad does expedse battere whed you've got a
+Forchud to fall bag od?  Besides, Ba says I bust barry iddo the
+Beerage, ad accoblishbeds are dod usually expegded of a doblebad's
+wife!"
+
+She added, in her own voice, summarily banishing Miss Smith, her
+expectations, and her splutter:
+
+"Do not be vexed with me, Monsieur Breagh, I beg of you!...  I am
+perhaps a little excited.  There is something strange in the air....
+I have a humming in my ears as though great crowds of people were
+talking very softly....  What is it?" she asked in bewilderment,
+pressing the fine points of her small fingers into her temples.
+"What is the matter with me to-night?..."
+
+Then P. C. Breagh spoke out, in a tone that hurled a challenge to
+Destiny:
+
+"There is nothing the matter with you!...  That is the glory of it!
+You were ill, and now you are well....  You can laugh again, and
+sleep again, and cook a dinner and help to eat it....  You have made
+capital use of your time!...  For we came here on the twenty-first of
+August, and this is the fifth of October.  We have been shut up in a
+garden, as you say yourself, for more than six weeks!..."
+
+"Can it be possible?"
+
+She looked at him intently and realized his earnestness.  He answered
+with a glow of pride in his work:
+
+"Fact!  And in all the time you have never seen a newspaper or asked
+a question about the War.  Even when you have heard the great guns
+firing from the forts below Paris--Issy and Vanves and Montrouge and
+the rest--you never said a word that showed you noticed....  Do you
+know why?..."
+
+His voice wavered exultantly.  She looked at him and slightly shook
+her head.
+
+"No!..."
+
+"Because I willed you to.  By George! there are times when I believe
+that even yet I'd make a doctor.  Mental suggestion was the line I
+took with you...."  He rubbed his hands.  "Not that I could have done
+anything without the help of Madame Potier--first-class little
+woman!--regular brick that she is!...  You see, your brain had sucked
+up all the trouble it was capable of holding.  You wanted rest....
+Well, you've had it, thank God!  Night after night I've walked up and
+down, backward and forward, on the lawn, just as you saw me doing
+last night, saying: 'Sleep!  Forget!  You have my orders to!"
+
+The tone of mastery thrilled, even while the muscles of her mouth
+twitched with repressed laughter.  He was beautiful in her eyes as he
+leaned forward smiling at her.  She said, repressing her tears, and
+concealing her admiration:
+
+"But last night you did not say 'Sleep!' but something else,
+Monsieur...."
+
+There was a swift change in him, telling her that for once he was not
+listening.  His eyes were alert, his ear eagerly drank in a sound
+composed of many sounds that grew louder as they came more near.  Now
+the whole room was full of the trampling of horses and the fainter
+clink of spur and scabbard and bridle....  Cavalry were passing up
+one of the great avenues south of the Rue de Provence--not the Avenue
+of St. Cloud--probably the Rue des Chantiers--there was a distant
+roar of cheers....  Then in one little oasis of silence came the
+rolling of carriages, and then the walls shivered with the roaring of
+lusty lungs:
+
+"_Hoch der König!  Hoch der Kronprinz!_"--and the shouts were drowned
+in a great burst of martial music, and the trampling of men and
+horses, mingled with the beat of drums and the blare of trumpets,
+rolled on tumultuously again.
+
+The blood ebbed from Juliette's cheeks and lips to her heart as she
+listened.  Then the double doors of the dining room were butted open
+with the corner of a wooden coffee tray, and Madame Potier appeared
+with a steaming pot and two cups.  She was pale round the hectic
+patches that blazed in her thin face.  Her black eyes leaped to
+Breagh's with an eager question in them ... "_Have you told her?_"
+... and he answered with an almost imperceptible shake of the head.
+
+Then before either of them knew, Juliette had risen.  She went to the
+little woman and kissed her on the cheek.  She said, taking one of
+the gnarled work-worn hands in one of hers and holding out the other
+to Carolan:
+
+"Dear friends, to whom I owe so much, tell me now what in your great
+compassion you have kept from me.  For I think the time has come when
+I must hear!"
+
+The time had come, indeed, with the ring of Prussian cavalry hoofs
+upon the ancient cobblestones, and the roll of the carriages that
+came with them.  And before either of those the girl addressed could
+speak in answer, the resonant sound of a Prussian trumpet pierced
+their silence:
+
+"_Clear the way!  Clear the way!  Here comes the King!_"
+
+And followed a cry, pitiful as the wail of a hare in a gin trap:
+"Those are Prussians!" ... and another scream, shrill and thin and
+clear....  Then a crash!...  Madame Potier had dropped her coffee
+tray....  Before the hot steam of the spilled liquid rose up from the
+Tessier carpet, the small hand Breagh had clasped was suddenly,
+violently snatched from him.  He sprang to his feet, but Madame
+Potier had been quicker than he.  She had caught the girl round the
+waist, and now wrestled with her....  The silent, desperate strife
+was horrible.  The slender black-clad figure writhed for freedom like
+a snake....  Then all at once the life seemed to go out of it....
+They carried her to the sofa and laid her down....
+
+"Monsieur should have told her!" Madame Potier said angrily.  "Why
+leave it to the Prussians to break the news?..."  Tears were running
+down her cheeks as she unfastened the girl's dress, and rubbed the
+limp hands, while Breagh dropped Cognac between the little teeth, a
+drop or two at a time.
+
+And presently Juliette was looking at them, not wildly, and Madame
+Potier was answering: "It was nothing!...  Madame was startled into
+an attack of faintness when I was so clumsy as to drop the coffee
+tray.  Now I shall go and get more, and Monsieur will talk quietly to
+Madame as she lies there.  She must hear everything that we have kept
+from her....  Yes, yes! that is quite understood!"
+
+And she clumped away, with a backward glance of disdain directed at
+the masculine boggler, and Breagh drew a chair near the sofa where
+his wan Infanta lay, and sat down and told her all.
+
+Red sunset flooded the autumn garden as he talked.  Not a leaf
+stirred, hardly a bird uttered a nooning note.  But the strange sound
+that had haunted not only the ears of Juliette went on incessantly.
+It was the sighing and whispering and muttering of the vast crowds
+that had filled the Rue des Chantiers behind the lines of troops to
+witness the entrance of the conquerors, and now gorged the great
+Place of the Prefecture (above whose entrance flaunted the standard
+of the Hohenzollerns)--filled the upper end of the Avenue de
+Paris--and surged over the vast expanse of the Place d'Armes, beating
+in black and restless human waves against the lofty blue and golden
+railings of the Royal Château, above whose golden dome floated the
+black-and-white Prussian Standard and the white Flag with the red
+Geneva Cross.
+
+We know what he had to tell her....  The false step of MacMahon, the
+unavailing attempt of Bazaine to break out of Metz, the conflict on
+the Meuse, ending in defeat and the loss of 7,000 prisoners with guns
+and transport.  The flight and escape of the Emperor to the fortress
+city of Sedan....  The battle between the ill-led, unfed, dispirited
+French forces and the Three Armies.  The taking of 20,000 French
+prisoners, the wound of MacMahon, leading to his resignation of the
+chief command into the hands of General Wimpffen, summoned from his
+command in Algeria in time to capitulate.  The pitiable surrender of
+the Emperor's sword to the King of Prussia.  His transport into
+Belgium as a prisoner of War.  The flight of the Empress from the
+Tuileries.  The formation at Paris of the New Government of National
+Defense.  The entry of the King of Prussia into Rheims, and the
+arrival of the First and Third Armies in force before Paris.  The
+fight upon the heights of Châtillon--the defeat of Ducrot by a
+Bavarian Division--the German advance upon Nemours and Pitiviers--the
+investment of the capital, now encircled with an iron ring.
+
+For three days the Crown Prince had been established with his Staff
+at the Prefecture.  This day had seen the Great Headquarters of the
+Prussian King removed to Versailles, from Baron Rothschild's Castle
+of Ferrières....
+
+Truly it had been time to break the news to Juliette.  She lay still
+during the recital, only quivering now and then.  She drank the
+coffee when Madame Potier brought it, and thanked the faithful soul
+affectionately.  When the gas lamps were lighted, and the shutters
+shut, she bade P. C. Breagh good night in a faint whisper, and gave
+him both hands, saying with a liquid glance:
+
+"Thank you, my friend!..."
+
+He whispered as he kissed the little fingers:
+
+"You will sleep to-night, will you not?..."
+
+And she nodded in assent.  But when he had gone to his bed at the
+cottage, the old terrible thoughts came crowding back.
+
+That electrifying blast of glorious sound from the silver instrument
+of the Great Staff trumpeter had wakened and brought them like
+hornets buzzing and stinging about her ears....  She longed for her
+friend, but he had departed.  And the loneliness was too terrible to
+bear.
+
+She caught up a little white shawl that she had brought with her, and
+often wore when walking in the garden upon chilly evenings, or going
+to Mass in the early mornings, before the sunshine had warmed the
+air.  One turn of the wrist draped it faultlessly about her head and
+body.  Thus shielded, she went into the hall, and laid her hand upon
+the lock of the door.
+
+As she did so, cavalry horses ridden at a sharp trot came clattering
+down the cobbled street.  They were pulled up outside the Tessier
+mansion.  There was an imperious tug at the gate bell.  She waited
+for the opening of the kitchen door.
+
+Then she heard it unlocked, and the clatter of Madame Potier's clogs
+upon the terrace.  _Klop--klop--klop!_ they crossed the leads,
+descended the three steps that led to the gravel walk, and went on to
+the iron gate.  It was locked, as always, in the absence of Madame
+Tessier.  Presently the keys clashed, the lock scrooped back from the
+mortise, and the hinges uttered a protesting cry....
+
+Then the harsh tones of a man, speaking French with a frightful
+German accent, turned the listening girl to ice.  There was an
+exclamation from Madame Potier, a rejoinder in the stranger's
+gutturals.  A horse trampled.  The rough voice of the rider swore at
+the brute in German.  Then there was a clatter of boots upon the
+pavement, with a great clinking of spurs and scabbard, and the
+now-dismounted rider said in his infamous French jargon:
+
+"Go you before and open!  His Excellency is coming in!"
+
+Terrified, Madame Potier obeyed ... scuttling across the terrace like
+a frightened beetle.  Juliette, paralyzed with horror, heard the
+heavy spurred footsteps crunch and jingle up the gravel walk and
+ascend the steps to the hall door.  Almost directly, as little Madame
+Potier darted panting up the stairs from the kitchen, the hall
+doorbell clanged a deafening peal.
+
+A carriage had rolled down the Rue de Provence, and stopped before
+the smaller gate, ere the doorbell's iron echoes had ceased shouting
+through the house of the Tessiers.  There were other voices at the
+gate, other footsteps upon the gravel....  They mounted the steps.  A
+resonant, unforgotten voice said to the ringer in German:
+
+"The Herr Intendant General may spare himself the trouble....  I will
+interview the people of the house myself!"
+
+The person addressed replied in the harsh tones that had terrified
+Madame Potier:
+
+"But supposing Your Excellency be met with some insolence?..."
+
+The resonant voice answered with a smile in it: "In that case, Herr
+Intendant General, my Excellency will take the risk.  There are only
+women in the house, and should they offer violence, I have Count
+Hatzfeldt and Count Bismarck-Böhlen here!..."
+
+There was a laugh--gay, mellow, and careless--and a young man's voice
+answered:
+
+"Your Excellency may safely rely on our protection!"
+
+There was another laugh.  Under cover of it, Madame Potier hissed
+into the head folds of the white shawl:
+
+"They have quartered the Prussian Chancellor and the Foreign Office
+upon us.  That is what the sacred brute in the big boots and
+spectacles shouted, when I went down to open the front gate....  What
+is the Prussian Foreign Office?"
+
+From the white folds of the shawl a sibilant whisper hissed at her:
+
+"It is a man.  They call him Count Bismarck.  Now if you love me, be
+quiet, and watch and listen.  He shall ring the bell with his own
+hand....  Then I open the door!..."
+
+"But, Madame!..." whispered the distracted caretaker.
+
+No verbal answer....  The white shawl pulled closer, shrouding round
+the slender form and girlish features.  A little hand, firm and
+unfaltering, ready upon the latch of the door.
+
+Poor Potier whimpered....
+
+"Madame Charles....  My child! my treasure! for the love of Christ
+and Mary!...  Tell me what you are going to do!"
+
+The bell rang again, with a new and imperious hand upon it.  She well
+knew whose was the hand.  And the snow-water in her veins became
+liquid fire.  She threw open the hall door and stepped back to admit
+the Man of Iron.
+
+He stood upon the doorsteps like the house's master, a huge
+dominating figure, dressed as she had seen him on the battlefield of
+Gravelotte, in his high black, pewter-buttoned military frock and
+white peaked Cuirassier cap, riding cords, and great black jack-boots
+with long steel spurs.  He was powdered with dust as a man newly come
+off a journey, though his boots were clean, for he had driven in a
+carriage from Ferriéres.  Upon the step below him stood Count
+Hatzfeldt, his First Secretary, a man of thirty, tall,
+broad-shouldered, and _débonnaire_, wearing, as did Bismarck-Böhlen,
+the semi-military Foreign Office undress.  The lean trap-jawed
+personage in a dark uniform with velvet facings, whom we must
+recognize as the Intendant General, waited in the background, glaring
+through his spectacles at the tardy portress in the white shawl, and
+the peaked face and flaring black eyes of little Madame Potier, who
+stood beside her mistress as ready to spit and scratch for her sake
+as a pussy cat to defend its young.
+
+There was no pause.  The dominating figure stepped into the hall.
+His great Cuirassier sword clanked on the threshold.  He touched the
+peak of his cap with his bare right hand, and said, looking down from
+his great height upon the women:
+
+"This is the house of the Famille Tessier?"
+
+One of the women, who was swaddled in a white shawl, dropped him a
+stiff little middle-class reverence.  Behind her, the other bobbed a
+serving woman's curtsy.  He went on, addressing White Shawl as the
+superior:
+
+"This house, Madame, has been selected as the official residence of
+the Prussian Foreign Office.  We shall pay you an adequate sum for
+our accommodation, and remain here some weeks ... possibly three."
+
+He glanced at Hatzfeldt, and said with a flicker of sardonic humor
+playing in his heavy blue eyes, and about the corners of the deeply
+cut mouth that was masked by the heavy iron-gray mustache:
+
+"Though the actual duration of the visit depends--not upon
+ourselves--but upon the decision of the United German Powers, and the
+position which they shall decide to take up with regard to Conditions
+of Peace.  We are not the invited guests of France, whose stay can be
+cut short because our manners do not prepossess our hostess.  We came
+because we thought it advisable ...  we will go when it is convenient
+to depart!"
+
+"If Jules Faure could hear Your Excellency!..." said Bismarck-Böhlen,
+grinning.
+
+"He would cast up his fine eyes more tragically than he did at
+Ferrières," said Hatzfeldt, "when the three words, '_Forfeiture of
+Territory_,' drew from them so many patriotic tears...."
+
+"He is a weeper," said the Minister, pulling off his left glove, "and
+Wimpffen was a posturer, with his '_Moi, soldat de l'Armée
+Français_'--and the Duke of FitzJames is a manufacturer of
+bugaboos....  Our German caricaturists should draw him as a pavement
+artist, holding the hat beside a horrible red-and-yellow chalk
+picture of our atrocious cruelties in Bazeilles."
+
+
+
+
+LXIV
+
+We know that Bazeilles had been on the thirty-first of August a town
+of 2,000 inhabitants, mostly weavers, gathered about the ancient
+château that sheltered the boyhood of the great Turenne.  Bazeilles
+had not observed the Law of the Neutrality of the non-combatant.  The
+village had formed the extreme right of the French position on the
+day of the Battle of Sedan.  Lebrun's Corps had occupied it, and its
+inhabitants had been seized with the fighting fever, and had helped
+to hold back a Bavarian Division for nearly six hours.  Elderly
+civilians armed with antiquated rifles had displayed desperate
+bravery.  One old woman, possessed of an ancient horse pistol, is
+said to have shot down three of the enemy.  The men, their women and
+children, were now cinders mixed with heaps of calcined brickbats.
+The grim lesson had been taught very thoroughly.  Bazeilles served as
+an object-lesson on Prussian methods throughout the remainder of the
+War.
+
+"_I will remember Bazeilles!_" had flashed through the young head
+that was swaddled in white woolen.  "_My friend shall not forget to
+tell me what was done there!_"
+
+But the imperious hand of the Minister was upon the door of the
+billiard room.  She saw it summarily thrown open.  He went in,
+followed by Hatzfeldt, Bismarck-Böhlen at their heels.
+
+"Capital!" he said to them.  "We will have this arranged as a Bureau
+for the Councilors, the dispatch secretaries, and the cipherers.
+What is this?"  He went to the glass door that led into the winter
+garden, looked through, and commented: "One could smoke a cigar here
+after dinner in wet weather; very well, it seems to me!"
+
+
+The owner of the quick ears sheltered by the shawl of white woolen
+understood but little German, as she had previously said to her
+absent comrade.  But what slight lore she had in the abhorred tongue
+had been gained in conversation with a Prussian mistress.  She found
+that, thanks to the enemy's clear, melodious diction, she had no
+great difficulty in comprehending the substance of what he said.
+
+His long heavy strides carried him next into the drawing-room, that
+apartment destined to become famous in history as the seat of the
+various negotiations which led to the treaties with the States of
+South Germany, the proclamation of the King of Prussia as German
+Emperor, and later, to the surrender of the City of Paris, and the
+settlement of the Conditions of Peace.  The simply furnished,
+medium-sized room boasted a few mediocre oil paintings, a cottage
+piano, a sofa, some easy-chairs, and wall mirrors framed in
+handsomely wrought ormolu.  Upon a little table against the wall
+stood an old-world timepiece, surmounted by a bronze figure with
+fiendish attributes, which engaged his attention curiously.  His
+great laugh burst out, as he contemplated the grotesque.
+
+"Now," he said, his voice still shaken by amusement, "if that
+malignant little demon be a model of the guardian spirit of the
+Famille Tessier, the Socialists and Ultramontane will be of opinion
+that I have come to the right shop!"
+
+The young men laughed at the jest uproariously.  He joined them,
+crushing down their lighter merriment with a mirthful giant's
+thunderous "Ha, ha!..."  Then the double doors of the drawing-room
+opened.  He came out with his followers into the hall place,
+demanding of little Madame Potier in fluent French whether gas was
+laid on in the rooms above:
+
+"I think it probable, for you are a luxurious people in your habits,
+even down to the _bourgeoisie_ and peasantry of France.  At home, I
+am accustomed to go to bed with a candle, and blow it out when I get
+between the sheets.  But here in Gallia I shall do as the Gauls!"
+
+"There is gas in the bedrooms, Monseigneur!" shrilled White Shawl.
+
+"So!"  He looked down from his great height upon the speaker.  She
+caught up a box of matches from the hall table and thrust it into
+Madame Potier's shaking hand....
+
+"Go up quickly.  Light the gas in the bedrooms.  Monseigneur wishes
+to examine them all!"  She added in her shrill voice: "They are in
+use at the moment, but can be vacated and got ready for the
+occupation of Monseigneur in something less than half an hour!"  She
+broke off to shriek to the ascending Madame Potier....  "Quicker,
+Jeannette!  Thou art always as slow as a tortoise!...  But I come
+myself!..."  And with a halting, shuffling gait which made Count
+Bismarck-Böhlen grin, and even the polished Hatzfeldt put up his
+eyeglass, she jerked across the beeswaxed parquet of the hall, and
+mounted the gray-and-red drugget-covered stairs.
+
+What virtue lies in contrasts!  When Juliette de Bayard walked, you
+learned what poetry could be in simple motion.  Her skirts had a
+rhythmic swing and flow.  Those little feet of hers made twenty steps
+to the stride of an ordinary English girl.  At Mass, when folded in
+her white School veil, she advanced to the Communion rail to receive
+the Blessed Sacrament, she swam, she rocked as though upborne on
+waves of buoyant ether.  Watching her, you would have said that thus
+Our Lady must have glided onward, bearing the gracious burden of her
+Divine Child.
+
+This peacock-voiced creature who hid under a white shawl what the men
+who sneered at her dimly felt must be a countenance ugly to
+repulsiveness, had one shoulder thrust upward and forward, reaching
+nearly to the ear on that side....  A palpable curvature of the spine
+caused the curious gait, and possibly to this deformity might be
+attributed the voice that was so harsh, raucous, and torturing to the
+ear.
+
+"Do not laugh....  It is pitiable rather than ridiculous," she heard
+her enemy say, in his own tongue.
+
+Hot wrath, fulminating indignation, mingled in Juliette with the
+pride of the comedian who has made an effective exit....  To be
+pitied by him, and for a second time!  That liquid flame that
+circulated through her veins, illuminated her brain in its every cell
+and convolution.  By its lurid light she saw her own intention in all
+its ugliness.  Was she to blame, who had fled from this her destiny?
+Had she sought for her vengeance?  Of his own will had he not come,
+this world-shaking Colossus, to find his Fate waiting for him?
+
+And Breagh.  What of her promise to her comrade?  The thought was a
+knife-keen stab compelling a shriek.  She stifled it in the folds of
+the shawl, bent down her head, and with an exaggeration of the
+grotesque gait, scuttled upstairs with the agility of an escaping
+spider, provoking a guffaw from the Twopenny Roué, a laugh from the
+well-bred Hatzfeldt, even a deep chuckle from the Enemy.  Let him
+laugh!  As she fled from room to room, and the gas-jets leaped up
+flaring and shrieking under her small, fierce hand, like little
+Furies and Vengeances, and tell-tale articles of feminine attire and
+use were caught up and thrust into a small portmanteau, she bade him
+laugh as much as he would.  As she opened a cupboard by the
+chimney-piece where Madame Tessier had kept medicine and cosmetics,
+and took from the shelf a flat-topped, wide-mouthed chemist's vial,
+and thrust it within her dress, deep into her bosom, she told herself
+that France should laugh before long!
+
+Meanwhile, her enemy and France's waited, chatting in the hall at the
+foot of the stair.  When she descended, he went up with Hatzfeldt and
+Bismarck-Böhlen, and made a brief inspection of the rooms.  His own
+choice was made with the least delay possible.  Opening from the
+square, skylighted landing at the head of the main staircase, was a
+room, some ten paces long and seven broad, lighted by one window on
+the right side of the main front, looking toward the stables, and
+commanding a view of the pleasance and shrubbery from two more
+windows in the eastward wall.  This apartment, which was partly above
+the dining room, and had been occupied by Madame Charles Tessier, the
+Minister appropriated to his own use.  A second room, communicating
+with this, and looking on the pleasance, and boasting also a glass
+window door leading out upon the iron bridge topping the conservatory
+on the south side, he set apart for Bismarck-Böhlen.
+
+A somewhat better-furnished room looking upon the Rue de Provence
+would serve, as would the drawing-room upon the ground floor, for the
+reception of strangers and guests.  Privy Councilor Abeken would
+occupy the bedroom next to this, also with an outlook upon the Rue de
+Provence.  A tiny cell near the back stairs, only big enough to hold
+a bed, chest of drawers, and washstand, was set apart for Secretary
+Bolsing.  Upon the second floor Dr. Busch or Privy Councilor Bucher
+would occupy the best bedroom, the two Prussian body servants from
+the Wilhelm-Strasse sleeping in the attic overhead.  The two
+remaining chambers on the second floor--small, angular,
+ill-ventilated places--the women of the house were free to move into,
+and retain, if they desired.  "Only in that case," said the masterful
+voice, "they must contribute their services toward keeping the house
+in order.  Where I live, there must be no idlers.  That is
+understood!"
+
+Below in the hall, White Shawl and Madame Potier heard his strong
+laugh echoing amid the empty chambers and his heavy stride shaking
+the rafters above their heads.
+
+"I am pleased with my room, though it has a window opening toward the
+stables, where the detachment of troops supplying the sentries will
+be quartered for the present, with my orderly and coachman and the
+two grooms.  But common sights do not annoy me, any more than common
+noises, and there are two other windows overlooking the park.  The
+trees in their autumn coloring will remind me of my own woodlands at
+home.  Altogether the place has been chosen intelligently.  A more
+roomy and better-furnished house might afford spiteful people an
+excuse to accuse the Chancellor of the Confederated States of
+luxury--the love of which has never been a besetting sin of mine.
+True, I must have a table supplied well, punctually, and
+generously....  That is always an understood thing.  A _sine qua
+non_, in fact....  The King is quite aware of this....  I told him
+again yesterday, ... '_Sire, I must be fed properly if I am to make
+proper terms of peace!_'"
+
+His great laugh sounded again as he came trampling downstairs,
+bringing with him a masculine perfume of Russian leather and cigars
+of super-excellent quality.  And Hatzfeldt was saying in his languid,
+well-bred accents:
+
+"With Your Excellency's permission, I will now take leave of you--I
+must go and see the place where I am quartered.  It is at No. 25,
+Avenue St. Cloud."
+
+"So, then....  A pretty good distance from the Chancellor of the
+Confederation, should he require at some unusual hour the services of
+his First Secretary....  You will have to find the Count more
+convenient lodgings."  The Minister turned to the Intendant General,
+who barked:
+
+"At Your Excellency's honorable orders, the change shall be
+immediately made!"
+
+"Oh, for Heaven's sake, not to-night!" expostulated Hatzfeldt, with
+graceful peevishness.  "I am horribly done up with the heat and the
+dust we had on our way here.  Why should the King have dragged us to
+Choissy-le-Roi, in order to see the troops?  Cannot he see troops
+every hour of his existence?  Ah, by the way!  Did Your Excellency
+notice that at Villeneuve St. George the bridge of boats had been
+blown up?"
+
+The Minister shrugged:
+
+"Who can understand this destructive mania?  It is a national disease
+peculiar to the French.  Since the beginning of the war, they have
+destroyed bridges and railways to the tune of millions--for the sheer
+pleasure, one would suppose, of building them up again.  Well, good
+night!"  He held out his hand pleasantly to Hatzfeldt.  "Good night
+to you, Herr Intendant General!"
+
+The Intendant saluted stiffly and barked in his peculiar style:
+
+"I wish a very good night to Your Excellency!"  Then he clanked down
+the steps after Hatzfeldt and over the gravel walk to the front gate.
+
+"I know what Count Paul has it in his mind to do," chuckled
+Bismarck-Böhlen, looking after them.  "He will take a bath and dine
+at the Hôtel des Réservoirs."
+
+"It would not be a bad plan to follow his example," said the
+Minister, "since some of the Foreign Office _fourgons_ may be late in
+getting here.  Unless Madame Tessier is prepared to supply us with a
+dinner upon the spur of the call?"
+
+He added:
+
+"Come, shut the hall door.  I see they have already placed sentries.
+The grooms and Niederstedt will bring in the luggage by the back door
+and up the servants' staircase."  He continued as Bismarck-Böhlen
+obeyed: "They are particular about such matters in French houses,
+where there is so much wax polishing of the floors and woodwork.
+Where are the women? ... There were two.  A _bonne_ and her mistress,
+the proprietress...."  His powerful glance fell upon them standing
+near the doorway of the dining-room.  He motioned them to enter, and
+followed them in.
+
+"Madame Tessier!" he began, taking as by right the chair at the head
+of the long shining dinner table, upon which the tapestry cloth had
+not yet been replaced.  He looked at White Shawl.  The shrill voice
+cackled:
+
+"Madame Tessier is in Belgium....  I am Madame Charles Tessier, the
+wife of Monsieur, her son!"
+
+He said in his excellent French, laying on the table the flat white
+Cuirassier cap he had removed on entering:
+
+"I congratulate M. Tessier!  Can your servant cook, Madame?"
+
+The shrill voice responded:
+
+"Monseigneur must be judge of that when he has tried her dishes.  She
+does her best--the excellent Jeannette!  But if Monseigneur is to be
+served as befits his state and consequence ... I should prefer to
+cook for him myself!"
+
+"_So!_"  He leaned one elbow on the table, meditatively regarding the
+speaker, and the lambent blue flame of humor danced and flickered in
+his eyes: "Since we do not require you and your domestic to leave the
+house--only to confine yourselves to the two smaller bedrooms on the
+second floor--it may be as well that you should assist to a degree in
+the kitchen....  But for all that does not require women we have our
+servants--you understand?  And the _chef_ attached to the service of
+the Prussian Chancellery is extremely competent.  He is--rather a
+personage in his way!"
+
+Bismarck-Böhlen sniggered in his characteristic fashion.
+
+White Shawl shrilled, gesticulating with a hand that resembled a claw:
+
+"If your Prussian cooks better than I do--or even the _chef_ of our
+_gredin_ of an Emperor, he may call me a Bonapartist and I will not
+slap his face!"
+
+The Minister drew his well-shaped sunbrowned hand over his mustache,
+perhaps to hide a smile at the epithet.  He asked with his powerful
+glance intent upon Madame Charles Tessier:
+
+"So, then, you are not a lover of the Bonapartes?  What is your
+party?  Are you Republican or Monarchist?"
+
+She shrieked with raucous energy:
+
+"I am a patriot, and a citizeness of the French Republic!  All my
+life I have execrated the Bonapartes.  See you well--I do not love
+Prussians!...  But you have humiliated and dethroned this sacred pig
+of a Napoleon....  And for that I could kiss the hand that received
+his sword!"
+
+The person to whom the shrill tirade was addressed listened with
+imperturbability, although Bismarck-Böhlen, standing on the other
+side of the table, between the windows, involuntarily clapped his
+hands to his sorely sacrificed ears.
+
+Now the Minister said in his suavest French accents:
+
+"The hand was not mine, Madame, I beg to assure you, but that of the
+King of Prussia, who is hardly likely to pay us a visit here....
+Should His Majesty elect to do so, your ambition may be partially
+gratified.  You will see the monarch who has paid your Imperial
+bugbear so thoroughly well in his own coin."
+
+Here Bismarck-Böhlen broke in....  "Excellency! ... talking of coin
+... you told me to remind you of what happened the other day...."
+
+"Ah, so I did!" said he.  "It is a mere coincidence, but worth
+remembering....  Upon leaving the weaver's hovel, near the village of
+Donchery, outside which you and Leverstrom waited while I discussed
+the terms of the capitulation with Napoleon in a garret containing a
+table, a bed, and two rush-bottomed chairs, the French Emperor
+presented five pieces of gold to the weaver, which Leverstrom
+afterward told me he vainly endeavored to buy of the man.  His
+stupidity or the weaver's, we will not say now which was the
+greater!...  But the coins displayed in unbroken sequence--the
+portraits of five rulers of France.  There was Napoleon I.,
+imperially wreathed, on a fine fat piece of 1820; a Louis XVIII.,
+inane and aristocratic; a Charles X., with the knob in his nose; a
+Louis Philippe, looking like a bourgeois, and Napoleon III., Emperor
+of Ready-Made Plebiscites...."  He broke off to say: "And now,
+Madame, what news of this dinner?  Can you supply it, or must we go
+elsewhere?  Decide.  I am always an economist of time!"
+
+And the penetrating glance shaded by the shaggy eyebrows of the
+Minister questioned the meager peaked countenance of which merely a
+wedge showed between the curtaining folds of the white shawl....
+Lover of good cheer as he was, he was perhaps asking himself whether
+a creature so mean and pinched-looking could set before him the
+nourishing, well-flavored, well-cooked dishes, calculated to restore
+energy to his giant's frame.  She was studying the face revealed in
+the circle of light cast downward by the shaded lamps of the gasalier
+above the dinner table, half loathing, half fascinated by the
+tremendous personality now revealed.
+
+How much the published portraits of the man lacked, she realized now,
+clearly.  What mental and physical power, and force, and energy were
+indicated in the lines of the great domed skull and the astonishing
+frontal development.  What audacious courage and ironic humor were in
+the regard of the full blue eyes that rested lightly upon her own
+insignificance....  What deeply cut, pugnacious nostrils he had; what
+a long stern upper lip the full gray mustache curtained!  He had a
+cleft in his chin that reminded her of a friend she loved....
+
+This last and the other characteristics of the visage that confronted
+her were fuel to her roaring furnace of hate.  A baleful light blazed
+in the eyes she curtained from him.  Her heart seemed a goblet
+brimmed with intoxicating, poisoned wine.  And then a little thing
+tamed the snake in her.  It drew in its quivering, forked tongue,
+covered the fangs that oozed with venom, lowered its hooded head, and
+sank down, palpitating among its cold and scaly coils.
+
+With all its power, the profound weariness of his face had suddenly
+come home to and arrested her.  He looked, as was indeed the fact,
+like a man who had not known a good night's rest for weeks.  There
+were sagging pouches of exhaustion under the masterful eyes, and the
+lines about the forehead and mouth and jaws were deeply trenched with
+fatigue and anxiety.  With pain, too, for he was suffering from
+facial neuralgia brought on by nervous strain and overexposure, and
+divers galls and blisters, the result of days spent in the saddle by
+an elderly heavy-weight.  Now he yawned and leaned back in his
+creaking chair, and suddenly was no despot helmed with terrors, armed
+with power, mantled with ruthlessness, but a man fagged out, and
+tired and hungry, athirst for rest and the comforts of home.
+
+He had a wife living, she knew, and sons serving in the Prussian
+Army.  Perhaps he had a daughter who loved him, too....  Perhaps she
+was thinking of him ... praying for his return in safety....  Oh,
+God!...  The dreadful thought was not to be tolerated....  It must be
+driven away ... banished from the mind, if one was to carry out the
+plan....
+
+All these thoughts volted through the brain under the white shawl in
+the passing of an instant.  The next, she heard the shrill voice say:
+
+"It is for Monseigneur to decide!...  There is no difficulty about
+dinner--that is, provided Monseigneur can eat a good soup of
+artichokes made with cream!..."
+
+His startlingly blue eyes laughed.  He acquiesced, seeming to snuff
+the air with his deeply cut nostrils.
+
+"There is nothing better than puree of artichokes--provided it serves
+as the prelude to a solid, sustaining, and well-cooked meal."
+
+White Shawl shrilled:
+
+"There might follow a six-pound trout, boiled, with sauce _à la
+Tartare_....  One came in this afternoon, fresh to a miracle, a fish
+from the Gauche near Montreuil."
+
+He said to Bismarck-Böhlen:
+
+"The trout of the Cauche are capital eating ... especially those
+caught in the upper part of the stream, a mile below Parenty.  What
+else, Madame?"
+
+She proclaimed in the raucous voice that made Bismarck-Böhlen grimace
+and shudder:
+
+"A dish of cutlets and a _ragoût_ of partridges with little cabbages.
+It is now upon the fire, simmering in the casserole--I meant it for
+next day!"
+
+Like the trout, it had been designed for P. C. Breagh's delectation.
+
+She added:
+
+"And there are a cold ham, a peach tart, and a jelly of Maraschino,
+and I could toss up a savory omelette to follow the sweet dishes.  As
+for dessert ... we have pears and plums from the garden....  But,
+Monseigneur..."  It was greed that made the woman's strange eyes
+glitter so intolerably--"I shall be well paid for the excellent food
+and all my trouble, shall I not, Monseigneur? ... In good French
+money--not in Prussian notes?"
+
+Under the heavy mustache he showed his sound, even teeth in a laugh
+of enjoyment.
+
+"In good French money.  You have my promise.  So--you do not like our
+Prussian notes?"
+
+White Shawl screamed:
+
+"They are good where they come from, it may be, Monseigneur!...  But
+here--the people would as soon take dead leaves for pay!..."
+
+He thrust his hand in his breeches pocket, pulled out a gold
+Napoleon, and threw it ringing on the shining table.  Her eyes
+snapped.  The little clawlike hand darted from the folds of the
+enveloping white shawl and pounced on the gold piece.  She curtsied
+like an elder-pith puppet to the great figure sitting at the table
+head, and with the extraordinary gait that combined a hitch, twist,
+and shuffle, hobbled out of the room, shrilling as the door closed
+behind her:
+
+"Jeannette!  Jeannette!  Monseigneur will dine here!  Make you up the
+kitchen fire!  I will go myself to the cellar and get the fruit....
+And the wine ... Monseigneur will certainly require some wine!  Later
+on you must help me get ready the bedrooms.  Put out sheets and
+pillow cases to air!"
+
+Bismarck-Böhlen was saying, as he followed his great relative into
+the drawing-room, and extended himself upon the green plush sofa, as
+the Minister selected the largest armchair, and lighted one of his
+huge cigars:
+
+"What a woman!  What a voice!"
+
+The other laughed through the fragrant smoke rings:
+
+"You could say no more and no less of an operatic _diva_, had you
+recently fallen a victim to her charms.  My landlady pleases me.  My
+tastes, as you know, are somewhat peculiar....  But you need not feel
+anxious on the Countess's behalf.  My sentiments in this instance are
+highly platonic."  He added, smoking and speaking almost dreamily:
+"If in cookery Madame's performance equals her promise, what with
+trout, and partridges _aux petit choux_--cold ham to fall back on,
+and a savory omelette, we ought not to do badly at all!...  With half
+a dozen bottles of that champagne we brought from Rheims, and a
+little of the Epernay..."
+
+He added, yawning and stretching his great limbs: "I am not usually
+poetical, but I have a fancy with regard to the deep blue,
+green-fleshed grapes of the country, that their color affects the
+river into which the hillside vineyards drain.  The Marne water is as
+brilliant and green as though it were made of melted emeralds.  And
+the must from those grapes yields the best champagne of Rheims and
+Epernay...."  He yawned again and went on: "There is something in
+surroundings!  In this house I feel that I can work comfortably.  The
+view of old trees, and bushes and flower beds from the room I have
+chosen as a bedroom and study will make one feel almost at home.  Two
+of my servants shall sleep upstairs in the attics--of which there are
+several, and my coachman Niederstedt--who was my porter at the
+Wilhelm Strasse, shall have a shakedown somewhere belowstairs.  He is
+as strong as Goliath and as sharp as a needle.  An unusual
+combination of qualities, because giants are supposed by little
+people to be dull-witted and easily taken in!"
+
+He sent out a long column of fragrant blue vapor, and added, looking
+at the antique bronze clock surmounted by its grotesque bat-winged
+shape: "A fallacy, since I myself belong to the family of the Anakim.
+Do you observe that my landlady's familiar spirit appears to be
+winking at what I have just said?...  Kobold or gnome, there is a
+family resemblance between his countenance and Madame's.  I must get
+her to sell him to me, to carry home to Berlin."
+
+
+
+
+LXV
+
+P. C. Breagh had gone back to his bedroom at the gardener's cottage,
+under the garret where had slumbered the unlucky Jean Jacques Potier.
+The pet rabbits of the young man were even now in a hutch in the
+stable yard, and his striped house jacket and the green baize apron
+he used to wear when cleaning the Tessier silver hung on a hook in
+Madame Potier's closet, with the civil integuments of M. Potier, now
+deceased.
+
+It was too early to go to bed.  He pulled off jacket and waistcoat,
+filled and lighted the venerable briar root, and, sitting on his bed,
+re-perused by the light of his tallow candle a letter in headings,
+and bearing the date of September 23rd, which may be reproduced as
+written, here:
+
+288 GREAT CORAM STREET, LONDON, W.C.
+
+"MY DEAR YOUNG MAN!
+
+  I WAS SURPRISED AND GRATIFIED
+
+To Receive Letters dated respectively July 28th, 31st, August 4th,
+11th, 26th, Sept. 5th, 19th, from:
+
+  ONE WHO HAD VANISHED
+  SWALLOWED ALIVE
+  BY THE ROARING WHIRLPOOL OF WAR.
+  THEY ARE SLAP-UP AND NO MISTAKE!
+  ROBUST TO BRUTALITY!
+  THEY HAVE BEEN ACCEPTED
+  PUBLISHED AND PAID FOR!
+  BY THREE SUBURBAN EDITORS
+  SIMULTANEOUSLY.
+  A NEW IDEA
+  LONG CHERISHED
+  BY SOLOMON KNEWBIT.
+  A MAN BORN BEFORE HIS AGE!
+  THE BOSS OF A FLEET ST. WEEKLY
+  IS NOW NIBBLING AT
+  'BANG!
+  A DOG'S TALE.'
+  I Have Recovered My Fifteen Shiners And Have
+  Cash in Hand
+  For My Young Swell
+  WHEN HE COMES MARCHING HOME!
+  MARIA SAYS
+  YOU HAD BETTER LOOK SHARP!
+
+  AN IMPORTANT CLUE
+  DISCOVERED!
+  MYSTERY OF LOST FORTUNE
+  ABOUT TO BE CLEARED UP!
+  ABSCONDING TRUSTEE
+  HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED IN ECCENTRIC LODGER
+  BY THE LANDLADY!
+  PROOFS IN A SEALSKIN WAISTCOAT!
+  BE READY!
+  AT ANY MOMENT THE SUMMONS MAY COME!
+
+  I remain,
+      My dear young man,
+          Truly and faithfully yours,
+              SOLOMON KNEWBIT."
+
+
+At the bottom of the last page was written in a curious up-and-down
+handwriting:
+
+
+"Dr mr Breagh,
+
+"yu kno How mr Knewbit Has a Way of Puting Things queer but it Wold
+be Best For you To Come Home it Realy Wold.  There Is a Pore Siner
+only Wating To maik Amens wich Is Mind must alwais Have Bean weak and
+People Puting There Afares in the Hands of sutch a Trustea Can ixpect
+Nothing but Truble, mr Chown of Furnival's Inn is To Be let kno If He
+Gives Warning to Leeve the House wich i think never will Drink being
+got Hold of him to sutch an xtent dear mr Breagh you have thought you
+were Pore.  But your Fortune of 7,000 lbs was only took awai by the
+Almighty Goodness to Be Given back again, trust and beleive.  I am Dr
+mr Breagh,
+
+  "Respectfully and afexnly
+      "Maria Ling."
+
+
+P. C. Breagh folded up the pregnant pages--owing to Mr. Knewbit's
+professional predilection for capitals and spacings, the double
+letter covered a good number--and put them away and began to think.
+
+Would it not be best that Juliette should return to her husband in
+Belgium, since M. Tessier gave no sign of returning?  And whether she
+agreed with the notion of leaving Versailles or not, was it wise of
+P. C. Breagh to stay?
+
+He loved her.  He would love her always.  There were times when her
+eyes had tenderness in them for him.  Those unforgettable days passed
+together ... those strange and dreadful sights seen in common, those
+perils mutually encountered had made a bond between them that might
+never be broken now.
+
+But was it wise to remain near her, breathing her atmosphere,
+drinking in her rare, delicate, exquisite beauty, and growing more
+besotted in his worship of it with every day?  He knew that it was
+not.  By the anguish the mere thought of leaving her cost him, he
+realized how deeply the love of Juliette Tessier had taken root in
+his heart.
+
+His nature, as simple as hers was complex, made it easy to hold her
+blameless in all.  She had not led him on.  They had been flung
+together by force of circumstances.  That there was something
+guileful in her very guilelessness never suggested itself to Breagh.
+
+The gate bell pealed as he sat ruminating, causing him nearly to leap
+out of his skin.  That M. Tessier had returned was the possibility
+that instantly suggested itself.  He knelt by the window of the
+low-ceiled cottage chamber and leaned out into the deepening dusk.
+
+German voices at the gate, the stamping of horses, and the clinking
+of bridles....  The grinding of heavy boots on gravel, the jingle of
+spurs and the sound of scabbards scraping against the ground, rapping
+against the steps.  A pause and a voice he knew said clearly and
+resonantly:
+
+"The Herr Intendant General may spare himself the trouble.  I will
+interview the people of the house myself!"
+
+A loud voice barked out something unintelligible to the listener,
+ending with "insolence."  The voice of the Man of Iron returned:
+
+"In that case, my Excellency will take the risk.  There are only
+women in the house, and, should they offer violence, I have Count
+Hatzfeldt and Count Bismarck-Böhlen here."
+
+If there were any further words, the listener missed them, so
+deafeningly loud was the drumming of the blood in his ears....  The
+door was opened.  There was a gleam of something white in the dusky
+hail place.  And _He_ entered and the other men followed him....
+What did they there?  What was it best to do?...
+
+Now one by one the upper rooms were illuminated.  The house door was
+opening.  Two men came out and descended the steps.  One who walked
+lightly and hummed a tune between the whiffs of his cigar passed
+away, still humming, toward the Avenue St. Cloud.  The second who
+trailed a clanking sword gave harsh-voiced orders in the staccato
+tone of Prussian military authority to some persons in the street
+outside, mounted a charger held by an orderly, and rode jingling away
+toward the Boulevard de la Reine.  His helmet and his orderly's could
+be seen bobbing over the top of the wall that screened the Tessier
+house from the Rue de Provence, and the dark silhouettes of the heads
+and bodies of men who crowded the double box seats of two private
+luggage vans that waited beyond the _porte cochère_ under an escort
+of cavalry.  No doubt they were _fourgons_ sacred to the traveling
+Foreign Office of the Minister, bearing, besides the material of
+diplomatic labor, a working staff of Chancery clerks.  Other vehicles
+were waiting, and videttes of cavalry were posted at each end of the
+quiet street.  The trampling of their horses could be heard
+distinctly, with certain gruff admonitions, presumably addressed to
+pedestrians desirous of using the thoroughfare.
+
+Now the leaves of the _porte cochère_ were being opened and hooked
+back by the dusky silhouettes of a couple of men.  Liveried grooms,
+because of stray gleams of light flashed back from buttons and
+cockades.  Light thrown by the blazing yellow lamps of a large,
+empty, traveling landau that rolled in under the lozenged archway, at
+the heels of a splendid pair.  The horses smelt of dust and sweat,
+and whinnied as they whiffed the stables.  They were driven by a huge
+coachman, and a second carriage followed, piled with luggage, and
+containing three persons, who might have been secretaries or body
+servants, one could not decide.  Four led horses followed, guided by
+orderlies of Cuirassiers.  These did not follow the carriages, as
+they turned up the short avenue and pulled up at the hall door.  The
+orderlies, quite as though they knew the place, rode down the longer
+gravel drive that ended at the gates of the stable yard.  One trooper
+got down and opened the gates, and the eager horses were conducted in.
+
+_Tramp, tramp, tramp!..._
+
+A detachment of infantry, marching down the Rue de Provence.  Turning
+in under the archway of the carriage entrance, an eighth company
+belonging to a regiment impossible to specify, because of the
+enfolding, deepening dusk.  They also smelt hot and dusty and
+tallowy.  A subaltern was in command of them, and an under officer.
+They halted, marked time while they posted a sentry at each of the
+gates, then tramped on toward the gardener's cottage, and turned into
+the Tessier stable yard.  They were going to bivouac there.  It was
+all clear and plain and simple.  It was as fascinating as a shadow
+play--but for the tragic element that mingled in.  Now the servants
+and grooms were unloading the luggage from the carriages and
+marvelously deft and noiseless they seemed at the work.  A little
+later--and both carriages turned from the house, and were driven into
+the stable yard.  You could hear the grooms and the big coachman
+hissing as they unharnessed the weary horses, and the horses snorting
+recognition as they scented their stable mates.  And then P. C.
+Breagh became aware that the venerable pair of ponies that drew
+Madame Tessier's basket carriage were not to be permitted to remain
+in their comfortable loose boxes....  He could hear the elderly man
+who groomed and fed and exercised the ponies vainly protesting at the
+summary eviction of his charges, and the officer who commanded the
+detachment of infantry--Green Rifles, as it turned out--answering his
+complaints:
+
+"Find the beasts another stable, and the rent and forage will be paid
+for.  But remember!--if you grumble, His Excellency will have you
+shot!"
+
+And the ponies were led away in search of new quarters, as the
+Foreign Office _fourgon_, with its escort of Uhlans, ground over the
+trampled gravel and pulled up at the terrace steps.  One could hear
+the voice of Madame Potier and the creaking of the Venetian shutters.
+Then the billiard-room windows threw broad stripes of light across
+the terrace toward the wall.  They were going to carry in the
+dispatch boxes and light traveling safes, the copying presses and
+letter books and the rest of the Foreign Office impedimenta by way of
+the long windows....  One guessed whose idea that had been.
+
+A dominating, transforming spirit had invaded the quiet house in the
+Rue de Provence, bringing with it this purposeful, orderly bustle,
+this disciplined irruption of elements strange and new.
+
+Of all these servants and attendants, some would certainly take up
+their abode at the gardener's cottage.  Would P. C. Breagh, like the
+Tessier ponies, be presently turned out to seek cover elsewhere?
+
+And Juliette....  The thought of her roused all his stinging
+apprehensions.  He told himself that presently, when the house should
+have resumed something of its normal quiet, he would steal across the
+lawn in the shadow of the trees and borders, and lie in wait for a
+glance ... for a word....
+
+He would force her to leave at once for Belgium.  She must not remain
+in the house with all these men....  The time crept by with maddening
+slowness as he waited.  Dark shadows moved in lighted rooms, passing
+across the blinded windows....  The whole house was flaring with
+gaslight now.
+
+How long....  The slatted Venetian shutters of the dining-room were
+now unbarred and thrown open.  He could not see into the room by
+reason that it faced east toward the pleasance, while the window from
+which he watched looked southward, immediately commanding the hall
+door.  But broad beams of light were thrown down the steps and across
+the grass plot.  Tall shadows moved across the streaks at intervals.
+There was the clatter of china, glass, and cutlery, a smell of
+cooking delectably savory.  The Man of Iron was dining, and Hate had
+spread the board.
+
+A shudder went through Breagh, and a cold perspiration bathed him.
+His hair seemed to rise and stiffen upon his creeping scalp.  A sound
+broke from him ... perhaps a groan, perhaps an exclamation.  There
+was a soft step in the darkness under his window and a whisper like a
+sigh.
+
+"Monsieur Breagh....  Do not descend!  It will be better that I mount
+the stairs to you!"
+
+His first impulse was to reassume the discarded coat and waistcoat.
+Then he remembered that it was dark.  The floor creaked under his
+stealthy footsteps as he reached the landing and crept on stockinged
+feet down the narrow stairway.  She had pushed back the unlatched
+door and passed into the tiny passage.  He met her almost on the
+threshold, felt for and seized her little hands.  How feverishly hot
+they were!  He pressed them as he whispered:
+
+"I guessed what had happened!...  I know who has come here!...  For
+hours I have been waiting my chance to get a word alone with you.  I
+was just coming when I heard you under the window!"
+
+She whispered--and, although her hands burned in his, they trembled
+and her teeth chattered:
+
+"Monseigneur de Bismarck desired to dine here.  Every day one does
+not entertain a guest so noble.  See you well!  I have cooked for
+Monseigneur with my own hands a dinner worthy of--himself!  He has
+devoured like an ogre the trout _à la sauce Tartare_, and the
+cutlets, and is now engaged upon a _ragoût_ of partridges.  When it
+is time to fry the savory omelette that follows, Madame Potier will
+ring the little bell, and I shall run back to the house."
+
+The sentence ended in a stifled titter.  An ugly sound that sickened
+Breagh as he heard it.  He pressed the small hands, whispering
+entreatingly:
+
+"Don't laugh!  You must not laugh.  Go back and get what you need for
+a journey.  Tell Madame Potier I am taking you to Belgium.  Back to
+your husband! ... your place is where he is!  You shall not stay here
+... you must not, I forbid you!..."
+
+She ceased to laugh and pulled her hands away from his.  Her answer
+came: an inflexible utterance to be breathed so softly:
+
+"I remain here, Monsieur, until my husband comes!"
+
+He panted the old prayer:
+
+"Juliette, for the love of God...!  You don't know what terrible
+danger you are risking!..."
+
+The reply fanned past his cheek like the velvety wing of some great
+night moth:
+
+"Monsieur, I remain here, until the arrival of M. Charles Tessier.
+Although you will do wisely to depart while you may--unseen!"
+
+He said between his gritted teeth, while the pounding of his heart
+choked him:
+
+"I shall stay here! ... I decline to be sent away!..."
+
+She seemed to cogitate.  Then came the mere breath of an utterance.
+
+"Will you swear to be secret and faithful?"
+
+He said hoarsely:
+
+"Juliette, I must first know what you intend to do."
+
+She whispered, and her voice set his blood rushing and the fragrance
+of her maddened him.
+
+"Stoop!...  Why are you so tall?  Bend down your head!"
+
+He stooped from his majestic altitude of five feet nine inches and a
+bittock, and two little hands that scorched him clasped his neck
+about.  Light and soft as the touch of a flower was the contact of
+the mouth that whispered:
+
+"I will tell you....  There is a line of one of your English poets--I
+forget his name--but the words run like this....
+
+  "'_Throw but a stone--the giant dies!_'
+
+
+He gasped:
+
+"I hear you!"
+
+She whispered, still with her mouth against his cheek:
+
+"See you well!--for the deliverance of my country, it is I who am
+going to throw that stone!"
+
+He panted through the shuddering that had seized him:
+
+"Do you know what will happen, whether you succeed or fail?  You will
+be led out--placed with your back against--this wall perhaps--and
+shot!"
+
+He felt her lips smile against his cheek as she answered:
+
+"And what of that!  It will be the fortune of War!  But you..."  She
+sharply drew her face away, and the slight hands thrust him from her.
+"I will have you leave this place to-night!"
+
+A weakness seized him.  He sank down upon his knees and stretched his
+arms out, in the darkness, to the dimly outlined silhouette of the
+slight elfin creature standing on the threshold, and the scents of
+rose and jasmine came to him in gusts from the night-veiled garden
+with another fragrance that had no name.  He whispered, driven beyond
+himself:
+
+"I will not go!  I love you!"
+
+She said:
+
+"I have nothing to do with Love--who have consecrated myself to
+vengeance.  And your presence here might ruin all....  He knows M.
+Breagh, the Englishman....  Have you not told me over and over that
+once he..."
+
+She broke off there.  But the intolerable stab brought Breagh to his
+feet.  He snarled at her through his clenched teeth.
+
+"He may know Breagh, the Englishman, but he doesn't know Jean Jacques
+Potier.  Tell Madame that I shall wear her nephew's clothes and take
+his name, and do his work about the house and garden.  All his duds
+are in the cupboard up in my room there, and his apron and clogs and
+so forth...."
+
+Appalling triviality of the sex feminine.  The conjured picture
+evoked a titter.  She breathed, and he was stung with rage to know
+her shaken with irresistible mirth:
+
+"But you do not know how to sweep and clean, and how can you conceal
+your very red and curly hair?  French servant men have not such hair!
+You will be betrayed by it, Monsieur!..."
+
+His blood boiled, and he thundered in a whisper:
+
+"I shan't!...  Call it what color you like to-night.  It won't be
+there to-morrow!  There are clippers in the cupboard, and I shall
+have it off."
+
+A distant bell rang.  She was gone like a bat in the darkness.  His
+word was given.  He was pledged now to follow her wherever fate
+should lead.
+
+
+
+
+LXVI
+
+Versailles, always a town of martial music.  Royal or Imperial
+fanfares of brass, and welcoming salutes of deep-voiced cannon, had
+been--since a day early in October, when the girdle of iron and steel
+had closed about Paris--resonant with Prussian bugle calls and
+throbbing with Prussian drums.
+
+From dusk to dawn the electric search ray now mounted on the summit
+of the Arc de Triomphe, as the broad wheeling beams from Vanves,
+Issy, Mont Valérien, and the whole ring of forts that guarded the
+great, magnificent, menaced capital, whitened earth and sky in token
+of the unsleeping vigilance of the Parisians, and their ceaseless
+expectation of a German night attack, even as the long indicatory
+fingers of brilliant blue-white light, stretching from the ridge of
+St. Cloud and from the heights of Clamart, from Marly, Vanesse,
+Epinal, Noiseau, Choisy, and Bourget--no less than the formidable
+battery of big guns on the Place d'Armes, with their muzzles placed
+so as to sweep the avenues radiating from the Château--betokened the
+invaders' anticipations of yet another sortie.
+
+Ah, why had there been no sortie earlier than that abortive effort
+toward Chevilly on the thirtieth of September?  There were, at the
+beginning of the Investment, no more than 180,000 German troops of
+the Crown Prince's Army encircling Paris.  Up to the tenth of October
+what a triumphant turning of the tables might have been effected by a
+vigorous sally, effectively carried out!
+
+Huge German forces were engaged in the sieges of Metz and Strasburg,
+Belfort and Soissons, Schelsstadt and Verdun.  General von der Tann
+was engaged with the Army of the Loire near Artenay.  The stubborn
+resistance of Orleans kept an Army Corps of the Red Prince extremely
+busy.  The Grand Duke of Mecklenburg, with the right wing of the
+Prussians' covering army south of Paris, was actively engaged with
+the French at Dreux and Le Mans.
+
+And there were 55,000 troops of the Line within the walls of Paris;
+there were 105,000 Mobiles--not fighters to be sneezed at.  There
+were 30,000 National Guards--perhaps too soft in muscle and
+well-developed in the region of the corporation to be very
+effective--pitted against such seasoned warriors as Schmidt, Klaus,
+Kraus, and Klein.  But add to these, 25,000 Marines, Douaniers,
+Gardes-Champêtres and Forestiers, and there you had a force of
+485,000 trained Frenchmen, asking nothing better than to sally out by
+St. Denis, Villejuif, and Charenton, cut the line of investment
+north, clear the blocked road south, effect a junction with the Army
+of the Loire, destroy the Warlock's subtlest combinations, promptly
+raise the Siege of Paris, and deliver France from the invader.
+
+What was Trochu, Military Governor of Paris, thinking about?  What
+were MM. Ducrot and Vinoy doing, to delay until the garrison and
+fortress of Strasburg were surrendered, until the Capitulation of
+Metz on the twenty-seventh of October, and the fall of Verdun on the
+seventh of November, had released the main Army of the Red Prince for
+the strengthening of that steel and iron girdle that lay outside the
+defiant ring of forts?  The tentative sally of the twenty-ninth of
+November was foredoomed to failure from the outset.  No wonder Trochu
+and his plans furnished hungry Parisians with abundant food for
+mockery, when the Specter of Famine brooded over the City on the
+Seine.  Narrow-eyed and tight-lipped, cold, sinister, and mysterious,
+the man was a mere bag of wind, when all was said and done.
+
+Meanwhile, the great bronze muzzle-loaders of the Forts of Mont
+Valérien, Issy, Montrouge, Vanves, and Charenton, St. Denis and its
+twin sisters, roared at intervals throughout each day, raining common
+shell, chain shot, solid ball, and shrapnel into the lines of the
+investing host.  But the trenching and battery-making went on
+steadily; the high-walled farmyards and gardens of country houses in
+the environs were being converted into emplacements for artillery of
+the largest caliber.  Already several of Krupp's stupendous
+siege-howitzers, with muzzles cocked at angles of forty-five,
+demonstrated the possibilities of the bombardment for which the
+German Press daily shrieked.
+
+"_Not for the reduction of the military defenses, but to produce by
+the exercise of sheer terror, bodily suffering, and destruction of
+private property, such an effect upon the unarmed
+multitudes--subjected to a hail of incendiary shells within their
+encircling ring of walls and fortresses--as to compel the chiefs of
+the Government and garrison to come to terms at command of the
+popular voice._"
+
+Thus the leader-writers of the _Berliner Zeitung_ and other
+journals--peaceful-looking, stout men, with full beards and
+short-sighted eyes behind spectacles--wrote, as though they longed to
+dip their quills in newly shed French blood.
+
+"It is sad, very sad," said the Warlock, vexed for once, "that the
+siege trains conveying more than 100,000 hundred-weights of
+ammunition cannot be brought over a single line of rails with
+sufficient quickness to gratify these excellent gentlemen....  Yet
+for the present we can do no more than invest the place and wait for
+the means of attacking it.  The process of starving out is, as the
+mighty fortress of Metz has shown, a very slow one.  But as the loud
+voices of one hundred and one guns have already proclaimed to our
+Berliners--the empty stomach triumphs over the most obstinate
+resistance.  We now require an army to guard 300,000 prisoners of
+War!  Since the Babylonian Captivity the world has not heard the
+like!  And yet the chamber prattlers and the journalists accuse us of
+tardiness.  Already from several anonymous quarters have reproachful
+or ridiculing letters reached me.  One even contains a villainous
+comic verse, which I am told is sung in the music halls in Berlin."
+
+And the great tactician read, with the expression of one who savors
+the bouquet of sulphureted hydrogen or asafetida:
+
+  "_Guter Moltke, gehst so stumm?
+  Immer um das Ding herum:
+  Bester Moltke, sei nicht dumm,
+  Mach' doch endlich: Bumm, bumm, bumm!_"
+
+
+And he tore up the rude verses in indignation and threw them into the
+waste-paper basket of the Prussian Great Headquarters at the Palais
+de Justice, on the right of the Prefecture, and strode downstairs,
+too much out of tune to hum.
+
+To have been called slow and stupid, and affectionately urged to
+hurry up and make an end of things with bang, bang, banging!...  He
+was almost glad that his departed Mary was not alive to know of the
+humiliation inflicted by these scurrilous rhymesters on her beloved
+old man.
+
+It was an unfortunate moment chosen by a new junior assistant
+_aide-de-camp_ upon the Chieftain's personal staff, for tendering a
+request for leave of absence until the following day.
+
+"What, what?...  You have barely entered upon your new and important
+duties, the wine in which your comrades of the Guard pledged you is
+still bubbling in your veins....  Is it another congratulatory
+banquet, or a supper _tête-à-tête_ ... Am I right?"  The Warlock's
+keen glance glittered between his lashless eyelids at the tall,
+fair-headed young officer standing rigidly before him.  "_Prut!_ that
+reminds me!..." he added.  "In whose company did I see you lunching
+only yesterday at one of the little round tables in the ante-chamber
+of the dining salle at the Hôtel des Réservoirs?"
+
+Said Valverden, his blue eyes meeting the sharp gray glance with a
+charming candor:
+
+"Excellency, the lady is the recently married wife of a Roumanian
+noble.  Her name, if Your Excellency desires to know it, is Madame de
+Straz."
+
+Said the Field Marshal with an acute look and a dry intonation:
+
+"In Berlin, not so long ago, she called herself something else!"
+
+Valverden answered, with a conscious side glance at the twist of
+silver braid that marked his rank of Captain:
+
+"Her first husband was killed in action with his regiment at
+Gravelotte.  She is now legally married to M. de Straz."
+
+Moltke took snuff and said laconically:
+
+"She has not taken long in changing her state."
+
+Valverden began, rather lamely:
+
+"Madame had virtually been separated from M. de Bayard----"
+
+Like a bayonet thrust came the retort:
+
+"Since your Cousin Max ran away with her from Paris, fourteen years
+ago!  The woman is an adventuress, whom you will be wise to avoid."
+
+Valverden answered, with his disarming look of frankness:
+
+"Your Excellency, I was applied to by the person you mention for
+advice in a matter of serious urgency.  Madame de Straz has unhappily
+lost all trace of the whereabouts of her daughter, Mademoiselle de
+Bayard....  She has entreated me to solicit for her an audience with
+Your Excellency, in the hope that you might aid her to recover the
+young girl."
+
+The War Eagle croaked, ruffling his feathers with indignation:
+
+"Does the woman suppose that I have got the unfortunate young
+creature in my pocket?  Or does she suspect you of knowing where she
+is to be found?"
+
+Valverden said, hastily and flushing:
+
+"Your Excellency, upon my honor, I have never seen the girl!"
+
+The Warlock tucked away his snuff box and pointed the terrible
+withered finger at the left side of the young man's bosom, where hung
+upon a broad black, white-bordered ribbon a cross of dark metal,
+edged with a narrow line of silver, and bearing a crown and the
+letter "W."  A terrible grating voice said, and with all his cool
+effrontery Valverden quailed at the words and the stern look that
+accompanied them:
+
+"To you, young man, upon whom the Second Class of the Iron Cross has
+been conferred by the hand of your Crown Prince, for daring and
+gallantry upon the war field--no more I say than this: Do nothing to
+disgrace the wearer of that decoration--which should be sacred in
+your eyes...."  He added: "The leave you ask is granted.  Until
+twelve noon to-morrow, Captain von Herding will take your place."
+
+And His Excellency the Field Marshal returned his aide-de-camp's
+salute and wheeled sharply, and had taken a couple of strides across
+the vestibule, when he halted to ask:
+
+"This girl you speak of--how came she lost?..."
+
+Said Valverden, hesitating slightly:
+
+"According to Madame her mother, the ladies were on a visit to Rethel
+during the time when the Prince Imperial of the French was staying at
+the Prefecture.  They had obtained an audience of the Prince....
+Madame de Straz was prevented by illness from accompanying her
+daughter....  The young lady--Mademoiselle Juliette de Bayard--has
+never been seen since."
+
+The lean neck and spare features of the greatest of strategists
+became suffused with indignant scarlet.  He said:
+
+"The mother is a trollop of the very first water.  She took the girl
+to the Prefecture--why did she contrive an interview?  She sends her
+up alone--she declares that she has never since seen her....
+_Pfui!..._  The affair, in my nostrils, fairly stinks of vulgar
+intrigue.  Have no more to do with it--though the unlucky girl is no
+doubt to be pitied....  I will speak to His Excellency, Count
+Bismarck, who has agents in Rethel."
+
+And he steamed across the marble vestibule of the great hall of the
+Palais de Justice, crossed the Place des Tribunaux, and vanished into
+the Prefecture, over whose entrance hung the Hohenzollern banner and
+the Prussian standard, that was very soon to show a stripe of red
+beside the black and white....
+
+For the hitherto recalcitrant States of Baden and Hesse had joined
+the Bund.  The King of Saxony had signed,--Würtemburg would sign the
+treaty of Federation shortly.  There were prospects of a definite
+settlement with the King of Bavaria.  The ambition of the Man of Iron
+was shortly to be realized....  Bismarck was to rule a German Emperor!
+
+
+You might have seen him, upon this bland November morning that had
+succeeded a night of shrieking northerly gusts and driving pelts of
+sleety rain, walking with the Count Hatzfeldt in the garden of the
+Tessier mansion in the Rue de Provence.  The house immediately
+opposite had now been converted into a guard post.  Sentries in the
+uniforms of the Green Jaegers were on duty at the gates.  Over the
+principal entrance hung the black and white Prussian standard.
+
+The sky was deep blue, with argosies of white clouds sailing toward
+the northeast.  The leaves that yet remained upon the elms and
+poplars shone in the sunshine like newly minted gold.  Those that the
+gale had stripped lay in wet drifts upon the grass and gravel, though
+the three oak trees on the pleasance yet retained their suits of
+crisping russet brown.
+
+To the right, at the rear of the house, a young man servant was
+sweeping away the leaves that adhered to the narrow terrace of steps
+running round three sides of the building.  The swish of his birch
+broom punctuated the sentences of the newspaper article being read by
+Hatzfeldt to his Chief.
+
+It was the continuation of the article in the _Berliner Zeitung_ that
+had roused the ire of the Warlock a little while before.
+
+"Unanimously," it concluded, "and in the interests of Humanity, we
+demand that this measure be taken at once.  We reprehend in the
+sternest terms, not only those military commanders who are in favor
+of procrastination.  We cry in the ears of the
+Chancellor-and-Minister-President, Count Bismarck himself, who is
+credited with being the main factor in this policy of delay: _Mene,
+mene, tekel upharsin!_--'Thou art weighed in the balance, and found
+to want!'"
+
+Said the Man of Iron to Hatzfeldt:
+
+"Did I not know that my wife regards women who enter the lists of
+journalism as unsexed, and outcasts beyond the hope of redemption, I
+should be inclined to believe she had written this."  He added: "I
+have often been accused of inhumanity, but to be reproached for an
+excess of tenderness is something quite new to me.  How shall we
+reassure these excitable gentlemen?  Buschlein"--he referred to his
+Press article-writer, the rotund author of the famous
+"Recollections"--"Buschlein shall write that he has authority from
+Count Bismarck to state that his universally credited predilections
+for slaughter have not been blunted by recent experiences, and that
+he much approves of the bombardment idea, but that he has no control
+over those high military functionaries who command His Majesty's
+investing forces, and is not accustomed to be consulted by them."
+
+He spat and resumed:
+
+"Private correspondents worry me to know whether I am really averse
+to the bombardment, and why I won't allow firing into the town?  What
+pernicious rubbish!  They will be blaming me next for all losses
+during the investment.  Which are not small; for in little
+skirmishes, and during the short time occupied by those abortive
+sorties, we have lost more troops than we should have done had we
+regularly stormed the place."
+
+He added, looking humorously at Hatzfeldt, whose handsome,
+_débonnaire_ countenance invariably fell at any reference to a
+bombardment:
+
+"By the way, another balloon has been taken with letters from Paris,
+some of which I have already read, and a Figaro of yesterday's date.
+It has been decreed by the French Government that all wine and
+provisions are to be taken away from private people, as the poorer
+classes have already begun to fricassee their dogs and pussy cats.
+So your American father-in-law will have to look out for his
+cellar--an excellently stocked one, as I have heard from you.  And
+your wife's famous mouse-gray ponies will probably be made into
+cutlets--a pretty piece of intelligence for your next letter to
+Madame!"
+
+"Ah!... for Heaven's sake, Your Excellency!" cried Hatzfeldt, with
+ruefully elevated eyebrows, "I implore you not to conjure up the
+image of my wife's indignation and despair.  Every letter I receive
+from her begins and ends with her precious ponies."
+
+The Minister appended:
+
+"Her mother, father, and her brother, Henry, who is living at their
+estate of Petit Val, near Marly--I think you told me--being
+sandwiched in between the little beasts."
+
+They were pacing the garden paths.  The Chancellor had recently
+risen, and seemed inclined to be in a jesting mood.  He continued,
+throwing away the butt of a finished cigar:
+
+"I must be careful, or the Countess will send me no more _pâté_ of
+pheasants, or sausages.  Pray tell her, with my compliments, that
+both were excellently fresh and good....  Did you notice written on
+my table card that the Mayor of Versailles is to have a ten-minute
+interview before M. Thiers arrives at half-past twelve?  If I have
+not polished off the Republican official before Thiers toddles up the
+doorsteps with his portfolio under his short arm, and his gold
+spectacles twinkling, engage him in conversation below here for an
+instant--do not send him up straightway to the torture cell."  Thus
+the Minister had christened the small room adjoining his private
+apartment.  He went on: "I do not want him to go down to Sèvres with
+his white flag and his escort, and meet Jules Favre with a string of
+tales about our orgies and revelings, of the enormous expense of
+which the Mayor is coming to complain."
+
+"What insolence!" commented Hatzfeldt.
+
+"It seems," continued the Minister, "that we all cost the town too
+much to keep, the chief offenders being the grand ducal and princely
+personages at the Hôtel des Réservoirs.  Of course, one knows that
+the Tinsel Rabble eat and drink a great deal more than they require,
+and waste much more than they consume.  But to a Frenchman, one
+cannot admit as much.  So I shall tell the Mayor that he must apply
+to the French Government at Tours for permission to raise a
+substantial money loan, and as M. Thiers has only just come from
+there, he would naturally buttonhole the old gentleman if he
+encountered him.  Which--as our plump, neatly shaved old Professor is
+as timid as a hare and as soft as a baby--would discompose him very
+horribly...."  He continued: "He is dying to make peace with us,
+because there will soon be famine in Paris.  Imagine how I caught him
+out when I told him yesterday: '_Monsieur, you have only visited the
+city for a few hours.  We know better about the contents of its
+magazines than you do.  They have ample provisions to last until the
+end of January...._'  What a look of incredulity!  I had only been
+feeling his pulse, as it were....  His amazement told me what I most
+wanted to know.  What a man to make a bargain about an armistice, an
+invalidy civilian, who cannot conceal his feelings!  Who lets himself
+be put out of countenance and pumped!--actually pumped!"
+
+He turned aside to cough and hawk and expectorate copiously....
+"There!" he said, wiping his mustache vigorously with a large white
+cambric handkerchief.  "You see what it is to have a stomach as
+sensitive as mine is....  That injustice done me in the _Berliner
+Zeitung_ with reference to the bombardment has caused an overflow of
+bile, by which I was already incommoded.  Thiers will be certain to
+remain closeted with me for two hours.  He is nothing if not
+expansive and flowery, and redundant.  I shall not be able to get on
+horseback before three o'clock, and we dine at six."  He went on,
+punctuating the sentence with more coughs and hawkings: "And as our
+table is to be graced--_tchah!_--by a huge trout pasty, a love gift
+to the Chancellor of the--_hah!_--Confederation, from a Berlin
+restaurant keeper who throws into the bargain--_ahah!_--a cask of
+Vienna March beer and his photograph, taken with his wife
+and--_brr'r_!"
+
+He turned aside and spat vigorously, before ending, resuming, as he
+used the big white handkerchief:
+
+"One would desire to do justice to a gift so welcome....  More
+bile!...  I spat like this half the night through....  Decidedly I am
+not as well as when we galloped along the highroads with the Great
+Headquarters Staff....  I have wondered: Do I eat too much?  Does
+this sedentary life conduce to indigestion?" He spat again, and
+answered himself: "How can it be so, when I breakfast on a couple of
+eggs with dry toast, and a cup of tea without milk?  I don't
+lunch--lunch is a mockery of a meal--but in the evening I make a
+hearty dinner.  With beer and champagne in plenty, and wash all down
+with half a dozen cups of tea.  Then I go to bed--as you know, never
+before midnight.  There's a doze--and I waken up with my brain as
+bright as daylight--all sorts of things running through it, and my
+mouth full of this bitter--_faugh!_"
+
+"Your Excellency will need a fresh handkerchief," said Hatzfeldt,
+slightly shuddering, as the Chancellor vigorously crumpled the soiled
+cambric into a ball.  "Shall I send Your Excellency's servant to
+fetch another?"
+
+"No, no!  As it happens, I have sent Grams out.  And Engelberg is
+busy.  There is Madame Charles's factotum!"  He called in French:
+"_Hola_, Jean Jacques!  Approach, my brave young man!"
+
+His full blue eyes, their whites now red-veined and biliously
+injected, had turned to where the strongly built young male servant
+was still sweeping the steps of the rear of the house.  Cropped to
+the scalp, you saw the fellow attired in a well-worn morning jacket
+of striped linen, a blue waistcoat and tight blue cloth trousers,
+yellow piped at the side seams.  Summoned by an imperative word and
+gesture, he knocked the damp leaves off his broom, stood it up
+against the side of the conservatory, and shambled to where the
+Chancellor was standing, muttering with a downcast air and a furtive,
+sulky look:
+
+"_Ouiche, Monseigneur?..._   What is it Monseigneur desires?"
+
+Said the Minister, with a smile that curved the great mustache and
+showed the white, square teeth that a young man might have envied:
+
+"Monseigneur desires that without delay the brave Jean Jacques would
+betake him to the kitchen, and desire Madame Charles Tessier of her
+goodness to favor Monseigneur with a clean handkerchief....  Perhaps
+two would be better....  Ask for two, Jean Jacques, and compel thy
+legs to rapid motion, for to _croquer le marmot_ is not a favorite
+pastime with Monseigneur!  Comprehend you?"
+
+Jean Jacques replied in his extraordinary patois, with a bow of the
+clumsiest:
+
+"_Ouiche, Monseigneur!_"
+
+"_De quel pays sont vous?_" asked Hatzfeldt curiously.
+
+Jean Jacques responded with sulky unwillingness:
+
+"_La Suisse, Monsieur!_"
+
+Hatzfeldt said, as the young man returned to the scene of his
+abandoned labors, picked up his broom, and went round the end of the
+conservatory toward the kitchen quarters:
+
+"There are Frenchmen who call themselves Belgians or Swiss because
+they are too funky to fight!"
+
+Said the Minister:
+
+"Madame Charles Tessier, who knows all about this fellow, describes
+him as a native of Neufchâtel.  Here she comes herself, bringing my
+handkerchiefs.  Thank you a thousand times, Madame!  But why
+inconvenience yourself?"
+
+Madame Charles, whose black hair, heavily streaked with white, was
+crowned with a dreadful lace cap with lappets, parted in the middle,
+and brushed down in two old-fashioned festoons on either side of her
+haggard white wedge of a face, shrilled in her raucous voice that it
+was no trouble whatever....  The laundress's basket with
+Monseigneur's clean linen had but that moment come in.
+
+Madame Charles wore a gray poplin gown of rich, stiff, antique
+material, trimmed with black gimp upon the gores, round the bottom of
+the expansive skirt, and upon the sleeves and waist.  It had been
+discovered in a wardrobe belonging to the mother of M. Charles
+Tessier.  She had on one of Madame's black silk aprons, a pair of her
+black silk mittens, and the black chenille net adorned with steel
+beads that confined her back hair had housed the iron gray curls of
+her respected mother-in-law.  Over her narrow shoulders hung the
+inevitable white woolen shawl.
+
+She curtsied deeply to the Chancellor and slightly to Count
+Hatzfeldt, and went on into the garden, and disappeared round the
+corner of the ivy-bordered path.  Seen thus in the searching
+daylight, the elevation and forward thrust of the left shoulder that
+lent her gait its unpleasant peculiarity, and the curvature in the
+lower part of the spine were even more painfully apparent.  It
+occurred to her as she moved away from the two men, whose eyes,
+reluctantly or curiously, were following her, that to ape this
+deformity so persistently might be to bring it in reality upon
+herself.
+
+She shivered a little, despite the bland warmth of the November
+sunshine.  Round the corner of the green glass conservatory, well out
+of sight of those who walked in the garden, Jean Jacques Potier was
+shivering, too.
+
+When the Chancellor had coughed and spat and spat again, the knees of
+Jean Jacques had shaken beneath him.  His heart had sunk like a
+leaden plummet, and the sweat of terror had started on his skin.
+
+He was afraid--horribly afraid.  Not for himself, but for another.
+There was no knowing.  The thing he feared might happen at any time.
+
+"_Throw but a stone--the giant dies!..._"
+
+
+He could hear now the very voice in which she had added: "See you
+well, it is I who am going to throw that stone!"
+
+He had expended all the eloquence he possessed with the object of
+turning Juliette from her purpose.  He did not know whether he had
+succeeded.  She would give him no promise.  She was sphinxlike,
+inscrutable....  You could never feel sure that in the middle of the
+night there would not be a cry--and then a commotion of running feet
+upon the stairs, and then--the arrest, and the accusation.  He had
+made up his mind to say, when that happened: "_It was my doing.  She
+knew nothing about it.  It was I who put poison in the food of this
+man!_"
+
+Then he would be taken out and shot.  It would be done instantly,
+whether the owner of the life that had been attempted died or got
+well.  Perhaps the man would not die?  He had an iron constitution
+and the frame of a Titan.  But sometimes he looked weary and haggard
+and bilious.  And when he spat as just now, and pulled wry mouths
+over the bitter stuff he expectorated, the heart of P. C. Breagh
+would sink to the pit of his stomach, and his legs would shake under
+him, as they were shaking now.
+
+
+
+
+LXVII
+
+Meanwhile, the Man of Iron had commented to Hatzfeldt:
+
+"Our landlady is going for a little promenade ... she does not fear
+damp, that is quite plain ... see how she trails her skirts over the
+wet grass.  Now, if she were to show her feet, should we be grateful,
+or the reverse?"
+
+A light of cynical amusement flickered in his blue eyes as he noted
+Hatzfeldt's disgust of the creature of whom he spoke.  He went on:
+
+"Ugly women have sometimes pretty feet, and hands that are exquisite.
+Have you ever looked closely at the hands of Madame Charles?  If not,
+I recommend them to your notice.  They are well worth looking at."
+He added, ignoring the shudder that convulsed the dandy: "I propose
+that we follow her--discreetly and at a distance.  I have still a few
+minutes before the Mayor arrives."
+
+He led the way.  They crossed a portion of the lawn and turned into a
+gravel walk, damp and miry and drifted over with wet and rotting
+leaves.  The shining patent-leather boots of Hatzfeldt suffered by
+their contact.  The Chancellor, observing this, said:
+
+"Never mind....  You can have them cleaned!  My man Niederstedt
+polishes boots capitally!"
+
+Hatzfeldt returned plaintively:
+
+"I can have them cleaned, as Your Excellency observes.  But never
+again will they be the same after a wetting.  And they are made by
+the only man in the world who knows how to make boots."
+
+The Minister said brutally:
+
+"Order another pair of the fellow!"
+
+Hatzfeldt returned with a shrug and a rueful look:
+
+"He lives in Paris--Rue de Lafayette.  And Your Excellency is going
+to have Paris bombarded!"
+
+Said Bismarck, his great frame shaken by internal laughter:
+
+"The fellows who write the newspaper articles out of their own heads
+know a great deal better than that....  According to them, I am a
+humanitarian--altruistic to imbecility."
+
+"But we, who only write to Your Excellency's dictation, know Your
+Excellency better than they!"
+
+The injury to his immaculate foot coverings, and the impending
+destruction of his bootmaker's establishment, incensed Hatzfeldt to
+the point of an imprudent retort.
+
+The granite face turned.  The heavy regard rested upon him.  With his
+characteristic stutter--a signal as warning to those who knew him as
+the rattle of the _crotalus_ hidden in the brake, the Minister said:
+
+"So I am not a philanthropist, or a--or an apostle of light and
+sweetness.  I would prefer to build an Empire with the fallen towers
+of the modern Babylon?..."
+
+Hatzfeldt bowed with the grace inherited from the Russian Princess,
+his mother.  The Minister went on in a lighter tone:
+
+"As a boy, I always preferred the apples that hung on the highest
+branches.  They were bigger and sweeter and rosier than the others,
+though in stealing them I risked both my breeches and my neck.  Well!
+To be plain, there are two apples just now that I particularly covet:
+the Bombardment--and the Proclamation of the Emperor of Germany from
+the Tuileries...."  He added: "The _via media_ is not the surest road
+to an arrangement that shall be lasting.  The most convincing
+arguments are uttered by the iron mouths of big guns!"
+
+They had emerged from the shrubbery at the bottom of the garden.  The
+patch of green still spread upon the eastern boundary wall, where the
+water trickled down.  The aquatic plants had been weeded, and the
+tiny pond cleaned out by Breagh under the supervision of his Infanta,
+but the pipe remained unsoldered because the plumber's men had gone
+to the War.  Thus the Satyr's mouth remained dry, though the chuckle
+still sounded in the Satyr's throat.
+
+Madame Charles had been standing near the mask as the Minister and
+his courtly First Secretary stepped into the open.  She started
+slightly, glanced round, bent her head, and limped painfully away.
+
+Said the Chancellor, barely glancing after the awkward, misshapen
+figure:
+
+"I hope that it has not occurred to Madame Charles to look over the
+garden wall!"
+
+Hatzfeldt's eyebrows went up in mild surprise.  He objected:
+
+"It would hardly be possible.  The wall must be eight feet high, and
+how in the world could a woman, elderly and with that distressing
+deformity----"
+
+The laugh that shook the great figure beside him puzzled as much as
+the utterance.
+
+"She is a daughter of Eve--and it would be possible, by putting a toe
+in the jaws of yonder grinning gentleman, to ascertain that I have
+had two sentries posted on the other side of this wall.  Listen!..."
+
+He rapped on the masonry with the walking stick he habitually
+carried, and an answering rap came from the other side.
+
+"There is a good large garden there, belonging to an unoccupied
+house," he added.  "And ranged along the wall are bushes, behind
+which my two men stand well screened."
+
+"Did Your Excellency apprehend danger from that quarter?" inquired
+Hatzfeldt.
+
+"Hardly," said he, "though it is as well to be on the safe side, and
+Versailles is pretty well packed with people by whom I am rather
+particularly detested.  But as a fact, I placed the soldiers for the
+purpose of catching Madame's postman.  You did not perceive as we
+stepped out of the shrubbery that she slipped an envelope into this
+creature's mouth?"
+
+Hatzfeldt answered, in some astonishment:
+
+"Why, no, Your Excellency.  I saw nothing of the kind!"
+
+The Minister said, shaken with the internal, secret laughter:
+
+"And yet you have good eyes, better than mine for seeing some things
+at a distance....  A pretty face behind a thick veil ... a graceful
+figure concealed by a shawl.  Possibly the friend who communicates
+with Madame Charles with the aid of this grinning fellow admires
+her....  There is no accounting for tastes...."
+
+Hatzfeldt asked in a tone of disgust:
+
+"Who is Madame Charles's friend?  Is it possible that misshapen
+creature has a lover?"
+
+The Minister answered with a curious grimace:
+
+"A lover who is apparently a _Franc-tireur_."
+
+Hatzfeldt returned with acrimony:
+
+"One of those marauding free shooters who wear a black cloth uniform,
+and carry a black standard with a skull above a pair of crossbones.
+Perhaps his lady-love sat for the picture of the Death's head?"
+
+The Minister returned, with a look of amusement:
+
+"Possibly she did....  Though there have been moments when, under
+Madame's extraordinary coiffure with the black lace lappets, I have
+seen peeping at me--imagine what?"
+
+"I cannot imagine....  Hatred, possibly?" said Hatzfeldt.
+
+"Hatred, blazing from two extraordinarily blue eyes...."  The
+Minister went on: "But not only hatred....  Youth, and prettiness.
+Now, look here, and--for I am perfectly convinced that you believe me
+bewitched by our landlady--behold my rival's _billet-doux_!.."
+
+Hatzfeldt could scarcely speak for laughter.  The Minister put his
+hand into the Satyr's mouth and extracted therefrom a little
+envelope, inscribed in a bold, black, inky scrawl.
+
+"_To My Adored Wife._"
+
+The Satyr chuckled almost humanly as the Minister held the
+superscription under his Secretary's eyes, and calmly proceeded to
+open the envelope....  Hatzfeldt, at first crimson, and writhing with
+repressed merriment, became graver as the Minister read aloud:
+
+
+"_What of thy husband? dost thou ask in the nights that are sleepless
+and solitary.  Credit, my little one, that thy Charles is often near.
+In the thought of thy husband, if not in person, he rests upon thy
+heart so faithful and fond._"
+
+
+Hatzfeldt spluttered.  The reader continued:
+
+
+"_We Francs-tireurs attacked a squadron of Schleswig Hussars the
+other day at the village of Hably....  We shot down many of the
+Prussian marauders and killed their horses.  Only eleven escaped with
+life.  They returned later and burned the village, committing
+unexampled brutalities, and murdered several of the inhabitants.  It
+is well!  We have another cause to feed our roaring furnace of hate._
+
+"_All means of revenge are good, for ours is a holy war waged upon a
+merciless invader.  We number nobles, peasants, citizens, criminals
+in our armed and organized ranks.  Each man will kill as he knows
+best.  The rifle, the knife, the scythe, or the cudgel, the
+gardener's shears, the chemist's drugs, and the barber's razor are
+weapons lawful to be used against the enemies of France.  We will dig
+wolf-traps for these Prussian foes of ours, who plunder by method and
+wreck scientifically.  We will tumble them down wells, drown them in
+rivers, burn the huts they are sleeping in over their heads.  And our
+sisters?--our wives?  They are united with us in our solemn compact
+of destruction.  They will embrace to strangle.  They will smile and
+stab!  They will cook savory dishes for Messieurs les Prussiens, and
+the dogs will eat of them and die._
+
+"_These kisses on thy sweetest eyelids.  These for thy two little
+hands.  Dost thou love me?  Till death and after,_
+
+  "_Thine and thine only,
+      "Charles Tessier._"
+
+
+There was a silence.  The Minister broke it with a grim sentence:
+
+"When this fine fellow is not murdering Prussians, he is making love
+to his spitfire of a wife.  A fine breed of young criminals should
+spring from such a union!"
+
+The Satyr's mocking chuckle sounded like a comment on the speech.
+The Minister had deftly opened the envelope without tearing the flap,
+which was still moist.  He now refolded and slipped back the sheet
+into the envelope, wet his finger in the little jet that gurgled from
+the hole in the pipe behind the mask of the Satyr, and reclosed the
+envelope.  He drew out his watch and consulted it, as the clocks of
+Versailles struck the half hour, and said to Hatzfeldt, replacing the
+watch:
+
+"Half-past twelve....  Do you know, I read something by Félix Pyat
+very like this"--he slightly waved the drying envelope--"in a copy of
+the _Petit Journal_ that was brought me the other day....  Now, my
+Mayor is due, and M. Thiers is certain to arrive on his heels....  I
+must return to the house; but I should prefer that you stayed here."
+
+"Here, Excellency!"
+
+The Minister laughed in the amazed face of the Secretary.
+
+"I want you," he said, "to play the part of Leporello....  Frankly, I
+cannot understand why Madame Charles herself placed this letter in
+the gape of the mask....  I am curious to know who will fetch it away
+from there....  I am going to ask you to hide in the shrubbery and
+find out."
+
+Hatzfeldt glanced dubiously at the wall.  The Minister nodded.
+
+"My two men are not sufficiently sharp-eyed to see through these
+bricks.  Really, I must ask you to stay here and oblige me.  Von
+Keudell must keep M. Thiers in play instead of you....  Why, you are
+quite pale!..."
+
+Hatzfeldt gulped and admitted:
+
+"That letter gave me an unpleasant sensation.  I am regularly shaved
+by a Frenchman, you understand!...  And these _Francs-tireurs_ seem
+to be everywhere.  Really, it is horrible!"
+
+The Minister's brow became thunderous.  The lines about his mouth
+hardened to granite.  He said in his grimmest tone:
+
+"They should be hanged whenever found!  And not cut down, but left
+hanging, for a salutary warning to other rascals....  Do you know
+that the _Combat_--the organ edited by that blackguard Félix
+Pyat--wishes to get up a subscription for the purchase of a
+gold-mounted rifle to be given to the scoundrel who succeeds in
+removing the Prussian King.' ... Doubtless they have set their price
+upon the heads of Moltke, and the arch enemy Bismarck.  Well--_Auf
+Wiedersehen_!  Ride out with me after lunch to the aqueduct of Marly,
+and tell me what I want to know."
+
+And the great figure strode away, leaving the First Secretary to his
+unwelcome task.
+
+"After lunch..." he said mentally, as he insinuated his graceful
+figure between a lilac and a lauristinus, and the rich soil, rendered
+marshy by the overflow of the lily pool, squashily gave way beneath
+his once immaculate boots.  "Why, good Heaven!... the woman to whom
+that monstrous epistle was addressed actually assists the Foreign
+Office _chef_ with the cooking!  The Chief swears by her _ragoûts_
+and her omelettes and her _beignets_.  They are certainly
+excellent....  I must avoid them for the future.  A young married man
+with a family must be careful.  I wonder, if anything unpleasant
+happened, whether Touti would marry again?"
+
+The bushes were wet with rain.  Little cold showers sprinkled the
+dandy's head and shoulders.  His boots sank deeper as the wet
+trickled down his neck.  What a degrading task for a First Diplomatic
+Secretary!  With what shrieks of laughter his lively American
+Countess would read his written description of his experiences as a
+spy!  A corn began to shoot.  He sneezed.  This meant influenza to a
+certainty.  Even while he devoted Madame Charles, her bloodthirsty
+spouse, and all her countrymen to the hottest corner of Tophet, he
+kept a bright lookout.  And in another five minutes or so he saw the
+person for whom he lay in waiting coming down the mossy gravel path
+that wound through the shrubbery.
+
+It was Jean Jacques, the clumsy foot boy, whose mistakes and blunders
+kept the Prussian Chancery attendants in a continual eruption of
+abusive German epithets, and whose _patois_, proclaimed to be Swiss,
+was so extremely puzzling that Hatzfeldt, who had piqued himself upon
+an exclusive knowledge of the French of the Tyrol, could only assign
+the youth to a canton of his own.  He thrust his hand into the
+Satyr's toothed gape and pulled out the letter, twisted a wry mug as
+he regarded it, and said, with an admirable English accent:
+
+"Oh, damn!..."
+
+Then, at the urgent tinkle of a bell from the kitchen regions, he
+thrust the missive into the pocket of his striped cotton jacket and
+scampered back to the house.
+
+You will remember that when Juliette had consented to marry the
+unknown Charles Tessier, she had, for her dear Colonel's very sake,
+adorned the faceless one with features, a complexion, shoulders,
+muscles, and so on.  She had even boasted to Monica's brother of the
+swordsmanship of the worthy but unromantic young cloth manufacturer,
+whose most sportsmanlike accomplishment was the shooting of thrushes
+and sparrows, which he would bring home to the Rue de Provence in
+triumph, to be converted by his adoring mother into savory pies.
+
+Now, during these days of tension and anxiety, perhaps to relieve the
+strain of an otherwise unbearable situation--possibly with the desire
+of inflicting on her unfortunate adorer the torturing pangs of
+jealousy, or possibly to create and maintain in herself a fictitious
+interest in the supposititious husband, she had begun anew to
+expatiate upon his gifts and graces, and, having begun, could not
+leave off.  Her Charles had not red hair and yellow gray eyes, a
+blunt nose, and a square chin with a dent in it.  He was pale, with
+melancholy black eyes and a high brow.  His jetty mustache was waxed,
+his imperial finished in a point of the most elegant....  He quoted
+poetry in a deep voice, and was capable of torrential outbursts of
+passion.  He was altogether a perfect specimen of the type of
+Balzac's beautiful young man.
+
+Surfeited with these perfections, P. C. Breagh had become restive, to
+the point, one day, of being clumsily sarcastic on the immunity of
+widows' only sons from the obligation of military service, and so on.
+
+That afternoon Madame Charles had received a mysterious communication
+to the effect that her lord had secretly quitted Belgium, penetrated
+in disguise into France, passed through the Prussian lines in a
+series of hairbreadth escapes, and joined a corps of
+_Francs-tireurs_.  Since when, letters containing tirades inspired by
+the most flaming patriotism, sanguinary descriptions of adventure,
+and passionate protestations of devotion, had been found at intervals
+by Madame Charles in the mouth of the Satyr mask.  Of late, since she
+had developed nervousness about fetching the letters herself, Jean
+Jacques had sulkily performed the office.  And when she did not, with
+due precautions, declaim these effusions for the benefit of her
+victim and fellow conspirator, his was the task--inconceivably
+repulsive to a young man suffering the stabs of jealousy, of reading
+them aloud to Madame Charles.  Hence the expletive which had betrayed
+his British nationality to Count Hatzfeldt, standing disconsolate in
+his squelching patent leathers under the dripping lilac and syringa
+trees.
+
+
+
+
+LXVIII
+
+From Tours, chief town of the Department of the Indre et Loire, 120
+miles southwest of Paris as the crow flies, where Cremieux, Minister
+of Justice, and rather too doddery to be of efficiency at this
+crisis, had established the Administrative of the Provisional
+Government of the new French Republic;--whither M. Leon Gambetta,
+Minister of the Interior, Member of the Board of National Defense,
+had recently betaken himself, escaping from the besieged capital to
+Montdidier as a passenger in the car of a balloon--whither the
+veteran Garibaldi had now arrived to offer his services in the cause
+of Liberty--from Tours had come the famous diplomat and man of
+letters, contemptuously dubbed "Professor" by Count Bismarck, with
+the object of carrying out the peace negotiations in whose conduct
+the tragic patriarch Favre had broken down.
+
+You saw the famous Minister and author of the _Histoire du Consulat
+et de l'Empire_, as a little, stocky, black-clad old gentleman with a
+square gray head, round, clean-shaven face, and bright, round eyes,
+looking through gold-rimmed spectacles....  Above all, a patriot,
+heart and soul devoted to France, the position of this famous French
+statesman of seventy-five, newly returned, empty of all but fair
+words and vain courtesies, from a pilgrimage to the Courts of various
+neutral Powers, was horrible and painful beyond words.
+
+Sad, distracted, anxious little gentleman, charged with the mission
+of obtaining those needed terms of peace, or at least an armistice
+from the conqueror upon the threshold, can you see him, in the shadow
+of the magnificent Temple erected by the Sun King, toiling and
+moiling with his secretary, the younger M. Remusat, in preparation
+for those anguish-fraught interviews with the German Chancellor.
+
+The tables of his sitting-room at the Hôtel des Réservoirs were piled
+with books and papers--papers covered with abstruse calculations
+dealing with the most urgent need--the provisioning of Paris--papers
+dealing with the question of the Elections--papers dealing with the
+General Census--papers of every imaginable kind.  And with these,
+from dawn till midnight, the little, grief-worn man wrestled while
+the Tinsel Rabble and their staffs of German officers reveled in the
+dining-saloons, and trampled and shouted and clanked and jingled up
+and down the corridors, and in and out of the bedrooms; and the roar
+of the guns from the forts of the beleaguered city shook the windows
+from time to time.
+
+Now and then he would lie back exhausted in his chair, or lie down
+and sleep, if sleep ever visited him.  He took his frugal meals in a
+private cabinet opening out of the great dining-hall of the
+restaurant.  Since the thirtieth of October he had been engaged in
+this wise, save when, having been first compelled to apply to Count
+Bismarck for a pass and a military safe-conduct, he would meet and
+confer with Favre, or one of his other colleagues, at some chosen
+spot without the walls of the beleaguered capital.
+
+Only the previous day he had trundled down in a little, shaky, hired
+brougham to the half-ruined and wholly deserted suburb of Sèvres,
+preceded by an officer of Uhlans with a White Flag on a pole.
+
+Day after day the little brougham had drawn up before the modest
+house in the Rue de Provence, and the little gentleman, whose head
+seemed to whiten perceptibly, had stepped out with his portfolio
+under his arm, as now.  Day after day the Chancery footmen would open
+the door to him, and Madame Charles Tessier, hovering in the
+background, would drop the representative of suffering France her
+lowest curtsey, and sometimes gain a brief word with his unfailing
+bow and smile.  To-day, as Major von Keudell appeared in the doorway
+of the drawing-room--the Chancellor being closeted in his private
+interviewing-room upstairs with the Republican Mayor of
+Versailles--the little gentleman said simply, offering his hand to
+the eccentric-looking person in the cap with lappets and the white
+shawl:
+
+"The sympathy that is expressed in looks and by silence can be very
+eloquent and very touching.  From my heart I thank you for yours,
+Madame!"
+
+And as she had burst out sobbing and kissed the hand, he had drawn it
+away with a murmured protest, and had passed on into the drawing-room
+where Von Keudell was to hold him in conversation until the Mayor had
+been polished off.
+
+But M. Thiers had endured the ordeal with a courteous kind of
+resignation, only looking at his watch from time to time, or glancing
+at the clock over which presided the horned, bat-winged,
+cloven-hoofed and tailed figure that tickled the fancy of his
+oppressor so much.
+
+"His Excellency expected me," he said.  "There has been no mistake
+about the time of the appointment--named by himself at our previous
+interview.  The greatness of the interests concerned are
+apprehensible by His Excellency!"
+
+The mild sarcasm rebounded pointless from Von Keudell's bluff
+rejoinder:
+
+"No, no mistake at all.  His Excellency has merely shifted the hour.
+From half-past twelve to a quarter to one--His Excellency found it
+more convenient."
+
+"What boors are these Germans!" thought the angered diplomat,
+writhing, as some medieval victim, condemned to undergo torture by
+rack and fire, might have writhed at the delay of the hideous ordeal.
+
+And then the door opened.  The Chief Torturer looked in with the
+salutation:
+
+"A pleasant day!  I am quite at your service now, if you will come up
+to me....  You know the way, I think?..."
+
+And the great figure vanished, and the heavy footsteps thundered up
+the drugget-covered stairs.
+
+Did the sorrowful visitor know the way to the torture-chamber?
+Surely malice must have prompted the query addressed to the
+unfortunate plenipotentiary of France.
+
+The room he had so loathed had one window looking out on the Rue de
+Provence, and another at the south side of the house, where stood the
+pine-tree and the turtle-backed green glass conservatory with the
+wrought-iron bridge above it.  It had a figured gray carpet, a green
+hearthrug with red edges, dark green stuff curtains, and various
+oil-paintings and steel engravings hung upon the walls, which were
+painted coffee-tinted cream.  It was furnished with a writing-table,
+on which were a terrestrial globe, a celestial one, and a tellurion,
+a large gray marble-topped chiffonier, a sofa covered with chintz,
+pattern red-and-gray birds-of-paradise on a background with
+palm-leaves; two cane chairs and a round center-table, upon which lay
+a platter of wood containing the colored glass marbles with which one
+plays the game of solitaire.
+
+It was a game of solitaire which was played in that stiff,
+primly-furnished apartment, in one corner of which stood a mahogany
+bedstead of Empire pattern, with an obsolete drapery of green-figured
+brocade.  Such a game as may be played by a grim, greedy,
+gray-mustached Grimalkin with a plump, bright-eyed,
+feebly-palpitating mouse.
+
+M. Thiers had been gravely imperiled by the shell-fire of the French
+guns in the act of returning from Sèvres on the previous day, a
+mischance which had increased the palpitations which were caused by
+his heart disease, and wounded his feelings cruelly.  Commented the
+Chancellor, to whom he unwisely related the episode:
+
+"Fortunately the cab-horse was too ill-fed to bolt, but the window
+was broken, and you were mud-splashed all over....  Not exactly the
+first time that your countrymen have treated you in that way!..."
+
+And this first scratch of the claw that never failed to draw blood
+was followed by the query whether M. Thiers were provided with full
+powers for carrying on the negotiations?
+
+The Minister added, enjoying his victim's start and look of horrified
+astonishment:
+
+"My people in Paris tell me that there has been practically a
+Revolution, and that a new Government is coming into power.  On the
+Place before the Hôtel de Ville there were yesterday 15,000 persons
+assembled, most of them National Guards from the Faubourgs, disarmed
+and crying: '_Vive la Commune! ... Point d'Armistice!_'"
+
+He went on, unheeding the writhing of the sufferer, whose dignity had
+been so cruelly wounded:
+
+"It appears that the Mayors of Paris had been summoned by Arago, and
+were in one room conferring, while in the other was the Government.
+Mobiles guarded the doors, but were thrust back by the insurgents.
+General Trochu came out and confronted them.  He could only mouth and
+gesticulate in a sort of dumb Crambo.  Cries of '_A bas Trochu!_'
+drowned his voice.  There was a rush....  One does not know how, but
+Trochu finally escaped out of their clutches--got out by a back door
+and cut his lucky to the Louvre....  Here is one of the slips of
+paper that were thrown from the windows of the Hôtel....  They have
+'_Commune décretée.  Dorian Président!_' upon them.  There was a
+scene of confusion peculiar to your nation, in the midst of which M.
+Félix Pyat and other virtuous citizens proclaimed the Commune, and
+constituted themselves into a Government embracing Blanqui,
+Ledru-Rollin, Délescluze, Louis Blanc, and Flourens....  Flourens got
+upon a table--made himself heard, it seems, finally calling upon the
+Members of the Government of National Defense to resign.  M. Jules
+Favre refused ... was arrested with the old Government--the new
+Government reigned until two o'clock in the morning, when some
+battalions of Mobiles--the 106th and 90th, under Picard--closed in
+upon the Hôtel and ejected them.  Trochu was there with his staff....
+Since, a general sort of agreement appears to have been arrived at.
+A decree signed by Favre was placarded yesterday, announcing that on
+Thursday next a vote is to be taken whether there is to be a Commune
+or not....  What I relate happened the day before yesterday.  Now, if
+Your Excellency saw M. Jules Favre at Sèvres yesterday afternoon, he
+must have told you of the turn things were taking.  Oblige me with a
+plain answer to a plain question....  Did he tell you, or did he not?"
+
+The humiliated gentleman bowed his head assentingly.  The hot sweat
+of a mortal agony stood upon his broad forehead, and flushed and
+working features.  His glasses were dimmed with the reek of his
+torment and his shame.  The Enemy knew all.  There was no concealing
+anything from one so well served by spies and informers.  Probably
+the cruel interview with his fellow-Minister had been listened to,
+from its beginning to its end.
+
+Thiers and Favre had sat on two iron chairs at a gayly painted little
+iron table, before one of the wrecked _cafés_ that boasted the sign
+of _La Belle Bouquetière_.  No one had been near except a haggard,
+absinthe-sodden wretch, who lay in a drunken stupor upon the
+pavement, close under the broken window of the deserted restaurant.
+Perhaps that drunken man had been his spy....  What was he saying in
+the harsh, bullying tones that grated so?...
+
+"The mob who rode roughshod over General Trochu, and his Council of
+lawyers and orators, appear to be actuated by the desire of fighting
+things out with us.  They burn for a chance, it appears, to pit their
+undisciplined courage against the Army of United Germany.  They are
+hardly to be blamed for accepting literally the theatrical bombast
+with which they have been fed by Favre!"
+
+He laughed, and said, with a galling imitation of the rhetorical
+manner of the Democratic barrister of Lyons:
+
+"'Not a stone of our fortresses'--do you remember?  'Not an inch of
+our territory!'--have you forgotten?...  When it was in the power of
+the person to whom he boasted to have said to him: _Every inch.
+Every stone!_..."
+
+He rose up, towering over the unhappy personage who sat opposite to
+him, in a little wicker easy-chair that would have suited a child.
+His greedy vitality physically sucked energy from his victim.  The
+stare of his great eyes oppressed, the roughness of his speech had a
+wounding brutality.
+
+"Which Party governs France?  The Blue Republicans or the Reds,
+answer me?  Can one treat with a State that has no responsible heads?"
+
+"Monsieur le Comte!" screamed the personage thus cruelly prodded.
+"Do you not know that you are insulting me?"
+
+He had grown deadly pale, and now flushed red, making a passionate
+gesture as though to strike himself on the forehead, as the other
+asked him with bitter irony:
+
+"Is the truth so offensive to you as all that?...  If you did not
+wish to hear it, you have come to the wrong shop.  The day for
+compliments and flatteries has passed with the tinsel Empire of your
+Napoleon, unless you compel us to bring him back and set him up again
+at the Tuileries.  Believe me, he has contemplated this
+eventuality!--has his carpet-bags ready packed, and his eagle in a
+traveling-cage....  And certainly we could discuss the military
+questions at issue better with him than with you civilian gentlemen,
+who do not understand the language of War."
+
+It was not possible to get a word in edgeways....  The rasping voice
+tore the nerve-fibers as with a saw-edge, the towering figure
+overwhelmed, the powerful stare fascinated and terrified as the
+pitiless gaze of the snake when fixed upon a frog or a bird.
+
+And Bismarck went on, deliberately lashing himself into a passion:
+
+"Are you and your colleagues aware that I suffer in my reputation for
+these procrastinations?  It is said at home in Germany that I am
+over-lenient toward the French, our treacherous enemies ... that I
+delay to reap for United Germany the glory and profit for which she
+has paid so terrible a price in blood.  Yourself with MM. Ducrot and
+Favre have considered my terms for an armistice inadmissible....  In
+return I tell you you have forfeited the right to criticize any terms
+that I may propose....  You would hold the elections--even in those
+provinces of France which we hold as conquerors!  You would
+reprovision Paris and her fortresses!  We should be hellish
+unpractical if we listened to you!...  What the big devil!...  Are we
+to permit the levies, and the recruiting by which the French Republic
+may hurl against us a new army to shoot down?
+_Himmelkreuzbombenelement!_...  Do you take us for sheep's heads?"
+
+The unhappy Minister protested in a faint voice:
+
+"Monsieur le Comte, I do not even comprehend the meaning of the term!"
+
+"Ah, by God!" thundered the terrible voice, "you are ignorant indeed
+of German words and German meanings, and the word that you understand
+least of all when applied to yourselves is WAR!  Silk gloves are not
+our wear in War, and therefore the iron gloves with which we have
+handled you have pinched your soft flesh and made you squeal.  We
+might complain of your _Francs-tireurs_, who hide in woods and
+houses, and shoot our soldiers unawares; and of the inhumanity of
+your mitrailleuses which cut red lanes through whole regiments.  But
+no!  You are the sufferers--you are to be pitied--even for the
+injuries you wreak upon yourselves...."
+
+He struck with his clenched fist the top of the chiffonier near which
+he stood, and the dull shock of the contact of that sledge-hammer of
+muscle and bone with the solid marble, made the pictures shake upon
+the wall, the windows rattle in their frames, and the bewildered
+listener leap as if he had been shot.
+
+"I rode over to St. Cloud yesterday," he went on, "to look at the
+palace you have set on fire with your shells from Mont Valérien.  It
+is burning still, as I don't doubt you know.  A well-dressed French
+gentleman stood looking at the smoldering ashes of the conflagration.
+Near him was a French workman in a dirty blue blouse--'_C'est
+l'œuvre de Bismarck!_' said the gentleman to the plebeian, little
+dreaming who was near....  But the cad in the blouse only said to
+him: 'Why, our ---- gunners did that themselves!'  That workman had
+more sense in his pumpkin than the whole lot of you!"
+
+M. Thiers revived under the fresh insult sufficiently to plant a
+sting:
+
+"It is said, Monsieur, and on excellent authority, that the Imperial
+Palace was sacked by German troops before it was set on fire."
+
+The Chancellor lowered his heavy brows and demanded almost menacingly:
+
+"Do you assert that His Majesty the King or the Crown Prince of
+Prussia were parties to a crime of this kind?"
+
+"No, Monsieur, not for an instant!"
+
+The Chancellor said with a short laugh that had no mirth in it:
+
+"That is fortunate, otherwise I should have been compelled to break
+off, and finally, our negotiations with regard to this question of an
+Armistice, and deal only with the question of the territory to be
+added--in addition to the fortresses on the right bank of the
+Rhine--and those six thousand millions of francs that we shall
+certainly take from you!"
+
+The thrust caused M. Thiers to leap to his feet, galvanized into a
+feverish energy.  He screamed, raising his clenched hands and
+sweeping them downward and outward:
+
+"It cannot be, Monsieur!--it is outrage--robbery--ruin!  Europe will
+intervene if you persist in such a demand!"
+
+"Ha, ha, ha!"  The great jovial giant's laugh set the crystal drops
+upon the mantelshelf-vases and the wall-mirror girandoles tinkling,
+and reached the hearing of Hatzfeldt and von Keudell in the
+drawing-room, and the decipherers in the Bureau below.  It vibrated
+through the joists and planks and spaces above the plastered ceiling,
+and made Madame Charles start where she lay upon the floor of her
+bedroom listening, with her ear pressed to the uncarpeted boards.
+
+"My good sir, you are making game of me....  You have visited the
+Courts of the Powers--we know to what profit....  You have solicited
+intervention--to be told what both of us knew very well before! ...
+The British Lion may lash and roar, but will not do more, that is
+certain.  England has not sufficiently recovered from the war of the
+Crimea--from the further drain of men and gold caused by the Indian
+Mutiny....  Austria, in spite of creeds and bias--with her
+German-speaking population and her Germanized institutions--may be
+regarded as a powerful German State.  Italy lies under the heel of
+Austria.  If the Russian Bear elect to hug, the hugging will be done
+upon our side.  For it is inconceivable that Germany should ever be
+at war with Russia.  Our interests are and have always been one...."
+He laughed again, and said, laughing:
+
+"And, knowing this, you threaten me with the intervention of European
+Powers....  You will hear nothing with respect to forfeiture of
+territory!...  You refuse to contemplate the question of the Gold
+Indemnity!...  Wait!" he said--"wait until the bombardment is a month
+old and the bread-basket is empty....  Then we shall hear you sing to
+a different tune!"
+
+"Monsieur le Comte!..."
+
+The old man tottered to his feet.  He was ashen in hue, and
+trembling.  His blue lips hung breathlessly apart, his eyes had a
+lack-luster stare behind their gold-rimmed glasses; he pressed a hand
+over his left breast as though to repress a pang of pain.
+
+"M. le Comte ... I have suffered too much....  I find myself unable
+to continue our interview....  With your permission ...
+to-morrow?..."  He bowed and took his hat and cane, and repeated
+weakly: "To-morrow?"
+
+"With pleasure!" said the Man of Iron, escorting him to the door.
+
+And the old, humiliated, fallen King-maker, the great literary
+genius, the polished orator--tottered away out of the presence of the
+conqueror.
+
+He was to return upon the morrow, and for many days thenceafter, to
+be played with and tortured, to be tantalized and mocked.
+
+He was to return flushed with futile hope, only to be crushed and
+retire discomfited.  He was to furnish an inexhaustible source of
+amusement for the delectation of his implacable enemy.
+
+He was to return after a prolonged absence within the walls of the
+beleaguered capital, he and others, faint with famine, broken by
+anxiety, shattered by suspense and sleeplessness, forced by sheer
+hunger to sit and partake at the groaning board of their merciless
+foe, compelled by his arrogance to listen to his jestings, moistening
+the food they placed between their livid lips, with the stinging salt
+of tears.
+
+
+
+
+LXIX
+
+The center of a small but lively group, composed of admirers and
+listeners, Prussian officers known in Berlin, their Bavarian and
+Hessian friends and acquaintances, American and English Press
+Correspondents, and a traveling Oriental or two--you might have
+observed Madame de Straz--a full-blown Comtesse now, in virtue of the
+patent of nobility asserted by her husband--in the restaurant of the
+Hôtel des Réservoirs--not always accompanied by her Assyrian-featured
+lord.
+
+Adelaide had not grown younger since the adventure of the Silk Scarf.
+Her bold and striking beauty had suffered gravely, though her figure,
+set off by its fashionable and well-chosen dress, was as supple and
+graceful as of yore.  She looked like some gorgeous fruit that the
+wasps had ravaged, and to conceal this she made up heavily and wore
+thicker veils.  What she now lacked in loveliness she endeavored to
+make up in _espièglerie_ and easy-going good-fellowship.  Not a few
+officers responded with enthusiasm to her pressing invitations to
+breakfast or lunch at the little country villa she and M. de Straz
+had rented, at Maisons Lafitte beyond St. Germain.
+
+One need hardly say that there was play on these occasions, besides
+excellently prepared dishes and a liberal flow of the champagne,
+besides the cognac and liqueurs of which Madame drank a good deal.
+
+To quiet her nerves, raveled by the unhappy situation of her beloved
+country, she declared, for it suited her to be a Frenchwoman now.
+
+She would have dearly liked to inveigle a Duke, Grand or Hereditary,
+or even a Prince Regnant, to her roof-tree and her baccarat-board,
+but these personages, bestarred and beribboned, furred, jack-booted,
+buck-skinned and long-spurred, were as shy as the hares and
+partridges in the forest, that were incessantly cracked at by hungry
+pot-hunters.  Wherefore the sumptuous Adelaide must perforce be
+contented with Counts and Barons, whose purses were less lengthy than
+their pedigrees, as a rule.
+
+"A solitary nest and too remote, it may be....  But for a bride and
+bridegroom, solitude and remoteness have their advantages!" had
+proclaimed M. de Straz, with a shrug of infinite meaning, and
+suggestive glances of his black Oriental eyes.  Certainly the guests
+of Madame and Monsieur, even when conveyed to the destination in
+hired broughams and victorias, were wont to find the road, running
+through abandoned villages and by deserted châteaux, unexpectedly
+barricaded with felled timber and scarred with unfinished trenches,
+more than a trifle long.
+
+The nest of these love-birds, half a mile from the sacked railway
+station and the broken bridge of Maisons Lafitte, was enclosed in
+private grounds.  The villa Laon--how or from whom acquired, nobody
+ever thought of questioning--was a cottage with Swiss gables and East
+Indian verandas standing in gardens adorned with glass arcades and
+Italian pergolas, their vines and roses stripped and shuddering in
+the bitter wintry winds.  There were also Chinese bridges crossing
+pieces of ornamental water, aviaries of finches and canaries, and
+wired enclosures once well stocked with silver pheasants, now, thanks
+to the nocturnal ravages of mysterious marauders, depopulated in a
+manner painful to behold.
+
+"You pretend," said Valverden teasingly to Adelaide, "that the
+neighbors creep out at night and annex the pheasants, or that our
+cavalry pickets take them for the mess-pot, or that they are stolen
+by _Francs-tireurs_.  _Francs-tireurs_ there are in plenty in the
+neighborhood--every hour some honest German soldier gets his death at
+the hands of one of these scoundrels!--but as far as concerns the
+vanished inmates of the pens and cages, I believe you and M. de Straz
+have eaten them yourselves."
+
+He stretched his long spurred legs out over the brocade of an Empire
+sofa gracing Madame's boudoir, and leaning back his handsome head,
+looked up at her teasingly.
+
+"With my assistance, for that _salmis_ we had for breakfast was of
+home production I am certain.  Come, own that I have guessed as well
+as Mariette can cook at a pinch."
+
+Adelaide frowned and bit her lip.  But she let her gaze dwell
+lingeringly on the upturned face of the handsome Guardsman, and said,
+seeming to search for her own sulky, splendid image in the blue eyes
+with which Adonis made play:
+
+"If you were less like Max I believe I should detest you!..."  She
+added, after an instant: "And if you resembled him more than you do,
+you would find no welcome here."
+
+"Beyond _salmis_ of pet pheasants, and stewed carp out of your
+landlord's fish-ponds."  His red lips rolled back in a grin that
+showed the strong white teeth, the fuzzy ends of his fair mustache
+sparkled as though the hair had been sprinkled with gold-dust.  "Who
+is your landlord?  I am dying to know.  Do you rent the place of the
+gardener, or that pompous-looking butler who has not got the key of
+the cellars, but nevertheless can produce champagne of Comet brand
+and excellent Roussillon.  Or is it a speculative partnership?  Some
+of us have dropped a good deal of money here in play lately....  They
+are beginning to grumble noisily--particularly that little
+black-haired _aide-de-camp_ of the Duke of Coburg, and von Kissling
+of the squadron of Blue Dragoons quartered here at Maisons
+Lafitte....  What's in the wind I don't pretend to know, but they
+might get you turned out of here--they might even obtain an order
+from Headquarters for the return of their lost cash!..."
+
+"Bernhard!"  Her ringed white hands tenderly caressed his forehead.
+"You will protect me from them!--you will stand my friend!  Oh! how
+horrible it is to want money--always money!"
+
+Valverden said, neatly biting off the end of a cigar and spitting the
+nipped-off end through the open glass-doors leading out upon the
+veranda:
+
+"Has not M. de Straz got any money?  And did not my Cousin Max give
+you enough?...  You used to seem uncommonly flush of the ready when
+one saw you queening it among the gay _cocottes_ of Berlin."
+
+His tone cut like a whip.  But Adelaide was growing used to take
+insults with outward meekness.  She swallowed her wrath and even
+tried to smile.
+
+It was horribly true that she had need of money.  Even before she had
+fallen into her present state of servitude, she had known that a day
+was coming when she would be penniless.
+
+Like all other women of her sensuous tastes and clamorous
+predilections, Adelaide devoured money as a pussycat crunches up
+small birds.  Her dead lover had spent upon her lavishly, had
+provided that an income should be paid her out of his private estate.
+But it was not sufficient for a woman so extravagant, and Adelaide
+had supplemented it in various ways.  Firstly, by obtaining
+information for the Prussian Secret Intelligence Bureau.  Secondly,
+by tapping the bank-balances of admirers of the wealthier order.
+Thirdly, by signing Bills of Exchange and Promissory Notes for cash
+at ruinous rates of interest.  When she had conceived the idea of
+obtaining a reconciliation with Henri de Bayard, the prospect of
+incarceration in a debtor's prison had loomed very near.
+
+The cunning fable of her riches that had been devised to tempt him to
+his ruin, had failed through the very whiteness of the man's
+integrity.  Ah, Adelaide!  The way to have triumphed over the Colonel
+would have been to have crept in tatters as a beggar to his door.
+
+But she had never understood the man.  Let us hope that generous soul
+of his was spared knowledge of the degradation of the woman he had
+worshiped, as Valverden went on, barely deigning to hide his contempt
+of her, or to modify even slightly the insolence of his tone:
+
+"You have asked me to protect you.  I have no objection to doing so.
+My sympathy is not at all with the losers who squeal.  Even when I
+was as poor as a church-mouse I had the gift of being plucked without
+wincing.  Besides, I won money that night when Von Kissling dropped
+such a lot....  And of course my testimony would be
+worth--something...."
+
+His tone of bargaining was unmistakable.  Adelaide flushed a
+dusky-red, through which the fading streaks of Straz's love-gift
+showed plainly, and her dark eyes gleamed covetously as she bent over
+the young man.  She whispered with her hot lips almost touching the
+diagonal white band of forehead above his soldierly sunburn:
+
+"What, Bernhard?  Tell me what it would be worth to you...."
+
+His long blue eyes laughed up into hers, lazily.  He said, feeling
+for the silver case in which he carried his fusees:
+
+"Shall we say ... a little information regarding the whereabouts of
+Mademoiselle Titania....  M. de Straz has piqued my curiosity, you
+will observe."
+
+"So!..."
+
+She reared above him like a furious Hamadryad, whispering thickly,
+for rage dried up her tongue:
+
+"So it is of my daughter you and Nicolas have been talking apart
+together, both here and at the Hôtel des Réservoirs.  Are you both
+mad?  For a pale, plain, dull school-girl ... a peaky, undeveloped,
+mincing doll!"
+
+He raised himself to a sitting posture, and answered her coarsely:
+
+"Women like you cannot realize what is or is not pleasing to men of
+my standard.  The Prince Imperial must have seen a good many pretty
+women, young as he is, yet he found your daughter charming, I am
+told....  M. de Straz, who is a judge, admires her excessively....
+If my curiosity is tickled, the fault is your own, for it was you and
+not M. Straz who first engaged my interest in that quarter....  Did I
+not speak to Count Moltke at your request of Mademoiselle?  Well, he
+did--though at first he scouted the notion--sound Count Bismarck on
+the subject, when he called to congratulate him on his First Class of
+the Iron Cross, and be complimented on his own Order _Pour Le
+Mérite_."
+
+He folded his arms on his broad chest and dropped the words out
+lingeringly, relishingly, his blue eyes gloating over the changes in
+her tortured face:
+
+"And the Chancellor answered him: '_Do not you trouble yourself!  All
+is well with the pretty young daughter of de Bayard, by that
+disreputable old woman who played the mistress of Count Max in '67._'"
+
+She screamed, and struck with her clenched hand at the fair, flushed,
+grinning face as though she would willingly have battered out its
+beauty.  He caught her wrist with a fencer's quickness, and prisoned
+the other in the twinkling of an eye.  He went on, holding her
+immovable, leisurely enjoying the changes upon her tortured face:
+
+"As a good German I do not interfere with my superiors.  His
+Excellency knows where the girl is, and does not at present choose to
+tell.  But you, Werte Frau, have the right to question His
+Excellency, whose answer was repeated to me by my Chief, Count
+Moltke.  Do not forget, however, that you lay claim to the disrepute
+as well as the daughter when you present yourself at the Foreign
+Office ... in the Rue de Provence...."
+
+She panted breathlessly:
+
+"I shall not go!  No one shall compel me!"
+
+"Oh, in that case," said Valverden, rising and releasing her, "I can
+only leave you to the arguments of M. de Straz.  He is coming now--I
+can hear his voice in the garden.  _Auf Wiedersehen!_"  He said over
+his shoulder, as he lounged out of the cottage: "In the affair of Von
+Kissling, do not count on my assistance.  It is only given on
+condition you fall in with our views."
+
+So he and Straz were in league....  Rage stung her to the mad
+imprudence of rebellion--the proud sultana whom a thousand freakish
+cruelties on the part of her swarthy master had taught to be a
+trembling slave.
+
+The Roumanian, we know, was nothing if not subtle.  When Adelaide
+flatly refused to call at the Foreign Office in the Rue de Provence
+in the character of a bereaved and yearning mother, he smiled on her,
+almost tenderly.  He kissed the wrists Valverden's grip had bruised.
+
+"Queen Rose of my Garden of Delights," he said, "why did you let the
+girl go in the beginning?  You recognized her value even when you did
+not know that she has money in her own right."
+
+Money....  A new light began to break upon Adelaide.  The fear of a
+sudden and violent death no longer stiffened her muscles.  She
+moistened her lips, pale under their rose-tinged salve, and lifted
+her eyebrows inquiringly.
+
+"Money, soul of my soul," said Straz, who had almost reverted to the
+original gushing and poetic Nicolas of Adelaide's remembrance, the
+lover whom in pre-Sigmaringen days she had cajoled and despised and
+betrayed.  "Not a large fortune certainly, but between her
+grandmother's estate and her father's savings she has a sum of 80,000
+francs invested in the Belgian cloth manufactory and dyeing works of
+M. Charles Tessier.  Not a fortune, but not a sum to be at all
+despised."  He added: "I have obtained this information from a
+person--formerly a clerk in the employment of the Versailles firm of
+solicitors who enjoyed the confidence of M. le Colonel and his
+sainted mother."  The quirk of his lips and the roll of his eyes as
+he made this reference, so unsavory in the ears of Adelaide, cannot
+be described.  "From this retentive person--I refer to the
+ex-clerk--I have purchased the intelligence I now divide with her who
+has the right to share the secrets of my heart."
+
+Adelaide had previously seated herself, at a motion of his finger.
+She looked up now as he thrust a hand between his vest and
+shirt-bosom.  Their glances met.  He said to her with a snap of his
+thick white fingers:
+
+"No!  Put that out of your head, _ma cocotte_!  Not a sou of de
+Bayard's will ever come his widow's way."
+
+This uncanny faculty of the Roumanian for reading her unspoken
+thoughts was one of the secrets of his power over Adelaide.  She
+shuddered now, encountering his look.
+
+"Don't you know," he was demanding, "that with her unique beauty
+Mademoiselle would be a fortune in our pockets even were she
+penniless?  What! you doubt the justice of my taste--which placed on
+you the seal of approval when your own charms were at their
+perihelion.  You who have paid the price for those supreme moments
+when celestial flames enveloped you--when you knew yourself nearest
+to the bosom of the Sun."
+
+Were all the men in league with this man to taunt and mock and
+torture her?  A fierce surge of blood rushed to her brain.  She heard
+his thick chuckle as she loosened, with shaking hands, the lace about
+her throat.
+
+"Why do you not kill me outright?" she cried to him, as the tide
+rushed back to her heart, and left her livid.  "Are you not yet weary
+of playing this hideous farce of marriage?  Why murder me by
+inches?...  Will you never set me free?..."
+
+He said, combing his clubbed beard with his thick yellow-white
+finger-tips:
+
+"When you have helped to get back Mademoiselle, I will think about
+providing you an honorable retirement.  Come!  Be pliant....  You
+have my word that you shall be free.  But without funds," he
+shrugged, "who can do anything?  And Mademoiselle has these
+expectations ... and beyond these I have certain definite
+arrangements with--a certain personage--who is--content to pay
+handsomely for an introduction to her."
+
+She cast caution to the four winds and shrieked at him furiously:
+
+"'De Bayard's daughter by that disreputable old woman!...'  Ah, for
+that he shall indeed pay handsomely!"
+
+For though the sentence quoted by Valverden bore the unmistakable
+stamp of the Iron Chancellor's mintage, the tone in which the words
+had been repeated, the icy glance of contempt that had accompanied
+them, rankled in the flesh of the unhappy woman, like barbed thorns.
+
+The venom wrought in her still, even to hardihood and a courage
+bordering on effrontery, when a few days later her hired carriage
+drew up before the sentried gate of the Tessier mansion in the Rue de
+Provence, early in the forenoon of a December day.
+
+
+
+
+LXX
+
+One of the black-garbed Chancery attendants opened the yellow-painted
+hall-door.  Madame tendered him a card, and said in her most musical
+tones, plying the archery of her fine eyes:
+
+"Madame de Straz, formerly de Bayard.  By appointment to see His
+Excellency the Chancellor."
+
+Von Keudell looked out of the drawing-room and signaled.  The
+Chancery attendant caught his eye.  Madame, borne upon a gale of
+costly perfume, swept her velvets and Russian sables over the Foreign
+Office threshold, and amidst the tinkling of lockets, and charms, and
+bracelets innumerable, was ushered into the drawing-room.
+
+As the door shut, and the Chancery attendant resumed his bench and
+his German newspaper, Jean Jacques Potier, who had been polishing the
+hall parquet with a flannel clout on one foot and a brush strapped on
+the other, resumed his labors with a very red face.  Madame Charles
+Tessier, who had been watering the ferns and pot-plants on the
+console-tables, wrapped in the woolen shawl that seemed parcel of her
+individuality, might have struck the young man, when he furtively
+glanced at her, as being whiter than her shawl.
+
+But the deadly whiteness passed, and the rigor of terror could add
+little stiffness to the gait that was a compound of a limp and a
+shuffle, as the Twopenny Roué's bugbear climbed the back-stairs to
+her second-floor room.
+
+Madame Potier slept in the next.  One could hear her making beds on
+the first-floor beneath one.  Judging by the sounds, she was sweeping
+the Chancellor's sleeping-room.  _Knock-knock!_ went her busy broom
+every instant, against the furniture or the wainscot.  _Flip-flap!_
+That was the duster, being shaken out of the window.  When the
+Minister was unwell, and kept his room, Madame did not sweep, but
+merely dusted and made the bed.  And he lay on the sofa, pulled near
+the fire and lengthened with a settee, or worked with his back to the
+window, at a table in the middle of the room.  There were two great
+black leather dispatch-boxes on the table, and a great many maps of
+France, covered with marginal annotations; and the brass-handled
+mahogany bureau near the washstand-alcove was piled high with boxes
+of long, strong Bremen cigars.  And by the bed was the night-table,
+with the framed photographs of his daughter and Countess Bismarck,
+his traveling candlestick, a supply of hard wax candles in a box,
+matches; a volume of Treitschke's "Heidelberg Lectures," with several
+little good books, in cloth bindings, "Daily Readings for Members of
+the Society of Moravian Brethren," and "Pearls from the Deep of
+Scripture," as well as a bottle of patent medicine and a box of
+pills, both of which nostrums were renewed constantly, and neither of
+which seemed to do him any good.
+
+For he coughed and hawked and spat bile continually.  Rarely was he
+silent before two o 'clock in the morning, and then it might be that
+one ceased to hear him, because one had succeeded in wooing sleep for
+oneself.  Something ailed him.  Those who knew him best gave no name
+to his ailment.  Others whispered of catarrh of the stomach.  Yet
+others were oracular upon the subject of dyspepsia of the acute kind.
+
+Whatever the indisposition, it was fostered by the indiscriminate
+generosity of his admirers, who continually forwarded from all parts
+of the German Fatherland huge consignments of delicacies solid and
+fluid for the delectation of their Chancellor.
+
+Choice wines, rare cigars and fine tobacco, liqueurs and old
+corn-brandies, cold punch in barrels, beer of Berlin and Leipzig, and
+the brunette drink beloved of Bavarians.  Smoked Pomeranian
+goose-breasts, cakes, sausages of every variety, fresh salmon and
+sturgeon, pickled tunny, herrings and caviar, game of all kinds,
+smoked hams of bear, deer, mutton, and pig.  Magdeburg sauerkraut and
+Leipzig pastry, preserves and fruit, fresh and candied, gorged the
+capacious storerooms and cellars of the Tessier mansion, which would
+have been found inadequate to accommodate all these mountains of good
+things, had not each Privy Councilor, Secretary and decipherer of the
+Chancellor's perambulating Foreign Office possessed a capacity for
+gorging only inferior to the Chief's.
+
+In truth, this great Minister, so pitiless in his mockery of the
+idiosyncrasies and weaknesses of others, habitually overate himself;
+showing as little mercy toward his stomach as the staff of the Berlin
+Chancellery displayed toward the gorged and replete leather
+dispatch-bags that came to him by every post.  He was horribly
+greedy, and drank a great deal, and his stomach-aches, like himself,
+were on the colossal scale.  More than once Madame Charles had
+ministered to their assuagement with infusions of carbonate of soda
+and peppermint.
+
+"One should check the appetite when one suffers thus from
+overindulgence," she had once said to him, stirring her dreadful
+infusion with an ivory measuring-spoon.
+
+"The French climate does not suit me...." he had answered her.  "In
+Germany I can eat a great deal more than I do here.  Not that I eat
+much really, because my dinner is my only meal."
+
+"But, just Heaven!  Monseigneur! what a meal!" she had screamed at
+him in horror.  And the room had resounded to his giant's Ha, ha, ha!
+
+"Without a head and stomach of iron," he told her, "such as we
+Bismarcks inherit from our ancestors, and Göttingen has helped to
+render more tough, it would have been impossible in my young days to
+get on in the Diplomatic Service.  We drank the weaker men under the
+table, then lifted them up, propped them between chairs, and made
+them sign their names to all sorts of concessions which they would
+not have dreamed of making otherwise....  To this day I can toss down
+the strongest wines of the Palatinate like water with my dinner.
+Champagne I need, and the bigger glasses I get it in the more it
+agrees with me....  Port, such as the English sip with dessert, I
+prefer as a breakfast-wine.  Corn-brandy, such as our Old Nordhausen,
+is indispensable for the oiling of my machinery; and I derive benefit
+from rum, taken after the Russian fashion, with my eight or nine cups
+of after-dinner tea."
+
+He added, sipping Madame Charles's fiercely-smelling nostrum:
+
+"Not that anything I have drunk or eaten mars my capacity for cool
+reflection and close argument....  When I and one or two others are
+laid by, men will only peck and sip.  There will only be chatter
+about eating and drinking....  _Grosser Gott!_  What things I used to
+do in that line when I was young!"
+
+And he tossed off the contents of the tumbler, and mouthed at it, and
+set it down upon the little tray she held and dismissed her with a
+nod of thanks.
+
+But Madame Charles carried away with her an idea of him as he had
+been in those old days, huge, loud, voracious, powerful,
+tempestuously jovial or ironically grim.  She crowned the domed head
+with thick waving locks of brown hair, lightened the shaggy brows,
+and gave the blue eyes back their youthful fire; smoothed the deep
+lines from the florid face, restored his long heavy limbs their
+shapeliness, and reduced the girth of his waist.  And it was
+impossible to despise the finished picture, because the man was so
+much a man.
+
+Day by day, while the War went on, and Paris lay raging and spitting
+fire within her impregnable, impassable girdle of human flesh and
+steel and iron--to this house where he sat solid and square at his
+table in his bedroom-study, reading over documents vomited by the
+great dispatch-boxes, or letters and papers captured with
+balloon-posts, or driving the pen with that tireless hand of his over
+sheets to be conned by Monarchs and rulers of States--came the Crown
+Prince of Prussia, handsome and débonnaire, or the dry, withered
+gentleman who bore the great name of von Moltke, or the War Minister
+von Roon, or M. Thiers, or the Saxon Minister von Friesen, or the
+Grand Dukes of Weimar or Baden, or the Duke of Coburg, or the
+Representatives of Austria-Hungary and Bavaria, or the English
+Ambassador, who had recently come upon a Mission to Versailles.
+Night after night, other and stranger footsteps crossed the
+threshold.  Sometimes blindfolded officers in stained and
+weatherbeaten French uniforms had been led upstairs to that
+mysterious room where he sat, weaving his huge web of diplomacy, or
+manipulating with deft, capable touches the threads that moved both
+men and Kings.
+
+Everyone came to this house on the quiet by-street of Versailles,
+that had become the throbbing center of the world....  From the
+greatest to the smallest, from the worthiest to the vilest.  Now,
+last of all came--Adelaide de Bayard.
+
+And with her came the question: How much he suspected.  There had
+been one or two moments when Juliette had been temporarily thrown off
+her guard.  Could one really deceive him, who was so subtle,
+watchful, observant?...  Past master in cunning, ripe in diplomacy....
+
+She heard his heavy footstep on the staircase as she held her bosom
+and listened.  Madame Potier had finished his bedroom, and taken her
+broom and dustpan to the next.  Madame de Bayard had been shown into
+the smaller interviewing-room, where the Brussels carpet had been
+paced into threadbare alleys by the feet of men who were topped by
+aching responsibilities--where the Crown Prince of Prussia smoked his
+big painted pipe of Latakia as he chatted with the Chancellor--where
+M. Thiers sat through long ordeals of torture in the little wicker
+arm-chair.
+
+Would the mother of Juliette de Bayard sit in that chair?  Her
+daughter knew how superbly she would rise and sweep her reverence to
+the Minister.  How smoothly she would pour forth some false and
+specious tale....
+
+The Minister strode in upon Madame, carrying his cap and riding-whip.
+His heavy countenance had the healthier flush of exercise, his great
+spurred boots were plastered with clayey mud.  He had but just
+returned from an early ride with Count Hatzfeldt, taken at this hour
+"To escape," as he had explained to that elegant functionary, "the
+detestable clattering and knocking of that female Kobold, whose day
+it is to sweep my room."
+
+"Why let her sweep?" Hatzfeldt had asked, and his principal had
+answered:
+
+"I approve domestic cleanliness.  And a room that is used as bedroom
+and study somehow harbors both spiders and dust.  And I abhor
+spiders--nearly as much as cockroaches.  Those long-waisted insects
+that swarm in the conservatory here give me almost a sensation of
+sickness when they scuttle away from my boots.  I find a physical
+relief, actually, in crushing them."
+
+He experienced something of that nausea and its resulting impulse
+toward extermination, meeting the bold eyes and the false
+ingratiating smile of the still beautiful Adelaide.  He said,
+standing huge and adamantine between the woman and the window:
+
+"Be seated, Madame....  No ... not that chair!  Possibly I grow old,
+but I find that I can best deal with certain persons when the morning
+light is on their faces."
+
+"As you will, Monseigneur!"
+
+Adelaide mentally execrated his coarse brutality as she bit her lip,
+pulled down her flowered veil more closely, and prepared to sink into
+the little wicker chair.
+
+"No!" he said, stopping her, "not that chair!--take the other.  To my
+idea the seat you at first selected represents at present the Throne
+of France, or at least the Presidential fauteuil.  M. Thiers occupies
+it when he comes to see me....  And he is a person whom I hold in
+much respect."
+
+She winced at the side-thrust.
+
+"I regret, Monseigneur, to have forfeited your good opinion."
+
+"I do not usually bestow my good opinion," he told her, "upon ladies
+of your reputation, even though I may have reason to praise their
+sharp wits.  Now pray state your business here.  My time is limited."
+
+She half rose up with a pained stare of wounded feeling, thought
+better of it, sank down again amidst her velvets and sables, and
+recited her lesson as taught by Straz.
+
+The Roumanian, by dint of diligent, patient inquiry, had collected
+and pieced together with marvelous cleverness, the information
+gathered, correlative to the movements of Juliette.  Her departure
+from the Prefecture at Bethel, her frustrated journey to the Camp at
+Châtel St. Germain--her halt at the village of Petit Plappeville, her
+search for the Colonel upon the battlefield, were all pieces in a
+mosaic miraculously restored.  M. de Straz knew that Count Bismarck
+had seen and spoken to the young lady--had ordered separate burial
+for the body of de Bayard.  He could even name a soldier of the
+German burial-party, who had helped to dig the grave.  Subsequently
+Mademoiselle had been seen in company with a young Englishman ... she
+had returned with him to Petit Plappeville.  The village had been
+raided and sacked by Prussian cavalry.  Since when, Mademoiselle,
+with the young Englishman, had returned to Versailles....  She was
+occupying the Tessier mansion up to the moment of the arrival of the
+Chancellor with his Foreign Office Staff.  And--by a most curious and
+deplorable coincidence, from that psychological moment to the
+present, all trace of Mademoiselle had been lost....
+
+"Consequently," Adelaide wound up her well-conned lesson, "myself and
+M. de Straz have no resource but to apply to Your Excellency.
+Naturally M. de Straz desires that the daughter of M. de Bayard and
+myself should be extricated from a compromising position and placed
+under our joint guardianship.  He takes--such chivalry is innate in
+his nature--a parental interest in the poor young girl!"
+
+Said the Minister, smiling with cynical amusement:
+
+"Therefore in the interests of Chivalry and Morality--you call on
+me--as proprietor of the seraglio in which you suppose Mademoiselle
+to have been hidden away....  You demand"--he struck the riding-glove
+he had removed upon the palm of the right hand it had covered--"and
+the hint of such a demand is a menace--do you hear?--a menace--that I
+should render the girl up to you, or pay through the nose for what I
+once declined to buy.  You think at this epoch in the history of
+Germany--when the search-ray of international interest is turned upon
+the doings of that fellow Bismarck at Versailles--that I should not
+care to be classed with the Minotaurs who devoured youths and
+virgins.  Madame, they were French monarchs, I am only a Pomeranian
+squire...."
+
+He rose up, towering over the quaking woman, and strode across the
+shaking floor and pulled the green silk bell-rope by the fireplace.
+It came down in his hand, top ornament, wire and all, and he said as
+he looked at it and tossed it from him:
+
+"That is a suggestion on the part of your Fate which I shall not
+adopt, though I could hang you and your paramour...."
+
+He added, speaking loudly as Von Keudell opened the door, and the
+wretched woman rose and tottered toward him:
+
+"Did I hold the secret of your daughter's hiding-place, I would not
+betray her to you....  _Adieu_, Madame de Bayard....  You observe
+that I do not add, 'and _au revoir_!'"
+
+The great resonant voice had sounded through the whole house like a
+beaten war-gong.  Lying upon the floor of her room, straining her
+ears to catch some fragments of their colloquy, it broke over
+Juliette in waves of thunderous sound.
+
+Jean Jacques, below in the hall, was told by Von Keudell to "see the
+lady to her carriage," which, in virtue of her appointment, had been
+admitted through the Tessier _porte cochère_.  The Swiss youth obeyed
+with even a clumsier grace than usual, the polishing-brush being
+still strapped about one instep, and the clout still swathed about
+the other foot, as he hobbled down the shallow doorsteps to open the
+brougham-door for Madame.  As she stepped in and took the seat, her
+strained eyes leaped at his face suddenly.  As he leaned in arranging
+the rug about her knees--what was it he heard her say:
+
+"You are the English boy I saw in July at the house of M. de
+Bismarck.  Do not attempt to deny; I never forget a face!  When can
+you come and see me?...  I must speak to you!  I swear to you that I
+mean no harm to Mademoiselle Juliette de Bayard!"
+
+Her lips were ashen under their rose-salve.  The ringed, bare hand
+she laid on his rough paw burned like fire.  He muttered in the weird
+_patois_ that passed as Swiss with some German occupants of the
+Tessier mansion:
+
+"Madame will pardon....  One does not understand!"
+
+She gave a disjointed, unmusical peal of laughter, that rattled the
+brougham windows.
+
+"Droll boy!  But you will come, whether you understand or not.  The
+Villa Laon, Maisons Laffitte, near St. Germain....  Night-time will
+be best--to-night or to-morrow night."  She added, looking at him
+over the lowered window as he shut the door upon her: "Ask for Madame
+de Straz.  I shall be waiting for you.  Do not forget!..."
+
+The carriage drove on.  He stood upon the lowest doorstep staring
+after it, for only privileged vehicles were admitted by the _porte
+cochère_.  A hand fell heavily on his shoulder, startling him
+hideously.  A terrible grating voice said in his ear, speaking in the
+Minister's excellent English:
+
+"So, Madame Delilah has been trying her sorceries, has she?  Come
+this way, my young English friend....  I want two words with you!"
+
+
+
+
+LXXI
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+LXXII
+
+She passed out of the room.  Von Keudell held open the door for her.
+As he did so, he glanced toward his Chief for instructions.  The
+Minister said, answering the interrogation in the look:
+
+"No.  I prefer to extend to Mademoiselle the semi-liberty of the
+_parole_."  He added: "Exceptional cases must be treated
+exceptionally.  Upon a different kind of young woman I should
+promptly turn the key.  Tell Grams and Engelberg that they are
+released from duty outside there.  And Niederstedt...."
+
+He whistled, and the great red face and huge unwieldy figure of the
+East Prussian ex-door porter filled up nearly the whole width of one
+of the long windows.  The red face disappeared as the steam of its
+owner's breath dimmed the glass, and the effect was so quaint that
+the Minister laughed irresistibly as he opened the window and
+relieved the impeccable guard, saying:
+
+"Why, my good Niederstedt, you are frozen--you smoke like a volcano.
+Go down to the house-steward--tell him to give you some old
+corn-brandy, hot, with sugar and pepper.  That will thaw you inside
+as well as out!..."
+
+He shut the window, and came back to the fireplace, pushed forward
+the great green brocade armchair, and threw himself into it, saying
+as he stretched his long legs out to the glowing billets:
+
+"You may go, Mr. Breagh; there is no cause for detaining you.  But
+while you remain here, revert to your own dress, and leave it to more
+experienced hands to polish the floor and balusters, to which I
+adhere like a fly who has walked upon treacle, half-a-dozen times in
+a day.  Remember--I see no reason for denying you reasonable access
+to the society of Mademoiselle de Bayard--unless she objects to your
+visits, in which case she will probably notify me!----"  He added
+more genially: "Sit down.  Take that chair opposite me....  You need
+no longer stand in the attitude of a suspected criminal.  Indeed, I
+rather think you have repaid a small service I was enabled to render
+you in pulling you out of a Berlin crowd, last July.  Ah, that
+reminds me.  I must ask you for the return of that paper...."  He
+watched with a slight expression of amusement as P. C. Breagh
+produced the shabby note-case from a pocket inside his livery
+waistcoat, commenting:
+
+"Had you been searched, those papers would have betrayed you
+instantly.  One more skilled in the art of disguise would have
+carried nothing that could afford information.  That is a very
+elementary rule."
+
+P. C. Breagh said, meeting the powerful eyes fully:
+
+"I have already had the honor to explain to Your Excellency that my
+disguise was not assumed for any purpose but that of remaining near
+Mademoiselle de Bayard."
+
+He rose and offered the folded half-sheet of Chancellery note to the
+Minister, who took it, unfolded and glanced at the black upright
+characters above the signature, then tore the paper to pieces, and,
+leaning forward, dropped it into the heart of the fire.  Then he
+kicked back a charring log with the toe of his great riding-boot, and
+said, leaning back in the green armchair:
+
+"Credited--as to your statement about the reason of your
+impersonation.  You should see to it that Mademoiselle rewards such
+chivalry.  As regards the pass I have just cremated--did you find it
+useful or--otherwise?"
+
+P. C. Breagh said:
+
+"The one and only time I did use it, it proved of service to me.  But
+later----"
+
+"Speak frankly," said the Chancellor.  "I have no disrelish for
+candor, you are aware."
+
+P. C. Breagh said, flushing to the temples:
+
+"Later, the accidental discovery that I possessed it, exposed me to
+the accusation of being a spy."
+
+"So you chose to do without it?"
+
+"I thought," said P. C. Breagh, "that I would try to do without it.
+And upon the whole I managed--better than I expected to...."
+
+"To put it baldly," commented the resonant voice of the Minister,
+"you preferred to travel in blinkers and with hobbles on--for the
+sake of a scruple of the genteel kind.  That is your Celtic blood....
+You remind me of the story--I think it hails from Dublin, of the
+little old spinster lady of high family, who was reduced for a living
+to hawking pickled pig's-trotters in the streets.  She accepted the
+money to buy the license, with the basket and the first installment
+of trotters, and went forth into the streets to sell them--but beyond
+this, as a gentlewoman--her feelings did not permit her to go.  So
+she cried, in a whisper: 'Trotters! who'll buy my trotters!  Only a
+penny!  Pickled trotters!  Please God, nobody hears me!' ... and
+nobody did hear her, so that was the end of her...."
+
+He had told his absurd tale with one of those comic changes of face
+and voice characteristic of him.  Now he reverted to gravity, and
+said, as P. C. Breagh rose to withdraw:
+
+"Go! but remain here as my guest for the present.  You are not under
+_surveillance_.  But there is one question I must again put to you.
+What of this mysterious personage who represented himself to you as
+M. Charles Tessier?  You must now be convinced that Mademoiselle
+knows nothing of him?  Well, then, I will repeat the simple questions
+which you refused to answer just now.  Where did you first see him?
+how long ago? and how many times have you encountered him?"
+
+P. C. Breagh had been first addressed by the stranger when returning
+from an errand in the character of Jean Jacques.  Putting it roughly,
+about a fortnight back.  Since then, he had been twice spoken to by
+the same man.  Interrogated as to the appearance of the stranger, he
+ruminated a moment, then answered: "The man was of middle height, but
+broad and tremendously muscular.  He was remarkable to look at, very
+dark; with great black eyebrows, and a profile like that of an
+Egyptian hawk-god.  No! ... He was more like those curly-bearded
+man-bird-bulls Layard dug up in the mounds of Babylonia and Assyria."
+
+Said the Minister:
+
+"You have answered all my questions in that simile....  The man is
+Straz the Roumanian, who is supposed to have married Madame de
+Bayard.  What was it she said to you this morning when I had the
+ill-manners to break upon the lady's confidences?"
+
+Said Breagh, with a pucker between the broad eyebrows that would be
+red when he had washed off the soot:
+
+"Whatever she is, she is Mademoiselle de Bayard's mother, and I would
+ask Your Excellency to remember it too."
+
+"_Quatsch!_" said His Excellency roughly.  "Mademoiselle de
+Bayard--for whom I have a sneaking sort of kindness, in spite of her
+avowedly bloodthirsty intentions toward myself!--has no worse enemy
+than that adventuress-mother of hers, and you should be aware of it
+by this time.  In plain words, she visited me in the Wilhelm Strasse
+upon an occasion you will remember, to offer to sell me Mademoiselle
+as bait for the better catching of an Imperial fish.  I did not take
+the high horse with her, but refused her simply as declining an
+unsuitable business proposal."  He laughed and added: "These good
+ladies have conveniently short memories.  Imagine her coming to
+appeal to me to-day, in the character of a bereaved mother with a
+yearning heart!...  Well, now she has asked you to go to see her?
+Have I not hit it?"
+
+Answered Breagh:
+
+"She told me that I was English, and that she remembered having seen
+me at Your Excellency's.  She asked me where her daughter was, and
+then--when I pretended stupidity--she laughed, and insisted that I
+must visit her to-night or to-morrow night.  How late did not matter.
+She seemed certain that I would come."
+
+"Well, you will go to her," said the Minister, "but not to-night, I
+think!  To-morrow night would be preferable!... If you appeared
+to-night, she would think that you are to be easily got over, and she
+would not show her hand to you.  Go to her late.  Twelve o'clock will
+not be too late for her.  Women of her type are usually
+night-birds--and, besides, most people sit up on Christmas Eve.
+Report direct to me at whatever hour you may get back.  I myself am
+not likely to turn in before daylight, because the Crown Prince and
+the three Bavarian Envoys dine here."  He added, looking quizzically
+at the young man: "Now you are saying to yourself, 'That has
+something to do with the scheme for the accession of the South German
+States to the North German Confederation....  An agreement has been
+definitely arrived at.  That is why Bismarck let that fat plum drop
+about the New German Empire just now.'"
+
+He laughed outright as P. C. Breagh reddened, but made no effort to
+deny the charge, and went on:
+
+"Baden and Würtemburg have come to terms.  You cannot use the
+intelligence before it will be known by everyone in London, so I risk
+nothing by telling you.  Our chief stumbling-block has been the King
+of Bavaria, who suffers from gumboils, and considers that in turning
+the Palace of Versailles into a military hospital, we have outraged
+the shades of Louis XIV., Madame de Montespan, Louis XV., Madame de
+Pompadour, and Queen Marie Antoinette."  He added curtly: "There! be
+off, and tell Grams to send word to the stable that I am ready for
+the horses.  I ride with Count Hatzfeldt another hour to-day.  And
+change those clothes, if you would have me cease to address you as a
+footboy....  Clothes cannot make a man, but the lack of them can mar
+him--if they make him appear a clod."
+
+The horses came, and he rode out with Hatzfeldt.  There was a
+piercing northeast wind and a spatter of freezing sleet, much
+resented by the Diplomatic Secretary and his thin-skinned
+thoroughbred, and even displeasing to the Chancellor's great brown
+mare.
+
+The iron lions of Mont Valérien were growling and spitting shell down
+into the surrounding valleys, thickly wooded with trees, now
+stripped--all save the firs and pines--of leaves, and
+glittering-white with frost.  The lakes in the parks were frozen.
+Hundreds of thrushes drifted like leaves before the icy gale, toward
+the low-growing coverts of ivy and brushwood.  A balloon rose within
+the Bois de Boulogne, soared, and traveled south-west.
+
+Reaching the Aqueduct of Marly, they dismounted, for the purpose of
+taking what the Minister termed "a peep at Paris from the platform,"
+and, leaving their horses to the care of the grooms, transferred
+themselves there.
+
+Behind the Forest of Marly the red sun of December was sinking over
+the frosty landscape.  The Minister glanced casually through his
+glasses at the ruined houses of Louvéciennes in the foreground,
+sheltered amidst their clumps of whitened trees; and sweeping over
+the villages of La Celle and Bougival, looked long toward Fort Mont
+Valérien, where the great stronghold sat perched on its height with
+its many windows glowing like furnaces in that fierce reflection from
+the crimson west.
+
+The line of the Rennes and Brest railway running from Courbevoie
+through the Park of St. Cloud and Versailles showed strongly held by
+Prussian outposts.  Beyond, between banks dotted with damaged
+hamlets, and bordered on the north side with fanged ice sheets, the
+silver-gray Seine wound, flowing sluggishly about her islands,
+wrinkling her lips in disgust at the jagged buttresses of the bridges
+that had been blown up.  Farther south, over the lopped trees of the
+Bois de Boulogne, rose the great shining dome of the Invalides,
+bathed in that ominous ruddiness, looking like a great cabochon ruby
+studding a shield of silvery-green bronze.  For Paris from this point
+of view is shield-shaped, crossed with the bar-sinister of her
+historic river; backed with her fortifications as by the
+enamel-and-silver work of a cunning jeweler; set with points of
+diamond where the bayonets of a column of marching infantry moved out
+from the ramparts along the road toward Fort Vanves.
+
+It was frightfully cold.  Said Hatzfeldt, stamping to recover the
+circulation in his numbed feet, and beating his gloved hands
+vigorously upon his sides:
+
+"How cold!...  I can smell more snow.  Heaps of it, coming!"
+
+The Chief turned an eye toward the speaker without lowering the
+glasses through which he was looking.  He completed his survey before
+he said, restoring the binoculars to their case, and speaking with a
+jarring note of anger in his voice that made the Secretary arch his
+eyebrows:
+
+"I do not smell what I should like best to smell, and that is, the
+smoke of a German bombardment!"  He added: "We have to thank women
+and priests, and Jews and Freemasons, if our operations are not
+conducted as energetically as they should be.  To begin with,
+Monsignor Dupanloup has Augusta by the apron string--the Crown
+Prince, cajoled by his wife and bullied by Victoria, his
+mother-in-law--is ready to give up the command if I insist that we
+begin....  Do you know how many weeks it has taken me to get our Most
+Gracious to consent that the siege train should be moved from Villa
+Coublay and placed in position?  And then Moltke and the generals
+asserted that we had not ammunition enough....  Given three hundred
+powerful siege guns--ninety of them howitzers--with fifty or sixty
+mortars, and five hundred rounds of ammunition for each--could not we
+pour sufficient shell into the city to bring her to reason?  Give me
+the post of Commander-in-Chief for twenty-four hours--and I will take
+it upon myself!..."
+
+Hatzfeldt said mentally:
+
+"Ah, the devil! wouldn't you--and with a vengeance!"
+
+The Chancellor went on, deep lines of anger and vexation digging
+themselves into his gloomy face:
+
+"Never were two men more reluctant to reap the fruits of a great
+victory than our Most Gracious and his Heir Apparent--who in this
+matter, as in some others, needs a candle to light up his head!..."
+
+His face took on a sullen cast.  He stamped his foot upon the ground,
+and bayed out like some deep-mouthed bloodhound:
+
+"If they have no ambition of their own--these Hohenzollerns--do not
+they owe something to mine?"
+
+He ended, breaking into his great laugh, evoked by something in the
+expression of his Secretary:
+
+"Here am I--applying to you for sympathy, who are just as
+petticoat-ridden by your Countess as the King and Prince Fritz by
+their respective better halves.  Have you not your mother-in-law and
+your millionaire papa-in-law shut up there in the Rue de Helder--to
+say nothing of your wife's pet pair of pony cobs?"
+
+Hatzfeldt returned, shrugging ruefully:
+
+"I had another letter from my wife about the cobs this morning.
+Heaven knows whether they are still alive!"
+
+The Minister said with a touch of malice:
+
+"It is quite certain that there has been no fresh meat in Paris now
+for some time.  Except ass and mule flesh at fifteen francs a pound.
+Dogs and cats are getting scarce, consequently _ragoût de lièvre_ has
+become the staple dish at all the restaurants...."
+
+Hatzfeldt rejoined with a sigh:
+
+"I am not quite sure that a little starvation would not be good for
+myself personally, and one or two others of the Prussian Foreign
+Office staff.  For there is no denying we eat a great deal too much.
+Your Excellency knows there are few nights when we spend at the
+dinner table less than two hours and a half."
+
+The answer came:
+
+"You should eat little for breakfast, and nothing in the middle of
+the day; then your stomachs would neigh and prance at the dinner call
+as mine never fails to do.  Sometimes you see me dine twice without
+ill results--as when I am going to the King, who keeps a bad
+table--and find it necessary to fortify myself beforehand...."
+
+He broke off speaking to cough and expectorate, and Hatzfeldt, noting
+the deep yellow hue of his jaws and temples and forehead, and the
+sagging pouches under the great eyes, and the caves that his
+anxieties and labors had recently dug about them, said to himself
+that the Chief's health was not what it had been; that any fool could
+see with half an eye he was terribly liverish; that he slept little
+and spat bile continually, and that his superhuman capacity for work,
+in combination with his superhuman powers of eating and drinking,
+were maintained at high pressure by a remorseless vanity that proved
+him no stronger or wiser than other men.
+
+What was he saying in tones tinged with mockery, for he had probably
+taken that reference to the excess of luxury at the Foreign Office in
+the Rue de Provence as a thrust directed at himself:
+
+"If you would really like to try high living after the latest
+Parisian style, I have at home among some letters taken from a
+balloon captured yesterday the menu of a dinner given at Voisin's on
+the twenty-first by some rich Americans: _Potage St. Germain....
+Côtelettes de loup chasseur....  Chat garni des rats rôtis, sauce
+poivrade.  Rosbif de Chameau....  Salade de légumes.  Cèpes à la
+Bordelaise.  Dessert, none at all_....  I gathered from the same
+source that the Government are going to take over all private stores
+of provisions, and that the edible animals confined in the Jardin des
+Plantes are to be shot and cut up for sale."
+
+"Good-bye to poor Touti's ponies, then," said the Secretary, with
+resignation, "and possibly farewell also to my hopes of a sturdy son
+and heir."
+
+"Ah! if things are as serious as that," said the Minister, "you had
+better telegraph to the Countess.  Prince Wittgenstein, Clarmont, and
+little Desjardin, Secretary of the Belgian Legation in Paris, left
+there yesterday morning by special permit from General Trochu.  All
+three packed into a _coupé_ belonging to Prince Croy--these equine
+treasures of your wife's were harnessed to the vehicle.  They were to
+spend the night at Villeneuve St. Georges--and you will probably find
+them in Versailles when we get back."
+
+He added as the Secretary thanked him with effusiveness:
+
+"As regards the family in the Rue de Helder and your bootmaker--the
+only man in the world who can turn you out properly!--you may tell
+them, if you are in communication with them, that until the
+twenty-seventh of December they may sleep in peace....  As to-morrow
+is Christmas Eve, that means four unbroken nights of slumber.  After
+that--the Deluge; not of water, but of fire and steel and lead."  He
+added, ignoring the Secretary's start and half-suppressed
+exclamation: "Call to Reichardt to bring up the horses.  I find it
+chilly--let us be getting back!"
+
+
+
+
+LXXIII
+
+Christmas Eve came with an unloading of all the countless tons of
+snow that had lain pent up behind those skies of leaden grayness.
+The Seine froze in thin crackling patches, Paris and the surrounding
+country lay under two feet of snow.  Kraus, Klaus, Schmidt, and Klein
+of the Army of United Germany told each other gleefully that it was
+going to be a real German Christmas, after all.  Nearly every man had
+packed up and sent a French clock or a porcelain vase as a seasonable
+gift to his family in Germany, or some article of furniture of a
+bulkier kind.  Now upon the side of the senders of these love gifts
+was a great unpacking of strongly smelling parcels directed in
+well-known characters, and containing cakes, sausages, pudding,
+loaves of black bread, cheeses, barrels of Magdeburg, sauerkraut, and
+salt meat to eat with it, sweets, tobacco, cigars, and pipes.  Each
+hospital and barracks, camp and quarters displayed elaborate
+preparations for merrymaking; the most distant outpost wore a festive
+air.  Wagonloads of holly, ivy, and mistletoe creaked over the snow.
+Miniature forests of fir trees, large and small, had been cut down,
+and set up in tubs of earth for the festival.
+
+French eyes regarded these preparations upon the part of their foes
+with curiosity.  For Catholics there would be Midnight Mass at the
+churches--by consent of the German authorities!--Holy Communion--and
+some sort of supper--possibly none this War Christmas--upon the
+return from Church.  But this setting out of tables of presents under
+the fir-branches adorned with colored tapers hung with
+child-rejoicing trifles such as gilt nuts and gingerbread, apples and
+sugar plums; this singing of carols; Luther's "_Euch ist ein Kindlein
+heut geboren_," with "_Der Tannenbaum_," and "_Stille Nacht, Heilige
+Nacht_," the frequent references to Santa Claus and his sack, and the
+Christkind--apparently regarded as a benevolently disposed Puck or
+Brownie, was to the adult non-German inhabitants of Versailles
+excessively puzzling, unless they happened to be English Protestants.
+
+Of these honest Britons there was a fair sprinkling, the majority of
+them being exceedingly depressed and out-at-elbows refugees from
+Paris, whose exodus from the city in the previous month of November
+had been achieved under the auspices of the British Government, and
+the personal superintendence of Lord Henry Fermeroy, Secretary of
+Lord Lyons's Embassy at Paris, armed with a safe conduct from General
+Trochu.
+
+Despite his low-bosomed vests, Imperial, and French accent, this
+sprig of British nobility behaved like a man.  From the old lady who
+brought a tin bonnet box full of jewelry and a case containing a
+stuffed pug, with the prayer that these heirlooms might be taken care
+of at the Embassy, and the courtesan, Cora Pearl, who requested
+formal permission to carry on business, during the siege, under the
+protection of the British Flag, as from each individual unit of the
+army of distressed Britishers who flocked to seek his aid or counsel,
+Lord Henry earned gratitude, and praise, and good-will.
+
+When the provisions and money subscribed to the Fund for the aid of
+the many destitute English residents in Paris were at an end, he did
+not hesitate to dip his hand into his own breeches pocket.  His
+shining patent-leather boots carried him not only into the attics and
+cellars where grim Starvation crouched on a bed of damp straw.  They
+tripped over the Aubusson carpets of the drawing-rooms where Genteel
+Famine sat sipping hot water out of Sèvres cups, wherewith to quell
+its gnawing pangs, and retired, without having trodden upon a single
+corn during the accomplishment of their owner's charitable errand.
+He bombarded Count Bismarck with official Notes, until he had
+obtained permission from that grim Cerberus for his little army of
+refugees to pass the Prussian lines.
+
+Of his dreary three days' journey in charge of the string of country
+carts containing the exiles, who were permitted to travel to
+Versailles via the Porte Charenton, Brie-Comte-Robert, and Corbeil,
+Lord Henry afterward penned a Narrative.  Which literary effort,
+printed, bound in cloth of a soothing green, and adorned with a
+Portrait of the Author, the young man bestowed upon his friends.
+
+Perhaps you can see the blue eyes of Juliette peering between the
+frost flowers encrusting the window of her bedroom on the second
+floor, which commanded a view of the garden of the Rue de Provence.
+
+She had, upon the previous evening, received an intimation from the
+Minister that she would be permitted to take exercise regularly in
+the garden between the hours of nine and ten.  Thus with a throbbing
+heart, she dressed the shining tresses so long concealed under Madame
+Charles Tessier's chenille net and white shawl, and arrayed herself
+in the plain black silk skirt and bodice that we have seen once
+previously--looped over a cloth petticoat of the same mourning hue.
+She sought for, found, and put on the gray velvet jacket trimmed with
+Persian lambskin, and the little gray toque that matched it,
+despoiled of its azure feather.  These things, with many others, had
+been packed away in a trunk and stowed in the attic now occupied by
+Madame Potier, when Mademoiselle had departed for Belgium under the
+charge of Madame Tessier.
+
+She wound a white silk scarf about her throat, tied on a veil, and
+found herself wishing for a knot of violets to brighten the pale,
+somberly clad reflection in the looking-glass....  Color ... and her
+Colonel's grave lying under the first-fallen snow....  She blushed
+deep rose for very shame of her own vanity, and then in all
+conscience the picture was bright enough.
+
+The pleasance, like the rest of the world, lay under a mantle of
+sparkling whiteness.  The orderlies and grooms had already cleared
+and scraped the paths in the vicinity of the house.  The ring of the
+shovels and the swish of the brooms might be heard in the distance.
+Mademoiselle sighed, thinking of Jean Jacques Potier.
+
+Then timidly she stole down by the back staircase and passed through
+the hall door into a world all glittering.  The keen air was as
+exhilarating as champagne.  It breathed on her cheeks, and renewed
+the roses that had bloomed there when she had frowned at the girl in
+the mirror.  The frost kissed her eyes, and they sparkled like
+sapphire-tinted icicles.  She tripped down the short curved avenue,
+passed the gardener's cottage, and turned into the kitchen garden.
+Not that she was looking for anybody there.
+
+All through the autumn and winter in a sheltered corner had bloomed a
+large standard rose tree of the hardy, late-flowering kind.  The
+storms of October had passed over and left its fragrant pink blooms
+unscathed, the bitter winds and night frosts of November had done no
+more than brown the edges of an outer petal.  The tree in its
+fragrance and beauty, and its strange immunity from hurt of wind and
+weather, had been an unfailing source of pleasure to Juliette.  When
+an overblown flower shed its leaves, she had gathered up and kept
+them.  When a new bud plumped and bravely unfolded, her heart had
+known a delicate thrill of joy.
+
+So Mademoiselle went on into the kitchen garden, whose paths had not
+been cleared of snow.  There was her tree--standing in its corner,
+but buried to the lower branches in a drift that had formed in this
+sheltered angle of the southward wall.
+
+The roses had met their match at last.  Drooping and yellow, sodden
+and heavy, they had no more courage or hope to give away.  Juliette
+kissed both her hands to them, in farewell, and turned to encounter
+P. C. Breagh.
+
+The green baize apron and other integuments of the late Jean Jacques
+Potier had been replaced by the old brown Norfolk suit so often
+mentioned in these pages.  It had been sedulously brushed and his
+linen was scrupulously white, and he had bestowed infinite pains upon
+the knot of the black silk, loose-ended tie.  His cropped hair would
+grow again, and his broad red smear of eyebrow was echoed on his
+upper lip by a young but decidedly red mustache with rather fuzzy
+corners.  The pleasant lips smiled at sight of her, and a hot flame
+leaped into the gray-and-amber eyes.  Her own could not be likened to
+sapphire icicles now.  They were tender, and her long upper lip was
+haunted by flying smiles that came, and vanished, and came again.
+
+"It is you!  Ah, my friend," she said, "I am so glad--I am so glad!"
+
+He caught the gloved hands she stretched out to him, and held them in
+his, that were reddened with Jean Jacques Potier's labors, and kissed
+them eagerly.  The little gray gloves were not buttoned--his warm
+lips feasted unchecked upon each blue-veined wrist, until she told
+him breathlessly:
+
+"No more!--there must be no more!...  Pray cease, my friend!"
+
+She had withdrawn her hands....  He said with a catch in his breath
+and with eyes that implored her:
+
+"I do not offend you?..."
+
+She looked at him full and drew off one glove and laid the bare hand
+in his extended palm.  Warm and soft, it seemed incredibly small as
+it lay there.  The touch of it infused a melting sweetness; a thrill
+went through the man from head to foot.  Perhaps the thrill was
+communicated, for she drew her hand away quickly.  She said:
+
+"You are very generous to one who has so often deceived you....  How
+many times I have condemned myself for my wickedness, thinking: 'Of
+all those noble deeds I have described in the letters, not one has
+been really performed by M. Charles Tessier....  All are invented to
+make a good face!'"
+
+He said in a whisper:
+
+"I could forgive you for making even a worse fool of me--now I know
+you never were married!  It was your telling me that knocked me out
+of time....  Nothing else mattered much afterward....  You said to
+Monseigneur yesterday that it was to retain your place in this house
+you pretended to be the wife of its master.  But why did you pretend
+it in the first place to _me_?"
+
+She began to change color from pale to red, and tried to free her
+hand.  It was impossible.  He said:
+
+"I mean to know....  I have the right to know!..."
+
+She faltered:
+
+"See you well, Monsieur, I cannot explain...."
+
+He said doggedly:
+
+"Then I shall explain it for you.  You told me that to make me
+jealous!  Now, did you not?"
+
+She winced.
+
+"Monsieur ... not then!...  Upon my faith, I assure you....  See you
+well, I had promised my father that M. Charles should be my
+husband....  I would have kept that promise _à tout hasard_ ... had
+M. Charles not married Mademoiselle Basselôt.  And so I told you I
+was married, not then to make you jealous ... that came after.  But
+to make it ... possible to be true!"
+
+He almost reeled under the sudden shock of the terrible, exquisite
+confession.  He would have given a year of life to let himself go
+with the sweet roaring current that tumbled foaming through his veins
+and sent its red sparkling bubbles to his brain.  But there were
+steps and voices on the other side of the high laurel hedge that
+divided the kitchen garden from the pleasance.  He recognized
+Bismarck-Böhlen's snigger and Hatzfeldt's lazy, well-bred
+accents--telling an anecdote of the Minister one could not doubt.
+The languid voice reached their ears distinctly.  It said:
+
+"He was an officer of French Imperial Hussars, who had been taken
+prisoner at Sedan, and had broken his _parole_.  He had been taken
+again in arms against us, fighting under General Chancy at Le Mans.
+So she comes post-haste to Versailles, lays siege to the King, who
+will not see her--to the Crown Prince, who will not see her--and
+finally to Moltke, who will not see her, because all three of them
+are cowards at the sight of a woman's tears.  Finally the Chief
+consents to receive her....  It was yesterday, in his room at the
+Prefecture.  She comes in--all in black, which to a blonde of her
+type is very suitable, full of hope at not being made to _croquer le
+marmot_ for long.  She reels off a long tale about her Frederic, his
+bravery, and his excellent heart.  The Chief listens sympathetically,
+looking at the clock from time to time.  Again the heart is pressed
+upon his notice.  It is heavy with grief at the thought of a life
+parting from Madame, who is Frederic's mistress, by the way--and not
+his wife!...  It is weighed down with suspense at the delay of the
+Prussian _Kriegsrath_ in answering the loved ones his prayer....  She
+gets so far, when the Chief looks up at the clock, and says, touching
+his table bell: 'Madame, that excellent heart of your client is even
+heavier than it was five minutes ago....'  'How, Monseigneur?' cries
+Madame.  'He was shot,' says the Chief, 'just now when I looked up at
+the clock.  And, as a rule, seven out of the ten bullets shot off by
+the firing party are found to have lodged in the region of the
+heart.'  So the poor woman screamed and fainted.  They carried her
+past me with her teeth set and all her fine hair hanging down...."
+
+Bismarck-Böhlen's snigger greeted the _dénouement_.  The footsteps
+grew fainter.  Juliette and Breagh exchanged glances.  She said with
+white lips:
+
+"Monseigneur can be merciless!  And yet, when I heard him tell my
+mother that did he know of my hiding place, he would not betray it, I
+said to myself: '_How you have misjudged this man!_'"
+
+Her comrade had started at the reference to Madame de Bayard,
+remembering the rendezvous to be kept that night.  Juliette went on,
+with a liquid look:
+
+"Monsieur, I have a favor to ask of you....  All those weeks when I
+struggled with that purpose from which you tried so faithfully to
+dissuade me, I did not once dare to set foot in Our Lord's House.
+But when I threw away that wicked bottle, I found that I could pray
+once more....  I went to the Carmelite Fathers and made my
+confession....  I received Our Lord in the Holy Communion ... and my
+soul began to be at peace again.  Now it is Christmas Eve and I
+should much like to attend the Midnight High Mass, or the Second Mass
+at daybreak, and I had intended to ask you to take me, but I am upon
+_parole_....  Therefore, I entreat of you--pray for me when you make
+your own Communion.  How much I need Divine pardon and guidance ...
+even you can hardly know...."
+
+His conscience stung.  He had not intended to evade the sacred
+obligation, yet he had wavered as to when he should comply with the
+command of the Church.  He said:
+
+"It shall be as you ask.  I shall attend High Mass at the Church of
+the Carmelites at midnight.  Afterward, I have an appointment--at a
+place some distance from here."
+
+"So late, Monsieur?"
+
+Her glance had not only surprise in it, but fear for him.  He said
+lightly:
+
+"Very late....  I may not get back until--some time near the second
+breakfast....  Madame Potier will have some hot coffee ready for
+me...."
+
+She flushed and knitted her small hands together anxiously.  She
+asked:
+
+"Could you not--could you not take me into your confidence?"
+
+He said bluntly:
+
+"Not without myself committing a breach of confidence...."  He added,
+holding out his strong hand: "Try to trust me.  If it were possible
+to tell you, I would do it, you must know."
+
+"I know it, and I trust you, Monsieur, always...."
+
+There was faith in her eyes.  He kissed her hands and released them,
+and turned with her silently....  They walked back together as far as
+the house.
+
+
+
+
+LXXIV
+
+At six o'clock, when the snow had ceased falling and the old moon of
+December glowed redly through a thinning veil of frost fog, the Crown
+Prince arrived to dine with the Minister.
+
+The Heir Apparent of Prussia came with an escort of Dragoons of the
+Bodyguard, driving with one of his aides-de-camp in a closed sledge
+belonging to the exiled Empress, an exquisite vehicle, finished like
+an enameled _bonbonnière_, supplied with a great white Polar
+bearskin, and drawn by two superb black Orloffs, whose glossy coats
+had the burnish of old Italian armor in the ruddy light of torches
+held by orderlies and grooms.
+
+The Minister, followed by Hatzfeldt and his Chief Privy Councilor,
+went down bareheaded, between a double row of Chancery attendants,
+dressed in their new dark-blue liveries, with black velvet facings,
+to welcome his Crown Prince.  The broad breast of "Unser Fritz"
+displayed the Order _Pour la Mérite_, with the First-Class of the
+Iron Cross, and the Red Eagle, with an English Order, bestowed by
+Queen Victoria upon her son-in-law.  He sported new shoulder straps,
+distinctive of his newly conferred rank as Field Marshal, and cut a
+very gallant figure, as may be supposed.
+
+Perhaps you can see him at the head of the long table in the
+dining-room of the Tessier mansion, his Chancellor and host upon his
+left hand.  Upon his right sat the Bavarian plenipotentiary, Count
+Maltzahn.  Count Holnstein, another Bavarian Minister, newly arrived
+from Munich with a letter from his King, and the Bavarian Minister of
+War, Von Pranky, were severally disposed according to their degrees.
+Prince Putbus was there, and a certain Herr von Zadowski, a large
+red-faced man in a green Hussar uniform, wearing a white patch with a
+red Cross, the badge of the Knights of St. John, and the Iron Cross,
+was also present, and the Secretaries and Privy Councilors filled the
+lower end of the board; sporting the new Foreign Office uniform of
+dark blue, with black velvet side stripes to the trousers, and a
+black-velvet-collared, double-buttoned military frock.  Sword belts
+and black-hilted swords with gold knots caused the more stout and
+elderly among the Councilors infinite discomfort, to the secret but
+acute delight of Bismarck-Böhlen and Count Hatzfeldt.  The dinner,
+composed of love gifts from admiring German patriots to their
+Chancellor, was of a quality, quantity, lusciousness, and length
+calculated, as Privy Councilor Bucher piously whispered to a
+neighbor, "to make a guest imagine himself a banqueter in Abraham's
+bosom before the time."
+
+Long before his table companions had reached the zenith of their
+sensuous enjoyment, the Crown Prince had finished his temperate meal.
+The Chancellor commented mentally, glancing at the clear, rather set
+features of the great golden-bearded figure seated beside him:
+
+"Fritz is endeavoring to impress myself and these Bavarians, with
+whom it rests to decide whether he is Emperor or no Emperor, _par la
+fermeté de son attitude_ with regard to the pleasures of the table,
+and by the Spartan simplicity of his habits and tastes.  How I should
+like to offer him black broth and barley bread in a special wooden
+bowl and platter.  But that, I suppose, would be _lèse majesté_."
+
+And closely emulated by Von Holnstein and Von Pranky, he gave free
+reign to his Gargantuan appetite, taking twice of nearly every
+course, and washing the huge meal down, as was his habit, with floods
+from Rheims and Épernay.
+
+When the cloth was drawn and fresh relays of wine appeared, the
+Prince accepted but a single glass of _fine champagne_ with his
+coffee.  When the costly cigars were offered, he pulled from his
+pocket a porcelain pipe bearing his crest and monogram, painted and
+sent him by his English wife as a Christmas present, and said:
+
+"I should prefer to smoke this, if Your Excellency does not mind."
+
+Dinner over, His Royal Highness, with the Bavarians and the Minister,
+repaired to the salon.  Overhead, Mademoiselle de Bayard, lonely in
+her prison bedroom on the second floor, heard their voices--deep,
+sonorous bass, shrill tenor, and penetrating, resonant
+baritone--engaged in discussion or joining in argument.  At ten
+o'clock the Prince took leave, attended to his vehicle as previously
+by the Chancellor, to whom he said, in a low tone, as he pressed his
+hand:
+
+"We are now no longer North Germans, but Germans.  I shall urge upon
+my father the speedy proclamation of the Empire with all external
+state.  Names, arms, titles, colors place us before the world in a
+proper light.  I have never coveted a Crown Imperial.  I denounce the
+idea of a bombardment as brutal and unnecessary.  But I am willing to
+reap all the honors and advantages that can be gained from our
+victory.  Impress this upon my father, who treats pomp and solemnity
+with indifference.  As to demanding the old crown of Charlemagne from
+Vienna, I do not at all see the necessity for that.  I shall write to
+my wife to-night!"
+
+And _Unser Fritz_ got into the exquisite sledge that had been given
+to the beautiful Empress by the Third Napoleon, and was whirled away
+in a glittering dust of snow, kicked up by the fiery Orloffs' heels.
+And the Chancellor, recovering from his deep, ceremonious bow,
+wheeled and went back up the steps, with his bald head glittering in
+the ruddy torchlight....  None might guess what savage triumph
+swelled the heart beating under his white full-dress uniform, upon
+this the night that set upon the fabric of the man's colossal labors
+the copingstone of Success.
+
+The Bavarian plenipotentiaries took leave within ten minutes.  Count
+Hatzfeldt had been summoned to the salon a few moments previously.
+When the unseen bustle of their departure had subsided, the
+Secretaries and Councilors, smoking and drinking tea in the
+dining-room, were unexpectedly joined by the Minister.
+
+All rose up as he suddenly opened the folding doors, thrust in his
+head and shoulders, and surveyed them, smiling.  Behind him was
+Hatzfeldt, pale and excited, and with eyes that seemed dancing out of
+his head.  There was a silence of expectation, then the great figure
+moved to the table, and men scattered to make space for him as though
+his contact might have slain.
+
+He wore full-dress White Cuirassier uniform, without the steel
+cuirass, and the First and Second Classes of the Iron Cross, and the
+Red Eagle, with the peculiar deporation that he always sported, and
+which had been given him in his young manhood for saving life.  His
+bald forehead and great domed cranium were studded with shining drops
+of perspiration, under his tufted brows his blue eyes blazed with a
+triumph almost fearful; his straight-bridged, snub-ended nose, thick
+cheeks, and bulldog jowl were crimson and dripping.  He drew out his
+handkerchief and wiped them--and the hand that held the linen
+palpably shook.
+
+He said to them all, and they held their breath to listen:
+
+"Gentlemen, the Bavarian business is settled, and everything signed
+and sealed.  We have got our German Unity--and our German Empire!"
+
+There was a deep silence for a moment, broken by Busch's request to
+be allowed to take the pens with which the treaty had been signed.
+He got permission.
+
+"That little Busch," said the Minister, "will never lose anything for
+want of a tongue.  If he thinks to find there the gold pen set with
+brilliants, that was sent me by the Hamburg jeweler, he is mistaken.
+Come!" he added, "this is a great occasion!" and bade Hatzfeldt ring
+for a servant and order up more champagne.
+
+The wine was brought and opened.  He said to the servant who
+officiated:
+
+"Let the house steward know that some wine is to be sent to the
+clerks and decipherers in their room.  The servants also are to have
+what they like best for drinking--I fancy Niederstedt will choose Old
+Nordhausen.  But--short of my best liquor, let what each likes best
+be given to him.  No!--not that glass.  I will drink out of my
+biggest goblet!..."
+
+With the fizzing bumper in hand, he waited until all had been served,
+looking, as he reared his great bulk at the head of the full table,
+the biggest man, mentally and physically, who had ever served the
+Hohenzollern.  In his most powerful tones, he called the toast:
+
+"_Hoch!_ to His Imperial Majesty, our Kaiser Wilhelm!"
+
+Every man there strained his lungs to the utmost, but the great bull
+voice of the Chancellor drowned every other there.
+
+He talked a little more: "We should never have hooked the King of
+Bavaria, but for the pluck of Holnstein, who set off from Munich to
+tackle His Most Gracious at his Palace of Neuschwanstein, and--there
+being no railway--made in six days a journey of eighteen German miles
+on foot and on horseback over mountain passes, agreeably diversified
+by forest tracks and timber roads."
+
+He drank and went on:
+
+"He arrived, to find His Majesty nursing his toothache in absolute
+solitude, invisible to human eyes, save those belonging to the
+dentist, his valets and fiddlers and grooms.  At first the King
+refused to receive him, but Holnstein was clever enough to gain over
+the dentist to deliver a letter from his own hand, and incidentally
+one written by myself...."
+
+He went on, with a smile that curved the great mustache into lines of
+gayety:
+
+"Knowing myself particularly detested by King Ludwig, I had taken
+pains to make my letter acceptable.  I said in it that my family had
+enjoyed the patronage of his family a trifle of five hundred years
+ago.  I mentioned that reinstitution in the Wittelsbach good graces
+had been the object of my whole life's labors.  I incidentally
+pressed the claims of the King of Prussia to be made Emperor of
+Germany.  I enclosed, with many apologies, the draft of a letter
+which expressed the concurrence of Bavaria.  'Your Majesty has only
+to copy this and sign it,' I added, 'and the troublesome business is
+closed.'  What a prospect to a monarch afflicted by an obstinately
+throbbing gumboil!  There was no paper or pen at hand with which to
+answer, so the dentist presented his patient with a sheet out of his
+pocketbook, and the patent ink reservoir pen with which he writes his
+prescriptions.  King Ludwig sits up in bed, scrawls a copy of my
+draft reply, and the German Empire is made....  The Festival of the
+Orders and the Proclamation of the Emperor will come off in the Great
+Hall of Versailles upon a certain date not far off....  I will leave
+you to guess what the date is likely to be!..."
+
+In the midst of a deafening tumult of joyful outcries and
+congratulations, he turned his great eyes upon one excited face after
+another, and drained his capacious glass and set it down.
+
+"And with all this, gentlemen, our hopes might have foundered....
+The Royal sign manual might have availed us nothing!... the Treaty
+might never have been signed!...  Everything has depended upon a
+question as trivial and ridiculous as indeed are most of our human
+vanities.  Imagine the gravity of the question at issue!...  Whether
+the Bavarian officers are in future to wear the marks of their
+military rank upon their collars as heretofore, or on their
+shoulders, like us North Germans?...  Upon that the German Empire has
+dangled, do you hear?  Ah! how many times," he said, "I have been
+tempted to break out and tell those fellows in the devil's name to
+sew their stars and badges on the seats of their breeches.  But I
+comforted myself with the old adage: _Politeness as far as the last
+step of the gallows, but hanging for all that!_"
+
+They roared with laughter.  He called:
+
+"Fresh bottles!  A little excess may be pardoned, upon this of all
+the nights in the year.  Really, I need a buck-up after all that I
+have suffered, what with this Bavarian business, with Gortchakoff's
+Note, and the bumptiousness of the English, who, without knowing why
+or wherefore, are bellowing for war.  All that danger has been
+avoided by the exercise of a little diplomacy....  But how can we
+expect to be taken seriously by the Powers when we procrastinate in
+the matter of the Paris Bombardment--which ought to begin at once!"
+
+There was a hubbub of acquiescence, from which only the voices of
+Hatzfeldt and Abeken were missing.
+
+Bismarck-Böhlen begged leave to propose a toast.  The Minister asked,
+tolerantly regarding his young relative, who vibrated with suppressed
+hiccups, and was palpably unsteady upon his long legs:
+
+"What is this toast we are to drink?"
+
+Bismarck-Böhlen, in labor with speech, got out with a final effort:
+
+"The--_hic!_--bombar--_hic!_--ment!  Big--_hic!_--potarroes for
+Paris!"
+
+"Ah, as God lives!" he said to them, "I must drink that toast!"
+
+It went round.  Hatzfeldt followed with:
+
+"Our glorious Chancellor!"
+
+"Our glorious Chancellor!  Our great, ineffable, powerful
+Kaiser-maker!  _Hoch!_ the Fürst von Bismarck-Schönhausen, Imperial
+Germany's master-mind!"
+
+Sobs mingled with their acclamations.  Their faces were now purple
+red with the exception of Hatzfeldt's, which was ghastly, and
+Bismarck-Böhlen's, which presented a combination of shades, in which
+pea green and orange predominated, as, bathed in tears, he staggered
+to embrace his august relative.  He was turned off with a single jerk
+of the Minister's wrist, to fall weeping on the bosom of Privy
+Councilor Abeken, who, shocked at finding himself involved in
+something approaching to an orgie, was in the act of escaping from
+the room.
+
+"My thanks for the toast!" said the resonant voice in their dulled
+and singing ears, "but pray all remember that I am no longer the
+North German Chancellor, or even the Chancellor of the Germanic
+Federation, but Chancellor of the German Empire, which has a better
+sound!  And this is now, or will be by the New Year--the Imperial
+German Chancellery, and Foreign Office, while you, my friends, are
+Imperial Privy Councilors, Secretaries, and so on.  We will baptize
+your green honors in a fresh round of champagne, and then I must
+leave you.  I have yet before me some hours of hard work, and must
+keep my head clear and cool."
+
+He held his great glass to the now drunken servant to be filled up.
+
+"_Prosit!_" he said, and lifted the capacious vessel high, and tossed
+off the wine and dashed the costly goblet into the fireplace, where
+it exploded in crystal fragments and sparkling dust.  Had they tried,
+his satellites could not have followed his example.  Their leaden
+arms could only lift the wine to their dribbly lips.  They drank--and
+one by one each toper collapsed and buckled as though the solid oak
+floor had given way under his boneless feet.  Hatzfeldt sank prone
+across a chair.  Bismarck-Böhlen had rolled under the table some
+moments previously, where, judging by the ominous nature of the
+sounds that asserted his presence, Madame Tessier's Brussels carpet
+was suffering for his excess.  Similar noises, stertorous snores were
+reëchoed from other quarters as the Minister surveyed his fallen
+warriors:
+
+"Men cannot drink in these days!" he commented, and left the room.
+
+
+
+
+LXXV
+
+He threw on his cap and his great white cavalry cloak lined with
+Russian sables and passed out by the front door into the still white
+night.  The snowstorm was over, the fall had lessened to the merest
+sprinkle.  The bitter northerly wind no longer drove the blizzards
+screaming before it, each tree stood immovable under its burden, the
+overloaded evergreen bushes lay flat upon the ground.  And the moon
+sailed high, drifting away eastward.  Through the tatters of the
+frost-fog shone the great blazing jewels of the stars.
+
+Twelve o'clock struck near and far, and from the great Cathedral of
+the Place St. Louis, as from every bell-graced tower and steeple in
+Versailles, rang the Christmas carillon.  Many voices broke upon the
+piercing, windless quiet.  Many footsteps were passing through the
+snowy streets.  Catholics were going to their Midnight Mass and
+Communion to be celebrated by permission of the Prussian Minister.
+He pictured the crowds that would flock to the great churches of
+Paris--how Notre Dame would be packed to the doors, and Ste.
+Marguerite, also the great Church of the Carmelites, and the ancient
+church of the Augustine Fathers in the Place des Victoires....
+
+He imagined the flower-decked High Altars in the churches and chapels
+of Versailles thronged about with war-weary, famine-bitten refugees
+and residents.  German Catholics would mingle with them--the
+conqueror and the conquered kneeling side by side.  Wounded soldiers
+of both nations would help each other to limp to the Communion rail;
+the atmosphere of the hushed, crowded sanctuaries would throb and
+vibrate with prayer....
+
+For what boon would all these suppliants entreat High Heaven most
+fervently?  Pacing in and out of the snowy garden alleys, his giant
+shadow passing over the moveless tree shadows, he asked himself the
+question.  There was but one reply:
+
+For Peace....  They would pray to GOD for Peace ... that Bismarck was
+not going to give them yet a while.  Under the icicles that had
+formed on his great mustache he laughed.  And a Satanic pride swelled
+within him as he told himself that this was his crowning hour of life.
+
+The wild sweet frenzy of the bells was dying down.  Distant refrains
+of sturdy German carols came from the military quarters and the
+barracks.  The bells stopped, wavered, broke out again, grew faint,
+and were still.  And it seemed to the man standing in the chill
+silence of the snowy garden as though he heard the Spirit of France
+and the Spirit of Germany communing in the depths of this Christmas
+Night.
+
+It was the voice of France that wept:
+
+"_Alas! miserable that I am, what hast thou done to me?  Why have thy
+fierce hordes rolled down upon me from the strange Pagan lands in the
+inclement East?  Was it my fame, or my wealth, or my beauty that
+tempted thy Hunnish warriors, the yellow-haired footmen, with hard,
+blue-eyed faces and huge hairy limbs, and the uncouth, fierce tanned
+horsemen, who ride as though they were one with their beasts?  Woe is
+met for my white breasts that were kissed by the conquering Roman!
+must I yield them again to be bruised by the ravishing Frank?  A
+curse on thee! thou treacherous, deep-flowing, swift river, that hast
+again proved no barrier to the Prussian invader!  I am fallen a prey
+to the Confederation set up by the Corsican upon the Rhine.  Oh! hard
+as the nether millstone!  Wilt thou unpitying, behold Famine devour
+my beauty?  See, the white limbs that show through my tattered
+garment are fleshless!  No man who looks upon me would desire me
+more!  For what hast thou dug a pit about me and set up thy terrible
+war engines?  Was I not willing to make terms with thee, as the
+conqueror?_"
+
+It was the Voice of Germany that answered:
+
+"_O Gaulish Queen! thou wert willing, but not for the conquered is it
+to appoint the sum of the ransom, or hold parley with the victors
+regarding the price of blood!  Hearest thou, O fallen one?  I
+withdraw my triumphant legions when it pleases me.  This is a land
+where the wine and the women are luscious.  When we have drunken deep
+enough, we shall load ourselves with spoil and treasure and go.  Yet
+ere I withdraw, I shall have known thee as a lover, whose desire is
+kindled the fiercer because of thy hate.  Death shall be the priest
+who celebrates our espousals.  He shall unite us with a ring of steel
+and fire.  Then I depart, leaving thee to the enemies of thine own
+household, who shall wreak thee greater ruin than thy foes.  But a
+child shall be born of thy long resistance and my fierce triumph and
+our brief mingling, who shall be called Peace!  Hearest thou, O
+France?_"
+
+He listened, standing on the hard-frozen, white-powdered garden path
+between the swept-up snow mounds.  There was no answer.  He returned,
+stamping the snow from his clogged spurs, to the house.
+
+The door stood open as he had left it.  The even tread of the
+sentries came from the Rue de Provence.  He had heard the guard being
+changed at the entrance gates and beyond the wall at the bottom of
+the garden.  Those without were vigilant if those within were not.
+He remembered, noting the absence of the usual Chancery attendant
+from the hall bench, that he had given permission to the servants,
+without distinction, to make merry upon this night.  He could hear no
+clinking of glasses and bottles belowstairs.  Perhaps sleep had
+overtaken them as it had the revelers in the dining-room.  He softly
+opened the double doors of that apartment.  A stench combined of
+stale tobacco, spilled wine, and alcoholic humanity offended his
+nose, and he withdrew it.  But not before he had ascertained that
+with the exception of Abeken, who had left early, and Count
+Hatzfeldt, who must have been taken home--the Staff slept there.
+
+He looked into the drawing-room.  The fire lay in gray ashes between
+the fire dogs.  On the table lay the signed Treaty with Bavaria.  He
+picked it up and rolled it, looking at the mantelshelf, where the
+bat-winged bronze demon brooded over the ormolu clock.
+
+The room, whose hearth was cold, whose windows, closely shuttered,
+bolted and blinded, had the curtains drawn close over them, was
+lighted by a yellow ray shining through the glass door opening into
+the conservatory.  He crossed to this door and looked through.
+Commendably sober, the two officers of the guard of Green Jaegers who
+were quartered here sat chatting in whispers and smoking by the
+stove.  Between them on an upturned tub bottom stood a little,
+twinkling, taper-lit Christmas tree.
+
+"Von Uslar!  Bleichröder!..."
+
+The Minister opened the glass door and looked in.  The officers
+sprang to their feet and stood saluting him.  He smiled at the little
+tree, and asked, nodding at the door at the end of the conservatory,
+leading to a room where the library of the late M. Tessier had
+peaceably moldered until the clerks and decipherers of the Prussian
+Foreign Office had been assigned it for their quarters:
+
+"Have those fellows yet gone to bed?"
+
+And even as he queried he knew by the peculiar smile upon the faces
+of Captain von Uslar and his subaltern, that the scene in the
+dining-room was repeated here.  He said with a shrug:
+
+"Oh, well!...  They had my permission to make a night of it.  One
+would like to be sure, though, that there are no candles to upset!"
+
+The junior officer moved to the library door and opened it, setting
+free a puff of hot air laden with wine fumes, and a chorus of snores
+ranging from piping alto to deep bass.  Nothing could be seen except
+the vague outlines of prostrate bodies, revealed by a pale gleam of
+moonlight that made its way down the chimney and shone upon the dead
+ashes of the hearth.
+
+"Shall I wake anybody?" queried the lieutenant's look.  The Minister
+made a sign in the negative, bade a pleasant good night to the two
+officers, and withdrew, shutting the glass door.  He quitted the
+drawing-room, went into the hall, tried the fastenings of the hall
+door, and crossed to the hatchway under the main staircase that led
+to the kitchen quarters.  A gas jet was flaring in a draught at the
+bottom of the staircase.  He went down, regulated the light as he
+passed to a safer volume, and tried the handle of the door leading to
+what had been a housekeeper's parlor, and was now used by the house
+steward and the Chancery attendants as an upper servants' hall.  A
+gasalier of flaring jets revealed five persons in here, wrapped in
+the heavy sleep of drunkenness.  One, the house steward, snored,
+recumbent on a sofa; Grams and Engelberg, those monuments of rigid
+respectability, reposed with their heads and shoulders resting on the
+table, appropriately decorated with empty bottles and upset glass
+beakers, and in the center of which stood a great china bowl.
+
+The Minister peeped into this vessel curiously.  Apples stuck with
+cloves, and cinnamon sticks left high and dry at the bowl bottom
+testified to the Yuletide correctness of the punch, brewed by the
+skilled hand of the Foreign Office cook.  He, the artist responsible
+for the dinner which had astonished the three Bavarian
+plenipotentiaries, leaned back, slumbering profoundly in a
+high-backed armchair.  A china pipe, gayly tasseled and painted,
+drooped from one side of his relaxed mouth.  His feet rested upon the
+sprawling back of the gigantic Niederstedt, who had gone to sleep
+upon a sheepskin rug in front of the wood stove.  His huge right hand
+still grasped an empty bottle that had contained his favorite Old
+Nordhausen.  He opened one eye as the Minister stooped to inspect
+him--uttered a stertorous snort, and relapsed again into his hoggish
+Nirvana, leaving the Minister, as he deliberately turned out the gas
+and quitted the steward's room, to realize that, save himself, the
+two officers smoking in the winter garden, and the women presumably
+sleeping on the second floor, the house whose outer precincts were so
+vigilantly guarded, did not contain a sober head.
+
+"Well, well!  A bout of drunkenness may well be condoned in the
+servants when the master himself gave the signal for revelry!"
+
+He told himself so, smiling as he made the round of the basement
+house doors.  Nothing had disturbed his equanimity saving the
+discovery that Niederstedt was incapable of speech or movement.  For
+with his strange characteristic mingling of audacity and caution, the
+Minister, while leaving Mademoiselle de Bayard practically free
+within the house limits, had insured by private orders that the giant
+East Prussian should sleep henceforth outside his master's bedroom
+door.
+
+Again, as the master's long strides carried him upstairs to the hall
+again, and he took his bedroom candle from the row on the Empire
+console, he knew a moment of inward f rat.  There was nobody to help
+him undress, and put away his clothes.  Wherever Fate and the
+Intendant General had assigned the Minister's sleeping quarters, the
+deft Grans, or the attentive Engelberg had always appeared--or,
+failing these, the stolid Niederstedt--to render these and other
+personal services, the lack of which after long use is keenly felt.
+
+Is was a hellish nuisance to a middle-aged man to have to get himself
+out of his full-dress uniform.  One grew hot at the mere thought of
+unfastening the shoulder belt and sword belt, collar hooks, buckles,
+swivels, and so on.  Last, but not least, the final wrestle with the
+polished, spurred jack boots....
+
+"God be thanked, I am not wearing the cuirass!" he said to himself
+devoutly, as he laid hand upon his bedroom door.
+
+It swung back, and then his vexation passed from him.  On a little
+table near the hearthside, where yet some embers of a fire glowed
+redly, stood a little gayly-caparisoned Christmas tree.  Under its
+branches, adorned with red-and-white tapers as yet unlighted, lay the
+gifts that came from home.
+
+He crossed the room in two long steps and stood smiling before the
+little fir tree.  The purplish redness died out of his great cheeks
+and jowl, the congested veins no longer stood out like ropes upon his
+throat and temples.  The great eyes that had blazed with Satanic
+pride softened into tenderness, as he picked up the gifts one by one
+and looked at them.
+
+"From His Daughter to Papachen," said an embroidered tobacco pouch.
+"From Bill" and "From Herbert" a gold fusee box and a smoker's knife
+were respectively labeled.  "From thy wife Johanna" was written on a
+slip of paper attached to the case that contained a handsome cup of
+Tula ware.  He turned the cup in his hands many times before he
+returned it to its outer husk.  He said fondly, familiarly, as though
+the giver were standing beside him:
+
+"Little thou carest, thou good heart!--whether thou art wife to a
+Chancellor of the North German Confederation, or the Chancellor of
+the German Empire.  One object in life thou hast--and that is to get
+the old man home again!"  After a moment he added, pitching the
+Bavarian Treaty on the center table, unhooking and removing his sword
+belt, and throwing it on the couch: "Babel must be bombarded, or thou
+wilt not be pleased with me ... am I not a good pupil, to have
+learned my lesson so well?"
+
+The shoulder belt came off with a slight degree of twisting and
+fumbling.  He laid it aside, and moved to the slaving glass, and by
+its aid unfastened from his collar swivel the Iron Cross.  "Good!" he
+commented, and laid it on top of a dispatch box on the center table.
+Then he began slowly and methodically to unfasten the other Orders
+from his breast.  As he pricked a finger with the pin of one in
+wrenching at it angrily, it occurred to him that it would have been
+perfectly feasible to have removed his dress tunic with all its
+decorations, and this discovery stung him to wrath.
+
+"_Kreuzdonnerwetter!_--am I, then, such a sheep's head?" he said
+angrily to himself.  Something dropped upon the floor with a tinkle
+and rolled away merrily under a chair, leaving its owner with the
+thick silver pin that had secured it gripped between his finger and
+thumb.  It was the medallion bestowed upon him in '42 for an act of
+gallantry, the obverse a shield of silver on a circle, bearing a
+red-enameled Prussian eagle, and on the reverse the inscription:
+"_Für Rettung aus Gefahr_."
+
+The pin remained in his hand.  Cursing his own clumsiness, he took
+the lighted candle he had placed upon the center table upon entering,
+and stooped to recover the evasive prize.  Both hands were required
+for the task, that was quickly apparent.  Half unconsciously he
+reverted to a habit for which his wife had often playfully scolded
+him--nipped the broken silver pin between his teeth and bent down to
+resume his search upon the floor.
+
+As he stooped, the detonation of a driving charge and the deafening
+roar and shriek of a huge shell were followed by an ear-splitting
+explosion.  His practiced ear told him.  that the shell had been
+fired from the Fortress of St. Valérien.  Half a dozen others
+followed in rapid succession.  No alarm trumpet sounded.  Dogs
+barked, near and far, the echoes of the cannonade rattled among the
+woods and high grounds, then died out.  He said to himself: "Those
+sugar plums have done damage somewhere near St. Germain....  Now,
+then, where is this runaway medal?"
+
+As he queried, a sudden spasm of the windpipe shot him to the
+perpendicular.  He coughed and hawked as he had never done before.
+With a hand upon his side, he coughed, straining horribly.  With
+streaming, starting eyes he coughed, clutching at his throat.
+
+And then, with a sudden stab of pain beneath the uvula and a
+strangling access of coughing, he realized that a familiar home
+prediction had been fulfilled:
+
+"_Otto, you will certainly swallow that pin!..._"
+
+He could almost hear the voice of his wife speaking.  How absurd! he
+thought, and laughed; and the agony in his lacerated gullet brought
+on a fit of choking worse than those that had gone before.  He seized
+the candle and held it to his face before the shaving mirror, opening
+his powerful jaws to their widest and straining his eyes that were
+too blind with tears to see his own swollen, discolored features.  He
+spat furiously, ejecting showers of saliva streaked with blood, but
+not the obstacle that was choking him....  He thrust his hand into
+his mouth, and groped as far down his throat as his fingers could
+reach--all to no avail....
+
+"_Help!..._"
+
+He gasped the word, realizing that if no help came, he was a dead
+man.  And he seized the bell rope and rang furiously, until the rope
+came down in his hand as had that of the reception-room a day or so
+previously, followed by a long trail of rusty wire that, when tugged,
+evoked no metal clang below.
+
+"Help!  For the love of God!" he croaked, and whirling vertigo seized
+him.  Whooping with a dreadful croupy intake, he tripped over a
+footstool, and fell upon his hands and knees, and struggled up again
+in a last strangling effort, and staggered to the door.
+
+The door handle seemed to stick, or could it be that his grasp had
+lost its power?  In the light of the gas and his yet flaring candle,
+he looked at his knuckles and saw that they were turning blackish
+blue....  A wave of blackness rose and fell, swamping consciousness.
+He emerged from drowning waters, and found himself upon the landing,
+gripping some round object that proved to be the wrenched-off door
+handle, and moaning in the whisper that he thought a shout:
+
+"Help, help, help!..."
+
+Bismarck, the man whom Kings and Emperors meant when they spoke of
+Prussia--the great Minister who had made three Wars--was dying.
+Would no one come?  Not one of those who loved the man would ever
+know the true story of his sordid, solitary ending....  Not one of
+those who hated him but would hear every ugly detail of it, and
+recount it for others, smiling at its grim, grotesque absurdity....
+
+Choked by a pin!...  An end rather less noble for a great Chancellor
+than being run over by a donkey cart or smothered in a midden pit
+full of liquid manure....
+
+Someone was groaning horribly, close beside him.  Deep ruckling,
+gasping groans with a rattle and a catch midway.  Were they his own
+death groans?  What was this?  The walls were melting and vanishing.
+Clear, vivid, definite, there unrolled before his filming eyes a
+picture of Varzin, his Pomeranian country home.  It was Spring.  The
+dark pines about the house shone as though newly varnished.  The
+larches were caparisoned with tassels of pale green.  The blue sky
+was vivid as Persian turquoise.  He saw his daughter in a white dress
+step out from the low wide porch and stand smiling upon the terrace.
+She had a bunch of primroses in her belt, and his great hound Tyras
+had followed her and was rubbing his great head against her sleeve.
+
+"Dying!" he tried to say to her.  "Help your father!" ... But it
+seemed to him that he uttered nothing but a groan.  There was a
+thundering in his ears like the noise of a field battery.  His great
+bulk reeled toward her....  He pitched forward and fell heavily....
+
+He heard a scared voice crying: "Monseigneur!..." and knew no more.
+
+
+
+
+LXXVI
+
+Juliette had not gone to bed, this snowy night of the Noël.  She had
+said her Rosary and waited until the Christmas carillon.  Then she
+knelt and prayed for her own pardon, for light and guidance, for a
+blessing upon those living friends she held most dear, for the souls
+of the beloved departed.  And then she had waited, pacing solitary in
+her bedroom or sitting by her fire, for the sound of Breagh's return.
+
+Madame Potier had gone to the Midnight Mass at the Cathedral.  There
+would be crowds of communicants--she might not reach home before
+three.  And in her absence had Juliette wished to sleep, sleep would
+have been banished by the sounds of revelry going on in the regions
+belowstairs.
+
+Those first shouts for the Kaiser had been followed by others for the
+Chancellor.  Even in her remote eyrie she could hear the clinking of
+glasses and the popping of corks.  Then after a wild outburst of
+cheering she had seen, peeping between the frost flowers on her
+window into the snowy, moonlit garden, the great figure in the white
+Cuirassier cloak move down the path between the snow-laden trees.
+
+She was possessed by a great sense of loneliness, and a vague unreal
+sensation of living somebody else's life, and not the life proper of
+Juliette Bayard.  She locked her door and built up the fire to a
+cheerful hearth blaze, and sat upon the rug in her white dressing
+gown, combing and brushing her glorious hair.
+
+Never again need those superb waves of jet-black spun silk be
+confined in the chenille net of Madame Charles Tessier.  One could be
+charming if one chose--there was no grim reason for being ugly,
+thought Mademoiselle, as she brushed and brushed....
+
+What was that?
+
+So strange a sound from below that she dropped comb and hairbrush and
+sprang to her feet quivering....  She had heard such a groan uttered
+when the lance of the Uhlan had plunged through the body of my Cousin
+Boisset....
+
+Again! ... the sound of a door thrust violently open.  Heavy
+footsteps thudded on the gaslit landing of the next floor, and a
+muffled voice cried out as though for help.
+
+A man's voice....  Again it cried.  No voice sounded in answer.  She
+unlocked her door, and set her foot upon the stairs.
+
+A few steps down....  Then she saw him, the tottering giant with the
+distorted, blue face, and the open mouth that trickled with saliva
+and blood.  What had befallen Juliette's enemy and France's pitiless
+oppressor?  His huge staring eyes were fixed on her.  Tears rolled
+from them as the deep groans issued from his gaping mouth and his
+broad chest heaved and labored vainly for air.
+
+"_Choking!  Help!_" his gesture seemed to say to her, and a terrible
+shudder convulsed her as the huge body crashed down prone at her feet.
+
+With a strange mingling of pity and aversion she knelt down beside
+him and looked at him closely by the light of the flaring gas jet
+that illuminated the landing and stairs.
+
+He had turned a little in falling.  His blackening face and staring,
+agonized eyes spoke to his desperate condition....  What was to be
+done?... The obstruction in the throat must be removed somehow....
+She rose up and went into the empty room upon her left hand, and felt
+in the darkness for the bell.  There was none.  The bell rope had
+been pulled down by the hand of the Minister, for this was the
+torture chamber, where M. Thiers underwent his periodical ordeal of
+thumbscrew and rack.
+
+Air....  He must have fresh air.  She desperately flung both the
+windows open, admitting a gush of piercing cold.  He still groaned,
+but more faintly.  The man was dying.  Was not this the Judgment of
+Heaven?
+
+In the hour of his triumph the sword had fallen.  France would be
+saved--there would be no bombardment of Paris if the enemy were to
+die to-night.  This she told herself, standing in the sharp draught
+from the open windows, and knew a thrill of intolerable triumph,
+thinking:
+
+"Our Lord has delivered him into hands as weak as mine!"
+
+_Ting!..._
+
+Her heart leaped and stood still.  She looked breathlessly from the
+window.  Along the middle of the snowy Rue de Provence, where
+pedestrians must walk to avoid the dangers of the frozen sideways, a
+lantern moved, carried by a squat, muffled shape.  A taller figure
+followed, moving steadily.
+
+_Ting-ting-ting!..._
+
+A shock and thrill of mingled awe and terror passed through her.  To
+some dying Catholic, saint or sinner, in the dawn of this day of the
+Christ-birth, the Body of the Virgin-born was being conveyed....  Was
+it not to aid a soul in dire temptation--two souls, it might be--that
+He had bidden His minister pass this way?
+
+She bent the knee and made the Sign of the Cross, trembling, then
+rose and sped back to the suffocating man.  With a strength that she
+could not have believed herself possessed of, she raised his
+discolored head upon her lap....  His great jaws were wide open.  She
+thrust the tiny hand within them.  Shuddering, sickening, she probed
+with her slender fingers, thrusting them down into the contracting,
+gulping throat.
+
+Something bright projected beneath the swollen uvula, wedged firmly
+into the membrane, blocking the orifice of the trachea.  She nipped
+the projecting end in the little fingers and pulled.  It yielded.  He
+gave a gulp of relief.  As the big teeth snapped together, she
+plucked the little hand from peril, bringing with it the broken
+silver pin.
+
+
+
+
+LXXVII
+
+He was instantly, tremendously sick, as an overeaten ogre might have
+been in an Eastern story.  When he had finished vomiting, he heaved
+up his huge, shuddering bulk.  She put her slight shoulder under the
+groping hand, and guided him.  With this slight aid he reached his
+room.  The couch stood drawn forward at an angle toward the
+fireplace.  He staggered to it, let himself drop upon it, and said,
+in a groan:
+
+"Drink!..."
+
+He pointed to the night stand at his bedside.  When she poured from
+the jug that stood there into the glass and brought it to him, he
+gulped the contents greedily.
+
+"Barley water ... good for the throat!" he gasped, giving the glass
+back.  She filled it again, and again he emptied it.
+
+His sweat-dabbled face was regaining a more natural color.  She went
+to the washstand, filled a small shaving basin with cold water from
+the hand jug, and brought it with a fine clean towel to his side.
+She dipped the towel in the water and laved his face and forehead.
+That he experienced relief and refreshment from this she saw by the
+placid air with which he submitted, leaning his head back against the
+pillowed sofa end, and closing his eyes.
+
+She dried his face, and suddenly the great eyes opened.  The voice of
+the Chancellor said:
+
+"There....  That will do!"
+
+From the passive victim he had suddenly reverted to the master;
+potent--authoritative....
+
+"Go to bed, Mademoiselle de Bayard, and sleep," he told her.  "I am
+comfortable ... I shall do well enough!"
+
+She replaced the basin and towel in silence, bent her head to the
+figure sitting upright on the sofa, and moved noiselessly to the
+door.  As she touched the broken handle, he said to her abruptly:
+
+"You will be silent upon the subject of to-night's--misadventure?..."
+
+She answered:
+
+"I will be silent, Monseigneur!"
+
+He said, lifting a finger to detain her yet another instant:
+
+"Do not err in supposing me ungrateful.  I know very well that you
+have saved my life!"
+
+A shudder passed through her slight figure.  She averted her eyes,
+remembering....  He finished:
+
+"I lunch with the King at the Prefecture to-morrow.  I will see you
+before I leave the house."
+
+"As you will, Monseigneur!"
+
+He added with something like a twinkle:
+
+"With regard to all that ... _débris_ upon the landing ... it will
+not be the first time Niederstedt has been guilty in that way.  Good
+night, Mademoiselle--or, rather, good morning....  Hark!  Was not
+that the bell of the house door?"
+
+"I--am not sure, Monseigneur!"' she said, in hesitation, for so
+ragged and weakly a peal had been evolved by the ringer that the
+sound might have passed unnoticed by ears less keen than his.
+
+"They are all asleep or drunk belowstairs!"  He began to raise
+himself stiffly from the sofa.  "I will go down...."
+
+"No; I will go!" she said.
+
+And she left the room.  He let himself sink back on the sofa.
+"_Grosser Gott!_" he said to himself.  "How near a thing! ... And
+that the little Fury should have stopped the brand from quenching....
+Well, now, at this rate, I may live another thirty years.  Not that I
+should find much zest in a prolonged spell of power and authority.
+The King-Emperor in the ordinary course must die before long.  My
+master in that event would be a good-natured booby, who in assuming
+the supreme dignities of Imperial authority would value the stage
+setting beyond anything else!"
+
+He quoted with acerbity increased by recent suffering:
+
+"'Pomp and solemnity' ... 'The ancient Crown of Charlemagne from
+Vienna' ... 'I shall write to my wife to-night' ... Pray do!...  And
+while Your Royal Highness is about it you had better consult little
+Prince William, who would probably give you as valuable advice."
+
+His thoughts reverted to the fair-haired, puny-limbed eleven-year-old
+urchin in kilt and plaid of Royal Stuart tartans....  "Now," said he,
+"what sort of a future Emperor may be enclosed in that husk?...  That
+the boy has a crippled left arm, and a capital set of sharp teeth,
+which he uses on the calves of his Military Governor and tutors, is
+practically all I know of him....  Come in!"
+
+He had been so lost in thought as to miss the sound of chains undone
+and bolts drawn back, though he had shivered unconsciously as the
+opening of the hall door had admitted a volume of fresh, piercing air
+to the heated house.  Now he reared himself upright upon the sofa,
+stared for a moment at the figure that responded to his gruff "Come
+in!" and burst into an irresistible laugh.
+
+"Quite right, Mr. Breagh!" he said, in his clear and fluent English.
+"I told you to come up to me at whatever hour you might get back.
+But I forgot that you would naturally visit Madame de Bayard in the
+costume proper to Jean Jacques Potier, to whom I suppose that
+extraordinary overcoat and the wolfskin cap must have belonged.
+Frankly, I did not recognize you....  The condition of your clothes,
+and that bandage on your forehead are responsible, more than my lapse
+of memory.  You certainly look rather shaken.  Let me hope you have
+sustained no serious hurt?"
+
+P. C. Breagh grinned mirthlessly, and looked ruefully down at his
+snowy boots and trousers, from which the melting snow was beginning
+to drip in little rills upon the carpeted floor.  By the light of the
+two gas lamps depending above the table, it could be seen that the
+gory bandage surmounting his pale face had been applied by an
+experienced hand.  He needed no immediate surgical aid.  But his blue
+lips and drawn and pallid features betrayed him exhausted.  The
+Minister, noting this, pointed to a chair.
+
+"Sit down," he said, "and rest before you speak!  There is brandy in
+that flask that stands upon the bureau....  But something hot would
+be better for you--that is what you most need."
+
+There was a sound upon the landing ... a faint tap upon the door
+panel.
+
+"See who it is!" said the Chancellor.
+
+As Breagh rose, the door opened, wide enough to admit a little tray
+bearing two steaming coffee cups.
+
+"Capital!" said His Excellency, addressing the unseen cup-bearer.
+"Now, that I call an excellent thought!"
+
+He took a cup from the tray Breagh offered, bidding him:
+
+"Sit down and drink the other.  I should have got none except for
+you!"  When the steaming cup was empty, "Proceed," he said, ignoring
+the gray daylight outlining the curtain poles and filtering between
+the drawn curtains.
+
+"At what hour did you get to Maisons Lafitte?  For I presume you did
+get there?"
+
+P. C. Breagh said:
+
+"I got there at about two o'clock....  I had an appointment at the
+Cathedral, otherwise I should have started before."
+
+"I hope she was pretty!" said the Minister, smiling.
+
+P. C. Breagh went on, as though he had not heard:
+
+"The snow was beginning to freeze.  It was not such bad walking, but
+that hill of St. Germain was a winder, and in the Forest I lost my
+way....  If a party of men--peasants in sheepskin caps and
+jackets--forest keepers possibly--had not turned out of an avenue and
+kept marching ahead, I might never have got as far as the Seine
+road...."
+
+"The men were marching, and not walking," commented the Minister, and
+his great brows scowled, and his bulldog jowl hardened as he added:
+"And they carried guns, or you would not have taken them for
+keepers....  I have no doubt that they were _Francs-tireurs_."
+
+"I lost them where the road winds by the Seine," P. C. Breagh
+continued.  "And then I had a real stroke of luck.  I came across a
+hack cab from Versailles at a regular standstill.  The snow had
+balled in the wretched horse's feet, and the driver was as drunk as
+David's sow.  The fare was asleep inside, but he woke as I opened the
+cab door and flashed one of the lamps in his face, and then he
+said"--the narrator unconsciously gave the tone and accent of the
+Doctor--"'By the piper that played before Moses, my boyo!  I was
+dreaming of you, and here you are.'"
+
+The Minister broke in:
+
+"That man was the English correspondent of _The Times_ newspaper.  He
+is of the same surname, though no relative of Odo Russell, the
+English Envoy, who has been sent out here upon a Mission to our
+German Court....  Ill-natured diplomatists whisper that Great Britain
+is jealous of the great successes of Prussia, and does not welcome
+the prospect of a United Imperial Germany.  _Au fond_, we Germans
+have a kind of sentimental regard for your nation.  She is an
+offshoot of the great Germanic stem--it is impossible that we should
+not regard her as nearer to us than others....  Though, should we
+ever seriously quarrel, it may be found that the bitterest variance
+may exist between those of the same blood....  And so you have never
+confided to your friend the secret of your presence in Versailles!
+Reticence in the young is an unusual gift.  Possibly he gave you a
+lift in his vehicle?"
+
+"----Till the unlucky Rosinante gave out," acquiesced Breagh, "and we
+had to leave her with her Jehu at the wreck of the railway station,
+and then the Doctor stopped at the diggings of the friends he was on
+the way to look up, a half squadron of Barnekow's Hussars who are
+quartered in a deserted chateau.  They gave me some sandwiches and
+beer, and then I went on by myself to the Villa Laon where Madame de
+Bayard"--he stopped and added in a low voice--"used to live."
+
+Something in the tone attracted the attention of the Chancellor.  He
+repeated:
+
+"Used to....  Does she not, then, live there now?  Has she gone with
+M. de Straz--the pair of love birds together?..."
+
+Said P. C. Breagh, seized with a shudder that knocked his knees
+together, and speaking in a low voice:
+
+"I--I beg of Your Excellency to spare her your irony....  Madame de
+Bayard is dead!"
+
+"So!..."
+
+The Minister's ejaculation was followed by the order:
+
+"Now the details!...  Has she died naturally, or by accident--or by a
+murderer's hand?"
+
+P. C. Breagh said, lowering his voice apprehensively:
+
+"She was killed by a shell.  There was a bombardment from Mont
+Valérien....  It broke out at about a quarter past two this
+morning--just as I reached the Villa Laon...."
+
+"Ah! now I understand how you got that love token on your forehead!"
+said the Minister.
+
+Breagh nodded, and wiped his wet forehead with a blood-stained
+handkerchief, and shuddered and went on:
+
+"Nobody had gone to bed when I got to the villa.  The blinds of what
+I could see was a dining-room were drawn up and the curtains all
+drawn back.  The room was brilliantly lighted, lots of mirrors and
+crystal girandoles.  It was like a scene on the stage, looking at it
+from the snowy garden.  Shin-deep in snow, because the paths had not
+been cleared....  You could not tell where the paths were, in fact,
+so I steered my course by the big shining window.  Then I saw him,
+moving before me----"
+
+Queried His Excellency:
+
+"By him, you mean whom?..."
+
+"A man," said P. C. Breagh, "whom I saw moving along before me,
+taking cover behind snowy bushes and clumps of frosted prairie grass.
+When he stood up, I saw that he was short in figure and had immensely
+broad shoulders.  I was quite sure that I had seen the fellow before.
+In fact----"
+
+"In fact," the Minister sharply interrupted, "you recognized him as
+the man who posed as M. Charles Tessier, and who can have been nobody
+but M. Straz.  Now tell me, whom was he watching?  Madame and a
+companion, I venture to guess?"  He added, as P. C. Breagh assented:
+"What was the man?  A civilian or an officer?"
+
+P. C. Breagh answered, repressing another shudder:
+
+"A tall, fair officer of the Prussian Guard Infantry.  He and Madame
+were at supper, or they had just finished.  He had opened a fresh
+bottle of champagne and was leaning over to fill Madame's glass when
+I noticed the short man standing still, watching them closely.  He
+seemed to have his right hand in his pocket.  He drew it out and
+then--I don't know very well what happened.  There was the heavy boom
+of a big gun, and a shell came shrieking like an express train....  I
+remember how the spitting flare of the fuse lit up the sky.  And
+there was a terrific crash--and something hit me on the head--a bit
+of masonry, it must have been--for when I came to myself other shells
+were hurtling, and hitting, and bursting....  One smashed the stables
+of the chateau where the Hussars are quartered, and another has dug a
+crater, they tell me, in the side of the Terrace of St. Germain.  The
+flashes made everything show up clear like lightning, and I picked
+myself up....  The blood was running down into my eyes, blinding me.
+But I'm not likely to forget what I saw.  It was ... so awfully
+stagey ... so like a picture of the sensational, blood-curdling,
+highly colored kind."
+
+"Go on!"
+
+"It was like this.  The upper story of the Villa had been shaved
+off--simply.  There was the interior of the dining-room before me,
+all color and mirrors and gilding and twinkling wax candles in
+crystal girandoles.  The French windows had been shattered, and there
+was a great hole in the ceiling.  On the mantelshelf, just in front
+of me, between two Sèvres candlesticks, was a clock, the hands
+pointing to half-past two.  There were Sèvres figures on each side of
+the clock--I have seen them here in the shop windows, '_Pierrot qui
+rit_' and '_Pierrot qui pleure_.'  The crying Pierrot had been
+smashed by the shell splinter that shivered the mantel mirror, but
+the laughing Pierrot was untouched.  He seemed to be holding his
+sides and screaming at Valverden sprawling across the table with his
+skull shattered, and Madame de Bayard sitting stone-dead in her
+chair.  She had the cigarette in her fingers, still alight....  It
+must have been painless....  There was only a small blue hole in her
+temple--just here."
+
+The Minister was repeating:
+
+"Valverden!...  Are you clear that you mean Count Max Valverden?...
+But of course you are!  There is no other officer of that name in the
+Prussian Guard Infantry.  How you came to be acquainted you shall
+tell me to-morrow."  He laughed harshly, looking at the clock upon
+the mantel.  "I should say to-day, at a somewhat later hour."  He
+added, as Breagh rose: "Have you told anything of this matter to
+Mademoiselle de Bayard?  Then, I advise you, do not enlighten her at
+all.  Or, if you must do so, tell her after you are married!"
+
+He drove the sentence home with another that left the listener
+gasping:
+
+"For of course you will marry, you are capitally suited to one
+another.  The mother exists no longer and M. Straz if he escaped,
+which is most likely, will not be able to interfere.  Let me
+recommend you to get some rest.  You will require it.  For at twelve
+you leave Versailles with Mademoiselle de Bayard en route for
+England.  Now go!..."
+
+
+
+
+LXXVIII
+
+P. C. Breagh and Juliette met upon the morrow in the same spot near
+the rose tree that had borne pink blossoms undismayed through the
+bitter wintry months.
+
+"You have bestowed upon me no Christmas present, Monsieur," Juliette
+said to him gravely.  "Now I will have you gather one of those roses
+and give it to me...."
+
+He strode into the drift, mid-leg deep, and cut a bud that was upon
+the sheltered side next the wall.
+
+"Be careful of the thorns, lest they prick you!" Juliette cried to
+him.  "Do not cut your fingers!  Do not get wet!"
+
+"You shall not have this rose," he said, withholding the frozen
+flower, "until you have given my Christmas gift to me!"
+
+Her blue eyes rose, brimming, to meet his.
+
+"Ah! what is there I can give you?  Tell me, my friend!" she said
+softly.
+
+He got out, blushing, and swallowing a lump that rose in his throat:
+
+"We have been through so much ... we have seen strange and terrible
+things together!...  We have shared dangers ... we have seen a great
+nation in the death throes....  Nothing could ever make us strangers
+whatever came to pass....  But now we are going back to England.
+Before we leave this garden where we have been so happy----"
+
+"It is true....  We have been happy here!" she answered.
+
+Winged smiles were hovering about her mouth.  Jeweled gleams played
+between the black fringes of her eyelashes, as though fairy
+kingfishers were diving for some new joy in those sapphire depths.
+She asked demurely, as the clumsy male creature choked and boggled:
+
+"What do you seek, Monsieur?  Some souvenir....  Some token of
+friendship?"
+
+He said, in a low, dogged voice:
+
+"I have never asked mere friendship from you.  But if you--if
+you----"  He got it out with a desperate effort:
+
+"Before we leave this ... if you would kiss me--once..."
+
+She drew back.  A terrible dignity vested her sloping shoulders.
+Modesty veiled her eyes.  He was going miserably away, when she
+beckoned to him, with that splendid sweep of the arm that might have
+belonged to Krimhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde-Britomart and the whole covey
+of Romance Ideals....  He returned....  She spoke, and her eyes were
+wavering under the eager fire of his:
+
+"See you well, Monsieur, a young lady cannot bestow a gift of that
+kind.  It is for the gentleman, having obtained consent, to take..."
+
+Breagh caught her to his broad breast and snatched the coveted
+guerdon.  He cried to her in wonder and triumph:
+
+"You love me!...  A fellow like me?...  And you will be my wife?  We
+are not going to England to be parted!  I am not a beggar any more!
+I will try again for my practicing degree in Medicine, and get it!  I
+will write books and make a name for myself in Literature.  But not
+unless you'll marry me!...  Oh, Juliette! say when you will marry me?"
+
+She said, with downcast eyelids that veiled laughter, though the rose
+flush had dyed her very temples, and the beating of her heart shook
+her slight frame:
+
+"Monsieur, my grandmother would have answered: '_Under the
+circumstances, the marriage cannot take place too soon....  Once a
+young girl has been kissed, she must be married._'  And"--the smile
+peeped out--"I was taught always to obey my grandmother...."
+
+"Admirably spoken!" said the Chancellor.
+
+He had come upon the lovers, of set purpose it may have been.  Now he
+stood surveying them in an ogreish, yet not unamiable fashion, as
+they stood before him hand in hand.
+
+He said, and the resonant tones were veiled by a painful hoarseness,
+of which the reason was known to Mademoiselle alone:
+
+"Mr. Breagh, Count Hatzfeldt has the necessary papers of which I
+spoke to you.  You will find him in the drawing-room waiting to
+complete some slight formalities inseparable from the granting of
+passports in time of War....  Good-bye to you, good luck and all
+happiness.  I am on the point of departure for the Prefecture, so I
+shall not again see you.  For a moment I detain Mademoiselle."
+
+As Breagh bowed to Juliette and His Excellency and hastened toward
+the house, the Chancellor said to Juliette:
+
+"It is too cold to stand here ... it will be wiser to walk a little.
+There is a path that leads us out near the wall at the bottom of the
+shrubbery."
+
+It was where the mask of the Satyr, now with long icicles hanging
+from his eyebrows and goat-beard, jutted from the ivy of the boundary
+wall.
+
+The little spring had not frozen, the ferns and grasses round its
+margin were still quite green.  A few pinched violets peeped from
+among their broad leaves.  Juliette stooped and gathered one or two
+of the faintly-fragrant blossoms and a leaf of fern and a sprig of
+ivy.  As she slipped them into the inner pocket of her jacket, the
+Chancellor spoke:
+
+"Mademoiselle, I have to thank you for my life.....  Now, last
+night----"  He squarely confronted her, his powerful eyes looking
+down upon the little figure so frail and slender.  "Now, last night,"
+he repeated, "had you really believed that my death meant the
+salvation of your country....  Well!...  Did you not hold me in the
+hollow of your hand?"
+
+She met his stern regard with a look that was clear as crystal.  She
+said in her silver tones:
+
+"It is true, Monseigneur.  Our Lord granted me my wish.  You so
+great, so strong, so powerful, were helpless as an infant....  I had
+only not to put out my finger--and you were a dead man!  The power of
+Life and Death was mine, yet I could not let you perish, for Almighty
+God would not permit it....  He willed that you should not die....
+Crush France or spare her, you will not be carrying out the wishes of
+Count Bismarck.  You will do what God permits you to do--no more and
+no less!  But when you are most strong and most powerful ... when you
+play with Kings and Emperors like pawns, then I ask you to remember
+Juliette de Bayard!"
+
+She quivered in every limb, but she went on resolutely:
+
+"You are not a good man, Monseigneur!...  Hard, subtle, arrogant,
+cruel and unscrupulous, God made you to be the Fate of France.  One
+day she will lift up her face from the mire into which you have
+trodden it, and the star will be burning unquenched upon her
+forehead.  We may both be dead before that day dawns.  But rest
+assured that when next your armies cross the Rhine they will not gain
+an easy victory!...  We shall be prepared and ready, Monseigneur,
+when the Germans come again!"
+
+He looked at her and listened to her in silence, perhaps in wonder.
+She seemed the Spirit of France incarnate, a pale reed shaken by
+prophetic winds from Heaven.
+
+"It may be so," he said to her gravely.  "And now, Mademoiselle de
+Bayard, I shall ask you to give me your hand at parting!"
+
+"Take it, Monseigneur," she bade him.
+
+He held it in his an instant, saying in his clear-cut French:
+
+"I desire no evil to France when I say that I wish that every
+Frenchman had a daughter like you!..."  He added: "Thanks for the
+_beignets_....  I shall always remember you when I am served with
+them....  And for last night again thank you!...  Farewell and all
+happiness attend you, Mademoiselle!"
+
+His heavy footsteps crunched the snow.  He was gone, and she had
+almost called after him:
+
+"Monseigneur, I do not hate you so much as I have said...."
+
+
+On the morning of the 27th of January eighteen seventy-one French
+guns on Fort Montrouge had been keeping up a brisk cannonade of the
+German investing-works.  Meeting no response their thunder ceased.
+There, upon the east and north of beleaguered Paris--with a
+simultaneous uprush of fierce white flame from the muzzles of seventy
+giant howitzers, with the detonation of driving-charges, and the
+piercing scream and deafening crash of the percussion of Krupp's huge
+siege-projectiles, the bombardment of the doomed Queen City of Cities
+had begun....
+
+A few moments before, as Juliette de Bayard and her lover set foot
+upon the steamer-pier at Dover, an aged French lady, who had stopped
+Count Bismarck on the steps of the Prefecture, had imploringly said
+to him:
+
+"_O! Monseigneur, donnez nous la paix!_"
+
+And the Iron Chancellor had replied to her almost smilingly:
+
+"Dear lady, it is with a peace as with a marriage, there must be two
+parties willing to conclude the contract....  I am ready to make
+peace, but the other side is not!"
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75200 ***
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+<title>
+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Man of Iron, by Richard Dehan
+</title>
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+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75200 ***</div>
+
+<h1>
+<br><br>
+  THE<br>
+  MAN OF IRON<br>
+</h1>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  BY<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="t2">
+  RICHARD DEHAN<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  AUTHOR OF<br>
+  BETWEEN TWO THIEVES, ONE BRAVER THING,<br>
+  (THE DOP DOCTOR), ETC.<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br></p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  NEW YORK<br>
+  GROSSET & DUNLAP<br>
+  PUBLISHERS<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p class="t4">
+  <i>Copyright, 1915, by</i><br>
+  FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="t4">
+  <i>All rights reserved, including that of translation<br>
+  into foreign languages</i><br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="t4">
+  <i>February, 1915></i><br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p class="t3b">
+PREFACE
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>For the second time, since this book's beginning, the rose
+of July had flamed into splendid bloom.  I drew breath,
+for my task approached its ending, and looked up from
+the yellowed newspaper records of a great War waged
+forty-four years ago.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Perhaps I had grown negligent of modern signs and
+portents, or the web of Diplomacy had veiled them from all
+but privileged eyes....  Now I saw, looming on the
+eastern horizon, a cloud in the shape of a man's clenched
+fist in a gauntleted glove of mail.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>For days previously the frames of the open windows that
+look across the garden seaward, had leaped and rattled in
+answer to the incessant thud-thudding of big naval guns at
+sea.  One opal dawn showed the grim shapes of
+super-Dreadnoughts, Dreadnoughts, pre-Dreadnoughts and
+war-cruisers, strung out in battle-line along the glittering-green
+line of the horizon, escorted by a flotilla of destroyers and
+a school of submarines.  Night fell, and sea, land, and sky
+alternately whitened and blotted in the wheeling ray of the
+searchlights.  Electric balls dumbly gibbered in Admiralty
+Secret Code.  Gulls cradled on the glassy waters of the
+Channel must have been roused by outbursts of full-throated
+British cheering, and the crash of the Fleet bands
+striking into the National Anthem, as the sealed orders of
+the Supreme Admiral were signalled from the Flagship
+commanding the Southern Fleet.  No sound reached us
+ashore but the hush of the waves, the whisper of the
+night-wind, and the plaintive ululation of the mousing owls on
+Muttersmoor.  Yet what we saw that night was the awakening
+of Great Britain to the knowledge that her greatness is
+not past and gone.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Since then, the menacing cloud in the east has assumed
+solidity.  The mailed fist has fallen, imprinting Ruin on the
+soil of a neutral country, demolishing the matchless
+heirlooms of Art and the priceless treasures of Literature,
+bringing down in gray fragments the glories of Gothic
+architecture, everywhere destroying the Temple of God and
+shattering the House of Life.  The galleries and cabinets
+of noble and burgher, the treasure-houses of a nation are
+plundered.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>We have lived to see the War of Nations.  We are in it:
+fighting as our Allies of Belgium, France, and Russia are
+fighting; for racial name, national existence, social
+independence, and freedom of bodies and souls.  And this being
+so, I see no cause to blot a line that I have written.  For
+the Germany of 1870 was not the Germany of 1914.  The
+New Spirit of Teutonism had not shown itself in those dead
+days I have tried to vivify.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was waged sternly
+and mercilessly, but not in defiance of the Rules that
+govern the Great Game.  Treaties were held as something more
+sacred than scraps of paper.  Blood was lavishly poured
+out, gold relentlessly wrung from the coffers of a
+vanquished and impoverished State.  Things were done&mdash;as in
+the instances of Bazeilles and Châteaudun that made the
+world shudder, but not with the sickness of mortal loathing.
+Kings and nobles made War like noblemen and Kings.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Yet that great Minister whose prodigious labor reared up
+stone by stone the German Empire was, unless biographers
+have lied, haunted and obsessed in his declining days by
+remorse of conscience and terrors of the soul.  "</i>But for
+me,<i>" he is reported to have said, "</i>three great wars would
+not have been made, nor would eight hundred thousand of
+my fellow men have died by violence.  Now, for all that I
+have to answer before Almighty God!<i>" ... Could the
+relentless exponent of the fierce gospel of blood and iron
+have foreseen the imminent, approaching disintegration of
+his colossal life-work, under the hands of his successors&mdash;might
+he have known what Dead Sea fruit of ashes and
+bitterness his fatal creed, grafted upon the oak of
+Germany, was fated to bring forth&mdash;he would have drunk ere
+death of the crimson lees of the Cup of Judgment; he
+would have seen in the shape of his pupil the grotesque,
+distorted image of himself.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+RICHARD DEHAN.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+SOUTH DEVON, November, 1914.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap01"></a></p>
+
+<p class="t2">
+THE MAN OF IRON
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<h3>
+I
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+When Patrick Carolan Breagh attained the age of six
+years, the boy being tall enough to view his own topknot
+of scarlet curls and freckled snub nose in the big shining
+mirror of his stepmother's toilet-table, without standing on
+the tin bonnet-box that was kept under the chintz cover,
+or climbing on a chair,&mdash;he was fated to acquire, during
+one brief half-hour's concealment under a Pembroke table,
+more knowledge of Life, Death, and the value of Money,
+than would otherwise have come to him in the course of
+half a dozen more years.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon this unforgetable third of January, his plaid frock
+had been taken off and, to his infinite delight, replaced by
+a little pair of blue cloth breeches and a roundabout jacket.
+Amateurish as to cut, the nether garments displaying so
+little difference fore and aft that it did not matter in the
+least which way you faced when you stepped into them,
+they were yet splendid,&mdash;not only in Carolan's eyes.  Alan,
+his junior by three years, bellowed with envy on beholding
+them; and four-year-old Monica sucked her finger and
+stared with all her might.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was plain to Carolan that, having once assumed the
+manly garments, no boy could be expected to put on those
+hateful petticoats again.  In vain Nurse Povah,&mdash;who had
+been Carolan's foster-mother,&mdash;and Miss Josey, the
+governess, explained to him that the breeches were not
+completed, and directed his eyes to the mute evidence of pins,
+chalk-marks, and yellow basting-threads.  Their arguments
+were vain, their entreaties addressed to deaf ears.  An
+attempt to remove the cause of contention by force resulted
+in Nurse's being butted, though not hard! and Miss Josey
+kicked with viciousness.  In the confusion that ensued, the
+rebel effected an escape from the scene of combat.  And
+the door of the sitting-room being open, Carolan trotted
+across the Government cocoanut matting of the landing
+with the intention of confessing his own misdeeds, since
+Miss Josey was quite certain to report him at headquarters,
+had not this often-tested method of blunting the edge of
+retributory justice failed, through his own fault.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For upon entering the large, shabbily furnished room,
+situated on the second floor of a gaunt, gray stone building
+known as Block D, Married Officers' Quarters&mdash;the room
+that served Captain Breagh and his second wife as
+sitting-room, dining-room, smoking-room and boudoir&mdash;Carolan
+became aware that his stepmother, quite unconscious of
+his intrusion, was dusting the china vases on the
+mantel-shelf, and was instantly possessed by the conviction that
+it would be huge fun to hide under the large round table
+that occupied the middle of the worn Brussels carpet, and
+bounce out upon the poor lady when she turned, making
+her say "Owh!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So the boy noiselessly dived under the deep, hanging,
+silk-fringed border of the Indian shawl that covered the
+circular Pembroke table, upon which were ranged, about a
+central basket of wax fruit and flowers, gilt frames with
+spotty daguerrotypes, albums of scraps, Books of Beauty
+containing the loveliest specimens of Early Victorian female
+aristocracy, and Garlands of Poetry reeking with the
+sentimental effusions of Eliza Cook and L.E.L., interspersed
+with certain card-cases and paper-knives of Indian carved
+ivory and sandal-wood, and other trifles of brass and
+filigree ware.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The big, shabbily furnished second-floor room had three
+windows looking out upon the graveled expanse of the
+Parade-ground, and commanding a view of the flower-bedded
+patch of sacred green turf, inclosed by posts and
+chains, that graced the front of the pillared, pedimented,
+and porticoed building that housed the Officers' Mess.  And
+when the regiment got the route for another garrison town,
+nearly everything the room contained&mdash;from the Pembroke
+center-table and chintz-covered sofa, to the secrétaire
+at which Captain Breagh penned his letters, the big
+leather-covered arm-chair in which he sat, and the Bengal
+tiger-skin hearthrug,&mdash;would be packed,&mdash;with the picture
+of the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Vimiera, and
+the chimney-glass over which it always hung&mdash;into wooden
+cases, with the before-mentioned chimney-glass, curtains and
+carpets, beds, baths, uniform-cases and a great number
+of other things; and then after a period of rumbling
+confusion there would be a new sitting-room looking on
+another barrack-square, other bedrooms and a fresh
+nursery,&mdash;and Carolan would forget the old ones in something
+under a week.  As a matter of fact, the regiment had been
+shifted four times since its return from India, when
+Carolan was little more than a baby, and Monica and Alan and
+Baba were nowhere at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now either Mrs. Breagh occupied an unconscionable
+time in dusting the vases and making up the fire for her
+Captain, who by reason of long service with the regiment
+in the East was susceptible to chill; or Carolan, with the
+mental instability shared by the child and the savage, lost
+interest in his new project and abandoned it.  He was
+squatting silently in his hiding-place when Miss Josey
+entered; he heard her complaint, noted down two spiteful
+exaggerations and one malicious falsehood, and witnessed
+the exhibition of a bulgy ankle in a badly-gartered white
+cotton stocking surmounting an elastic-sided cloth boot.
+When the governess withdrew, consoled by Mrs. Breagh's
+sympathy, Nurse Povah was summoned from the other
+side of the landing by a tinkle of the hand-bell, and bore
+stout witness on the culprit's side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Did ye see her leg, I'd make so bould as ask, or did
+ye take her worrud for ut?  And&mdash;av there was anythin'
+to show barrin' a flaybite, is ut natheral a boy wud parrut
+wid his furrst breches widout a kick?  Sure, they're the
+apple av his eye, and the joy av his harrut!  And her&mdash;wid
+her talk av bendin' his will and breakin' his temper!
+is ut like ye wud lay a finger on the Captain's eldest son,
+to plaze the likes of her?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Captain has said himself&mdash;over and over&mdash;that a
+sound thrashing would be a capital thing for Carry,"
+Mrs. Breagh returned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He praiches&mdash;ay, bedad!&mdash;but does he ever practuss?"
+demanded Nurse, smoothing her apron with stout, matronly
+hands, and getting very red in the cheeks.  "Niver fear
+but he'd be too wise to bring a curse upon himself by
+ill-thrating a motherless child!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Motherless!</i>"  What did the word mean?  Carolan wondered,
+recalling how Nurse would describe some particularly
+down-hearted person as being as long in the jaw as a
+motherless calf.  And now Mrs. Breagh was saying, in the
+kind of voice some good people use for the purpose of
+Scriptural quotation, and which is not in the least like
+their accents of every day...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Solomon said, 'He that spareth the rod'&mdash;but you
+Catholics never seem to read the Bible.  And I always
+treat Carolan as if he were my own child&mdash;and you know
+I do!  'Ssh!  Here comes the Captain&mdash;and I <i>think</i> I
+hear Baba crying...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Nurse, with the honors of war, retired to the
+nursery on the other side of the landing, as Captain
+Breagh's hasty footsteps and the jingle of his scabbard
+were heard on the stone stair.  A minute later he entered
+the room.  But during the minute's interval Carolan had
+had time to ponder, mentally digest and form a conclusion
+from what he had just heard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It had never previously occurred to him that the stout,
+dark, beady-eyed, brightly dressed lady whom he had been
+taught to call Mamma was not really his mother, but he
+knew it now.  It was revealed to him in one lightning-flash
+of comprehension that this was the reason why her
+hands felt so like hands of wood whenever they touched
+him, and why her kiss,&mdash;religiously administered night and
+morning&mdash;was a thing he would much sooner have gone
+without.  He knew,&mdash;and something inside him was glad
+to know&mdash;that it was not wicked of him not to love her as
+he loved Nurse, or Monica, or Ponto the brown retriever.
+And then his heart dropped like a leaden plummet to the
+pit of his infant stomach.  This was to be a day of
+discoveries.  He had discovered that by kicking out lustily it
+had been possible to resist the forcible removal of his new
+breeches.  He had discovered that "Mamma" was not his
+real, real mother!  Would Daddy turn out to be Monica's
+and Alan's and Baba's Daddy, and not Carolan's, after
+all?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A sob rose in his throat, and his hot, dry eyes began to
+smart and water.  But the manly trampling and clanking
+came nearer.  The door opened&mdash;his father was in the room.
+He could only see his shiny Wellington boots, and the
+bottoms of the red-striped dark blue breeches that were
+strapped over them.  But familiar knowledge built from
+the boots the handsome manly figure in the light brick-red
+coat with the Royal blue facings, the China and Punjab
+war-medals, the crimson sash and the other martial
+accouterments topped by the stiff leather stock, and the head
+whose wealth of jet-black curls and luxuriant bushy
+whiskers might have been the glory of a fashionable
+hairdresser's window; in combination with the well-cut features,
+light blue eyes, and fine rosy complexion, as yet scarcely
+deteriorated by Mess port, whisky punch, and late
+hours.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Captain Breagh kissed Mrs. Breagh with a hearty smack
+that made Carolan start in his hiding-place, and said the
+wind was enough to cut you in two, and that the fire
+looked tempting; as he laid down his pipeclayed gloves
+and dress-schako with the gilt grenade and white ball-tuft
+on the aged and dilapidated sideboard, and permitted his
+lady to relieve him of his sword.  Then he rubbed his hands
+and thrust them to the blaze enjoyingly, and threw
+himself into the creaking leathern arm-chair.  This, it
+suddenly occurred to Carolan, would be a favorable moment
+for emerging from concealment.  He had got on all-fours,
+ready to appear in the character of a bear or tiger, when
+Mrs. Breagh stopped him by beginning to tell tales.  The
+child was beyond control, she declared&mdash;there was no end
+to his naughtiness.  For the sake of his immortal soul,
+something would have to be done....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What's he been doing?  For my own part,&mdash;I wouldn't
+give a brass farthing for a pup that wouldn't bite, or a
+boy that wouldn't show fight when he was put to it!"  The
+arm-chair creaked suggestively as the Captain stretched
+out his legs, and the firelight danced in the polish of his
+boots, hardly dimmed by the dry gravel of the Parade-ground.
+"And it's in the blood, that high spirit.  Don't
+suppose I'm bragging that the Breaghs are any great
+shakes in the way of family!&mdash;though the name's as decent
+a one as you'll meet in a long day's march.  But Carolan's
+a Fermeroy on the mother's side&mdash;and they're a hot-headed,
+high-handed breed," the Captain added, taking
+the newspaper from the Pembroke table, "and have been
+ever since the year One&mdash;if you take the trouble to look
+'em up in Irish History.  Not that I've ever read any,
+but my poor Milly used to say&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His wife's eyes snapped with irrepressible jealousy at
+the reference to her predecessor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And everything that came from her you took for Gospel,
+I suppose?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Pretty near!" said Captain Breagh, and began to
+unfold his newspaper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I get little enough time for reading things that are
+useful," said Mrs. Breagh, as the Captain dipped into the
+crackling sheets.  "It was my bounden duty to speak,
+and I've done it!  And if you think you are doing your
+duty by the child&mdash;let alone his mother&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She broke off, for the Captain bounced in his chair, and
+dashed down the newspaper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Haven't I told you I won't have poor Milly's name
+dragged into these discussions!  She's dead!&mdash;and so let
+her be!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If a lady can be said to snort, Mrs. Breagh gave utterance
+to a sound of that nature.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I'm willing, Alexander, I'm sure!  But all things
+considered, I must say I think it's a pity her ladyship died
+and left you a widower!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And you're right there, begad you are!  And how
+many times have I told you she was merely an
+Honorable, and not her ladyship!"  He left the newspaper
+sprawling on the hearthrug, and mechanically reaching
+down his pipe and tobacco-pouch from the corner of the
+mantelshelf, proceeded to fill the well-browned
+meerschaum, and when his wife lighted a spill and held it to
+him as an olive-branch, he thanked her in an absent way.
+What did the Captain see as he pulled at the gnawed,
+amber mouthpiece and stared into the red-hot heart of
+the fire, communing with that other self that dwells within
+every man?
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap02"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+II
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+I think he saw young Alex Breagh, a junior Lieutenant
+of the Grenadier company of the Royal Ennis Regiment
+of Infantry, winning his spurs of manhood under Gough
+and Hardinge and Gilbert on the plain beside the Sutlej,
+where stands Ferozshahr.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For I don't pretend to be a hero or anything of that
+sort, but I've never shirked my share of fighting," said the
+silent voice within him, and the Captain exhaled a spirt of
+smoke and mumbled: "I believe you!"  And the other
+Breagh went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Fair play and no favor won us our honors, mind you! though
+the chance didn't come until later on.  True, we
+helped Sir Harry Smith to pound the Sikhs at Ferozshahr
+and at Aliwal, when the cavalry of his Right had driven
+the Khâlsas back across the Red Ford.  Waiting for the
+elephants with the heavy siege-guns and the ammunition
+and stores to come up from Delhi, took a hell of a time.
+Seven long weeks of broiling by day and freezing o' nights,
+while Tij Sinh and his thirty-five thousand Khâlsas
+entrenched themselves, mounted their heavy artillery&mdash;made
+their bridge of boats, and encamped their cavalry up the
+river.  But the day came&mdash;our day!&mdash;and I don't forget
+that foggy tenth of February while I'm breathing."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Captain Breagh sucked at his pipe and reflectively pulled
+a whisker.  And the silent voice went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"We were with the Left Division under General Dick,
+and led the assault, while Gilbert and Smith feigned to
+attack on the enemy's left and center.  And in that
+charge,&mdash;when the General got his death-wound from a
+swivel-ball,&mdash;I was the second red-coat to cross the ditch, and
+scramble over the big mud rampart, and saber a Sikh
+gunner with his linstock in his hand!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Breagh, chagrined at remaining so long the object
+of her husband's inattention, picked up his fallen
+newspaper and almost timidly laid it on his knee.  And the
+child under the table kept as quiet as a mouse, almost...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Thank ye, my dear!" said the Captain, while the other
+Breagh went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And when the Treaty was signed and the rumpus all
+over&mdash;for the time!&mdash;because Dalhousie's bungling brought
+the hornets about our ears again!&mdash;we marched from
+Lahore to Calcutta with Britain's victorious army&mdash;barring
+the force we'd left with Lawrence at Mian Mir."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The silence continuing, Mrs. Breagh drew her work-table
+toward her, and began to look over a basket of little
+toeless and heel-less stockings.  As she did this she sighed.
+The Captain smoked thoughtfully.  And the inward voice
+went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Governor-General and his staff rode with Sir Harry
+Smith and the Advance&mdash;and between the Cavalry Brigade
+that came after 'em&mdash;for Sir Harry swore he'd be damned
+but since we'd seen the hottest of the fighting, we should
+have the post of honor!&mdash;between the Cavalry and Ours
+came the spoils of war, drawn by the Government
+elephants&mdash;two hundred and fifty Sikh guns we'd taken at Sobraon.
+Hah!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Captain's eyes were fixed on the fire.  He smoked
+in quick, short puffs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Standards waving, bands blowing their heads off, and
+a bit o' loot in most men's knapsacks.  Glory for the dead,
+and praise and promotion for the living&mdash;begad! it was
+worth while&mdash;just then!&mdash;to be a British soldier!  And
+I'd been wounded just enough to look interesting, and got
+a Special Mention in Despatches&mdash;and the women were
+pulling caps for me,&mdash;devil a lie in that!  And I danced
+with Milly at the Welcome Back Ball at Government
+House, in March, 1846.  And whether it was Fate&mdash;or
+that way she had of looking up under her eyelashes, and
+showing a laughing mouth full of tiny pearly-white teeth
+over the top of her fan, I've never been quite clear.  But
+even before the steward introduced Lieutenant Breagh to
+the Hon. Millicent Fermeroy, I'd fallen head over ears in
+love with Milly, and she was as mad for me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still silence reigned in the room, only broken by the
+cinders falling on the hearth, and the breathing of three
+people.  Mrs. Breagh still bent over her basket of little
+worn socks, of which those in most crying need of darning
+belonged to Carolan.  Her lips were tightly closed, but as
+the man within her husband talked to the man, the woman
+within the woman talked to his wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I wonder whether he knows I know he's thinking of
+her again?  I wonder whether she'd have liked to sit and
+toil and moil for a child of mine, and know that the other
+woman held the first place in his heart?  Ah, dear me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She glanced at her husband.  He did not see her.  He
+was living in the Past.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Nobody noticed how often we danced together....
+It had gone pretty far with us before Her Ladyship scented
+what was in the wind, and sent an <i>aide-de-camp</i> to remind
+Miss Fermeroy that the doctor had set down his foot against
+her overheating herself with waltzing,&mdash;and I found myself
+staring after her with her bouquet in my hand....  And
+I took it home to quarters&mdash;and I've got it now, stowed
+away with her letters and a lot of other things in a tin
+uniform-case....  Fanny hasn't an idea of that!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The smoke-puffs came more slowly, and the darning-needle
+now worked busily.  The voice of a sergeant who
+was drilling a squad of recruits came in gruff barks from
+the Parade.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Fermeroys were great folks....  Colonel Lord
+Augustus Fermeroy&mdash;Milly's uncle, was a tremendous Light
+Cavalry swell on the Commander-in-Chief's Staff.  Of
+course, I knew that he would never hear of an engagement
+between his brother's orphan daughter&mdash;(to do the old
+man justice, he loved her as his own!)&mdash;and a Lieutenant
+of a marching regiment of infantry who'd nothing but his
+pay.  So&mdash;as Milly and me had made up our minds we
+couldn't live without each other,&mdash;we were married
+secretly&mdash;first at a Protestant Mission Church, and then by a
+French Franciscan <i>padre</i>&mdash;and <i>he</i> made bones about
+splicing us&mdash;because I wasn't a Catholic,&mdash;and if I hadn't
+told a white lie or two about my intention of turning
+Papist, I don't believe he'd have tied the knot.  But all's
+fair in love!&mdash;and we were in love with a vengeance.  I
+suppose I was a selfish beggar to coax Milly into deceiving
+her people, but&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A long ray of chilly January sunshine, full of dancing
+dust-motes, came in at the window.  Mrs. Breagh sneezed
+as it fell across her face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A time came when I knew I had been as selfish as she
+never would have called me.  People had to be told!&mdash;so
+we enlightened 'em by shooting the moon.  The condition
+of my war-chest wasn't over and above flourishing, but I
+got a month's leave for the Mofussil and secured a twenty-rupee
+furnished bungalow at Titteghur&mdash;and next morning&mdash;before
+the hue and cry had well begun, Lady Augustus
+got a <i>chit</i> from Milly by <i>harkára</i>&mdash;I remember every word
+of it.  '<i>Dearest Aunt,&mdash;I hope you have not been alarmed,
+supposing me to have been murdered or carried off by
+wicked persons.  I am safe and happy with my own dear
+husband, from whom, I shall never be parted now.</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The pipe was nearly smoked out, but the Captain did
+not appear aware of that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'<i>Never be parted</i>,' and before three months were over
+our heads..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Clash!  Mrs. Breagh had let her scissors fall.  Her
+husband made a long arm, picked them up, and gave them
+back to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Thank you, Alex, love!" said Mrs. Breagh effusively.
+But he went on sucking at the now empty pipe, and staring
+at the waning fire.  And the silent voice went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Fermeroys were furious.  But there was no use in
+making a fuss and a scandal, and I must say they took the
+blow awfully well.  Good haters both&mdash;declared that under
+no conceivable circumstances would they ever admit within
+their doors an officer who had acted so dishonorably, but
+they'd receive Milly whenever she liked to come.  Nor
+would they&mdash;though her uncle was her guardian and
+trustee&mdash;deprive her of her fortune&mdash;seven thousand pounds
+in East India Stock, Home Rails, and Government Three
+Per Cents.  But they tied it up tight for the benefit of the
+child that was coming, and others that might come&mdash;in
+what they called a Post-Matrimonial Settlement, and I
+was agreeable; though, mind you!&mdash;I had the law on my
+side if I'd chosen to make a fuss.  And I was too much in
+love to bother over money&mdash;or to care a cowrie about being
+cut by the Fermeroys' friends."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing but gray ashes remained in the pipe-bowl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I don't know whether it wasn't to get me out of the
+way that the regiment was ordered to Sikandarabad.
+There'd been a Sepoy rising at Haidarabad, six miles north
+of the Subsidiary Force's cantonments&mdash;and as the big
+Mussulman city was swarming with all the blackguards
+and <i>budmashes</i> in the Dekkan&mdash;and bazar-<i>gup</i> had it that
+another Rohilla riot was threatening&mdash;Ours got the route
+to go.  And Milly&mdash;God bless her! wouldn't hear of being
+left behind.  And we steamed down coast to Masulipatam,
+and marched the two hundred miles; and though it was
+early in January, the roads were confoundedly squashy and
+the heat was like a vapor-bath&mdash;there being no winter to
+speak of in the South."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He's in a regular brown study," said her unseen gossip
+and confidante to the Captain's second wife.  "Perhaps
+his tailor has been dunning him, or he's been losing at
+cards.  When men are out of spirits, money's generally
+at the bottom of it!  Better get him to tell what's the
+matter by-and-by&mdash;not now!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And the long road ran like a brown snake between
+mangrove-swamps and paddy-fields, where it wasn't
+coffee-plantations and cotton-ground.  And there were
+black-buck and partridge for the shooting when you could get
+away from the columns; and duck and snipe when we were
+hung up at the river-fords waiting for the elephants that
+were to take over the baggage and guns."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The shouts of the drill-sergeant came more faintly from
+the Parade-ground.  The Captain seemed to doze as he
+sucked at the empty pipe, but Memory's voice went
+on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The women and children of the rank and file were
+carried on the baggage-wagons, and the officers' wives
+traveled by bullock-<i>tonga</i> or <i>palki-dak</i>, under an escort of
+good-conduct men of the Subsidiary Force the Brigadier
+had sent down from cantonments.  Milly laughed at their
+oilskin-covered wickerwork chimney-pot hats and little old
+red coatees, and black unmentionables and bare sandaled
+feet.  But they couldn't keep the beggars of bearers from
+turning out of the road and taking short-cuts through
+jungle-paths.  Then they'd dump the <i>palkis</i> down in the
+shade, and light a fire of sticks, and squat round and smoke
+their hubble-bubbles or chew betel....  And Milly's
+blackguards had gone out of sight behind some trees, and
+she was scared at finding herself alone and unprotected.
+And she tried to be calm and plucky, thinking of&mdash;what
+she and me were looking for....  But something trotted
+out of a cane-brake and snuffed at the <i>palki</i> curtains&mdash;and
+she went off in a dead faint and small blame to her!  For
+there were the prints of a full-grown tiger's pugs in the
+soft ground round the palanquin&mdash;and the place where
+his hind-claws had torn up the grass when he bounded
+off...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The forgotten pipe was upside down in the smoker's
+mouth now.  A pinch of ashes had fallen upon the breast
+of the unhooked scarlet coat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"When I came up I made those coolie-brutes eat plenty
+stick.  But Milly&mdash;poor girl! had got her death-blow.  And
+the boy was born that night under canvas by the roadside.
+An old Murderer&mdash;Surgeon-Major Murdoch of Ours&mdash;did
+all man could do to save her.  But&mdash;just at dawn&mdash;with
+the eastern sky all lemon-yellow and pink and madder
+behind a mango-tope, with a Hindu temple near it, and a
+clump of mud huts&mdash;and some old saint's shrine under a
+sacred peepul-tree&mdash;the boy was born and the mother
+went out like a blown waxlight.  Oh, my darling! ... And
+the Catholic chaplain&mdash;who'd been fetched to give
+Milly the Last Sacraments&mdash;baptized the boy, for Milly
+had made me swear all the children should be of her faith.
+And the boy would have died, too, but that my company
+Sergeant's wife&mdash;she that is nurse to my youngest child
+to-day&mdash;happened to be able and willing to suckle him.
+And we struck camp and set out on the last march,
+carrying a corpse and a new-born baby.  And that night we
+buried my girl by torchlight in the cemetery belonging to
+the European infantry-barracks.  And it's six years ago
+to-day&mdash;and here I am married to another woman!  Are
+you happy with her, Alex Breagh?  She's as unlike the
+other as chalk's different from cheese&mdash;and poor Milly 'ud
+have called her a vulgar person!  I know she would!
+And yet&mdash;Milly never gave me a decent meal, and the
+servants did as they liked! and Fanny's a rare
+housekeeper.  I've been more comfortable since I married her
+than I ever was in my life before.  Yes, I'm a happy
+man!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He told himself this continually.  And yet the knowledge
+of material comfort could not long silence the crying
+of his heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took the smoked-out pipe from his mouth, and turned
+to look at the plump, high-colored, personable woman who
+was sitting darning his children's stockings with his
+wedding-ring shining on her finger, and the present had its
+value for him, and he ceased to company with the dead.
+His regard, at first chill and gloomy, warmed: his
+good-humored smile curled his full red lips again....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why, how you look, love!" said Mrs. Breagh, and she
+rose and came to his side.  Then she sat on his knee and
+smoothed his hair from his forehead.  And the Captain
+returned her kiss, and told himself that true wisdom lay
+in making the best of one's luck generally, and being
+grateful for whatever good the gods chose to grant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No use crying over spilt milk! ... Beg pardon, my
+dear!&mdash;but what were you asking me?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I was asking&mdash;supposing Carolan had never been born&mdash;or
+had died&mdash;whether you would have come into his
+mother's money?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Would I have inherited Milly's seven thousand pounds?
+Not a halfpenny of it, my dear!  In the event of her
+decease without issue it would have gone back to her family.
+And even during Milly's lifetime she only had the
+half-yearly interest.  Couldn't sell out stock, or raise a lump
+sum for&mdash;ahem!&mdash;for the benefit of any person she'd a
+mind to help.  And husband and wife are one flesh, so the
+Bible tells you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The poor thing that's gone ought to have had more
+spirit than to let you be treated so!" said the second wife,
+who had possessed no fortune beyond a hundred pounds
+or so, bestowed as dowry on his younger daughter by the
+hard-worked apothecary of an English country town; and
+was conscious that in marrying her the Captain had not
+aspired to a union above his social rank.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Begad! my dear!  I don't mind owning that Lord
+Augustus hated me, from the top hair of my head to the
+last peg in my boot-sole.  And&mdash;when he died&mdash;and he
+did go over to the majority not long after the Fermeroys
+had sailed for England with Lord Hardinge&mdash;when he died
+it didn't make a pin's difference, for under that settlement
+I've told you of, the co-trustee, a solicitor&mdash;Mr. Mustey, of
+Furnival's Inn, Holborn, London&mdash;took his son,&mdash;who'd
+been made partner in his business&mdash;as his partner in the
+trusteeship.  And, of course, the money's the boy's!&mdash;though
+the two-hundred-and-twenty-odd annual interest is
+paid to me&mdash;the whole of it!&mdash;until Carry's old enough to
+go to school and college&mdash;and when he reaches twenty-three
+the whole lump of the principal will be his&mdash;seven
+thousand golden sovereigns&mdash;to play ducks and drakes with
+if he likes!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And my poor darlings will have nothing," Mrs. Breagh
+bleated, "unless,&mdash;-because I've treated Carolan in all
+respects&mdash;and more!&mdash;as if he were my own child, and
+that I would declare with my head upon my dying pillow!&mdash;unless
+he has the gratitude and the decent feeling to do
+something for Alan,&mdash;if it's only giving him a few hundreds
+to start him properly in life...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Don't count your chickens before they're hatched,"
+advised her lord.  "My dear, if you'll get me the materials
+from the sideboard, I'll wet my whistle.  Talking's dry
+work!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With wifely compliance Mrs. Breagh placed the whisky-decanter
+and the Delhi clay-bottle of drinking-water near
+her Alexander's elbow.  You are to imagine the Captain
+mixing a jorum on half-and-half principles, nodding to his
+Fanny, and taking a refreshing swig of the cooling draft.
+And at this juncture a head of scarlet curls was poked out
+from the covert of the Indian shawl tablecloth, and the
+clear treble of his eldest son piped out:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Dada, how much money is seven fousand golding
+sovereigns?  And how long will it be before I get them to
+make ducks and drakes?"
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap03"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+III
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+You are to suppose Captain Breagh, startled by the
+unexpected apparition of his eldest son, swallowing the whole
+jorum of whisky and water at a gulp, and his wife dropping
+her darning into her lap with the very exclamation
+Carolan had previously promised himself.  Still as a mouse,
+he had lain in ambush beneath the Pembroke table, with
+the portrait of the Duke of Wellington on a gray charger
+in the foreground of the highly varnished
+oil-painting&mdash;representing the Royal Ennis Regiment in the
+performance of prodigies of gallantry in conflict with the French
+at Vimiera&mdash;staring with bolting blue eyes, and pointing
+at him with a Field-Marshal's <i>bâton</i> whenever he had
+peeped out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, conscious of having made an impression, and with
+a curious mixture of sensations, emotions, impulses,
+fermenting in a brain of six years, the boy stood upright
+before his elders, his well-knit shoulders thrown back, his
+sturdy legs, arrayed in their virile coverings of blue cloth
+adorned with cat-stitches of yellow basting-thread, planted
+wide apart upon the tiger-skin hearthrug, and his stomach
+thrust forward with the arrogance characteristic of the
+newly made capitalist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why the devil were you hiding there?  Eh, you young
+Turk, you?" blustered the Captain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Eavesdroppers," said Mrs. Breagh acidly, "never go
+to Heaven."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Farver Haygarty&mdash;&mdash;" Carolan began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"We don't want to know what Father Haygarty says!"
+snapped Mrs. Breagh, whose Protestant gorge rose at the
+Papistical teachings of the regimental chaplain.  And then
+she remembered that in a few years the worldly prospects
+of her three children might depend on the good-will of this
+chubby-faced, red-haired urchin who stood silently before
+her, contemplating her with a new expression in a very
+round pair of oddly amber-flecked gray eyes.  And being
+a weak, ill-balanced, underbred woman, and a mother into
+the bargain, she truckled, as such women will, to the latent
+potentialities vested in the stubborn wearer of the
+unfinished suit of clothes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not but what Father Haygarty is a good man and
+much respected&mdash;and I dare say you're sorry for having
+kicked poor Josey.  So, since it's your birthday we won't
+say any more about it&mdash;and Nurse shall pull out those
+basting-threads and sew on the brace-buttons when you're
+in bed to-night&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There! you hear!  Stop, you young rascal!  Come
+back and kiss your mother, and thank her, and run away
+to Mrs. Povah!" bade the Captain, for Carolan, driving a
+pair of grubby fists deep into the pockets of the new
+breeches, had swung contemptuously upon his heel, and
+made for the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She's not my muvver!" said the son, pausing in his
+struggle with the door-handle to turn a flushed and frowning
+face upon his sire.  "She said so just now and so did
+you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Then shut the door!" thundered the Captain, but it
+had slammed before the words were fairly out.  And
+Carolan stamped across the landing whistling defiantly,
+and burst into the nursery, where Baba&mdash;for the moment
+its sole occupant&mdash;was asleep in her bassinette, Alan and
+Monica having gone out to walk with Miss Josey, and
+Nurse being busy in the adjoining room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carolan's head was hot, and his heart felt big and
+swollen.  He was a person of consequence, and at the
+same time a thing of no account.  Thus the pride that
+flamed in his gray eyes was presently quenched by scalding
+salt drops of resentful indignation.  He was sorrowful,
+elated, angry, and complacent, all at once, as he stood by
+Baba's crib.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had never until now suspected Mrs. Breagh was not
+his mother.  He had called her "Mamma" ever since he
+could speak.  No question had ever risen in his mind as to
+the existence of some secret reason for her dislike of him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When she had seemed most hateful in his eyes, by reason
+of her lacking reticence and absent sense of honor&mdash;for
+she couldn't keep a secret if she promised you ever so, and
+was always telling tales of you to Dada!&mdash;Carolan had
+frequently relieved his feelings by going into corners and
+calling her "that woman" under his breath.  The appalling
+sense of crime, involved with the relief this process
+brought&mdash;for to call your real mother names would be a
+sin of the first magnitude&mdash;bad invested it with a dreadful
+fascination.  Now the glamour had vanished, together with
+the wickedness.  Mrs. Breagh was nothing to Carolan.  He
+was the son of another woman&mdash;and she was dead in India.
+Her name was Milly&mdash;a gentle, prettily sounding name.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Only the day before, Carolan had found out what the
+thing grown-up people called "death" and "dying"
+meant.  He had given a shiny sixpence that had lain
+hidden for weeks at the bottom of the pocket in his old
+plaid frock to Bugler Finnerty for a thrush he had limed,
+a beautiful brown thrush with a splendidly dappled breast.
+Only the bird's eyes looked like beads of dull jet glass
+instead of round black blobs of diamond-bright bramble-dew.
+And it had squatted on the foul floor of the little
+wood and wire cage in which Finnerty had been keeping it,
+panting, with ruffled feathers and open beak.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Finnerty had said that the bird would thrive on snails
+and worms, and Carolan had promised it plenty of these
+luxuries.  He had meant to range for them through all
+the soldiers' vegetable-allotments, and ransack the
+Parade-ground flower-beds.  But all at once the thrush had fallen
+over on its side, fluttering and struggling&mdash;and Carolan
+had been so sorry for it that he had thrust his pudgy hand
+into the cage, and taken the poor sufferer out with the
+intention of nursing it in his pinafore for a little, and then
+letting it go free, since it was so unhappy in captivity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when he had bidden it fly away it had had no
+strength to do so.  It had lain helpless in his hands, and
+the strange quivering thrills that had passed through its
+slender body had communicated themselves to the child.
+Something was taking place&mdash;some change was coming.
+Without previous knowledge he had been sure of that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the change had come, with the drawing of the thin
+gray membrane from the corners next the beak, over the
+round yellow-rimmed eyes.  Then the upper and underlids
+had sealed themselves over the veiled eyeballs&mdash;the
+quick panting had changed to long gasps, the head had
+rolled to one side helplessly&mdash;and with a long shuddering
+convulsion the thing had taken place.  The slender body
+had stiffened in Carolan's hand, the glossy wings had closed
+down tightly against its dappled sides, its scaly legs had
+stretched out rigidly and not been drawn back again.  And
+a voice that seemed to speak inside Carolan had said to
+him: "This is death!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Now broke in upon his immature brain a flash of blinding
+brilliancy.  Milly, who had been his mother, was dead,
+like the thrush.  He shut his eyes, and saw her lying, very
+pale and pretty and helpless, with ruffled brown hair the
+exact color of the bird's feathers, and beautiful brown
+eyes&mdash;why was he so certain that they had been brown?&mdash;all dim
+and filmy, and her slender body and long graceful limbs
+now quivering and convulsed, and now growing rigid and
+stiff.  And a lump rose in his throat, and a tear splashed
+on the front of the brand-new blue jacket, and another that
+would have fallen was dried by a glow of inspiration.  For
+he had dug a grave with a sherd of broken flower-pot in
+the angle of one of the official flower-beds that decorated
+the oblong patch of lawn before the Mess House, and buried
+the dead thrush in the shelter of a clump of daffodils, and
+said a "Hail Mary!" for it, because, though Miss Josey and
+Mrs. Breagh&mdash;whom he would never call "Mamma" again!&mdash;termed
+it a Popish practice,&mdash;Father Haygarty said that
+one ought to pray for the dead....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Surely one ought to pray for the soul of Milly.  She
+would understand, it was to be hoped! why one had
+never done it before.  Somebody would tell her Carolan
+hadn't known!  Poor, poor Milly!  He wished he had
+been there with his new tin sword when that snuffing
+Thing came out of the jungle and frightened her so that
+she had died....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked about the nursery.  There stood Monica's
+Indian-cane cot, and Alan's green-painted iron crib on
+either side of Nurse's wooden four-poster.  At the
+bed-head above Nurse's pillow was nailed a little plaster
+Calvary, and a miniature holy-water stoup, and over Carolan's
+little folding camp-bedstead hung a noble crucifix of ebony
+and carved ivory, so large and so massive that two iron
+staples held it in its place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Face of the pendent, tortured Figure&mdash;there was
+death in that also.  It seemed to the child that the breast
+beneath the drooped, thorn-encircled Head, heaved with
+long sighs, that the lips gasped for breath&mdash;that long
+shuddering spasms rippled through the tortured Body,
+bringing home, as nothing ever had before, the meaning of
+the lines that the boy had learned as a parrot might....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>He was crucified also for us ... suffered ... and was
+buried....</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And that was why we prayed to Him for the dead and
+buried people, because He had suffered death and gone
+down into the dark grave, and He knew how to help souls....
+Carolan nailed his resolution to say a nightly "Our
+Father" for poor Milly to the masthead of determination,
+unaware that Father Haygarty had incurred the displeasure
+of Mrs. Breagh by urging the necessary discharge of
+this filial duty as a reason why the boy should be told about
+his mother who was dead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We may guess that the influence of the second wife had
+inspired the Captain to insist that the hour of enlightenment
+should be deferred indefinitely.  And if any one had
+suggested to Mrs..  Breagh that she had been prompted by
+a belated jealousy of her predecessor, she would have been
+genuinely horrified at the idea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nurse came in as Carolan decided on his course of future
+loyalty, and started at the sight of the sturdy little figure
+standing, with legs planted wide apart, on the shabby
+nursery drugget, its childish brows puckered with
+profound thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Now may the Saints stand between you and the mischief
+I know you're plannin'!" said Nurse, who prided herself
+on reading thoughts in faces.  "Is ut playin' acreybats
+on the windy-sill, or shavin' wid the Captain's razor?
+Spake ut out!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carolan spoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mamma is not my muvver, an' I shall call her Mrs. Breagh
+<i>always</i>!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"God be good to me!" said Nurse, quite pale, and
+putting her hand to her side.  "An' who tould ye that,
+an' set the two eyes of ye blazin' like coals of fire?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You saided it!&mdash;and she saided it&mdash;and Dada saided
+it&mdash;when I was playin' robber's cave under the sittin'-woom
+table," Carolan proclaimed.  "And I'm goin' to
+pray for Milly&mdash;that's my weal muvver&mdash;because she's
+dead&mdash;even if they say I shan't!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There'll none durst," said Nurse rather awfully, "wid
+Bridget Povah to the fore!  And what else?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Slightly damped by the prospect of being permitted to
+carry out his shining new intention without interruption,
+Carolan reflected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Nuffing," he said at last, "'cept that I want to know
+how much is seven fousand golding sovereigns?  For I
+am going to have them when I grow up."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Sure!" said Nurse, slightly bewildered, "a sovereign
+is the same as a wan-pound note!  Ye have seen thim things,
+have ye not?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carolan had seen the soiled rags of Bank paper changing
+hands on market-days, and the recollection wrinkled his
+nose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'Tis quare talk ye have," said Nurse, "about the sivin
+thousand wan-pound notes.  'Tis a little haystack av them
+ye would be gettin' from the gintleman at the Bank.
+Where arr ye goin' now, ye onaisy wandherer?  Wid your
+hoop for a rowl in the Barrack-square?  Take your cap&mdash;an'
+remember that wheniver ye're clane out av sight, Biddy
+Povah has her eye on you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Carolan was already out of the room and half-way
+down the stairs.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Outside under the blue sky, with its flocks of fleecy
+white clouds all hurrying southward, it was easy to forget
+the things that had hurt.  The crackle of the sandy gravel
+underfoot, the purr of the iron hoop in the metal driving-hook
+soothed and stimulated; the ringing clatter when one
+got upon the cobblestones, and the echo when one came
+under the archway of the Barrack-gate&mdash;were familiar,
+pleasant things.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Familiar, too, was the sentry on guard, great-coated&mdash;for
+at all times and seasons of the year a nipping wind
+howled through the stony tunnel that ended in the arch of
+the Barrack-gateway&mdash;and pacing his official strip of
+pavement, that began at the yellow-painted sentry-box with
+the blunt lamp-post near it, and ended at the big spiked
+gate.  And the peep into the guardroom, with unbuttoned
+privates in the familiar red coats with Royal blue facings
+sprawling on plank beds reading thumbed newspapers,
+and the sergeant sitting on his cot stiffly stocked and fully
+accoutered&mdash;that had the charm of a well-known, never too
+familiar sight.  To other senses besides the eyes and ears
+appealed the figure of Mary Daa, the apple, cake and
+ginger-pop woman, sitting under a vast and oddly-patched
+blue gingham umbrella at her stall, made of a short plank
+mounted on two barrels, against the great bare wall on the
+left of the Barrack-entrance, exercising a privilege permitted
+to no other, because Mary's stone ginger-pop bottles
+might be relied upon as containing nothing else....
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+It was market-day, and the great cobblestoned place,
+bordered by a line of shops and houses, broken by the
+bridge, under which flowed a famous salmon-river, was
+seething with people out to buy and sell and enjoy
+themselves.  On the right hand was the Catholic Church, a
+modern building of no great design, animated bundles of
+rags containing female penitents performing the devotions
+of the Stations round it.  While upreared upon the summit
+of an isolated rock beyond the rushing river, perched the
+ivy-mantled remnant of the ancient castle from which the
+town derived its name; once held against the Commonwealth
+by King James, and with Ireton's round-shot yet
+bedded in the massive masonry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The distracting grind-organ accompaniment of a round-about
+blared on the ear from a field where some caravans
+of strolling show-people had encamped themselves.  Rows
+of empty jaunting-cars, shafts down, waited their squireen
+owners in the bleakest angle of the market-place; and
+in the farm-carts with feather-beds in them, covered with
+gay patchwork counterpanes, the strapping matrons and
+buxom maids of the hill-farms or mountain-villages had
+jolted and joggled from their distant homes, and&mdash;the
+last bargain made&mdash;would jolt and joggle back
+again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Booths and stalls, presided over by them, exhibited cheese,
+butter, and other dairy-produce.  Crates were crammed
+with quacking ducks and loudly cackling fowls.  Strings
+of shaggy-footed horses and knots of isolated cows were
+ranged along the curbs to tempt the would-be purchaser;
+hurdled pens of sheep waited to change owners; but the
+staple article of commerce, in the active and the passive
+mood, alive and squealing or dead and smoked, was pig.
+In reeking basements below the shops&mdash;cellars where
+potatoes, cabbages, and onions were peddled to the poorest,
+and turf and firewood were sold in ha'p'orths&mdash;piles of
+pigs-tails, fresh and dried, rivaled the salted herring in
+popularity, and were borne home, wrapped in red-spotted
+handkerchiefs, and stowed away in the crowns of hats, to
+be frizzled over turf-embers for supper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A jig was being danced to the music of a fiddle and a
+clarionet on a square of smooth flagstones in the middle of
+the market-place.  And&mdash;for this was the West of Ireland
+in the early fifties&mdash;the bright red or dark blue cloaks and
+white frilled caps of the matrons, the short stuff petticoats,
+chintz jacket-bodices and bright handkerchief-shawls of
+the unwedded women; the corduroy breeches, blue yarn
+stockings and buckled brogues of the men, their long-tailed
+gray or blue coats and high-crowned, narrow-brimmed
+chimney-pots&mdash;gave charm and variety to the shifting
+scene.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not for the first time observed, the half-dozen of coarse,
+strapping, red-faced women who daily patroled the square
+in the neighborhood of the Barracks; whisky-hardened
+viragoes whose uncovered heads of greasy hair, thrust into
+sagging nets of black chenille-velvet, and uniform attire of
+clean starched cotton print, worn over a multiplicity of
+whaleboned petticoats, bespoke them,&mdash;as did their coarse
+speech and loud laughter,&mdash;members of the ancient sisterhood
+of Rahab and Delilah, followers of the most ancient
+profession in the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Prone at all times to hunt in pack or couples, the wearers
+of the greasy hair-nets flauntingly displayed a pair of
+captive red-coats.  One of them was fairly sober, and sulky
+at being thus paraded under the eyes of his countrymen.
+The other, a raw young recruit, half-fuddled with libations
+of porter and whisky, staggeringly promenaded the
+pavement with a siren on either elbow; and, being in the
+pugnacious stage of liquor, was stung by some sarcastic
+comment from the crowd into shaking off the women who
+supported,&mdash;while they feigned to lean on him,&mdash;and
+challenging the critic of morals, in broad Yorkshire, to a bout
+at fisticuffs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Leggo o' me, tha&mdash;&mdash;!" he hiccoughed to the Paphians.
+"Cannowt a chap walk wi'out women-fowk hangin' on, an'
+armin' him?  As for tha!"&mdash;he addressed the critic&mdash;"Ah'll
+teach tha to meddle wi' thy betters.  If tha'rt a
+mon&mdash;coom on!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Fight, is ut?  Och, ye poor craythur, the wind av a
+fist wud level ye," commented the censor, turning on his
+heel contemptuously.  Upon which, the belligerent, taking
+the act as a confession of recreancy, wrenched himself from
+the women, and, staggering forward, came into violent
+contact with Mary Daa's plank-and-barrel stall; with the
+result that certain apples, oranges, and cakes, displayed
+to tempt customers, were scattered on the flagged sidewalk,
+or rolled gaily down the gutter; pursued with yells
+of joy by certain ragged urchins who usually were to be
+found in the vicinity of Mary's stall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carolan clapped his hands with a child's delight in the
+upset and the subsequent fray, as Mary, vociferating maledictions
+on the soldier's drunken clumsiness and the predatory
+activity of the raiders, shook her fists at their flying heels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah nivir meant t' dommage tha!  Wull sixpence neet
+maak guid thy loss t' tha?" stammered the Yorkshireman,
+thrusting a hand into his trousers-pocket in search of the
+coin.  Then his flaming face darkened heavily, and he said,
+withdrawing the hand, empty, "Ah havena a brass farden
+t' pitch at dog or devil, let alone sixpence.  Mak't oop to
+her, Noorah lass, an' Ah'll gie't thee back agean!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the woman he had called Norah said, linking her
+arm in the soldier's and affectionately ogling him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Sure, I'll give the ould craythur a shillin', asthore, and
+a kiss av the handsome boy you are will pay me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then happened what Carolan, with a child's intuitive
+sense of things that are incomprehensible, saw with a
+strange shock and thrill that never quite passed away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bright new shilling tendered to Mary by the plump
+clean fingers with the twinkling glass-and-pinchbeck rings
+on them was dashed to the flags by a fierce blow of the old,
+bony, wrinkled hand....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Take up yer money, ye livin' disgrace!" Mary had said
+sternly to the staring woman, "and thrapse upon your
+way!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And under the regard of many eyes, for nearly all the
+faces in the crowded market-place seemed to be looking
+that way, the woman had picked up the coin; and as her
+comrades hurried on, had slunk after them, leaving the
+tipsy soldier standing there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Had ye no modher, ye fool-man?" Mary asked him,
+"that ye are hastin' quick to hell, arrum-in-arrum wid
+Thim Wans?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the tipsy young soldier had given a thick grunt that
+might have meant anything, and hung his head sulkily,
+and gone staggering upon his way, but in an opposite
+direction to that taken by the women.  And Mary Daa looked
+after him long and sorrowfully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Please tell me," asked Carolan, edging up to the
+apple-woman, for Mary and he had struck up a friendship over
+divers ha'p'orths of nuts and pink peppermint-candy sticks,
+"what are they, and why are they wicked?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mary brought round the weather-stained brown tunnel
+of her huge and venerable bonnet, and became aware of
+a small boy with a scarlet topknot and a pair of honest
+gray eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Who arr ye talkin' of?" she demanded, and there were
+shining drops of water on her wrinkled cheeks, and the
+cracked glasses of her huge iron-framed spectacles were
+foggy.  She took them off, and wiped them on her old green
+plaid shawl, as Carolan explained that he had been
+referring to Thim Wans.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What arr they?  Wandherin' waves av the say, poisonous
+planets; thraps for the feet, fiery dhragons that ate
+up the bodies an' souls av men!  Look me in the face wid
+your child's eyes, ye that will be a man wan day, an' get
+by harrut the worruds I'm spakin' to you!  An' when the
+pith is set widin your bones, and the hair is thick upon
+your lip, and the blood is hot widin the veins av
+you&mdash;kape them worruds in mind!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carolan thanked Mary Daa, and, having a stray half-penny,
+purchased a cocked-hat of brown peppermint rock,
+and went home crunching.  He had learned a good deal
+that day.  The mystery of Death and the power of Money
+had been revealed to him.  Also, he had gained some slight
+preliminary inkling of the forces that are arrayed against
+the human soul in its march through this strange world of
+ours, and of the strange and foul and ugly things that lie
+hidden beneath the shining surface of Life.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap04"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+IV
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Furnival's Inn, Holborn, with its parallelogram of dusty
+or rain-washed cobblestones unrelieved by any patch of
+railed-in grass plot, where sooty lilacs and rusty hawthorns
+make a show of putting forth green leaves in Spring, and
+plane-trees shed their bark, as boa-constrictors doff their
+skins, at the approach of Winter&mdash;Furnival's Inn, even in
+the year of stress of 1870, impressed itself upon the casual
+visitor as a dismal spot in wet weather and a dusty one in
+dry.  But that an immortal genius wrote a deathless work
+of humor in its cheerless precincts, one would have said
+that nothing young or gay or natural could ever flourish
+there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At nine o'clock upon the morning of a day heavily
+fraught with Fate for the protagonist of this unpretending
+life-drama, recent puddles testified to overnight's rain, and
+gray clouds rushing north-westward across a monochromatic
+parallelogram of sky, framed in by the bilious-hued,
+grimy-windowed, decrepit-looking Inn buildings, predicted
+more presently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Punctually upon the stroke of the hour you might have
+seen a shaggy young man in a red-hot hurry plunge under
+the round-topped carriage archway, eschewing the smaller
+side-entrance intended for pedestrians.  Whereat the upper
+half of a porter, crowned with a tarred chimney-pot hat,
+and wearing a brown livery with copper-gilt buttons,
+appeared at the wicket of his lodge-door, and the fresh-faced,
+shaggy-haired boy in the battered felt wideawake and
+well-worn frieze overcoat, had felt an eye boring hard into his
+back, as, after one doubtful glance about him, he dived
+between the gouty Corinthian columns of the fourth portico
+on the left-hand side, and rang the first-floor bell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I'd ring if I was you!" the porter had soliloquized,
+noting the masterful tug given by the early visitor to the
+dingy brass bell-handle&mdash;third of a row of six sticking out
+like organ-stops on the right of the heavy, low-browed
+outer door.  "And again! ... Don't be shy!" said the
+porter, who was something of a cynic: "Break the bell-wire,
+and then you won't have done no good to yourself!&mdash;supposing
+you to be a client or a creditor of Mustey and
+Son&mdash;though you're over-young to be the first and
+over-cheerful to be the second, it strikes me!  Good-day,
+Mr. Chown!"  And the porter touched his hat to a lean,
+mild-looking, elderly man in black, who turned in at that
+moment beneath the smaller archway.  "You're not the first
+this morning, early as you are.  There's a young chap who
+don't seem in the mind to take no answer&mdash;has been ringing
+ten minutes without stopping at Mr. Mustey's bell."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Pressing business, I suppose, to bring him out so
+early!" said the person addressed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A glance of intelligence may have been exchanged between
+Mr. Chown and the porter, but there were no further
+words.  Mr. Chown passed on, and joined the younger man
+on the doorstep under the fourth portico on the left
+side, as he prepared to fulfill the porter's prophecy
+about breaking the bell-wire; and said, shifting his
+umbrella to the hand that held a shiny bag of legal
+appearance, and drawing a shabby latchkey from the pocket of
+his vest:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Excuse me, but if it is a business appointment with
+Mr. Mustey Junior,"&mdash;he tapped the key upon the tarnished
+brass door-handle as though to knock some grains of dust
+out of the words, and went on, punctuating his utterances
+with more tapping&mdash;"I happen to know"&mdash;<i>tap-tap-tap</i>&mdash;"that
+he won't be here to-day."  He added, as he took a
+brief, comprehensive survey of the healthy,
+square-shouldered, well-built youngster of some five feet eight
+(with a hopeful promise of more inches in the breadth of
+the shoulders, and the depth of the chest), buttoned up in
+the rough frieze garment that had seen hard wear.  "But
+possibly it is the head of the Firm" (<i>tap-tap</i>) "you want,
+and not Son? ... In which case I'm afraid you'll have
+to wait some time, as the old gentleman stayed very late
+at work yesterday.  I should mention that I am employed
+in the capacity of head-clerk by" (<i>tap</i>) "a firm of solicitors
+who have offices on the ground-floor immediately underneath
+Mustey and Son" (<i>tap</i>), "and&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Chown, still industriously tapping, nodded at the
+lowest of a series of legends in letters of black paint, flanking
+the right-hand row of bells, and setting forth the titles
+of "Wotherspoon and Cadderby, Attorneys and Commissioners
+of Oaths."  He continued: "And though I was
+detained myself, and did not leave till eight-thirty, I
+noticed particularly&mdash;when I shut the front-door behind
+me, that the gas in Mr. Mustey Senior's private room was
+burning still."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For the matter of that, it's burning now!" said the
+strange young man, whose head was plentifully covered
+with a crop of decidedly red and obstinately curly hair,
+crowned with the battered gray felt wideawake previously
+mentioned; and whose square, blunt-featured, fresh-colored,
+rather freckled face was illuminated with a pair of very
+clear and intelligent eyes of a good gray, curiously flecked
+with yellow.  He indicated with a knotty vine-stick he
+carried two dingy, wire-blinded windows on the first floor,
+and Messrs. Wotherspoon and Cadderby's head-clerk, with
+an irrepressible start of consternation, saw that the
+darkness of the room behind them was thrown into relief by a
+greenish patch of radiance that indicated the position of
+a paper-shaded gas reading-lamp which to his knowledge
+hung over the heavy writing-table that occupied the middle
+of the elder Mustey's private room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"God bless my soul, so it is!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The speaker, with a tallowy change in his complexion,
+stepped backward from the doorstep to the pavement,
+conveyed himself in the same crab-like fashion to the
+center of the quadrangle of ancient buildings constituting
+the Inn, and so stood, staring up at the window with the
+yellow-green flare behind the dusty brown wire-blinds,
+and tapping his latchkey on his chin as he had tapped it
+on the door-knob.  Then he rejoined the other to say, with
+rather a perturbed and dubious air:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If your business could wait half an hour or so, and
+you&mdash;being a stranger, as I take it?&mdash;and new to the sights of
+London&mdash;were to indulge in a little walk along Holborn&mdash;say
+as far as Bloomsbury Street&mdash;and drop in at the
+British Museum, and have a look at the Elgin Marbles or
+the Assyrian Bulls,&mdash;or the&mdash;the Mummies in the Egyptian
+Department,&mdash;and then come back again,&mdash;you might stand
+a better chance of getting the bell answered."  The speaker
+added, meeting a look of decided obstinacy, quite in
+keeping with the pouting, deeply-cut lips and the square chin
+with a cleft in it: "Unless you can suggest a better idea,
+you know...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My idea is to stop here and ring until the bell <i>is</i>
+answered.  But I am obliged to you all the same!" said
+the young man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You've waited long enough, you think?" hesitated
+Messrs. Wotherspoon and Cadderby's head-clerk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The answer came with a flash of strong white teeth in the
+fresh-colored countenance that was dusted with dark brown
+freckles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Just twenty-three years," said the shaggy-haired young
+man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Lord bless me!" said Mr. Chown, "you must have
+begun waiting in your cradle!  But time flies and business
+presses, and&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My view exactly!" returned the freckled young man,
+as the head-clerk inserted his latchkey into the heavy door
+and it swung slowly backward, revealing a bare and
+gloomy hall wainscoted with grimy oak and hung with
+mildewed flock-paper.  "<i>Donnerwetter!</i> how you smell here!"
+he commented, having taken in a chestful of the medium
+that served the inhabitants of the Inn buildings for air.
+"But I suppose you're used to it!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Comparing our atmosphere with that of other London
+offices, I should be inclined to call us rather fresh than
+otherwise," said Mr. Chown, who had dropped his latchkey
+and was groping for it on the dirty floor by the oblong of
+daylight admitted by the open hall-door.  "But I suppose&mdash;as
+some of the gentlemen who rent chambers here are
+still away on their vacations&mdash;the place might seem&mdash;to a
+stranger from the country&mdash;a trifle close."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Stuffy!" corrected the young man, whose expression
+of disgust was highly uncomplimentary.  "Drainy,
+black-beetly, mousey, dusty, cellary.  With a tinge of escaped
+gas and a something else that I&mdash;&mdash;"  He sniffed and said,
+puckering a sagacious nose: "Why, it's gunpowder!  The
+place is chock-full of the fumes of burnt gunpowder....
+Here!  Hallo!  What the devil are you trying to do?
+What do you mean?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the other, who had risen to his feet with a reversion
+to the sallow change of countenance previously observed
+in him, had caught him by the arm, as his eager foot had
+touched a dilapidated mat that lay as a snare for the
+unwary at the foot of the uncarpeted staircase, and with
+unexpected strength and quickness had swung him to the
+hall-door, and was endeavoring to push him over the
+threshold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I mean&mdash;&mdash;"  Mr. Chown was of middle age and evidently
+quite unused to wrestling: and as he strove with
+the shaggy young man upon the threshold of the dingy
+hall, it was evident that he would very soon give in.  "I
+mean..." he panted, "... that you ... can't you be
+sensible?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I should be a fool if I couldn't see that you're hiding
+something.  Let go!" said the red-haired young man, not
+at all malevolently, "or I shall have to hurt you!  I'm
+going upstairs, and you can't stop me!  What harm do
+you think I am going to do to the white-haired old man
+who's lying fast asleep across his table?  I shan't go in
+without knocking, if that's what you're thinking of!  And
+what harm do you suppose he's going to do to me?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A sullen bang answered, for Mr. Chown had reached out
+a wary hand behind his own respectable back, and grabbed
+at the dim brass knob and slammed the heavy door upon
+himself and his antagonist.  There were circles round his
+eyes, and he puffed and panted heavily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You young&mdash;<i>puff</i>&mdash;idiot!" he gasped, "I'm
+not&mdash;<i>whoof!</i>&mdash;considering you&mdash;for&mdash;a&mdash;<i>whuff!</i>&mdash;moment.  It's
+him,"&mdash;he pulled out a colored handkerchief and mopped
+his face&mdash;"him that I've known since I was first articled,
+and had many a kindly word from, and many a liberal
+present.  And now that this has happened&mdash;I may say
+I've seen it coming, and many a night I've stayed
+here&mdash;knowing him busy over his accounts above, and many a
+time I've been on the point of going up and knocking and
+offering a word of sympathy.  But&mdash;it wasn't to be done!
+... You could never take a liberty with him, alive&mdash;and
+no one shall if I can stop 'em&mdash;now that he isn't!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Now that he&mdash;why, man!&mdash;you don't mean to say&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They confronted each other on the doorstep, and the
+shaggy, obstinate young man had now flushed to ripe
+tomato-color as he stammered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You don't mean he's dead?  It isn't possible!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I say nothing and I mean nothing.  There's no third
+party present," asserted Mr. Chown, with professional
+caution, "to testify to what I said or didn't say.  But his
+son has to be looked for, and brought here if they can find
+him&mdash;and if Mr. William can't be found&mdash;and without
+prejudice I think that's more than likely!&mdash;some one he
+knew and trusted must be the first to go into that room.
+His housekeeper I've heard is a good creature.  He's often
+dropped a word in praise of her to me, I know....  We'll
+telegraph&mdash;I know his address!  Number Three&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young man interrupted: "Addington Square, Camberwell."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Send her a wire!  I'll pay!"  Mr. Chown plucked a
+shilling from his waistcoat pocket and agitatedly pressed
+it on the stranger.  "There's a telegraph office at Snow
+Hill!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Where is Snow Hill?  I'm a stranger in London.  As
+it happens, I came from Schwärz-Brettingen&mdash;it's a
+University town in North Germany&mdash;to keep a business
+appointment with Messrs. Mustey and Son."  The shaggy-haired
+young man pointed to those first-floor windows....
+adding: "The elder gentleman is chief trustee of my
+mother's fortune&mdash;his son, who you say's missing, is the
+other&mdash;that is, he has been since the death of a great-uncle
+of mine....  For I didn't come of age, according to my
+mother's settlement, until my twenty-third birthday.  And
+as it happens, I'm twenty-three to-day!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I see!  He was to have paid the money over! ... Good
+Lord!  Good Lord!" groaned the head-clerk, "what
+a world it is!&mdash;what a world it is!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And all this while we're swopping talk, the old fellow
+upstairs may be dying for help that we could give him!"
+snarled the younger man, and caught the head-clerk by the
+shoulder in a grip that struck him as unpleasantly
+powerful.  "Look here!&mdash;where is your key?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Just inside in the hall there....  I'd dropped it, don't
+you remember&mdash;I was looking for it when you&mdash;when
+you&mdash;said you smelt gunpowder," explained the attorney's
+clerk, "and then it all rushed on me."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You did on me!&mdash;and I thought you'd gone crazy.
+Look here&mdash;&mdash;" the other began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To be at all effective I had to take you suddenly,"
+said Mr. Chown, adding, with a mild gleam of pride, "and
+you must add&mdash;I was effective!  And if you've got it into
+your head that there's life in the poor old man yet&mdash;put it
+out again!  For he shot himself last night just on the
+stroke of nine&mdash;and I could take my oath of it!  I heard
+what must have been the&mdash;the noise&mdash;as I passed out at
+the gate, and the porter he said to me: 'A gas explosion
+somewhere in the neighborhood, Mr. Chown, or else it was
+a thunderclap.'  And I thought it might have been
+thunder&mdash;for the weather observations in the newspapers had
+mentioned storms as prevailing in South and South-Eastern
+England&mdash;and the winds have been blowing from south and
+south-east.  And my wife has headaches when electricity's
+in the atmosphere&mdash;and she has been bad three days past."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But let's do something&mdash;not stand here with our hands
+in our pockets!" urged the red-haired young man with
+eagerness.  "I'm a surgeon&mdash;not diplomaed, worse luck! but
+enough of a one to give aid in such a case as you've
+hinted at."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My key's inside the house&mdash;as I've told you!" retorted
+Mr. Chown, "and unless we were to break down the door&mdash;which
+would bring the police upon us before they're wanted&mdash;or
+one of us could climb like a cat&mdash;so as to look in at
+that window and make certain&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Donnerwetter</i>!  Good idea!" said the shaggy young
+man, in whose conversation mingled interjectional scraps
+and snatches of a language not comprehended by Mr. Chown,
+but dimly conjectured to be German.  In the same
+instant he had pulled off his frieze overcoat, revealing the
+unsuspected fact that he wore no jacket under it&mdash;had
+thrown it upon the area-railings close to the row of bells
+that resembled organ-stops, and mounted upon it,
+shirt-sleeved, vigorous, ready and purposeful.  An iron
+torch-extinguisher, a rusted relic of the days when respectable
+citizens went forth o' nights attended by linkmen, jutted
+from the wall immediately above his head.  He made a
+long arm and grasped it&mdash;and to the dazzled observation of
+the head-clerk appeared to walk up the wall like a
+housefly.  But in reality he had wedged a toe in an ornamental
+border of sooty masonry of the brick-in-and-brick-out
+description, that outlined the doors and windows of the Inn
+buildings; and with a degree of skill and suppleness that
+testified to no small degree of practice, hoisted himself up.
+Directly afterward he was observed to be in the act of
+getting over the sooty balustrading that edged a narrow
+ledge of stone running before those first-floor windows,
+and the head-clerk, holding his breath, saw him stoop and
+peer in over a wire blind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Directly afterward, as it seemed, he withdrew his head
+and looked down into Mr. Chown's pale face, and his own
+had lost its ruddy color.  Then, coming down as he had
+gone up, much to the astonishment and curiosity of
+Mr. Chown's two juniors and several legal-looking personages
+who had arrived upon the scene and gathered in quite a
+little crowd upon the cobblestones&mdash;he said in a low tone,
+as he drew the former gentleman apart:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You were right.  Whether it was done last night or
+more recently, it has been done, and thoroughly.  With a
+new-looking revolver.  He has it in his hand!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Poor old gentleman, I could swear that what he did
+he has been driven to do, through despair and debt and
+misery....  'Mr. William will be my ruin, Chown!' he
+said to me only three days ago.  And he has been his ruin,
+sir!" said Mr. Chown, blowing his nose with a flourish,
+and wiping his eyes furtively.  "His ruin, Mr. William has
+been....  You may depend upon that!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the young man from North Germany, pulling on his
+shabby overcoat:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The table is covered with papers, and the safe facing
+the window is open....  Do you think&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I don't think&mdash;I know!  He had a kind of swooning
+fit a week back, when the crash came, and a Receiving
+Order in Bankruptcy was made against him on the petition
+of his creditors.  He was a long time coming round&mdash;and
+I stayed by him while the caretaker went to fetch a
+hackney-cab&mdash;for I'd been called, being a sort of favorite with
+him, and having known him for years.  He'd been robbed
+and plundered then, because he groaned it out to me; and
+he pointed to that safe, and told me that it had been gutted
+by means of false keys&mdash;the Bramah he always wore on his
+watch-riband having been got at and copied.  'All the
+cash I had left in the world, Chown, besides seven thousand
+in Trust Securities! ... It's my punishment for having
+been near and hard to others that I might be generous to
+him!'  Are you going!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The shaggy young man, crimson to the lining-edge of the
+old gray wideawake he had pulled over his brows after
+buttoning his overcoat, made an incoherent sound in his
+throat, and swung abruptly round upon his heel.  The
+reflection had occurred to him: "He'd have been generous
+to me if he'd waited to have seen me&mdash;and blown out my
+brains before scattering his own; <i>pfui!</i>&mdash;over that table
+and all the papers!"  But he did not voice it aloud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Leave me your address," said the kindly-hearted
+Mr. Chown, "and&mdash;it's not business to say you may trust
+me!&mdash;but I'll undertake to bring your name before the Official
+Receiver&mdash;for you're one of the principal creditors&mdash;provided
+what you've told me can be proved...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I suppose you know that&mdash;dead man's writing when
+you see it?" said the other, swinging round on Mr. Chown
+with no very pleasant look.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"As well as I know my own!" retorted Mr. Chown,
+nodding back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If so&mdash;and not because I admit you've any right!&mdash;but
+because I choose to show it you&mdash;you may read this!"
+went on the late Mr. Mustey's chief creditor, pulling a
+rather worn and crumpled oblong envelope out of his
+pocket and exhibiting the direction written on it in a
+flowing, old-fashioned, legal hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'P. C. Breagh, Esq., care of Frau Busch, Jaeger
+Strasse, Schwärz-Brettingen, N. Germany.' ... But I
+really shouldn't have dreamed&mdash;" began Mr. Chown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Read it!" said the owner of the letter, savagely thrusting
+it upon him, and the head-clerk with another protest,
+nipped in mid-utterance by another order to read it,
+mastered the contents.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The writer acknowledged the receipt of Mr. P. C. Breagh's
+letter, and begged to remind him that he was
+quite well acquainted with the terms of his late mother's
+Marriage Settlement.  He congratulated his young friend
+on having so nearly attained the age of discretion decided
+under the provisions of the instrument referred to; and
+appointed the hour of nine o'clock upon the morning of the
+3d of January, to discharge his trust and hand over the
+cash, deposit-notes, and securities....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"While all the time he knew&mdash;none better, except his
+precious partner!&mdash;that I should leave his office as poor as
+I'd come there.  It would have been decent," snarled
+Patrick Carolan Breagh, "to have owned the truth."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And accused his own son!&mdash;And now I look at the
+date of this it was written on the day before that affair of
+the false Bramah....  Do him justice, Mr. Breagh! ... Try
+to think he meant fair by you.  Wherever he's
+gone..."  Mr. Chown looked vaguely up at the monochromatic
+sky&mdash;now darkening as though it meant to rain in earnest&mdash;and
+then down at the cobblestones, "he'll be no worse for
+that, and you'll be the better here, I dare to say!  You'll
+give me your address, sir?  I don't know but that as you
+were the first to discover the body, you'll be expected to
+give evidence before the Coroner."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Damn the Coroner!" said P. C. Breagh.  "Whether
+he wants it or not I haven't an address to give.  I paid my
+bill at a thundering beastly cheap hotel in the Euston Road
+by handing over my trunks of clothes, and books and
+instruments to the landlord....  He promised to keep them
+for three weeks&mdash;to give me a chance to redeem them!&mdash;and
+he grunted when I said I'd be back with money enough
+to buy his bug-ridden lodging-house before two days were
+over his head.  And I pawned my coat for dinner yesterday
+and a coffee-house bed last night....  That's why you
+saw shirt-sleeves when I pulled off this old wrap-rascal....
+But I'll look in here again to-morrow&mdash;unless I&mdash;change
+my mind!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had passed under the archway and was gone before
+Mr. Chown had recovered himself sufficiently to call after
+him.  To follow would have been no use.  So the head-clerk
+went sorrowfully back to write and dispatch those urgent
+telegraphic messages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Carolan, shouldering through the double torrent of
+pedestrian humanity rolling east and west along the worn
+pavements of Holborn, plunged through the roaring traffic
+of the cobblestoned roadway, and with his chin well down
+upon his chest, and his hands rammed deep into his pockets,
+turned down Fetter Lane, knowing that he, who had been
+heir to a goodly sum in thousands, was, by this sudden
+turn of Fortune's wheel, a beggar.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap05"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+V
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+As a dog will skulk dejectedly from the spot where a bone
+previously buried has failed to reward the snuffing nose
+and the digging paw, so P. C. Breagh, on the long-expected
+twenty-third birthday that was to have made him master
+of dead Milly's fortune, slouched down Fetter Lane,
+humming and vibrant with the vicinity of great printing-works,
+and redolent of glue and treacle, tar, printers' ink,
+engine-oil, and size.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A double stream of carts and trucks, heavily laden with
+five-mile rollers of yellow-white paper for the revolving
+vertical type-cylinders of the Applegarth steam
+printing-machine&mdash;then in its heyday&mdash;bales of tow, forms of type
+and piles of wood-blocks, choked the narrow thoroughfare.
+The smells from the cheaper eating-houses&mdash;where sausages
+frizzled in metal trays, and tea and coffee steamed in huge
+tapped boilers, and piles of doubtful-looking eggs, and
+curly rashers of streaky bacon were to be had by people
+with money to pay for breakfast&mdash;even the sight of
+compositors in clean shirt-sleeves and machine-men steeped in
+ink and oil to the eyebrows eating snacks of bread and
+cheese and saveloy, and drinking porter out of pewter on
+the doorsteps of great buildings roaring with
+machinery&mdash;sickened P. C. Breagh with vain desire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His world was all in ruins about him.  He was conscious
+of a painful sense of stricture in the throat, and a tight
+pain as though a knotted rope were bound about his
+temples.  His hand did not shake, though, when he thrust
+it out under his eyes and looked at it curiously.  But he
+shouldered his way so clumsily along the narrow, crowded
+sidewalk that he found himself every now and then in
+collision with some more or less incensed pedestrian, such as
+the printer's devil, who cried, "Now then, Snobby, where
+are yer a-comin' to?" or the stout red-faced matron in
+black, displaying a row of bootlaces and a paper of
+small-tooth combs for sale&mdash;who emerged from the swing-doors
+of a public-house as P. C. Breagh charged past them, and
+wanted to know whether he called himself a young man or
+a mad bull?  A well-dressed, elderly gentleman, carrying
+a calf-skin bag and a gold-mounted umbrella, confounded
+him for a bungling, blundering, blackguardly! ... and
+was left reveling in alliteratives as the provoker of his
+wrath swung out of the Lane and found himself upon the
+reported Tom Tiddler's ground of Fleet Street.  And
+then a curious swirling giddiness overtook him, and he
+dropped down upon some stone steps under the Gothic
+doorway of a church with a lofty tower, and sat there with
+hunched shoulders and drooped head, staring dully at the
+pavement between his muddy boots.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was conscious of a dull resentment at his lot, but no
+base hatred of that old man with the shattered skull, lying
+prone among the bloody litter of his office-table, mingled
+with it.  All his life, since that sixth birthday when he had
+learned the meaning of Death, and the potential value of
+Money, the attainment of his twenty-third year had been
+the goal toward which he had striven; and every third of
+January crossed off the almanac "<i>brings me nearer,</i>" he
+had said to himself, "<i>to the money that will be mine to
+spend as I shall choose!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now ... without a profession&mdash;for he had failed
+to obtain his degrees in Medicine and Surgery&mdash;without
+funds, for a reason that did him no dishonor&mdash;without
+books or belongings of any kind except the clothes upon
+his back; without hope&mdash;for who can be hopeful on an
+empty and craving stomach?&mdash;without work to occupy
+those strong young hands and the sound, capable brain
+behind those gray, amber-flecked eyes, the unlucky young
+man who had been reared on expectations sat under
+St. Dunstan's Tower; and heard St. Dunstan's clock and
+St. Paul's, and all the other City churches answer the boom
+of Big Ben of Westminster, solemnly striking the hour of
+ten.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His prospects had been blighted and ruined, his young
+hopes lay dead: he felt bruised and battered by the
+experiences and discoveries of that birthday morning, as
+though the pair of wooden clock-giants that some forty
+years back had figured among the City sights from their
+vantage in the ancient steeple of St. Dunstan's, had beaten
+out the hour with their mallets on his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His stepmother had always resented the monetary independence
+of her husband's son by Milly Fermeroy.  Well! she
+and her vulgarities, her resentments and jealousies, had
+long been laid to rest, poor soul!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In that bloody June of the Mutiny of '57 she and her
+two youngest children had perished at Cawnpore.  A
+fortnight later Major Breagh, previously wounded in the
+head by a shell-splinter in the defense of the entrenchments,
+was bayoneted by a Sepoy infantryman during a
+desperate sortie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carolan had remained as a boarder at the Preparatory
+School of the Marist Fathers at Rockhampton where he
+had previously been placed, thanks to the "interference,"
+as Mrs. Breagh had phrased it, of the regimental chaplain.
+Father Haygarty.  And, owing to the same influence, Monica,
+Carolan's junior by two years, had&mdash;after the double
+stroke of Fate that left the children orphaned&mdash;been sent to
+the Sisters of the Annunciation in London, the charges of
+her support and education being defrayed out of the
+interest of Carolan's seven thousand, and the compassionate
+allowance of twenty-five pounds granted her by Government
+as the orphan daughter of an officer killed in war.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap06"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+VI
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+To-day, as P. C. Breagh sat paupered on the doorstep of
+St. Dunstan's, he realized that, from childhood to this hour,
+dead Milly's money had been his bane.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"When I was quite a little shaver I expected to be
+knocked under to, and given the best of everything, because
+I was going to be rich one day....  I knew my money kept
+my stepmother from grumbling and nagging at me.  And&mdash;my
+first thrashing at Rockhampton was because I'd
+bragged about it to a bigger boy.  He said when he let
+me get up&mdash;that I should be obliged to him one day, if I
+wasn't at the moment!  And my first fight&mdash;no, my
+second&mdash;because the first was over my Irish brogue!&mdash;my second
+fight came off because I'd forgotten my lesson, and talked
+about being able to drive four-in-hand, and live up to a
+Commission in the Household Cavalry when I should
+come of age....  Silly young idiot!  And when I was old
+enough for a public school&mdash;and passed&mdash;I wonder, with
+my luck, how I managed to pass?&mdash;into Bradenbury
+College&mdash;I had mills, no end! with the fellows there, because
+I couldn't keep mum about my expectations."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He leaned his dusty elbows on his knees and went on
+thinking, as a regular procession of legs of all sexes, ages,
+and colors went past, and the muddy river of Fleet Street
+traffic roared over the cobblestones, boiled in swirling
+eddies where it received the stream flowing down Chancery
+Lane, and choked and gurgled in and out of the squat
+archways of Temple Bar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I'd talked of Oxford as a preliminary to Sandhurst and
+a Cavalry Commission&mdash;and I went in for an Exhibition
+Entrance&mdash;but my classics queered me for the University.
+Knock Number One!  The Head put it on the Italianate
+Latin I'd learned from the Marist Fathers&mdash;and why old
+Virgil, and Ovid, Horace, Cæsar, and Livy, and the rest
+of 'em, should be supposed to have pronounced their
+language with a British accent I've never been able to
+understand! ... When I went up for the Woolwich Open
+Competitive&mdash;having altered my views about the Household
+Cavalry!&mdash;my plane trigonometry dished me for the Royal
+Horse Artillery....  Knock Number Two!  So I told myself
+that it wasn't as easy getting into a Queen's uniform
+as it was in my father's time....  You were given the
+Commission&mdash;or you bought it&mdash;and if you could drill, and
+march, and fight, no more was asked of you....  And
+I tried for the Royal Engineering College of India&mdash;and
+failed in dynamics&mdash;and had a shot for the I.C.S.&mdash;and
+missed again!  Oh, damn!  And do I owe every one of
+the whole string of failures to the belief that money makes
+up for everything and buys anything?  I'm half beginning
+to believe I do!  Even the kindness I have had from
+people I'd no claim on&mdash;and who is there alive I have a
+claim on?  Have I been cad enough&mdash;ape enough&mdash;worm
+enough&mdash;to put it down to&mdash;&mdash;Grrh!&mdash;how I loathe
+myself!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He covered his reddened face with his hands and shuddered.
+It is horrible to have to go on living inside a fellow
+you have begun to hate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Even Father Haygarty's untiring kindness, his interest
+in all I did and thought and hoped for....  Weren't there
+times when I suspected that my&mdash;in some degree
+representing property&mdash;accounted for&mdash;oh, Lord!  And when
+he was dying and his housekeeper sent for me&mdash;for he'd
+given up being an army chaplain and got a little living
+in Gloucestershire&mdash;did I realize even then what a friend
+and father I was losing?  I hope to God I did, but I'm
+hardly sure of myself!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stubbed with the toe of his muddy boot the jutting
+corner of a paving-stone, and scowled at the image of
+himself that was growing more and more distinct.  He had
+always thought P. C. Breagh rather a fine young fellow.
+Now he knew him for what he had always been.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"When Father Haygarty was gone&mdash;it wasn't long
+before Mustey and Son began to send explanations and
+apologies, instead of the whole of the quarter's
+interest-money.  There had been a drop in securities of this kind
+and the other, and Consols were down&mdash;and at first I was
+as pleased as a prize poodle at being made excuses to.....
+But the fact remained that where I'd been getting two
+hundred and forty, I was only getting one hundred and
+seventy-three....  And that&mdash;if I really meant to go in
+for my Degree in Surgery and Medicine, for I'd made up
+my mind to be a medical swell&mdash;I had&mdash;if Monica was to
+go on staying with the Sisters!&mdash;I'd got to give up the idea
+of Edinburgh, or the London University, and matriculate
+somewhere abroad.  So I went to Schwärz-Brettingen,
+and shared rooms with another English chap....  It was
+admitted I had solid abilities&mdash;the Professors whose
+lectures I attended thought well of me.  And I failed!&mdash;Failed
+for the fourth time!  Have I the accursed money to thank
+for that last blow?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He perspired as though he had been running, and,
+indeed, nothing takes it out of you like a spruit over the
+course of the past with your conscience as pacer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I'd thought myself rather a fine fellow when, with my
+student-card in my pocket and my <i>Anmeldungsbuch</i> in my
+hand I called&mdash;in company with a squad of other
+candidates&mdash;on the Rector Magnificus.  We had a punch
+afterwards, and a drive and coffee at the Plesse&mdash;and made a
+night of it at Fritz's.  I woke with a first-class student's
+headache in the morning, and a hazy recollection that I'd
+told one or two of the British colony&mdash;in confidence&mdash;and
+several Germans&mdash;about the money I was coming into
+by-and-by...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He ground his teeth and squeezed his eyelids together,
+trying to shut out the picture of P. C. Breagh in the
+character of a howling cad.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But if I bragged&mdash;and I did brag!&mdash;I worked....
+The Marist Fathers had grounded me in French and German
+in spite of myself, and my pride had been nicely stung
+up by that failure for Sandhurst and the others....
+Men told me what I'd got to grind at, and I ground; filling
+piles of lecture-pads with notes on all sorts of subjects.
+Anatomy, physiology, physics, chemistry, botany, and
+zoology....  My brain was a salad of 'em&mdash;but I passed
+the <i>Abiturienteti-Examen</i> at a classical gymnasium with a
+better certificate than a lot of other Freshmen&mdash;thanks to
+the Marist Fathers, who'd pounded Latin and Greek into
+me!&mdash;and then&mdash;after two years of walking hospitals,
+attending demonstrations and lectures, and doing
+laboratory-work&mdash;varied by beers and <i>schläger</i>&mdash;and more beers and
+more <i>schläger</i>!&mdash;and perhaps I took to sword-play all the
+more kindly because of the soldier-blood in me!&mdash;came
+the first regular examination.  And I don't forget that
+third of November&mdash;not while I'm breathing!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Donnerwetter</i>!  P. C. Breagh could see the cocked-hatted
+and scarlet-gowned University beadle ushering a
+pale young man, with saucers round his eyes, into the awful
+presence of the Dean, and Examiners in the Faculties of
+Surgery and Medicine....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The neophyte&mdash;arrayed in the swallow-tail coat, low-cut
+vest, black cloth inexpressibles, white cravat, and kid
+gloves inseparable from an English dinner-party, or the
+ordeal of examination at a German university, found his
+inquisitors also in formal full dress, seated in a semicircle
+facing the door, and looking singularly cheerful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A solitary chair marked the middle of the chord of the
+arc formed by the chairs of the examiners.  Upon this stool
+of judgment&mdash;after bowing and shaking hands all round
+and being bowed to and shaken&mdash;the victim had been
+invited to seat himself.  The Dean opened the ball with
+the Early Theorists.  And he had seemed quite to cotton to
+P. C. Breagh's ideas on the subject of Egyptian Sacerdotal
+Colleges, the preparation of Soma in the Vedas, the
+therapeutical formulas of Zoroaster, Chinese sympathetic
+medicine&mdash;the dietetic method of Hippocrates&mdash;who invented
+barley-water!&mdash;the observations of Diocles and Chrysippus
+and the criticisms of Galen.  At the expiration of half an
+hour, when the Hofrath delivered him over to the next
+examiner, P. C. Breagh had felt that, if the others were no
+worse than the Dean, all might yet be well.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Professor Barselius, who followed the Dean, and was
+reported to be a terror, when correctly replied to upon an
+interrogation as to the chemical composition of the fatty
+acids, vouchsafed a grunt of approbation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Professor Troppenritt, who succeeded Barselius, was a
+person with a reputation for amiability, and a mobility of
+mental constitution which enabled him to flit like the
+butterfly or leap like the grasshopper from subject to
+subject, harking back to Number One, perhaps, when you
+felt quite sure he had done with it for good.  But on that
+fateful third of November a tricksy demon seemed to possess
+Troppenritt.  He no longer flitted like the butterfly,
+or hopped like the grasshopper&mdash;he sported with the seven
+great departments of Structural Anatomy, Physiology,
+Pathological Anatomy, General Pathology, Ophthalmology,
+Medicine, Hygiene and Midwifery&mdash;as a fountain might
+toss up glass balls, or a conjurer juggle with daggers....
+His victim after a while found himself breathlessly
+watching the hugh knobby rampart of forehead, behind which
+the Professor's intentions were hiding, in the vain hope
+that the next question might be foreshadowed on its shining
+surface.  A hope destined never to be fulfilled....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fact remains that P. C. Breagh, after some really
+creditable answers, was beginning to recover the use of his
+mental faculties, when the Dean&mdash;prompted by the candidate's
+evil genius&mdash;suggested a little pause for cake and
+wine.  It was awful to see how Hofrath and Professors&mdash;there
+were three of them besides the conjurer Troppenritt&mdash;enjoyed
+themselves at this sacrificial banquet, which had
+been arranged upon a little table in a corner, waiting the
+five-minute interval.  And P. C. Breagh rejected cake,
+which was of the gingerbread variety, garnished with
+blanched almonds and sugar-plums.  But the single glass
+of Rüdesheimer he accepted might have been the
+Brobdingnagian silver-mounted horn that hung within a garland
+of frequently-renewed laurel leaves upon the walls of a
+famous students' beer-hall&mdash;or have been filled with raw
+spirits above proof,&mdash;the contents mounted so unerringly to
+his head, and wreaked such havoc therein.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The three remaining Professors were almost tender with
+the sufferer, but what Troppenritt had begun, the wine
+had completed.  The <i>nicht wahr's</i> had been succeeding
+one another at marked intervals,&mdash;like distress-signals or
+funereal minute-guns, when the traditional three hours
+expired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh&mdash;removed to cold storage in the anteroom&mdash;was
+detained but five minutes longer....  His nervous
+shiverings had reached a crescendo, when the beadle opened
+the door....  And the Dean, stepping forward, in staccato
+accents delivered himself:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Candidate, from the quality of the dissertations in
+writing previously submitted, we, the Faculty of Surgery
+and Medicine of the University of Schwärz-Brettingen&mdash;would
+a more satisfaction-imparting result have anticipated
+as the result of the just-concluded oral examination
+undergone by you....  But although lacking in
+<i>Gedächtniss</i>&mdash;has been manifested on your part a so-remarkable
+degree of <i>Einbildung</i> and <i>Begriff</i> that the Faculty
+of-hesitation-none-whatever have in the
+following-advice-to-you-imparting;&mdash;Yourself
+another semester give, or better still,
+another twelvemonth! and try again, young man!&mdash;try
+again!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not bad advice, if the young man had chosen to follow
+it.  But January drew near, and the inheritor-expectant
+of seven thousand pounds scorned to toil and moil over
+intellectual ground already traversed.  He had tried for
+honors, and he had failed, thanks to the hypnotizing
+methods of the too-agile Troppenritt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So P. C. Breagh spent the money that would have kept
+him, with economy, for six months, in giving a farewell
+banquet to his friends; called&mdash;in his best attire, with kid
+gloves and a buttonhole bouquet&mdash;on his favorite
+lecturers; left cards on the wives of those who possessed
+them; paid his landlady&mdash;who had faithfully labored to
+convert his formal, class-room German into a malleable,
+useful tongue,&mdash;kissed her round cheek&mdash;tipped the civil
+servant-maid five dollars,&mdash;and turned his back for ever on
+Schwärz-Brettingen, its <i>Aula, Collegien-Haus, Theatrum
+Anatomicum</i>, Botanical Garden, Library and Career&mdash;(a
+correctional edifice the interior accommodations of which
+were only known to him by hearsay),&mdash;its restaurants,
+beer-saloons, coffee-gardens, and fencing-halls; its chilly
+wood-stoves, its glowing enthusiasms; its pleasant
+companionships, its passing flirtations with <i>schoppen</i>-bearing
+Hebes, and nymphs of the coffee-garden, restaurant, or
+ninepin alley.  One cannot say its love-affairs, because in
+the esteem of P. C. Breagh&mdash;though Passion might bloom
+red by the wayside at every mile of a man's journey&mdash;Love
+was a rare blossom found once in a lifetime, too often
+never found at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh's idea of Love was that it should be spelt
+with a capital, and spoken of in whispers.  Nor, let us hint,
+was the ideal Woman at whose feet, he promised himself, he
+would one day pour forth all the gold and jewels of his
+heart and intellect, a being to be lightly trifled with.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+To commence with, she would have to be six feet high or
+thereabouts....  Blue-eyed, blonde-haired, of classical
+features, cream-and-rose complexion, powerful intellect
+and thews matching, the ideal woman of P. C. Breagh must
+have weighed about fourteen stone.  He imagined her a
+kind of Britomart-Krimhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde&mdash;with a
+dash of Mary Queen of Scots, Kingsley's Hypatia, and a
+spice of Edith Dombey and the beautiful shrewish Roman
+Princess out of "The Cloister and the Hearth"&mdash;though
+these heroines were jetty-locked, and for this reason fell
+short of P. C. Breagh's ideal of female loveliness.  Fair and
+colossal, he had seen her over and over again,&mdash;though a
+little too roseate and pulpy in texture to come up to his
+ideal&mdash;in the vast canvases of Kaulbach and in the
+overwhelming frescoes of the Bavarian Spiess.  But he had
+never yet encountered her in the flesh.  One day they
+would meet&mdash;and she would be scornful of the young,
+obscure, unknown man who looked at her&mdash;she felt it from
+the first, and that made her quite furious!&mdash;with the eye
+of a consciously superior being&mdash;a master in posse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the masculine world would bow down before the intellect
+combined with the beauty&mdash;of
+Britomart-Kriemhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde&mdash;and so on,
+for he amalgamated new heroines
+with the others, in the course of his reading.  But one
+man lived who would not bow down.  She would taunt him
+with this stiff-necked pride of his, in the course of an
+interview on the terrace of a castle, whose moat he had swum
+and whose guarded ramparts he had scaled in order to
+be discovered, scorning her, and communing with the
+moon.  And he would quell her tempestuous wrath, and
+silence her reproaches, by telling her that it was for her to
+pay homage and court smiles.  Then she would summon her
+vassals and lovers, and half a dozen of them would set upon
+P. C. Breagh, who would strangle one with his naked hands,
+run another through with his own sword&mdash;and provide
+materials, broadly speaking, for half a dozen first-class
+funerals&mdash;before he leapt into the moat, carrying a rose
+that she had dropped between his teeth&mdash;-and "<i>gained the
+distant bank in safety,</i>" or "<i>dripping and bloody, emerged
+from the dark water, gripped an iron chain, eaten with the
+rust of centuries, and, painfully scaling the frowning
+masonry, disappeared into the...</i>" etc.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Absurd, if you will, and bombastic and impossibly
+high-flown.  Yet such boyish dreams keep the soul clean and
+the body from grosser stain.  Walking with your head
+erect you may stub your toe, and come a cropper on the
+stones occasionally.  But you pick yourself up again and
+proceed more warily&mdash;none the less rejoicing, seeing the
+splendor of the sunset, or braving the blaze of noonday,
+or drinking in the delicate spring-like hues of dawn....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One does not know how long P. C. Breagh might have
+remained upon the steps of St. Dunstan's, had not the
+hour of twelve sounded from the new clock&mdash;a youngster
+barely forty years old&mdash;that had replaced the gong-hammering
+wooden giants, now on view outside the Marquis of
+Hertford's villa in Regent's Park.  A constable civilly
+asked him to move on.  He got up, heavily, and mechanically
+felt for his watch that was in keeping of the landlord
+of the fourth-rate hostelry in the Euston Road.  And it
+occurred to him&mdash;as a pin-prick among innumerable stiletto
+strokes&mdash;that the watch alone, being a heavy silver one
+attached to a slender gold snake-chain once the property
+of dead Milly&mdash;would have satisfied the man's claim, which,
+exorbitant as it was for the accommodation afforded, was
+considerably under three pounds.  You are to understand
+that P. C. Breagh had been so certain of returning in a
+few hours, heavy with ready money, that he had treated
+the landlord's detention of his luggage as a joke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The present situation was no joke.  But Youth preserves
+above all the property of rising unbruised and elastic from
+a tumble, and of healing readily when it has sustained
+mental or physical wounds!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The blood in the veins of P. C. Breagh was mingled with
+the finer strain that came from the breed of Fermeroy.
+He had no idea of finding a craven's refuge in suicide.  The
+single shilling remaining to him might purchase sufficient
+strychnine for a painful, unheroic exit, but P. C. Breagh
+was not disposed to invest his remaining capital in that
+unpleasant alkaloid.  And neither did it occur to him then
+to test the depth and drowning-capacity of the muddy
+liquid running under any one of London's bridges, from
+Westminster to the Tower.  For by the contradictory law
+of Nature, reversing scientific fact, a helpless weight that
+hung about his strong young neck kept his moral head
+above the turbid waters of Despondency.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+He was not alone in the world.  There was Monica.
+With the remembrance of that frail link, binding him to
+the rest of humanity, awakened in him the desire to see her.
+He turned his face Westward and stepped into the moving
+throng.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap07"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+VII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+The Great Class fermented in irrepressible excitement.
+Subsequently to the arrival of a foreign mail, Juliette
+Bayard had been summoned by an attendant lay-sister to
+the presence of Mère M. Catherine-Rose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had remained nearly half an hour in the Parlor of
+Cold Feet&mdash;so called in recognition of the fact that the
+apartment contained no fireplace, and that even in the
+hottest weather cool draughts played hide-and-seek across
+the polished parquet from circular brazen gratings inserted
+in the wainscot, which ancient legend connected with the
+presence of a French <i>calorifère</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the door opened and Juliette emerged, somewhere
+about the middle of the noon recreation, an advance-patrol
+in the shape of a pupil of the Little Class, by name Laura
+Foljambe&mdash;happened to be buttoning a shoe-strap at the
+end of the corridor.  The apoplectic attitude inseparable
+from this particular employment would have rendered
+observation impossible&mdash;in the case of an adult.  But
+Laura, under the cover of a luxuriant head of yellow
+ringlets, unconfined by any comb or ribbon, observed, firstly,
+that Juliette had been crying, and secondly, that Mère
+M. Catherine-Rose had tears in her own eyes.  More, she had
+called Juliette back, embraced her affectionately, and said:
+"We shall miss you, my dear!"  "You will be brave, I
+know!" and "Remember to write!"  Packed with news,
+Laura rushed into the Lesser Hall, where the seniors were
+gathered round the stove, the raw chill of the January
+weather rendering the garden a place of penitence, and
+emptied her budget of intelligence upon the spot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette must be going away!  The forty girls of the
+Great Class had unanimously arrived at this conclusion
+when Juliette herself arrived upon the scene.  It needed
+but a glance to assure her of the treachery of Laura; it
+needed but a moment, and the spy, blubbering and
+protesting, was seized, shaken, and forced upon her
+knees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are to understand that when Juliette Bayard was
+angry, she was so with a vengeance.  Heroic by
+temperament, her wrath smacked of the superhuman.  A
+demi-goddess enraged might have manifested as semi-divine a
+frenzy.  Ordinary prose seemed too poor a vehicle to
+convey such indignation.  You expected hexameters or
+Alexandrines....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That you listened I would stake my honor!&mdash;I would
+pledge my life!&mdash;I would put the hand in the fire!  Mean!
+Base!  Despicable!  Ah, you look simple, little thing, but
+you are cunning as a mouse&mdash;fine as amber!  No!  I
+do not pinch, I would scorn it&mdash;you know that perfectly!
+Yes!  I will permit you to go when you confess who set
+you on!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Laura, unwilling to incur the resentment of forty
+grown-ups, undesirous of forfeiting the saccharine reward of
+treachery, boohooed in a whisper, for class-hour was
+approaching.  The wrathful goddess towered over her, eyed
+with blue lightning, crowned with dusky clouds of thunder,
+flushed like the sunset that comes after the day of storm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Had Arthur Hughes or Fred Walker been privileged to
+peep&mdash;one painter at least would have armed her uplifted
+hand with a bulrush-spear, helmeted her with a curled
+water-lily leaf, and given the smiling world Titania in the
+character of Pallas Athene, or Queen Mab as an Amazon.
+And Juliette would never have pardoned the painter.
+For&mdash;despite the testimony of her tale of inches&mdash;she
+would have it that she was tall, even above the average
+height of woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I shall not be beautiful, no! but I shall be commanding!"
+she had assured those favored girls on whom she
+deigned to bestow her imperial confidence.  This select
+number in turn possessing a circle of confidantes, the drop
+of a secret meant a series of widening rings, extending to
+the circle of the day scholars, reaching the Orphanage
+by-and-by, and trickling at length into the basement, where
+the Poor School assembled on Wednesdays and Fridays,
+to gather up the crumbs of knowledge that fell from the
+tables of the daughters of the great and rich.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You may imagine the scene in Lesser Hall upon this
+chilly day in January.  Excitement was much more warming
+than crowding round the smoky stoves.  Of the semi-circle
+of great girls in their black school-dresses, enlivened
+only by the red or white class-rosettes, or the pale blue
+ribbons of the Children of Mary, all the heads, adorned
+with every shade of feminine tresses,&mdash;all the eyes of all
+colors, set in faces plain or pretty&mdash;were turned toward
+the tragic figure of Juliette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once kindled, such violet fires of wrath blazed in those
+implacable eyes, one would have supposed nothing could
+ever quench them.  But when she was sorrowful, they
+were bottomless lakes of misery.  Despair lay drowned and
+wan amid the long black sedges drooping at their borders.
+Under the dark, hollowed precipices that shadowed
+them it seemed as though no sun could ever shine.  But
+when the laugh was born, it leaped to the surface with a
+quiver that caught the light and flashed it back pure
+sapphire or loveliest Persian turquoise.  No face ever framed
+of earthly clay had more of the mirth of Heaven in it,
+then.  Her long upper lip, the elastic, mobile feature that
+could draw out to so portentous a length, would be haunted
+by flying smiles, and the deep-cut corners of her short
+scarlet under lip would quiver.  To inventory the beauties
+of a young lady and omit the nose would suggest cause
+for reticence on the writer's part.  Juliette's nose was not
+of Greek or Roman type, but neither was it snubbed or
+tip-tilted.  It had a rounded end, and deep, curved,
+passionate nostrils.  It pertained to no known order of nasal
+architecture.  It was Juliette's nose, and could never have
+belonged to anybody else.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If you would more of her,&mdash;and after the first encounter
+you either sought or shunned&mdash;loved or loathed&mdash;as she
+would have had you do who was in all things sincere and
+candid, you are to understand that her cloud of dusky
+hair framed a small oval face that made no show of carnation
+or vaunt of rose.  Her clear fine skin was almost always
+pale.  She would have laughed you to scorn had you
+likened those colorless cheeks of hers to lilies.  She prided
+herself upon a frame of mind eminently commonplace,
+antipodean to the romantic.  "I am sensible, me!" you
+often heard her say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In form&mdash;though as you know she believed herself to be
+a giantess&mdash;she was small and slight, and not at all
+remarkable.  A framework of slender bones, frugally covered
+with tender, healthful flesh.  Her shoulders sloped so
+much that in her loose-bodied, full-sleeved, black merino
+school uniform she seemed about to vanish.  Her hips were
+narrow, without the voluptuous curves that belong to
+heroines.  But a Divine jest had added to her little
+high-arched head a tiny pair of rosy shells for hearing, and the
+palms and nails and finger-tips of her narrow hands,&mdash;and
+feet I have heard it said by some who loved her&mdash;were
+roseate also.  The younger children liked to pretend that
+this was a judgment on Juliette for stealing strawberries
+in the early June season, but she only joined in that one
+raid on the Sisters' kitchen-garden "To be a good
+comrade!" ... and as it happened, all the strawberries were
+slug-eaten.  And where are there strawberries worth the
+stealing, unless it be in France?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For next to God and Our Lady, and her father M. le
+Colonel, Juliette Bayard loved her country.  Paradise was
+but an improvement on France, to hear her describe it to
+the little ones.  Further, though she had a perfect taste in
+dress, when released from the school uniform; though an
+ordinary hat under her deft transforming fingers would
+become a miracle of exquisite millinery; her groups of
+flowers, and landscapes, in water-color, her crayon dog's
+heads, were mercifully hidden from the drawing-master's
+eye.  She sang out of tune, but in time; played correctly,
+but hated the piano; danced like an air-wafted tuft of
+dandelion-down or a gnat upon a summer evening,&mdash;and
+had a Heaven-born gift for housekeeping and cookery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of this last gift more anon.  Meanwhile Laura writhed,
+or seemed to writhe, under the torrent of passionate
+reproaches, culminating in another shake, and a slap which
+might have damaged a kitten newly-born.  Laura fell
+prone, moaning and gurgling.  And Juliette, pierced by
+remorse at her own ruthlessness, sank, pale as ashes, beside
+the victim's corse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Darling Laura! sweetest Laura!&mdash;tell me I have not
+hurt you!  Just Heaven! how could I strike you?&mdash;I,
+who am so strong!  Indeed, I might have killed you! ...
+Pray for me, my little angel!  It will need a miracle to
+cure my temper, as Mother Veronica constantly says.
+Cannot you get up?  Do try, to please me!  Tell me
+where you feel most injured?  Quick, or I know I shall be
+angry again! ... Show me the bruise!  Pouf! that is a
+mere nothing!  I will kiss it and make it well, and you
+shall have the blue bead Rosary."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mention of the blue beads palpably restored vitality.
+The sufferer was understood to intimate that a chocolate
+elephant would absolutely complete the cure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The elephant to-morrow when the Great Class return
+from the promenade.  The Rosary before Benediction.
+Away with you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Laura scuttled.  Juliette blew her a parting kiss, and
+said, with a comprehensive glance of scorn at the faces of
+her classmates:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It was not she who deserved the&mdash;&mdash;  I have not the
+expression! ... It is one of your English words that mean
+many things together ... a kiss ... a blow ... the boat
+of a sailor who catches fishes and crabs....  I have seen
+such boats at Havre and Weymouth, and they are very
+pretty....  Ah!  Now I remember.  You call them
+fishing-spanks!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Class shrieked.  Juliette stood calmly while the
+tumult of laughter and exclamations raged about her.
+Her long upper lip shut down upon its scarlet neighbor,
+her brows frowned a little; her slender arms, lost in their
+loose sleeves, hung straightly by her narrow sides.  Millais
+would, seeing her, have painted a maiden martyr.  Watts
+might have limned her as Persephone new-loosed from the
+dark embrace of Dis, her wooer, taking her first timid steps
+upon the glowing floor of Hell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"When you have finished making so much noise&mdash;<i>peu
+importe</i>&mdash;but I have a piece of news to tell you.  You are
+none of you inquisitive&mdash;that goes without saying!&mdash;or
+you would not have dispatched that poor infant to play
+the spy outside the parlor door.  Bridget-Mary and
+Alethea Bawne, I do not mean you&mdash;you are souls of
+honor&mdash;incapable of curiosity! ... Also, Monica Breagh, <i>c'est
+là son moindre defaut</i>!  But there are others&mdash;yet my
+friends&mdash;who are not so delicate,&mdash;and to these I address
+myself.  You do not deserve to hear&mdash;and yet I cannot be
+unkind to you; I, who have such joy of the heart in the
+knowledge that I am to return to my dear father!&mdash;such
+grief&mdash;ah! but such grief of the soul in bidding adieu to
+the School!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not for good?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You are going to leave the School?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Dear, darling Juliette, say you're only joking!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She is in earnest.  Look at her upper lip!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Vous moquez-vous du monde de parler ainsi!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Throbbed out a Spanish voice, husky and passionate:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Qué vergüenza!  No, no, es imposible!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Sure, dear, you'd not be so cruel as to make game
+of us?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She stood her ground, firm, but no longer frowning.
+Her heart swelled, her eyes were heavy with the promise of
+rain.  Her slender arms went out as though she would have
+embraced them all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My dears, it is true!  I go to Versailles to rejoin my
+father.  He says to me also&mdash;I have his letter here!" ...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Silence fell upon the turbulent crowd as she laid a
+slender hand on the place where her heart could be seen
+throbbing.  The paper rustled, but she did not draw it
+forth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He says, in this&mdash;I am to be married ... soon,&mdash;very
+quickly!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A Babel of cries, ejaculations, and exclamations broke
+out about her.  A girl's voice, more strident than the rest,
+shrieked:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I hate your father!  Beast!" and broke down in hysterical
+sobbing.  Juliette replied, those about her hushed
+to hear; and in the oasis of silence her tender, silvery
+voice rose like a fountain springing from the heart of
+purity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My father is not what you say, but the Emperor's
+brave soldier and a noble gentleman.  I am proud to obey
+when he commands!  He has said to me that I am to be
+married, and does he not know what is best for me?
+Would he wish to bring unhappiness upon his Juliette?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was not so much loyal as Loyalty personified, standing
+there defending him; with her little hand keeping down
+her bursting heart of anguish, and salt lakes of unshed
+tears pent up behind her sorrowful sapphire eyes....
+Her voice broke as she said "his Juliette," and one of the
+Bawnes, a stately, black-browed girl, answered, speaking
+in French:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He would not if he is&mdash;what you have described
+him! ... But&mdash;unless you knew of this before&mdash;it is so
+sudden....  It would seem to argue that M. le Colonel
+was thinking more&mdash;you will not be offended!&mdash;of the
+happiness of his future son-in-law than of his
+daughter's&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Non, non, non!</i>"  She made an emphatic gesture with
+her little hand, and shook her head so that a tear fell from
+her lashes on the bosom of her black school-dress, "Dear
+Lady Biddy&mdash;you are mistaken.  For&mdash;comprehend you?&mdash;my
+happiness is in obeying that beloved father, always.
+For me, there is no greater joy....  And his letter bears
+date of the New Year&mdash;three days since&mdash;behold the
+postmark.  It is the custom to give young people étrennes at
+that season&mdash;my father bestows on me a husband, and I
+am&mdash;content!  See you well?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was faulty English, yet Juliette's "See you well?"
+haunted the music-loving ear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now even the reserved began to question, while the
+frankly curious waxed importunate concerning the date of
+Mademoiselle Bayard's impending departure, the name,
+rank and personal appearance of the mysterious husband-elect,
+the number and uniform of his regiment.  For, of
+course, he was certain to be an officer of Cavalry, Dragoons,
+Lancers, or Cuirassiers.  That he must be handsome went
+without saying; but were his eyes dark or light, and did he
+wear a moustache only, or sport the hirsute ornament in
+conjunction with an imperial?  Beset from all quarters,
+Juliette was beginning to lose command of herself,
+when the hour of two struck from the great clock in
+the corridor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The clang-clang of an iron bell succeeded, the double
+doors at the upper end of the Hall rolled backward,
+uniting the Great and the Middle Classes in the religious
+exercise that opened afternoon School.  The hymn sung,
+the brief litany chanted to an accompaniment played on
+the harmonium by a mistress in the purple habit and
+creamy veil of the choir-sisters, another nun approached
+Juliette and whispered in her ear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was to go to the dormitory and pack her trunk,
+which would presently be brought her by one of the
+lay-sisters.  And this done, she was free to spend the
+half-hour previous to Benediction in the parlor with&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The name was lost in Juliette's embrace and kiss of
+gratitude.  She was usually chary of caresses, perhaps she
+wished to hide her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were fairly overflowing, poor eyes! when their
+owner gained the solitude of her white-draped cubicle in
+the Greats' dormitory.  Once the curtains fell behind her
+she was free to fall upon her knees beside the bed and sob
+there, to call upon Our Lady for succor and pity, to rock
+herself and hug her bleeding heart.  And all these things
+Juliette did, until the dull thump of felt shoes upon the
+shining boards betokened the arrival of the lay-sister,
+bearing the oilskin-covered dress-basket, disinterred from
+some below-stairs repository, which had to be filled from
+the locker, dress-hooks, and drawers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ten minutes had been devoured in grief, forty yet
+remained for packing.  A lover of method in all things,
+frugal and prudent in the expenditure of resources ("<i>I am
+sensible, me!</i>"), Juliette was economical of time.  Ten
+minutes might be spared to re-perusal of the letter that
+had set her faith in that dearest father rocking like a palm
+in tempest, and wrung such tears of anguish from the heart
+that worshiped him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She drew the bulky envelope from its pure hiding-place,
+kissed it, and moaned a little.  There were three sheets of
+thin foreign note, flourished over in a big, bold, soldierly
+hand.  The date bore evidence that the letter had been
+penned on the Eve of Saint Sylvestre, answering to our
+New Year's Eve.  The address was:
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+  "<i>Barracks of the 777th Regiment,</i><br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"<i>Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard,</i><br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"<i>Versailles.</i><br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"<i>My Daughter,</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Of news thy father has not much to tell thee that thou
+wouldst find of the most interesting, save that of the
+fashions prevailing in Paris at the moment, the most daring and
+eccentric is the little hat or miniature bonnet, tilted
+forward upon the forehead by the chignon, and spangled with
+beetles, dragon-flies, and other brilliant insects.  Jeweled
+birds, yachts in full sail, or baskets of flowers, dangle from
+the ears of all the feminine world!</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>The Empress is as beautiful as even she could wish to
+be.  I saw her driving a pair of little thoroughbred mares
+in the low park-phœton yesterday in the Bois, near the
+Rond des Cascades.  She was so gracious as to recognize
+me&mdash;though I was in civilian riding-dress&mdash;and beckoned me
+with her parasol-whip from the line of equestrians respectfully
+mustered on the left side of the road.  She patted the
+gray Mustapha&mdash;thou wilt be glad thy horse was so
+honored!&mdash;and asked if I was quite recovered of the wound
+I received at Solferino,&mdash;proving that an Imperial memory
+can be conferred with the hand that raises to Imperial
+rank.  Later on I met Dumas, and&mdash;at the corner of the
+Rue Laffitte&mdash;Baron Rothschild and Cham, the caricaturist&mdash;and
+there thou hast a résumé of the encounters of the
+day.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Do political matters really interest thee?  Learn, then,
+a new Ministry is in formation by M. Emile Ollivier&mdash;a
+'homogeneous cabinet,' is to be drawn chiefly from the Left
+Center in the Corps Législatif.  My father's friend, M. le
+Général Lebœuf, Minister of War, retains the post he held
+in the expired Administration.  M. le Maréchal Vaillant
+continues as Minister of the Emperor's Household.  Haussmann
+has fallen! his ten thousand hands will no longer
+scatter gold from the Imperial Treasury.  The last
+announcement emanating from the Prefecture of the Seine
+gave notice that the cemeteries of Mont-Parnasse,
+Montmartre, Ivry, and others are to be seized by the
+municipality in 1871.  All the private monuments are to be
+withdrawn before the first of April....  With what sorrow of
+heart these tragic removals will be effected thou wilt realize,
+who hast so often accompanied thy father, bearing wreaths
+to lay upon thy grandmother's tomb at Père Lachaise.
+Pray that the necessity to find a home for those sacred,
+beloved ashes may not devolve upon us.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Thou must know that in October, during the maneuvers
+at the camp of Châlons, a new and terrible weapon
+was placed in the hands of the Imperial army of France.
+It is the </i>Mitrailleuse<i>, conceived by the brain of De
+Reffye&mdash;an invention worthy to rank with that of the Chassepôt
+rifle, which fulfilled such great expectations the first time
+the weapon was used in action, at Mentana, against the
+Garibaldians.  How shall I describe it?  I will say, briefly,
+that it is a rifled, breech-loading gun of from fourteen to
+twenty-nine barrels; that it has as many locks as barrels;
+that it can be transported from place to place by two men,
+and fired by one, who manipulates a lever, sitting upon a
+saddle attached to the gun-carriage.  And that it is a mill
+that grinds&mdash;a machine that hails&mdash;death upon an enemy.
+Armed with batteries of these invincible weapons, the march
+of an invading army would be irresistible!</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Two of these marvelous guns have been by the Imperial
+favor bestowed upon our regiment.  The men baptized
+them in wine by the names of Didi and Bibi.  They are
+treated as regimental infants, and thrive exceedingly
+well.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>My child, whether this news will make thee sad or joyful
+it must be that Juliette joins her father here at
+Versailles not later than on the twentieth of the month of
+January.  Madame la Supérieure will supply thee with
+funds in exchange for the enclosed note of credit furnished
+me by my bankers.  Purchase thyself&mdash;on arriving in
+Paris&mdash;for certainly the modes of London will never
+content a taste so fastidious&mdash;some fresh and charming toilettes
+of the evening, costumes for the house, theater or promenade,
+and suitable lingerie.  Last, but not least, bring a
+marriage-robe, crown and veil.  I am not joking, I assure
+thee!  For my daughter I have found a husband.  A
+young man, sincere, upright, honorable, and a good
+Catholic, whom I have known from boyhood, whom my child
+will love as a wife should; and by whom she will be adored
+and cherished.  Thou knowest Charles Tessier, the son of
+my mother's widowed friend, the estimable Madame Tessier,
+whom we have visited in the Rue de Provence, Versailles!
+Charles has succeeded to his father's large businesses
+at Paris, Lyons, and in Belgium, as a manufacturer
+of woolen dress-materials, the pattern Écossais, so much
+in favor with S.M. the Empress and the belles of the
+Imperial Court, having been imported, woven and supplied
+by this wise, enterprising and energetic young man.
+Who&mdash;but it will be for his wife to perceive and praise his
+many excellencies.  I leave thee to the pleasant task of
+discovering them.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>My Juliette, if so much of thy father mingles in thy
+nature that of all careers this of a soldier seems to thee the
+noblest&mdash;if the pursuit and attainment of military
+glory&mdash;distinctions won upon the field of War, appeal to thee&mdash;as
+Heaven knows they have to me!&mdash;since my blood first
+learned to thrill at the roll of the drum&mdash;and leap at the
+sound of the trumpet&mdash;if thou hast pictured in thy innocent
+mind&mdash;loved in thy spotless dreams&mdash;some brave and
+noble officer chosen for thee by him who now writes&mdash;tear
+the picture!&mdash;forget the dream!  For when such dreams
+become realities they are&mdash;how often rudely shattered by
+the rush and shock of armies meeting in the blood-stained
+field of War!</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>My dear, War is a monster composed of flesh, and iron,
+and steel, that like the dragon or chimera of classical
+mythology&mdash;devours the hopes of virgins and the happiness
+of matrons, and leaves children orphans and homes heaps
+of dust.  Thou rememberest thy grandmother?  She had
+been married just five years when my father reddened
+with his heart's blood the soil of Algeria.  Yet when I
+wished to follow the profession of arms she did not
+endeavor to dissuade me.  She hid her anguish as only
+mothers can, but her beloved life was shortened by anxiety
+undergone during the terrible war of the Crimea; that war
+so protracted, so disastrous to our brave ally of England&mdash;so
+fraught with loss and suffering to the more fortunate
+army of France.  And that was not the only blow Fate
+dealt me while I served as </i>aide-de-camp<i> upon the staff of
+M. le Maréchal Grandguerrier.  Thou dost not know as
+yet!&mdash;one day I may find courage to tell thee....  Even
+a soldier may shrink from baring wounds that are of the
+soul.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>My daughter, I have never spoken to thee of thy
+mother....  The time has arrived when&mdash;&mdash;</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sixteen words were lined out by a heavy stroke of
+the quill.  The closing sentences were&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>In the event of War abroad&mdash;taking thy father from
+thee&mdash;perhaps to lay his bones in a trench hastily dug by
+peasants in some foreign province!&mdash;or in the event of War
+at home,&mdash;sudden, unexpected&mdash;sweeping as a cataclysm
+over thy native soil, thou wilt believe me, my Juliette, when
+I tell thee this marriage would be absolutely for the best!
+Living or dead, for me to know thee safe and cherished,
+here at Versailles with thy husband Charles and his
+estimable mother, would be happiness....  Wilt thou
+consent to the union?  Wilt thou obey thy father, who loves
+thee as his soul?  One finds this a scrawl which will prove
+difficult to decipher.  As thou knowest, I am a better
+artist with the sword than with the pen.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Written here at my new quarters, which comprise a
+sleeping chamber and boudoir elegantly furnished,
+suitable for a young lady of refinement; and a little kitchen,
+full of pots and bright pans.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+  "<i>Thy father,</i><br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"<i>HENRI-ANTOINE-ALBERT DE BAYARD,</i><br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"<i>Colonel Commandant.</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap08"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+VIII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Will it not be admitted that a letter such as this was
+calculated to cause a flutter of agitation in the meekest
+feminine bosom?  To be recalled from School before the
+completion of the tiresome process technically known as
+"finishing," that was matter for rejoicing.  The little
+bedroom-boudoir in the Colonel's quarters at the Cavalry
+Barracks, "elegantly furnished, suitable for a young lady
+of refinement," presented an alluring picture, the tiny
+kitchen, "full of pots and bright pans," charmed....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For Mademoiselle de Bayard, going back to her Colonel
+after two years' absence, laden as the working-bee with
+the honey of accomplishments and the well-kneaded wax
+of useful knowledge, promised herself that it should not
+be long before her idol should be convinced by practical
+demonstration that his Juliette had not forgotten how to
+cook.  Irish stew, saddle-of-mutton with onion-sauce,
+pancakes, Scotch collops, English plum-pudding and mince-pies
+had been added to her lengthy list of recipes, by grace
+of the Convent cook, Sister Boniface, who had permitted
+the ardent amateur to experiment in a second kitchen,
+used in hot weather, abutting on the garden, and not
+regarded as a portion of the nuns' enclosure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To return, and resume the old dear life of companionship,
+how sweetly welcome had been the summons.  But
+nothing could disguise the taste of the powder that came
+after the jam.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are to conceive the struggle in Juliette's faithful
+heart between obedience and anger.  Marry, my faith! yes!
+Every sensible young girl naturally expected to be
+married; but a husband approved of by oneself, if selected
+by one's father&mdash;that was what one had had reason to
+expect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And this Charles, eulogized as wise, sensible, far-seeing,
+and business-like.  Were these qualities, though naturally
+desirable in the estimation of a father-in-law, attributes
+that weighed down the scale in the opinion of a bride?
+Had one ever beheld him?  She shut her eyes and summoned
+up all the masculine faces in her gallery of mental
+portraits, dismissing one after the other with no's, and
+no's, and no's! ... Was it not horrible to have to admit
+even to oneself that one had not the faintest recollection
+of ever having seen or spoken to him?  Madame Tessier
+she remembered well as a little, stout, very <i>gentille</i> and
+amiable, elderly lady, whom she had visited with M. le
+Colonel, who had embraced one cordially, and insisted on
+one's partaking&mdash;immediately and at great length&mdash;of a
+collation of sandwiches, fruit, cakes, and syrups; excellent&mdash;and
+to a hungry school-girl, welcome at any hour of the
+day.  What more? ... Ah, yes!  Madame had much deplored
+Charles's absence, possibly at Lyons or in Belgium.
+Further, Madame had remarked to M. le Colonel:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My friend, your Juliette is the image of her beloved
+grandmother!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Will nobody ever say that I am like my mother?"
+Juliette had gaily cried.  And with a strange stiff smile,
+the Colonel had answered for Madame Tessier,&mdash;who at
+that juncture had opportunely upset a dish of little
+sugar-cakes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There have been moments, my child, when I have"&mdash;he
+coughed rather awkwardly for M. le Colonel&mdash;"anticipated
+that a resemblance might exist."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Could he have been on the verge of saying "feared,"
+and substituted the other word at the last moment?  Such
+an idea was ridiculous, yet it had occurred to Juliette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To questions on the subject of the faintly remembered
+mother the grandmother had been impervious.  The
+Colonel had always answered&mdash;yet with palpable reticence....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You have no mother, my little Juliette; she was taken
+from us, my child, while I was absent with the Army in the
+Crimea," or "She left us, while yet I was detained in
+Eastern Russia, serving as aide upon the staff of M. le
+Maréchal Grandguerrier....  It is true, she was both
+good and beautiful when I married her!  Now run and
+play!"  Or, in later years: "Now come and read to me!"
+or "Walk with me," or "Ride with me," or "Now
+tell me how and where thou didst learn to turn out such
+savory dishes with those tiny <i>pattes de mouche</i> of thine?
+Nowhere is there a <i>chef</i> whose choicest efforts can
+com-pare with my Juliette's.  And I have dined with the
+Emperor&mdash;and with Milord Hertford at Bagatelle&mdash;and with
+Consul-General Baron Rothschild&mdash;and&mdash;<i>parole
+d'honneur!</i>&mdash;I have told them so!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And all the time M. le Colonel had been keeping back
+something....  Was it not strange, thought Juliette, that,
+while upon the anniversary of the <i>Jour des Mort</i> Mass had
+invariably been offered for all deceased relatives of the
+De Bayard family, the actual date of the death of one so
+young and beautiful had never been marked with special
+solemnity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Could it be that the lost mother was not dead, but
+living!  Oh, but impossible! ... And yet&mdash;once
+awakened, the doubt would never sleep again....
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Did ever a girl receive such a letter?  It was fuller of
+darts than even the fabled porcupine.  It awakened stinging
+doubts of the kindness of the gentlest and tenderest of
+fathers.  "<i>Tear the picture!&mdash;forget the dream!</i>" he had
+said.  Ah, my Heaven! what young girl cherishes not such
+images&mdash;such visions! ... Juliette wondered sorrowfully.
+Sitting on her school locker, lost in thought, her
+elbows on her knees, her little pointed chin cupped in the
+slender hands, you saw her as a haggard, weary little
+creature.  For while joy made of Juliette a living rainbow,
+grief transformed her to the wan and rigid nymph that
+droops above a classic urn upon a mourning cameo; and
+anxiety or suspense or remorse of soul set a changeling in
+her place, wizened her, pinched her, struck her prematurely old.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She might&mdash;to employ hyperbole&mdash;have been sitting on
+her locker until the present hour, had not her sad eyes
+lighted upon a colored photograph of M. le Colonel in full
+military harness and equipment, contained in a little ivory
+frame fastened by a safety-pin to one of the starched white
+dimity curtains that imparted an air of select privacy to
+the little white-covered dormitory bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are to behold Juliette's father&mdash;<i>per</i> medium of this
+pen-portrait&mdash;and would that you might have heard his
+cordial voice, and pressed his living hand....
+Conceive him as a little man; and somewhat stout and
+paunchy; you would never have dared to term him so in
+the presence of Juliette.  And yet so manly, soldierlike and
+ingratiating was the boldly-featured face, with its brave
+eyes, curled moustache and imperial; the fur talpack with
+the green and scarlet plume and the red Hussar bag, was
+worn with such an air; the dolman of fine green cloth, laced
+and corded with heavy <i>galons</i> of silver and faced with the
+brilliant red of his silver-striped pantaloons, fitted his
+compact round person with such creaseless tightness; his
+silver-striped <i>ceinture</i>, belts and buckles were so <i>point-device</i>;
+his spurred Hessian boots graced such neat small feet; his
+right hand rested on his hip, his left upon the hilt of his
+long saber, with so pleasant a grace, that you could not
+but warm to this picture of a cavalry commander.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His daughter melted even as she gazed.  The generous
+soul, once wrought to the pitch of heroism, piles sacrifice
+on sacrifice.  She had meant to temporize, but she would
+not do so now.  She began to comprehend, as stray sentences
+of the father's letter floated back, that his mood had
+been sorrowful when he wrote it; and that those wounds
+of the soul he spoke of had been bleeding, though hidden
+from his daughter, many a year....  He was never sentimental;
+that sentence about laying his bones in a trench
+hastily dug by peasants in a foreign province had been
+struck from the steel of his nature by some flint hurled
+from the sling of Fate.  The words that followed, picturing
+War,&mdash;sudden, unexpected, sweeping as a cataclysm over
+the country,&mdash;had the solemnity of deep organ-notes.  And
+the rushing tenderness in the words, "<i>Living or dead, to
+know thee safe and cherished!</i>" thrilled, and the dignity
+of the entreaty touched and conquered: "<i>Wilt thou obey
+thy father, who loves thee as his soul? ...</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You saw light and warmth and youth and loveliness visibly
+flowing back into her as she looked at the picture.  The
+witches' changeling fled, a christened maiden remained
+in her place.  Words came to the lips that had been dumb,
+dews of tenderness bathed the eyes that had been dry as
+those of a sandstone statue in the Theban desert....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Dearest&mdash;beloved&mdash;best! ... Oh! shame that I should
+have dreamed of doubting you! ... There is some great
+reason for this decision&mdash;something terrible behind this
+haste of yours.  What, I may not know now!&mdash;one day
+all will be explained to me! ... Until then"&mdash;she rose
+and kissed the portrait&mdash;"until then I will trust you&mdash;who
+have never deceived me....  I will write to you as
+you would wish me to this very night.  Now I must pack,
+and then go down to Monica....  How to answer if she
+should question! ... but no, she never will!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dismissing the phantom of Charles, faceless and bodiless,
+but none the less terrible, she flew at the locker&mdash;pulled
+out the three drawers&mdash;stripped the row of regulation
+dress-pegs.  Brushing, smoothing, and folding, she even
+sang as she worked....  Presently a bell rang twice.  It
+was yet vibrating where it hung, on the passage-landing
+at the dormitory stair-head, when Juliette passed on her
+way to the guest-parlor.  Monica was waiting there.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap09"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+IX
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+A tall slight figure in the plain black, tight-fitting gown
+of a novice, made with a little cape covering the upper arm.
+A sweet plain face with eyes of hazel brown, framed in a
+close white cap with three rows of gophered frills, and
+there you have Monica, the chosen friend of the fiery
+Juliette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She has not three ideas!  How can you think so much
+of her?" a jealous rival is reported to have said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette retorted with a lightning riposte:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Possibly no more than three, but they are good ones!"  She
+marked them off on her tiny fingers.  "First, to serve
+God....  Again,&mdash;to serve her friends....  Once more&mdash;to
+help her enemies! ... If not, how is it that she spent
+two hours yesterday, working with you at that F major
+fugue in Bach's Book of Forty-eight? ... Has not
+that stopped you the whistle? ... I have eyes in my
+head, see you well?  <i>Pour tout dire</i>&mdash;you are an ingrate,
+you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"See you well!" could be a slogan on occasion, a blood-chilling
+note heralding the shock of battle.  But it came
+now in the softest of dove-notes, as they hurried to meet
+each other, clasped hands, and kissed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Dear one, I am so glad!  See you well, we have a whole
+half-hour to spend together....  And there is so much
+to tell you that I know not where to begin." ... She
+drew back frowning a little, vexed that Monica was not
+alone.  "I entreat your pardon! ... I did not know you
+entertained a visitor....  It is best that I retire....
+I fear I am.... how do you say? ... very much in the
+road!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Monica explained, holding the big red hand of an
+awkward young man in a shaggy greatcoat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You are not in the way, dear&mdash;and this is not a visitor!
+Let me introduce my brother, of whom you have heard.
+Caro, this is my friend, Mademoiselle de Bayard."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The shaggy young man, blushing savagely to the tips of
+his ears and the roots of his flaming hair, made a clumsy
+inclination, and offered the large red paw to Mademoiselle,
+who gravely inspected it, drawing down her upper lip,
+folding her own infinitesimal hands before her narrow
+waist, but made no movement to take it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He has angry eyes, with curious amber <i>taches</i> in
+them, ..." she thought.  "And he looks dusty as a
+voyager after a long travel....  Not <i>bien tenu</i> as a
+gentleman should be....  Living with Germans in Germany&mdash;he
+has become indifferent to the <i>petits soins</i> of the toilet.
+I would put the hand in the fire rather than tell Monica!&mdash;but,
+for me, I find him horrible.  What is he saying?  One
+would expect from a being so clumsy and so shaggy, not
+merely speech, but a roar!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet the voice was fresh and rather pleasant, as he replied
+to Monica's interested questions.  Had he had a good
+journey? ... How long had he been in London? ... Three
+days, and never let her know? ... Why not? ... Had
+he dined early, or lunched, and if not&mdash;he had been
+understood to mumble a negative,&mdash;would he not have
+something now?  Tea and sandwiches&mdash;Sister Boniface
+would cut the latter in a minute.  It was only three o'clock.
+Benediction wasn't until four&mdash;there would be heaps of
+time....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mumbled refusals grew faint.  Monica smiled her
+triumph.  Intent on hospitality she hurried out of the
+parlor, saying with a backward glance, and a smile halved
+between sulky Carolan and somber Juliette: "Sit down!&mdash;talk
+to each other ... I'll soon be back again!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the sound of the closing door smote the shaggy
+youth with a dumb palsy and transformed Mademoiselle
+de Bayard into the semblance of a large mechanical doll
+in black merino.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Stiff, pale, proud little creature!" Carolan mentally
+termed her.  It occurred to him that, attired in a brocade
+Court dress over a hooped farthingale, crowned with a wig
+of stiffened ringlets adorned with lace and ribbons and
+diamond powder, with a fan in one of those rigid little
+hands, she might have sat to Velasquez as a child Infanta.
+Or, upholstered and decked in Moorish finery, posed as
+one of the female midgets in the royal group of the
+Familia.  Whatever Velasquez might have thought, she was
+priggish, prudish, dull, doltish....  Obstinate, too, with
+that long, deeply-channeled upper lip.  And how persistently
+she kept those long, thick, uncurling lashes down.
+One wondered rather what might be the color of the eyes
+so concealed?  Black or brown?  Or&mdash;one had had a gleam
+of blue when for an instant she had looked at one.  Nobody
+cared&mdash;but perhaps they were blue?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She made no movement to sit down, nor did she indicate
+a desire that he should seat himself.  She flickered her
+somber eyelids for an instant, and the eyes seemed
+inky-black.  Burnt holes in a blanket, the observer brutally
+termed them, lifting his mental gaze to the china-blue
+orbs of his ideal, the colossal
+Britomart-Kriemhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In contempt of the prim puppet in the black merino
+he found himself adding inches to his loved one's height.
+Or perhaps it was to keep himself from madly shouting to
+Monica to tell them to hurry up with that tray....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When you have pawned your jacket and waistcoat for
+two-and-eightpence early on Wednesday, and have dined
+on a sausage and mashed for threepence, supped on a
+drink of water from a pump in a livery-stable yard....
+When the bed at a coffee-house has cost you a shilling,
+breakfast of burned-bread coffee and roll, threepence,
+and you have spent twopence on a paper collar, your
+remaining capital stands at a shilling, and by three o'clock
+on Thursday, if you have not ventured to break into this,
+you are beginning to return to the savage of the Earlier
+Stone Age.  Who, supposing his neighbor to be gnawing
+a lump of gristle when his own stomach was clamorous,
+dropped in upon the banquet armed with a flint axe, and
+possessed himself of the coveted <i>bonne-bouche</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh was frankly astonished at the savage
+voracity of his own impulses.  It did not occur to him
+that his nerves&mdash;he had always jeered at men who had
+talked of their nerves&mdash;had sustained a tremendous shock,
+and that this was the inevitable reaction.  His laboriously
+crammed scientific knowledge had never yet been called
+upon to account for his own bodily sensations&mdash;unless in
+the case of a jammer headache&mdash;diagnosed as the result of
+too many beers overnight.  At any rate he was not hungry
+now,&mdash;and the room with its stiff row of chairs, its
+high-molded ceiling, its dingy blue distempered walls, hung
+with engravings of Popes and Cardinals, Roman views,
+and Scriptural oil-paintings, began to heave and surge
+like the decks of the evil-smelling, second-rate
+passenger-steamer that had brought him third-class from Ostend.
+He thought of that old man with the shattered skull
+sprawling among his bloody papers, and knew that in
+another moment he should&mdash;horror of horrors! despite the
+presence of yonder speechless Immobility in the fiddle-bodied
+black frock and medaled blue neck ribbon&mdash;either
+faint or be violently sick.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He chose the first alternative, for the whole room, with
+its faded gilt mirrors, its album-laden tables, its formal
+rows of chairs skirting the wainscot, the little mats in
+front of them, and the beeswaxed floor on which with
+growing difficulty he maintained a perpendicular position,
+melted away from about and from under him, letting him
+sink down, down ... into bottomless, boundless abysses
+of intangible gray mist....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Out of which, after an interval of a hundred years or
+three minutes, he emerged sufficiently to say in a husky
+whisper:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It's nothing!  I'm all&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then be swallowed up again.  Coming to the surface
+in another æon or so to ask, with a wince of pain:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Did the old fellow shoot me in the head?  It&mdash;hurts
+like the dickens!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And to receive the answer in a cool little silvery voice
+like the playing of a fountain in a mossy basin at the end
+of a green alley, or the trickle of a brook through lush
+grasses and forget-me-not beds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You knocked the floor with it when you made to fall
+so suddenly!"  Something cool and light touched his
+aching forehead, and the voice went on again: "It does
+not bleed, no! but there will certainly be one big bump
+there!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"One bump....  Feels like one-and-twenty!" P. C. Breagh
+muttered, adding, with a heave and struggle that
+brought him into a sitting posture: "Help me up,
+whoever you are! ... Not all at once....  <i>Donnerwetter!</i>
+how giddy I am!  Try again in a minute! ... Here!
+... Give me hold of your fist!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The silvery voice said, with a liquid tremble in it that
+might have been laughter or shyness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But I do not comprehend&mdash;<i>feesth</i>!  Permit that I
+offer you the hand....  I am so very strong, me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Strong, eh?" P. C. Breagh said vacantly, being still
+absorbed in the effort to remember where he was.  He was
+certainly sitting up on a shiny, cold and slippery floor,
+leaning back against something warm and fragrant and
+soft, but he had not the least notion as to the nature of the
+support afforded him, nor did he associate the ownership
+of the voice with any person previously met.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Strong!..." he repeated, and yawned, and could not
+leave off yawning.  "<i>Physical exhaustion, fatigue, and
+lack of food,</i>" he mentally diagnosed, and found that, when
+his eyes had left off blinking and watering, the room was
+coming back.  There were the Popes, Cardinals, and views
+of Roman Basilicas; there the oil-paintings of sacred
+subjects&mdash;there the dingy gilt mirrors, the round center-table
+with books upon it, the oval one with an inkstand
+and nothing more,&mdash;the formal rows of chairs, instantly
+reviving the impression of a Convent parlor ... and
+stimulating him to rise, after some slips and sprawls and
+flounders, and stand upright on the beeswaxed boards,
+smiling rather stupidly and clutching something small and
+soft and sentient, for it fluttered in his big inclosing palm
+as a captive titmouse or robin might have done....
+<i>Donnerwetter!</i> it was the hand whose aid he had asked a
+moment before in his extremity....  A child's....
+No!&mdash;a girl's....  Who was the girl? ...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The truth burst on him then that it was to the mechanical
+doll, the stiff, pale, proud, absurd little creature, the
+Infanta of the drooping eyelids, the Moorish pigmy, he owed
+the help the little hand had given.  The silvery, sweet voice
+was hers, and against her he had leaned as he sat on the
+floor gathering in his scattered faculties....  The light
+touch that had visited his aching forehead, when she had
+said it did not bleed, had soothed him like the contact of
+a flower.  The sweetness of the voice was in his ears
+again....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Will you not sit down?  You are not strong, and should
+manage your forces.  A gentleman to faint like that I have
+never before seen!  Your sister will be grieved that
+you&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You are not to tell her!"  He dropped heavily into
+the chair she had brought, and made a feebly-emphatic
+blow at the table near which she had set it.  "Promise
+me! ... I&mdash;I must ask you to be good enough....  Who
+has gone and unbuttoned my coat?"
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap10"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+X
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+The pitiable secret the shaggy garment had concealed, the
+absence of jacket and waistcoat, bringing his hidden
+poverty into horrible relief, the dinginess of the shirt of
+two days' wear, the deceptive nature of the paper collar
+purchased at an outlay of twopence, had been revealed
+by some traitorous hand during his unguarded weakness
+of a moment back.  The color rushed back to his haggard
+young face in flood, as with shaky fingers he wedded the
+big horn buttons to their buttonholes, and felt about his
+neck to find it wet....  Juliette had said to herself that
+he had angry eyes.  They were tigerish as they flamed at
+her.  Then the yellow flame died out of them and they
+were nothing but gray and miserable.  He said brokenly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I&mdash;beg your pardon!  I must seem the last thing out
+in the way of a brute to you.  I had&mdash;fainted or
+something!&mdash;I've been through a lot of late!  And you meant
+to&mdash;be kind, I'm sure...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had thought her a mere child in size, but her personal
+dignity lent her height and presence.  Her great eyes met
+his full, and they were deeply blue as scillas in May, with
+great black pupils and velvety-black bands about the irises.
+She said in an icy little voice:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Sir, it is customary in these days to instruct young
+ladies in the knowledge of imparting medical aid to the
+sick or wounded.  A moment since I saw you fall to the
+floor!  I lanced myself to your side!&mdash;I debuttoned your
+paletot&mdash;sprinkled on your forehead water from that vase
+upon the table,"&mdash;she indicated the ornament with an
+infinitesimal forefinger,&mdash;"and in a few minutes I have the
+relief to behold you sufficiently recovered to demand if a
+man has shooted you? ... Naturally, I do not mean to
+be unkind!  But the promise not to speak of this to
+Mademoiselle, your sister, see you well?&mdash;I cannot give it!
+Young ladies"&mdash;there was an appalling stateliness about
+the tone and manner of this delivery, worthy of a mistress
+of deportment&mdash;"young <i>ladies</i> do not have secrets with
+strange young gentlemen!  And Monica is my dear friend,
+not you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Then if she is so much a friend of yours, you would
+wish to spare her knowledge of things certain to shock
+and grieve her.  You would not like to have her anxious
+and worried about what she couldn't help, would you?"  His
+eyes constrained and besought.  His voice was humbly
+entreating....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette recognized the cunning in this appeal.  She
+lowered her little pointed chin and leveled her thick
+straight eyelashes at the speaker.  "Yes!" the chin said:
+"No!" the eyelashes replied.  Thus encouraged,
+P. C. Breagh had an inspiration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But if I trust you!&mdash;you look as if you could be
+trusted...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From her little neck in its plain white frill to the cloud
+of dusky hair that crowned her, she flushed rosy as Alpine
+snows at sunset.  Did he mean to insult, or ingratiate, this
+overbearing, shaggy youth?  She said, with delicate
+reproof, completely lost upon his bluntness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My father has honored me with his confidence, as long
+as I can remember, sir."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Then I'll risk mine with you!" said P. C. Breagh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not risk!"  She had lost her glow, the sapphires of
+her eyes were shadowed by the blackness of the lowered
+lashes.  "Do not say risk, for that is to gamble.  See
+you&mdash;I will be trusted absolutely, or I will not be trusted
+at all!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He understood, in part, that he had wounded, and
+awkwardly begged her pardon, ending: "And show that you
+forgive me by letting me tell you that I wouldn't have my
+sister know, for the world!"  He got up and went to one
+of the white-curtained, ground-glass-filled windows, that
+masked the outlook upon Kensington Square, and said still
+more awkwardly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You see&mdash;you must have already seen from my togs&mdash;that
+I am a beggar.  I came back from Germany three
+days ago to find myself one.  I was to receive a fortune
+from the hands of trustees, and I found that their firm
+had gone bankrupt.  The elder partner had committed
+suicide&mdash;the younger had shot the moon.  My thousands in
+his pockets!"  He ground his teeth.  "And if I live&mdash;and
+ever meet that fellow!&mdash;he'll pay me in inches of skin!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said, and the silvern voice had the sweetness of
+Cordelia's:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am so very sorry!  Could you not prevail upon this
+dishonest gentleman to restore to you your property?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh said, with a flash of white teeth in his
+blunt-featured freckled face:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I might, if he had been considerate enough to mention
+where I could find him! ... Meanwhile..."  He
+shrugged his strong young shoulders in rather a
+despondent way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Meanwhile you are without a home ... and without
+money?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded, biting fiercely on his jutting underlip.
+"Just now!  But by-and-by&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She persisted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Without money and&mdash;starving!  Surely, starving! and
+that was why you fainted! ... And I, <i>mon Dieu!</i>&mdash;I
+have been blind and stupid....  <i>Je ne me doutais de rien</i>!
+Forgive me, I beg of you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her small face was all white and pinched and working.
+Sobs choked her voice; she struck her little bosom&mdash;she
+wrung the tiny hands in anguish....  And it was all
+real.  You could not doubt Juliette's sincerity.  And
+though his manhood was sufficiently new to revolt at
+commiseration, still, it was not unpleasant to know that one's
+misfortunes had pierced the bucklered pride of the little
+Infanta, and wrung tears from the most wonderful eyes
+he had ever seen.  And what was she saying?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur Breagh, it is a misfortune of the most grand
+that you are a man and I a woman!  Otherwise it would be
+so easy to say to you this....  Me, I am for the moment
+rich.  I could&mdash;if you would accord me the permission?&mdash;relieve
+these pressing necessities....  Let me know where
+a letter will readily find you....  Do not, I entreat you,
+be angry that I ask this!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he was angry.  His broad stripe of meeting red
+eyebrows came loweringly down over eyes that had the
+tigerish flame in them.  His face burned and he clenched
+his hands until the knuckles showed out white upon their
+sunburned backs.  He tried to speak and could not, so
+choking was his indignation.  To be asked to borrow from
+a girl&mdash;his sister's schoolmate, added one last dash of
+wormwood to the brimming cup of bitterness.  Unlucky
+P. C.  Breagh!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I'm uncommonly obliged, but decent men&mdash;in this
+country&mdash;don't do that sort of thing!  Even Frenchmen
+might call it caddish!" he choked out at last.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her eyes blazed murderously, a savage dusky crimson
+dyed the small white face that had looked at him with
+such pitiful entreaty.  She did not tower, she contracted&mdash;she
+crouched like a savage little cat ready to spring and
+rend him; her muscles grew visibly tense under her transparent
+skin.  He could hear the sharp hiss of her intaken
+breath, and see her lips writhe in the struggle to control
+utterance that seemed on the point of breaking from them.
+When she spoke, it was in a low clear whisper, more
+piercing, it seemed to her unlucky auditor, than any
+shriek.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Sir, when you say to me that even a Frenchman might
+find despicable the deed an Englishman would shrink from
+as a stain upon his honor,&mdash;you insult my country of
+France, and my brave father; and the noble gentleman
+who will be my husband soon! ... It is fortunate for you
+that M. Charles is not here, see you well?  Brave as a
+lion, he is a master of the sword.  But enough!&mdash;I was
+mistaken and I have been justly humiliated....  Permit
+that I wish you a very good afternoon!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She curtsied to the miserable P. C. Breagh with crushing
+ceremony, turned, and had swept from the room before he
+could even reach the door.  It shut in his face with a
+deliberate gentleness that was more final than a slam
+would have been....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I've done it, by golly!" said P. C. Breagh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Just after this lofty, dignified fashion had
+Britomart-Krimhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde quitted the scene of many an
+imaginary interview.  That a being so small and frail
+should assume the airs of these heroines tickled even while
+it angered him.  A moment more he glowered and fumed,
+cursing the Fate that had dealt him another set-back, and
+then ... the tinkle of crockery heralded the return of
+Monica with Sister Boniface and a tray, satisfactorily
+laden with a stout brown teapot, bread and butter,
+home-made preserves, and a dish of somewhat solid
+ham-sandwiches, the welcome sight of which drove away the dark
+blue devils and restored his cheeriness again.  He could go
+a long time on one full meal, he told himself, as he
+perpetrated a surprising onslaught on the eatables and
+thirstily swallowed cup after cup of convent tea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Replete at length, he leaned back in his chair, conscious&mdash;so
+overwhelming was the sensation of fullness after his
+protracted fast&mdash;of feeling like a boa-constrictor who had
+swallowed his blanket.  He longed to sleep, the continual
+battle with recurrent yawns was becoming painful; and
+yet you are mistaken if you suppose that this young man
+did not love his gentle step-sister, and was not glad at
+heart to be once more in Monica's company.  But Brother
+Ass, the body, ridden fast and far by the turbulent spirit
+and the eager mind, belabored by the cudgel of Fate until
+his solid ribs were cracking within his shaggy hide, wanted
+repose more than social converse.  Carolan's eyelids were
+closing under the stream of Monica's eager talk.  His head
+was nodding&mdash;his mouth had fallen ajar&mdash;a faint snore
+was on the point of issuing from the organ immediately
+above it&mdash;when he started as broad awake as though a
+wasp had stung him....  Monica was speaking of
+Juliette....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am so glad that you have met her!&mdash;yet sorry, too,
+because she is leaving us so soon now.  Is she not sweet?&mdash;with
+those grave airs, and those angelic eyes under determined
+eyebrows, and that shy wild smile..." thus Monica
+prattled on.  To stop her&mdash;or to prevent himself from
+giving her his candid opinion of her lauded idol, he
+inquired whether she did not find him handsome, and had
+her reply:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not a bit! rather ugly than otherwise; but I love your
+face, and always shall, Caro!  Why, you have a mustache
+already!" she cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He blushed as Monica jumped up for a nearer inspection,
+to discover that the close sprinkling of dark-brown
+freckles on the egg-smooth young surface of his upper lip
+had deceived the sisterly observation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The mustache will come," Monica said with a smile,
+"and then you will begin to be more of a dandy."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He fancied that her look betrayed a shade of
+disappointment.  "No wonder! such a beast as I must look!"
+he thought.  But he said with rather a clumsy air of
+indifference:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I daresay my clothes are a bit shabby, perhaps more
+than a bit!  But, you see, I've been knocking about on the
+rail&mdash;and aboard steamers&mdash;and so on."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Still, you could be&mdash;what Juliette would call more
+<i>soigné</i>."  There was a little accent of sisterly rebuke in the
+words.  "And I have talked to her so much about
+you&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That you're afraid she'll chaff you, now she has beheld
+the wonder!  If she did I shouldn't be surprised! ... And
+if I'd known you wanted me to turn up a thundering
+swell, I'd have polished myself up a bit.  My hair is too
+long, of course....  But&mdash;most British fellows run shaggy
+after a year or two at a German University."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He spoke as easily and naturally as was possible, with a
+lump in the throat embraced by the paper collar, and a
+savage pain tearing at his heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is a bargain then, and I shall see my old Caro looking
+as he ought to look, next time he comes here! ... Tell me,
+when will next time be?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stuttered, inwardly writhing:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I had no idea you'd mind the sort of&mdash;togs a fellow
+went about in!  You, who are going&mdash;you told me in your
+last letter! to take a vow of poverty and all the rest!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She laughed and patted the brown hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But you aren't going to take a vow of poverty....
+You will be independent....  You will have everything&mdash;I
+hope you will have everything; that goes to make Life
+pleasant, and all the other things that make it&mdash;precious....
+I am very ambitious for you, Carolan!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He laughed rather roughly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ambition in the cap and cape of a postulant!  What
+would the Mistress of the Novices say to that?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The face framed in the triple row of white frills was very
+pure and tender.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She would say that there are more kinds of ambition,
+than one.  I am ambitious that my brother should be
+spoken of among men&mdash;as a man who in the whole course
+of his career was never once ashamed to own himself a
+Catholic, and to prove not only in words, but in deeds&mdash;his
+loyalty to his Master in the face of the world!  You
+understand me, don't you?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He answered her in an embarrassed, awkward way, and
+with a look that evaded hers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Of course!  You mean&mdash;you'd like me to be the kind
+of fellow who goes regularly to Mass, and receives the
+Blessed Sacrament on all the Feasts of Obligation!  Well,
+I can't boast of being quite as scrupulous as that!  But
+at any rate I have&mdash;ringed in with the late-comers&mdash;at
+Christmas and Easter and Whitsuntide...."  He added,
+"Not that I should have been thought priggish if I'd
+gone oftener....  Of course the bulk of the students at
+Schwärz-Brettingen were Lutheran Protesants.  But about
+one-third were Catholics, I should think."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And were all of them late-comers&mdash;ringing in at the
+last minute?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I can't say that.  When one did turn out for early
+Mass one found the churches&mdash;there were three of
+'em&mdash;packed full."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah! ... Where are you staying?" she asked him in
+a changed tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He faltered, sick at heart at having to lie to her.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap11"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XI
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+"I&mdash;I haven't got the address on me just now!  By
+George, that's just ... Ha, ha, ha!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What is the joke?  Do tell me!" she urged, puzzled
+by the mirthless bark of laughter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He could not have explained.  His Irish sense of humor
+had been tickled to realize that in actual fact he did carry
+his address about him.  Did not the shabby old frieze
+greatcoat constitute his hotel, chambers and club?  To
+change the subject he began to question her experiences
+in the Novitiate.  She looked happy, he admitted.  He
+did not hide that her decision to take the Veil had been a
+surprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You see, you'd always been such a jolly girl," he told
+her.  "Such a stunning companion&mdash;I'd never have
+expected it of you."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her bright laugh rang through the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Dear boy, do you suppose that nuns are dismal things,
+or indifferent to pleasant companionship?  You should
+hear us laugh and chatter at Recreation.  Perhaps because
+the time for fun is limited, as the time for other things&mdash;we
+enjoy that half-hour's freedom all the more.  Not"&mdash;her
+smile did not leave her, but it changed in expression,&mdash;"not
+that I did not have my miserable hours.  For the
+matter of that I have them still!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He got up and went over to the hearth-side, where a tiny
+gas-fire made pretense of cheerfulness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I never thought it was all jam in the Novitiate.  A
+fellow I knew who had wanted to be a Carthusian monk&mdash;and
+found it impossible to stick out the
+preliminaries!&mdash;hinted as much to me."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I suppose," she said calmly, "that he could not submit
+to the&mdash;necessary experiences that lead to the final
+breaking of the will."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Breaking of the will!"  He kicked the old-fashioned
+fender savagely.  "What do they do to break yours, in
+Heaven's name?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What is done is done in Heaven's name," she said,
+"and that is why one can submit cheerfully.  But my
+first weeks in the noviceship were cloudlessly happy."  She
+laughed a little.  "I thought it was always going to
+be like that!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I see! ... I twig! ... They made much of you in
+the beginning...."  He gritted his teeth and turned his
+face away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Perhaps they did! ... I remember I had all the
+nicest things to do, and nobody minded....  I was
+allowed to dust the High Altar, change the flowers in the
+vases, and help the Sister-Sacristan brush and fold the
+vestments away.  And one day I was permitted to wash
+the lunette of the monstrance.  It was a wonderful
+experience.  One could understand how the Magdalene must
+have felt when she wiped the Sacred Feet."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was silent, for she had soared to heights beyond
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Perhaps it made me proud, for next day I was set to
+tidy the linen-room presses.  I worked for some weeks
+there, darning and mending and folding.  Then I was sent
+to the Refectory."  The smile was only in her eyes now.
+"I liked laying the long tables, but I hated washing dirty
+plates and dishes, and I simply loathed cleaning knives
+and forks."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I should think so!  Housemaid's duty!  I understand
+now what you meant a minute back! ... By George! ...
+'Miserable hours!' ..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her deep eyes rested on him calmly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And after I am clothed&mdash;after I have received the
+habit&mdash;I shall most likely go on having them!  I daresay
+I shall have them after I have taken the Veil."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He kicked the fender again, his hands shoved deep into
+his empty pockets, and felt the shilling, sole coin remaining
+to him, burn against his aching ribs.  He would have
+given ten years of life to have been able to tell her that a
+home with him was ready and waiting,&mdash;in case she shrank
+from the final plunge.  He made a great effort and groaned
+out:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But that won't be for two years to come.  And things
+may happen&mdash;who knows!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Oh!  I pray," she said with a sudden flush, "that I
+need not wait two years!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her eagerness lifted a load that had been crushing him.
+In sheer relief he began to stammer:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What a blessed idiot I am!  I didn't understand ... I
+thought you ... I believed you....  Of course you
+don't do the dirty work now.  That was only for a time, at
+the beginning.  Well, I'm glad!  I'd hate to think of my
+sister tackling servants' duties, anyway!  All right!  Well,
+what are you on to now, eh?  Back at dusting the Altar
+and doing the flowers?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No.  That is for others.&mdash;There are many others, and
+each of them must have a turn at the pleasant things.
+When you have lived in the community only a short time,
+you begin to understand that....  And when you have
+lived in it only a little longer you learn that between the
+pleasant duties and the unpleasant duties there is no
+difference, whatever.  Nothing being done that is not done
+for God.  When I was scrubbing the desks in the Little
+Class to-day,&mdash;there are seventy children, and the tiny
+ones come in with muddy boots from the garden in wet
+weather, and splash the ink over everything,&mdash;I was
+dusting the Altar....  When I was washing the slates I was
+washing the Feet of Christ.  It is no matter what we do as
+long as it is nothing to be ashamed of&mdash;and is done with a
+right intention! ... The lowest service counts as the
+highest in the sight of Almighty God.  It is one of the great
+mysteries of Faith that this should be so.  But it is so! ...
+There's the first bell for Benediction!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was too late now.  But even as she rose with that
+wonderful look in the calm face framed in by the triple
+row of little starched frills, and took his hand and led him
+to the door, P. C. Breagh realized that he ought from the
+first to have told the truth to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The parlor door led them into the corridor upon the
+boarders' side.  She guided him along it, left him at the
+entrance of the chapel, pressed his hand, whispered
+"Good-bye for now!" and vanished through a curtained archway
+on the right hand, communicating with the cloister,
+possibly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He entered the chapel.  A small portion of the nave,
+near the west door, was open to the public.  Some dozen
+worshipers, chiefly elderly ladies, knelt or sat upon the
+rush-bottomed chairs.  Beyond, a high, wrought-iron grille
+partitioned off the capacious choir, separated from the
+cloisters upon either hand by the tall carved screen that
+backed the rows of stalls.  And the dying daylight of the
+January afternoon shone through high windows, stained in
+hues tender as flower-petals or brilliant as jewels, depicting
+the various scenes in the life of the Virgin Mother of
+Christ.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The second bell had not yet rung for Benediction as
+Carolan bent the knee and slipped into a chair near the
+central gate of the grille.  The place was full of the presence
+and perfume of flowers, and the spice of incense burned
+at the morning Mass.  Tapers tall and short blazed on the
+High Altar, and a nun in purple habit and creamy veil
+knelt at a faldstool, absorbed in adoration of the Throned
+Mystery of Faith.  Within the space of a Paternoster the
+second bell rang.  The choir-sister rose, knelt in adoration,
+moved her stool carefully aside, and went out by a side-door
+in the sanctuary.  And a sound as of many moving
+waters began to grow upon the ear.  A curtain was drawn
+that masked an archway upon the farther side of the
+grille upon the right side: there was the invariable convent
+signal of a hand-clap, and two girlish shapes, in long white
+muslin veils over dark uniform dresses, entered together;
+and went to the bottom of the broad aisle between the rows
+of benches, moving sedately side by side.  One wore a pale
+blue, the other a crimson ribbon supporting a silver medal.
+One was of solid Teutonic build, with magnificent plaits of
+golden hair, vivid red and white coloring, and rather
+stiff, if dignified, bearing.  The other&mdash;a slender creature
+of stature almost childlike, yet with womanly coils of
+duskiness shot through with a tortoiseshell arrow, seemed
+insignificant as she walked beside her stately white-veiled mate.
+And yet, it was not walking, but gliding, hovering,
+floating ... such airy grace of movement as P. C. Breagh had
+never dreamed of,&mdash;Britomart-Krimhilde-Brünhilde having
+covered the ground with the magnificent indolence of a
+glacier, or traversed it with the overwhelming rush of an
+avalanche, when the exigencies of some imaginary scene of
+passion had compelled her to "fly from her conqueror's
+presence," or "impetuously gain his side."  Now for the
+first time her inventor found himself wavering....  Was
+his heroic ideal too Titanic, too colossal, too big and too
+clumsy?  Would it not be just as well to shorten her by
+half a dozen superfluous inches&mdash;reduce her superabundant
+flesh?  And if at the same time one were to darken her
+dandelion tresses?&mdash;tone down the staring china-blue of
+her eyes into&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+What was the color?  The blue of the spring flower or
+the blue of the sapphire? ... You never knew until she
+looked at you ... and then you weren't certain ... you
+kept wanting her to look again!  Meek or tigress-like, in
+whatever mood you found her, you would always be wanting
+Juliette to look, and look again.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+The revelation of his monstrous folly, the knowledge of
+his faithlessness came in the instant of recognition, hit him
+like a seventh wave and bowled him off his mental legs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before he had recovered, the white-veiled hovering figure
+had vanished.  The aisle had noiselessly filled with a great
+procession of similar figures, standing motionless, waiting,
+two by two.  There was a second clap of hands,&mdash;and the
+white-veiled column knelt in adoration.  At a third signal
+they rose and slowly filed into their seats.  And a second
+double line of younger girls, the Middle Class, also
+white-veiled and white-gloved, formed in the place of them, and
+the orderly, impressive maneuver was repeated by these.
+Little children took their places, and did as their seniors.
+A noble voluntary burst from the organ in the high-placed
+loft, and the purple-habited, creamy-veiled choir-sisters
+poured in and took their stalls, and the lay-sisters and
+novices followed, filling the great choir to overflowing, as
+the door of the vestry was opened by a sweet-faced child
+in a red cassock and white cotta, and the vested priest, a
+scholarly-looking, gray-haired man, came in and went to
+his place.  And the strains from the organ changed, and a
+voice fresh and sweet as a thrush's, passionless-pure as an
+angel's, began to chant <i>O Salutaris</i>,&mdash;and something like a
+sob broke from P. C. Breagh's throat, and hot tears came
+crowding, and one at least fell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had been shipwrecked, and here was a little green-palmed
+islet of peace to rest on&mdash;his only for a moment,
+but a moment in which to gather strength, and breath to
+face the raging seas again.  His mood changed.  He was
+glad he had not told Monica that he was homeless,
+half-clothed, and all but penniless in big, black, brutal, noisy
+London, and would have to water cab-horses, or sweep a
+crossing, or clean boots to keep alive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah, what was it Monica had said?  Without her knowing
+it those words had been somehow meant for Carolan.
+Let's see&mdash;how did they go? ... Something this way....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>It is no matter what we do, as long as it is nothing to be
+ashamed of, and is done with a right intention.  The lowest
+service counts as the highest in the sight of Almighty God.
+It is one of the great mysteries of Faith that this should be
+so.  But it is so!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I&mdash;see!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had sheltered his shamed and burning face in his big
+hands.  But with that ray of inward light had come
+courage and resourcefulness.  He lifted his head bravely
+now and drew in a deep chestful of the sweet, warm,
+pleasant air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Perhaps the money was spoiling me!&mdash;making me
+look to it instead of to myself&mdash;and I've been stripped and
+pitched into deep water as the big fellows used to do to us
+little chaps, when we funked.  Perhaps this is for the
+best&mdash;and I'll find it so one day.  Perhaps I can make up
+for some of the caddish things I've done&mdash;refusing that
+girl's offered help so savagely among 'em&mdash;by taking this
+thing well!  Facing what there is to face&mdash;and putting
+up with what I've got to.  Well, I'll have a shot at it!"
+said P. C. Breagh to P. C. Breagh.  "I'll do nothing that
+I'm ashamed of&mdash;and be ashamed of nothing that's honest;
+I'll labor for my daily bread&mdash;and for my nightly bed,&mdash;with
+these hands and shoulders,&mdash;if nobody will pay me
+for my brains!&mdash;And what I do I'll do cheerfully.  Shall
+I kick at sweeping a crossing, when He was a carpenter?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It seemed to him that he had not prayed, and yet he had
+without knowing it.  The Benediction seemed to fall on
+him like dew.  He went out by the west door with the
+small congregation, and found himself in the foggy London
+square within sound of the roaring traffic of the London
+streets, with a return of the old hideous shrinking.  A
+sensation paralleled by that of the shipwrecked castaway
+who has found brief resting-place upon the tiny coral atoll
+and must perforce commit himself, upon his crazy raft of
+planks and hencoops, to the shark-infested, treacherous
+Pacific seas again.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap12"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+He strolled up a short street, and looked for and found a
+roomy, double bow-fronted house of warm old red brick,
+with huge capacious areas.  "Vanity Fair" had been
+written there, he knew, perhaps "Esmond" too, though he
+was not sure.  He took off his hat to the memory of the
+magician, and wondered where his other idol, the still
+living author of the "Cloister and the Hearth," and "Never
+Too Late to Mend" might be run to earth, and made up
+his mind to see Dickens's grave in Westminster Abbey on
+the morrow, whether it cost sixpence, or whether it did
+not....  And then he wavered, sixpence, as we know, being the
+moiety of his capital; and then he remembered that
+to-morrow could only be reached by the bridge of to-night.
+He walked very fast for some distance, trying to exorcise
+the demons that this thought evoked, and,&mdash;blinded by
+their buzzing and stinging&mdash;was in Piccadilly before he
+knew.  The high railings of the Green Park, and the foggy
+solitude of the gravel-walks between the wintry lawns,
+tempted him to turn in and rest upon a seat a while, for he
+was still somewhat giddy and shaky, and the bump so
+confidently prophesied by the Infanta had appeared upon
+his brow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took off the old felt wideawake and stared at Piccadilly,
+brilliant with the paroquet-colors of passing omnibuses,
+green and royal blue, chocolate and white-and-gold.
+Behind the shining windows of the great Clubs, the members'
+heads, gleamingly bald, or affluent of hair and whiskers,
+alternately appeared and vanished.  He caught brief
+passing glimpses of white-bosomed waiters, ... the twinkle
+of gilt buttons on livery coats....  Beer-drays, driven by
+burly red-faced men, frequently in shirt-sleeves, went by
+with a whiff of malt, and the thunder of heavy hoofs.
+Vans of business-houses passed with a clang of bells.
+Victorias and landaus with muffled, and furred, and veiled
+ladies in them; shut-up broughams, madly-daring velocipedists
+on the machine of the era, a giant wheel followed
+by a pigmy one, made fleeting pictures on the retina of
+P. C. Breagh.  And the double river of traffic, and the
+eastward and westward-flowing stream of pedestrians went by
+without a break in them.  Gas-lamps began to make
+islands of yellow light upon the fog, but showed no
+dwindling in their numbers.  He wondered if they would go on
+like this all night?  And then some one came up and sat
+down on the other end of the seat rather heavily, and the
+slight resultant shock and jar brought round P. C. Breagh's
+head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He saw the thick-set, rather lax and round-shouldered
+figure of a man of middle age, dressed in a suit of tweeds
+patterned in giant checks of black and white and gray, the
+<i>dernier cri</i> in masculine morning-wear, had the observer
+but known it.  His hat, a low-crowned chimney-pot in
+hard gray felt, was tilted backward, his hair, of a pale
+tow-color, tufted out from beneath the hat in a way that cried
+for the attention of the barber; his whiskers, and mustache,
+of the same shade as the hair, were raggedly in need
+of the shears.  He wore a buttonhole-bouquet composed
+of a pink camellia with Neapolitan violets, and pale lemon
+kid gloves, and sucked the carved ivory knob of an ebony
+stick he carried, until,&mdash;upon his neighbor's looking round
+as above recorded,&mdash;he took it from a somewhat lax and
+swollen mouth, and observed that it was a nice afternoon.
+Adding, as P. C. Breagh made a sound which might have
+been assent or denial:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If it is affernoon?  Without my fellow to post me, I'm
+apt to be wrong about time.  Not that that's remarable.
+Lots of people the same, don't you know?  Nothing
+extra&mdash;nothing ex&mdash;oh, damn!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A covert anxiety&mdash;and a very visible tremulousness were
+combined in the speaker's manner.  His large watery blue
+eyes were painfully vague and blurred, with distended
+pupils that looked uneven; his gestures were uncertain,
+and his words, well chosen enough, and uttered with the
+tone and accent usually distinctive of a gentleman, came
+haltingly from a tongue that seemed to be too large for its
+owner's mouth:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You don't regard it as extra ... Stop a minute!"  A
+pause ensued, during which the vague-eyed gentleman
+waited, clutching his stick with both hands, and holding
+his swollen mouth ajar.  And when he shut the mouth to
+shake his head, and looked at P. C. Breagh in the act of
+doing this, the perspiration shone upon his puffy cheeks
+and stood in beads upon his reddened forehead, as though
+it had been July instead of a foggy afternoon in January,
+and the pink-bordered cambric handkerchief with which
+he wiped his worried face became, after this usage, a very
+rag.  And a queer, unwillingly-yielded-to sense of
+commiseration prompted Carolan to suggest:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'Extraordinary' was the word you wanted, wasn't it?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Much obliged!  The word, unnoutedly!  'Stror'nary
+how words do dodge one on occasion!" returned the
+uncertain gentleman in the large-patterned tweeds.  He
+added, pulling at the ragged light mustache, with a gloved
+hand that was decidedly shaky: "I don't know that it
+matters parricurarly&mdash;but I'd prefer you to know that I'm
+not runk!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not&mdash;what?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not runk!" repeated the vague-eyed gentleman
+emphatically.  "Not cut, foozled, miffed, fizzed, screwed!
+Not that it's oblig&mdash;that's another of the words that
+perretually queer me!&mdash;or incumment on me to isplain,
+but I regard it as due to myself, by Gad! that you should
+clearly unnerstand the case.  As I said to the manuscript
+upon the Bench when the bobby ran me in on Thursday&mdash;or
+was it Friray? ... Appearances are sally against me,
+but I have never been a rinking man!  The doctors have
+a crajjaw name for my connition, which under the
+exissing circ&mdash;and that's another of the words that play the
+deuce and all with me! ... Look at my westick, buttoned
+all wrong!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He slewed round upon the seat, and throwing back the
+large-patterned, fashionably cut-away coat, exhibited the
+garment mentioned, every buttonhole of which afforded
+hospitality to a button not its own.  His necktie, the ample,
+sailor-knotted necktie of the period, was under his left ear,
+and his shirt had come unstudded.  Being appealed to,
+P. C. Breagh admitted that the existing condition of things
+left something to be desired!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"When a man entirely ripends on valets and domessicks,"
+explained his incoherent neighbor, "a man is apt
+to be neglected and so on.  As a marrer of fact I live in
+that little joppa cottisit!"  He waveringly pointed to a
+large, handsome private dwelling with an ornate portico,
+situated nearly opposite, and sandwiched between two
+Clubs.  "An' as a narrural conquicense of my temorrary
+irrability to pronounce words of the most orinary nature,
+I am&mdash;&mdash;"  He drew an aimless figure in the muddy gravel
+with his ivory-topped, ebony stick, and went on with a
+weak laugh, "I am absoluly neglected by my own househol'.
+My own children seem ashamed or afray of me&mdash;all
+but Little Foxhall&mdash;splendid little chap is Little Foxhall!
+But his mother&mdash;my wife&mdash;&mdash;"  He broke off to say&mdash;"You
+will escuse my touching on these priva' matters in
+conversation with a perfec' stranger.  I am quite conscience
+I trepsass against the orinary usages of propriety,
+especially in speaking of my wife! ... But&mdash;the fact is, sir!
+I am most desperately wretched.  Six people imagine me
+runk&mdash;out of every half-dozen.  While the other six&mdash;the
+irriots whisser it when they think I'm out of
+earshock&mdash;suppose me to be suffrig from Sofrig of the Bray!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He began to tremble and shake, and put his stick between
+his knees to hold on to the edge of the seat with his
+lemon-kidded hands&mdash;and couldn't hold the stick in that
+position, and it fell, and P. C. Breagh picked it up and put
+it back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am murrabliged," said the owner of the stick, "by
+your kind attention!"  Something struggled and fought in
+the vague blue eyes that he turned upon Carolan,&mdash;it
+seemed as though in another moment Fear and Terror
+might have leaped glaring into sight.  "And while I am
+boun' to ajopolize for thrussing my privarrafairs upon a
+stranger&mdash;I feel bound to put the quession; Why should
+thissorathing happen to ME?  Goolor'!  I've been no
+worse than lossa urra fellers!"  He rose up shaking, and
+shakily sat down again, nearly missing the bench.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Bessaran loss of 'em&mdash;if you come to that!"  He
+turned to Carolan, and the vague eyes were piteous and
+desperate....  "You see the sort of chap my luck&mdash;my
+damble luck&mdash;has made o' me!  Yet I used to be
+envied&mdash;envied ... you unnerstand!  I have belonged to the
+best regiment in the Brigade of Guards&mdash;the devil another!
+I have played the bes' cards, driven the bes' turnouts,
+smoked the bes' cigars and had the most stunnin' women!
+Do you unnerstand me?&mdash;Have!"  He brought down the
+uncertain hand in an attempt to strike his knee emphatically,
+and missed it; and tried to look as though he had not,
+and went on: "And I have belonged to the best gloves,
+by Gad! an' put on the clubs with the most celebrarred
+li'-weights!  And I rode my steeplechase at York, and
+romped in first, and they toasted and speechified me at the
+Gimcrack dinner.  And I won my Oaks and my Derby&mdash;and
+led in the winner, with all the cheeple reering;&mdash;the
+seeple peering&mdash;the&mdash;Goolor'!  Goolor'!  And the horse
+was Gladianor&mdash;and the victory was a popular one&mdash;and
+my name was a household word through the Unirred Kingom.
+A household word!..."  He broke off, trembling
+and sweating, as the horse might have done after the race,
+and put the wavering hand to his head, and turned his
+empty blue eyes from Carolan's as though they hurt.
+"What was my name?" he asked himself in a dull, thick,
+shaky whisper, "Goolor'!  Goolor'!  What was my
+name? ... That you, Murchison?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a decent figure in the irreproachable dark clothing of
+a servant out of livery had passed and turned back, and
+now approached the bench, eyeing Carolan suspiciously
+even in the act of uncovering its well-brushed head, and
+saying in the smooth accents of servility:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is Murchison, your Grace.  It's cold, your Grace,
+and you've not got on an overcoat.  Your Grace had best
+come home now, before your Grace is missed!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Home?"  His Grace looked mildly from the authoritative
+Murchison to the stately "cottage opposite," and
+one of the uncertain hands in the pale lemon kid gloves,
+making as though to pluck at an untrimmed whisker, found
+itself imprisoned in a deferential but vigorous grip.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Home, your Grace!" said Murchison, applying muscular
+leverage to raise the inert figure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"All right.  Prass I better, Murchison!"  He rose to
+the perpendicular....  "Wish you a very good evening,
+sir!"  With a faded reminiscence of what might have been
+a courtly manner, he touched his hat to P. C. Breagh, who
+returned the farewell greeting, avoiding the sharp glance
+of Murchison.  Then valet and master moved off, leaving
+a little trail of dialogue behind them:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You give us the fair slip that time, your Grace!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Perhass I did, Murchison&mdash;now you happen to mention it."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Might have been killed crossing Piccadilly, your Grace,
+and none of us the wiser."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Goolor'!  I'd wish I had, Murchison&mdash;if it wasn't for
+Little Foxhall!" ... Then in a high, quavering note of
+eagerness, the plea, pitiable and ridiculous and pathetic:
+"I&mdash;I say! ... Tell me the boy'd have minded,
+Murchison&mdash;whass a lie to you, you dam' smoo'-ranged
+Ananias!&mdash;and I'll give you my nex' week's sovereign&mdash;I'm dead
+broke now!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Murchison and His Grace went away together, the
+man steering, with deft guiding touches of the master's
+elbow, the latter stepping high and bringing his feet down
+with a peculiar thump that threw a light upon the situation
+in the eyes of P. C. Breagh.  Not softening of the brain....
+<i>Donnerwetter!</i> what were the London doctors thinking
+of?  Had none of them read the "Dissertation on Tabes
+Dorsalis" of the Herr Doctor Max Baumgarten, published
+in Berlin only a twelvemonth previously, and dealing
+fully with that rare and curious disease of the nervous
+system? ... Fibrous degeneration of the posterior columns
+of the spinal cord, affecting the patient's sight, gait,
+and&mdash;in isolated cases&mdash;speech and memory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I'd like to have got him to let me rap his shins!  Bet
+you anything there'd have been total absence of reflex
+action!  Remember that peddler in the Nervous Ward of
+the Augusta Hospital at Schwärz-Brettingen! ... They
+cured that chap with spinal injections and regular
+massage.  And this man&mdash;being a thundering swell and having
+the best advice possible&mdash;is naturally being treated all
+wrong!  Hang it!&mdash;how cold I am!  Better be moving!"  He
+got up and stamped some warmth into his cold feet and
+flailed his cold ribs with his elbows until they tingled
+again.  He had learned something of the wretchedness that
+may sometimes dwell in princely homes, yet be homeless;
+and fare delicately from plate of gold and silver, and yet
+go hungry,&mdash;and lie down to toss and stare through dreadful
+sleepless nights on soft luxurious beds.  Therefore the
+bright reflections of great fires dancing on the plate-glass
+windows of the "cottage opposite" stung him to no
+comparisons.  "Is it base in me that the knowledge of the
+misery of this wealthy nobleman makes me more contented
+with my own obscure poverty?" he asked himself, and the
+answer was: "<i>Not if your content does not make you
+callous to his woe!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I hope that Little Foxhall would have minded!" he
+found himself saying; "and I wish to Heaven Baumgarten
+could get a chance of doing something for his father!  I've
+half a mind to drop a postcard to him&mdash;or write a line to
+the Herr Professor! ... Stop, though!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He remembered that he must break into his last remaining
+shilling to buy the postcard and pay for the stamps.
+Then he swung out through the Park side-gates, and now
+he was one of the crowd rolling Circus-wards, and all the
+street gas-lamps had been lighted by certain officials with
+poles, furnished with hooks for keying the gas on, and
+perforated iron sockets filled with blazing tow that had
+been soaked in naphtha; thus every shop or restaurant
+became an Aladdin's cave of brilliancy, and the down-drawn
+blinds of the houses and clubs hid splendor unspeakable&mdash;if
+only one had been able to pull them up....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alas! to us who live in these pushful days of Electrical
+Power Supply, the glories of the illuminated capital in the
+year of grace 1870 would appear murky enough.  We should
+sneer at the stumpy iron lamp-posts and the chandeliers yet
+adorned with Early Victorian crystal glass lusters.  The
+wood pavement, an invention <i>de luxe</i> economically confined
+to the West End, and upon the greasy surface of which
+bus-horses broke legs as easily as the most aristocratic
+thoroughbreds&mdash;the loose iron gratings covering basement-lights,
+and incidentally presenting man-traps for unwary
+pedestrians, as receptacles for stray umbrellas, dead cats,
+wisps of packing straw, discarded newspapers and
+orange-peel&mdash;the untrapped gutter-drains and sewer-vents would
+awaken our ridicule and evoke our indignation, even as the
+displays in the shop windows, especially those of <i>modistes</i>,
+<i>couturières</i>, and tailors, would provoke us to mirth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The extraordinary little hats, pot-shaped or plate-shaped,
+worn upon huge chignons, surmounting cascades of ringlets,
+<i>couleur Impératrice</i>.  The preposterous frilled <i>paniers</i>,
+the bustles, the <i>jupes</i> of velvet or plush, flounced to the
+waist or kilted&mdash;sometimes to mid-leg, displaying boots&mdash;such
+as are worn to this hour by Principal Boys in Christmas
+Pantomimes and serio-comic ladies of the Varsity
+Stage, who are, we know, Principal Boys in the pupa, or
+chrysalis-state.  All these things compel us to hold our
+sides when we review them in the illustrated papers of the
+<i>Ladies' Mentor</i>,&mdash;which illuminating periodical, in the
+dearth of Fashionable Intelligence from Paris, the hub and
+center of the modish world, came to a sudden end in the
+October of that year, and has defied all efforts at
+resuscitation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Though it is possible that the wearers of these
+long-vanished modes&mdash;surveying the belles of Belgravia, with
+their humbler followers of Brompton and Bayswater,&mdash;in
+the present year of progress, might be moved to laughter
+or provoked to wrath.  To-day, when the ambition of
+every properly constituted woman is to be shaped like a
+golliwog and dressed like a pen-wiper, or to acquire the
+sinuosities of a Bayadere and drape the same in cobwebs
+calculated to conceal nothing and suggest everything&mdash;can
+we honestly enlarge upon the bygone improprieties of
+our aunts, and moan over our mothers' taste in toilettes?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was just six when P. C. Breagh crossed Piccadilly
+Circus and turned down toward the Haymarket.  Why
+hurry, he asked himself, when you have nowhere to go?
+The restaurants were filling with diners who were going to
+the theaters, the smell of cooked meats made savory the
+fogginess.  He shrugged his shoulders, dug his hands deep
+into his empty pockets, and tried to whistle as he loafed
+along.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Misery stalked these West End streets, rampant and
+clamorous.  A burly man devoid of legs, shuffling along
+with his hands in a pair of woman's clogs, entreated
+P. C. Breagh in stentorian tones to buy a tin nutmeg-grater.
+A miserable creature, whose sole garment appeared to be
+the upper portion of an adult pair of trousers, begged him,
+in the professional whine, to spare a penny for the pore
+orphan boy!  A dank female, in rusty weeds, stationary
+by the curb, displaying a baby and a row of ballads,
+besought of him, for the love of Gawd! to pity the
+unfortunate widow and her starving orphans.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Buy a ballad, kind genl'man!  On'y a penny&mdash;goes to
+a lovelly choone!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+  "Ho!  Dermot, you look 'ealthy now,<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Your does is neat an' clean,<br>
+  Hi never sees you drunk about,<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;W'erehever 'ave you been?"<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+The stave chanted as an appetizer for the music-lover,
+she wiped the baby's nose with her ostentatiously white
+apron, and protested it to be the image of its
+father&mdash;blowed up in a Mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You mean a mine, don't you?" P. C. Breagh was
+beginning, when the widow once more burst into song.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+  "Your wife and Fam'ly&mdash;Har they well?<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;You once did use them strynge!<br>
+  Ho!  Har you kinder to them now?<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And wence this 'appy chynge?"<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Reverting to prose, as P. C. Breagh lounged listlessly on,
+she demanded why, if he wasn't going to buy, he had
+stopped and given a respectable female Tongue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And not even fork out a copper, you blistered
+swindler!  You blindin', blazin'&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Come now, Chanting Poll, what's all this here row
+about?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gruff, not unkindly voice of a policeman broke in
+upon the rusty widow's eloquence.  P. C. Breagh, yielding
+to a sudden impulse, wheeled and swung back again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It's all right, constable, the lady was only having a bit
+of chaff with me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I know her!" said P. C. 999, C. Division, removing a
+heavy but not brutal hand from the lady in question, "and
+the kind o' chaff she slings.  Done Time for it, too, she
+'as&mdash;before now!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he moved on, huge in his belted greatcoat, walking
+with the elephantine, clumping step begotten of boots with
+iron toe-caps, and iron-nailed soles at least two inches
+in thickness; and the dank widow cocked a knowing eye
+at his retreating back, and the other at her unexpected
+champion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Good for you, my dear!  Stand us a drain for luck,
+since you're so civil!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He returned:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I would if I'd got the tin!  I believe I'm poorer than
+you are!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"S'welp me bob! wot 'ave we 'ere?  A haristocrat in
+distress, har yer?" she demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not quite," he told her, as she turned the ponderous
+batteries of her raillery upon him.  "I've seen an aristocrat
+in distress to-day, and he was worse than me.  I'd not
+change!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Fer ten thousand jimmies hannual hincome, an' a 'ouse
+at Number One 'Yde Park Corner!" she jeered.  "'Ow
+did yer lose the I'm-so-funny?&mdash;for if you 'aven't it now,
+you 'ave 'ad it, I'll tyke me Davy!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It's&mdash;a long story!  Good-bye!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded and was moving on, when she shot out a
+gaunt hand and clutched him by the sleeve, crying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'Old 'ard, Mister!  'Ang on till I give this 'ere squealer
+to its mammy.  About due now, she ought to be!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Isn't it..."  His surprised look tickled the relict of
+the blown-up husband into a chuckle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mine?  Not by 'arf!  A tizzy per workin'-day is wot
+I pays for the loan of 'er.  Nothin' like a babby&mdash;specially
+in narsty weather like this 'ere&mdash;to touch the people's
+'arts!  Lil's mine, though, ain't you, deary?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A preternaturally bright-eyed, white-faced, wizened little
+creature peeped out from the shelter of the ostentatiously
+clean apron, making a sound as of assent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Is she ill?" asked P. C. Breagh commiseratingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not 'er, that's her color!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Hungry, perhaps?" he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why should she be? ... Wot did yer 'ave fer dinner,
+Lil?  Speak up like a good gal an' tell the gen'lman!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The small, grimy finger came out of the wide mouth.
+She lisped confidingly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ay'po'rth o' gin 'ot, an' a stit o' totlit!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My God!" gasped P. C. Breagh in horror, "does that
+baby drink hot gin?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"When she can get it! an' so does Hi!" explained the
+lady of the ballads, whom a short female in a plaid shawl
+and a battered brown bonnet had now relieved of the baby.
+She added hospitably: "Come an' 'ave two-pennorth o'
+comfort along o' me now!  It's meat and drink both! as
+you'll find afore long!  I'll stand treat&mdash;no blarney!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he groaned and fled from the tragic pair, seeing the
+blazing eyes of the drunkard, set in the small white childish
+face, staring at him from the gas-lamps and the hoardings,
+from the paving-stones beneath his hurrying feet, and
+from under the hats of passing strangers; and peering
+between the slowly-moving shoals of sooty smoke and muddy
+vapor, streaking the livid grayness overhead.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap13"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XIII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Pall Mall was some relief.  He looked for the Junior
+United Service Club, and found it; for the Rag,&mdash;and for a
+time walked up and down in the vicinity of both of these
+stately institutions, heartened by the memory that his
+father had been a member of the former&mdash;listening with
+eager ears to scraps of conversation between soldierly,
+well-groomed, clear-voiced men in evening dress, lingering
+on the wide doorsteps to finish some animated discussion,
+or waiting for cabs and hansoms, the common hack, or the
+smart private vehicle, low on the wheels at that date, and
+more heavily built than the later S. and T.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certain bald, mustached, and red-faced veterans, scrupulously
+attired for the evening&mdash;delighted him extremely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"By George, General!" he heard one of them say, as he
+went by, his slouch forgotten, his shoulders squared, his
+head held up, "look at that seedy-looking chap there!
+Twelve to one in sixpences he's one of the 'supererogatory
+useless infantrymen,' kicked out by Cardwell, after twelve
+years' Service.  D'ye take the bet or no?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The reference to the unpopular War Secretary under
+whose effacing hand infantry regiments had not only lost
+their numbers, but in many cases vanished from the rolls
+of the Army, swallowed up in the New System of
+Amalgamation&mdash;had, as was intended, the effect of the red rag on
+the bull.  The General bellowed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Confound me if I don't!  Pay the cabman, McIntosh,
+while I put the fellow through his paces!  Hi!  Hi!
+Come here, you, sir!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, as P. C. Breagh, summoned by an imperious wave
+of the umbrella, stepped out of the fogginess into the
+mellow circle of light streaming through the glass doors of
+the brilliant vestibule:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What's your regiment? ... Give me the old designation!
+... I know nothing of new-fangled names; ... All
+my eye and Betty Martin! and I don't care a dee who hears
+me say it! ... What is your rank, name and battalion-number?
+When were you discharged? ... Where's your
+small-book and certificate? ... Got 'em about you?
+... Every soldier has 'em about him!  And why don't you
+answer, dee you!&mdash;why don't you answer, man?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The volley of interrogations left no room for reply.  A
+second might have followed had not the General's crony, in
+unconcealed ecstasies at the sulky embarrassment of the
+victim and the determined attitude of the inquisitor,
+intervened:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Dashed sorry!  My mistake!  Believe you've landed
+a civilian, after all, General!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Be dee'd! and so I have!" the General, after a raking
+stare, admitted.  Then he took his crony's arm, they
+wheeled, and marched into the Club together.  From whence
+issued, a moment later, a small boy in buttons, who, after a
+look up and a look down the street, pursued the retreating
+figure of the stalwart young man in the gray felt wide-awake
+and shaggy greatcoat, and arrested it with the words:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'Arf a jiff, my covey!" He added, as the retreating
+figure wheeled and surveyed him in hard-eyed silence:
+"Wasn't it you what Old Fireworks went for just now on
+the 'Rag and Famish' steps?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The General called to me&mdash;mistaking me for&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I know!"  The boy in buttons winked.  "He's always
+a-pitching into somebody in mistake for somebody else!
+Catch hold!  This is for you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was a warm half-crown, thrust upon P. C. Breagh,
+without further ceremony.  He flushed a murky, savage
+red, and shouted:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What is this for? ... Who had the infernal insolence&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He choked.  Buttons, plainly regarding the tramp who
+could be insulted by half-a-crown as a new species, stared
+at him with circular orbs of astonishment, retorting:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What's it for?  How do I know, stoopid?  He told
+me to catch you and give it you....  Cool that!  Well,
+blow me!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These expressions being evoked by the swift, supple
+movement of arm and wrist that had sent the half-crown
+flying into the midst of the Pall Mall traffic.  A sharp ring
+on the wood-pavement, a yell, and a flourish of naked heels,
+and a street Arab had seized the treasure.  As the fog
+swallowed the wealthy imp, said Buttons icily:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That's your game, is it?&mdash;pavin' Pall Mall with 'arf
+bulls for gutter-pads to pick up.  Better ha' tipped it to
+me!&mdash;or sent it back to Old Fireworks.  He ain't got too
+many of 'em.  Signs too many toast-and-water tickets to
+be flush!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps P. C. Breagh, scalding with wrath as he was,
+would have dived in among the traffic to recover the coin
+had it been recoverable.  But the snows of yester-year
+were not more irretrievably gone.  He realized it, hung his
+head and hunched his shoulders, and moved away from
+the region of clubs, where officers of the twin Services talked
+shop in sublime indifference to other subjects, as
+white-chokered attendants supplied them with savory meats
+and cheering drinks.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Be sorry for the boy with the gaunt wolf Hunger at his
+heels, and the black demon of Despair sitting on his
+shoulders.  That determination of his to face what might come,
+and take his luck in a cheerful spirit, was to be put to a
+yet fiercer test before the dawn of a new day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was hungry and thirsty, and sorely tempted to break
+into his solitary shilling.  But that silver barrier between
+himself and pennilessness was not to be lightly changed.
+He wondered, as he recalled to mind the many occasions
+upon which he had wantonly squandered and wasted
+money, whether an experience such as this, previously
+undergone, would not have been a valuable lesson in thrift?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He presently came by a well-known theater.  It was too
+early for the frequenters of the Stalls and Boxes and Grand
+Circle.  But playgoers of the humbler kind were pouring in
+to fill the unnumbered seats in the upper tiers, and a crowd
+composed of the usual elements had gathered at the doors
+of the Pit and Gallery, and filled the narrow side-alley in
+which these were situated, and overflowed into the Strand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Queues not being officially recognized and regulated,
+there was a good deal of obstruction and pushing and
+persiflage.  Pausing a moment under the gas-jet bordered,
+glazed shelter ornamenting the box-office entrance, his
+unseasoned eyes winced as they took in a sad, sad sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You saw her as a woman not past early middle-age, nobly
+proportioned, and even in her dreadful degradation,
+imperially beautiful.  An old velvet mantle covered her, from
+which the torn and moth-eaten fur-trimming hung in
+draggled festoons.  A trained silk gown, stained and torn
+and flounced with mud of many thicknesses, trailed upon
+the slushy Strand pavement; a broken bonnet perched on
+a palpably false and inconceivably dirty chignon, the false
+curls that cascaded from beneath it, hid a workhouse-crop
+of rusty gray....  And she lifted her skirts aside,
+disclosing muddy bare feet shod with a trodden-down,
+elastic-sided boot and a ragged slipper; and stepped across the
+threshold of the gilt and mirrored vestibule with a
+graceful, royal air....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Now then, missus!  Out of this, will you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A uniformed theater-attendant had advanced toward the
+intruder.  But she did not retreat in terror at his
+truculence.  She drew herself up, and folded her arms upon her
+bosom, and confronted the menial with a haughty, quelling
+stare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Man! who are you to drive me from this threshold?
+Out of the way!  Clear!&mdash;and let me look at her.  Do you
+ask whom?  She! that woman who stands behind you
+smiling, with the white dove perched upon her whiter
+hand.  Times have changed, my girl, since you and I last
+saw each other!  Well, well!  You are the same, whatever
+I may be!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She laughed, a deep, melodious ha, ha, ha! not at all
+like the laughter of everyday people.  Even P. C. Breagh,
+inexperienced as he was in such matters, recognized it as
+the artificial laughter of the stage.  And, profiting by the
+momentary confusion of the functionary, she swept in
+her silken rags toward the person indicated; who looked
+back at her with beautiful stagey eyes from a life-sized
+canvas, wearing a stage costume; standing in a pose of the
+theater; fondling the bird that was palpably a property of
+the scene.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A long gilt-framed mirror hung beside the portrait, and
+to this she pointed with the tattered remnants of her
+theatrical manner, exclaiming with another of the stage
+laughs:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Look upon this picture and on that!  Ye gods!..."  Adding,
+as the guardian of the vestibule, now wroth,
+advanced upon her: "No!  Don't you hustle me.  I'm off,
+governor!  Farewell.  Ta-ta!&mdash;until we meet again!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was gone, but she must have noted the boy who
+stared, fascinated by her haggard beauty and her dreadful
+misery.  In fact, P. C. Breagh, passing on, had barely
+traversed a dozen yards of slushy pavement, before, with
+a bound and rush, a supple movement, predatory and feline,
+the woman emerged from an alley, and was by his side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Who are you?  A waif, like me?  Where do you come
+from?  I saw you looking at me with all your eyes and your
+heart in them!&mdash;I played that scene with the picture and
+the mirror for you!  You know&mdash;&mdash;"  She took P. C. Breagh's
+reluctant arm and leaned to his ear, being taller
+than he was, "There's always one person in the house you
+play to&mdash;and when that person's not there&mdash;the inspiration
+doesn't come.  When it won't, you&mdash;shall I tell you what
+you do if God hasn't made you able to say 'No' to
+them?&mdash;you send out the devils to fetch you brandy and
+champagne!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She laughed wildly and looked round suspiciously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Walk fast!  A policeman's behind us, shadowing us.
+I'll tell you my story as we go.  Did you ever hear of
+Anabel Foltringham?  You must have!  Everybody has!
+I drew crowds to that theater you've seen me kicked out
+of!&mdash;I was beautiful&mdash;great&mdash;famous!  Men gloated over my
+beauty&mdash;they hung upon my every word.  That made the
+devils jealous&mdash;the smooth, servile, obsequious devils in
+white aprons, that you find behind the scenes at every
+theater.  They call them dressers, but I know better, you
+can't deceive me!  You boy, I like your face!  You look
+at me as if I were a Christian, and a man I knew had eyes
+like yours! ... Don't leave me!  I'll make it worth
+your while to stay, only listen! ... I'll teach you all I
+know, make you a greater artist than any of them.  For
+the things that you shall learn from me&mdash;I learned
+myself&mdash;in Hell!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She hung upon the boy's wincing arm, her terrible breath
+scorched him, her burned-out eyes appalled&mdash;her greedy,
+long-nailed clutch found his flesh through his sleeve like
+the talons of a beast of prey.  And he wrenched himself
+free, and fled, sick at heart; fancying that the old boot and
+shoe were running after him, and that the mud-trimmed
+silk gown flapped at his hurrying heels like leathery wings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He broke into his shilling to pass the turnstile of Waterloo
+Bridge, stowed himself in a corner of one of the seated
+niches, and found relief in the presence of a stray kitten,
+sore-footed, hungry-eyed, ginger-haired, that rubbed against
+his legs and responded with appreciative purrs to his
+tentative back-strokings and ear-rubbings, administered
+half-unconsciously, as he wondered why human beings&mdash;under
+certain given circumstances, should be so much more
+beastly than the brutes?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The kitten jumped on his knee.  He saw that its fur had
+been torn&mdash;probably by a dog&mdash;and shuddered at the
+remembrance of having more than once set a rough-haired
+terrier&mdash;a companion of his early boyhood&mdash;to worry stray
+cats&mdash;and enjoyed the carnage resulting.  Why did he
+shudder now?  Because by a feat of imagination only
+possible to one who was beginning to learn what it is to be
+homeless and hunted and desperate, he had got inside the
+ginger kitten's ragged skin, and established between
+himself and what we are content to call inferior creatures a
+bond of brotherhood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Don't you go, Kitty! though I can't make it much
+worth your while to stop," he muttered.  "If I'd got the
+things&mdash;a scrap of lint and a saucer of clean water, a
+needleful of silk and a dab of carbolic ointment&mdash;I could
+patch up that tear&mdash;you'd be as good as new inside of a
+week."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He yawned, and the tramp of booted feet and the shuffle
+of naked ones grew faint in his ears; and presently the rush
+and roar of the Bridge roadway-traffic dulled to a
+hum&mdash;and he was deadly sleepy.  With blundering fingers he
+undid two buttons of the frieze greatcoat and tucked the
+kitten inside&mdash;and after turning round three times, and
+making a great parade of clawing the surface soft enough
+for comfort, it curled up and fell asleep, and its host not
+only slept, but snored.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even in sleep he was dogged and haunted by those three
+tragic figures;&mdash;the broken-down <i>viveur</i>, the child dying
+on gin, the lost creature who had once been Anabel
+Foltringham&mdash;they cropped up in his troubled dreams, over
+and over again.  And he woke up, and it was dark, and a
+sleety rain was stinging him, and even the kitten in his
+breast was cold and cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He got up, aching and stiff, hungry and thirsty, realizing
+that he must have slept for hours.  Big Ben boomed
+twelve.  A midnight express from Charing Cross dragged
+its chain of yellow lights across the railway bridge with
+a hollow roar and rattle.  One or two shapes passed,
+vaguely human in the wintry darkness; a Post Office van
+or so, with an official inside sorting bags by the light of a
+swinging lantern, three or four crawling cabs, a trolley
+with a formless mass upon it, pushed by two indistinct,
+slow-moving figures, coming from the Surrey side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Toward the Strandward end of the Bridge there was
+a light, with murky figures moving about it.  Revealed
+by its two flaring naphtha-lamps, the characteristic hostelry
+of the London gutters, with its gaudy paint and patriotic
+decorations, its clean shelves piled up with homely food,
+and hung with common crockery, its steaming urns of hot
+and comforting drink,&mdash;proved a Godsend to one more
+hungry and homeless vagrant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The shipwrecked mariner of his analogy might have
+known the same sense of relief, seeing his signal answered
+and some stout vessel, flying the red ensign of the British
+Mercantile Marine, bearing down upon his tiny, wave-washed
+raft....  P. C. Breagh was guilty of prodigality
+at that coffee-stall.  A penny cup of coffee, weak, but hot,
+and a twopenny sandwich, consisting of two slices of bread
+smeared with mustard and inclosing something by courtesy
+called ham, but really pertaining to that less stylish part
+of the pig known as "gammon," took the edge off his
+savage appetite.  A ha'porth of milk for the kitten, and
+another ha'porth of ham-trimmings, left him lord of
+seven-pence halfpenny cash.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus, warmed and cheered, he went back to his seat in
+the niche again, noting that every stone bench he passed
+had now its seated group, or prone extended figures.  His
+recently vacated place had its occupant, a thin, barefooted
+young man, indescribably ragged; who slept with his
+famished face&mdash;sharp and yellow as a wedge of cheese&mdash;turned
+to the sky, and the Adam's apple of his lean throat jerking,
+as though something alive, swallowed inadvertently, was
+madly struggling to get out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as he leaned upon the eastward parapet of the
+Bridge with the ginger kitten, now replete and happy,
+purring on his shoulder, and watched the wild welter of
+black water, pale-patched with foam and spume, rushing
+away beneath him, to plunge growling through the arches
+of Blackfriars Bridge, and speed away under Southwark
+and London Bridges, past the Custom House, Traitor's Gate
+and the Docks, between Wapping and Rotherhithe on its
+way to Greenwich and Poplar and Blackwell; and thence,
+by the verdant heights of Charlton to Woolwich, widening
+to a mile here; and so on past Gravesend and the Nore
+Light to where it flows between Whitstable and Foulness
+Point&mdash;eighteen miles broad; a kingly river, carrying on its
+back the commerce of the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wind blew bitter cold from the heights of Hampstead.
+A livid moon blinked through rifts in ink-black
+cloud-wrack above the Shot Towers and a huge mass of
+brewery-buildings on the right.  On the left, revealed in
+glimpses and suggestions by stray moonbeams and
+wind-blown lamp-flares, was a great confusion of trucks and
+trolleys; huge cranes rearing skeleton arms aloft, colossal
+cauldrons, heaps of clay beside yawning trenches, winking
+red eyes of warning for belated wanderers.  All this
+beyond a banking-face of stone masonry with completed piers,
+showed where the Victoria Embankment would be by-and-by.
+Meanwhile chaos reigned; the area would have been
+an appropriate playground for the inhabitants of Bethlem
+Hospital, in hours of relaxation, or on national holidays.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh laughed gallantly at his own conceit, and
+his chapped lips cracked and hurt him.  He staunched the
+bleeding with his handkerchief, conscious that a day might
+come when he should cease to have any use for such an
+article.  Habits die hard with us, but the cleanly ones go
+first, being acquired.  We continue to desire food and
+drink long after we have left off caring about the color of
+our linen&mdash;nay! long after we have become indifferent to
+the fact that we wear no linen at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was bone-weary; his thigh-bones seemed wearing
+through their sockets.  His knees ached, his feet were
+heavy as solid lumps of lead.  It occurred to him that the
+two things most desirable on earth were an arm-chair and
+a roasting fire to toast before.  Failing that, a seat on a
+stone bench, with a north wind gnawing you was better
+than nothing....  He thought that by now one of the
+sleepers in the niches would have wakened up and moved
+on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vain hope.  Where one had withdrawn, his place had
+been filled by three newcomers.  Misery, Dirt, Drunkenness,
+Disease, and Wretchedness herded in those stony
+refuges, mercifully winked at by the patroling policeman
+with the unsavory-smelling bull's-eye.  And strange
+beings perambulated or crept the pavement; 2 a.m. is the
+time when you may see them!&mdash;emerging from the foul
+hiding-places where they pass the daylight hours, to
+wander forth unseen....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such goblin forms, such Gorgon faces, revealed by some
+fitful ray of watery moonlight, or the lamp of a languid,
+belated cab....  It was a waking nightmare, a Dantesque
+vision realized, inconceivably hideous to nerves already
+weakening.  The Celtic strain derived from his father, in
+conjunction with the sensitive romantic nature bequeathed
+by Milly Fermeroy, might have urged their son to end
+things that bleak January night, with a leap from the
+parapet and a plunge into the wild black welter tumbling
+under the Bridge arches.  But P. C. Breagh was not fated
+to join the procession of grim, unconscious voyagers, that
+wallow in the tides and circle in the eddies, flounder under
+the sides of barges, beat upon the piles and bridge-piers,
+and sink to slumber in the river-sludge a while, before they
+rise, more dreadful than before, to journey on again....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His mother's faith plucked him as before, from the
+desperate brink of the temptation; and&mdash;he had worked in
+the dissecting-rooms and walked the hospitals, toward that
+end of failure previously recorded,&mdash;and the hardening did
+yeoman's service now.  But it went badly with him&mdash;at one
+period of that week-long night particularly....  He never
+liked to speak of that experience....  But long, long
+afterward he said to one who loved him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I held on to my reason, and prayed Our Lord for
+daylight.  And&mdash;I don't know how I managed&mdash;but somehow, I
+got through!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He found a seat at length, not knowing by whom or how
+it had been vacated, and dropped into it and slept like the
+dead.  And he awoke in a windless lull,&mdash;to a strange
+bluish-yellow radiance in the sky beyond the great squat
+dome of St. Paul's and the crowding chimneys of the City:
+and felt the stir and thrill and quiver that is the sign of
+this sad world's waking to yet another day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Three homeless women shared the seat with him.  Two
+were awake, watching him not unkindly.  A third slept,
+leaning forward in a huddled attitude, propped by the
+handle of a basket she held upon her knees.  She breathed
+in whistling squeals,&mdash;a night on Waterloo Bridge in
+January encourages bronchitis....  He listened for a moment,
+then with a prodigal impulse, dropped twopence of his
+eightpence into the basket on her lap.  And she woke, and
+said with an Irish accent:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"May the heavens be yer bed!" and slept again, heavily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The second woman snuffled out in the accents of the East
+End:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Gawd bless you, good gen'leman!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The third lifted a tattered scarlet head-shawl, and flashed
+a pair of jet-black Oriental eyes upon him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Fortune and Life!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To her he said, with a creditable effort at cheeriness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I've lost the fortune, mother! the life's about all I've
+got that's left to me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And a good thing too, my gorgious!  Don't yer complain
+of it!  Come, tip us yer vast!"  She added, as he
+stared uncomprehending&mdash;"Eight or left-hand dook&mdash;whichever
+the Line's brightest in.  Have yer a&mdash;No!  I'll
+give yer of my jinnepen for naught!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He held out the broad, strong palm, grimy enough by
+dawn-light.  She peered, spat on the chilly gray pavement
+and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You keep up heart&mdash;there's a change a-coming soon!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Can't come too soon for me!"  His smile was rueful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Keep up heart, I tell yer!" she bade him.  "Yer'll
+travel a long road and a bloody road, and yer'll tramp it
+with the one yer love, and never know it.  Until the end,
+that is, when tute is jasing.  And there's a finer fortune
+than I meant yer to get o' me!  Shake her up, Bet!"  She
+explained, as the other woman turned to rouse the sleeper,
+"Taken a great cold, she has!  We're fetching her to the
+Hospital.  'Tholomewses in Smithell, for the gorgio
+doctors to make her well.  Though that's not where I would
+lie, my rye, and my pipes playing the death-tune.  Shoon
+tu, dilya!  Better shake her again!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Wake up, deer!  There's a good soul!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They stood up, supporting the bronchial Irishwoman
+between them, shaking and straightening their frowsy
+garments&mdash;tidying themselves as the poorest women will.
+Then with, a farewell word they moved on, northward.
+And P. C. Breagh, following them with reddened,
+night-weary eyes, saw his Fate coming, though he did not
+know it, in the person of a small and shabbily-attired
+elderly man.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap14"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XIV
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+He came striding from the Strand side, in a red-hot hurry,
+making as much noise with his boots as three ordinary
+pedestrians.  He wore no overcoat, but was buttoned up
+in a decent black serge frock, having his throat protected
+by a large white cashmere wrapper.  Also he wore gray
+mixture trousers, rather baggy at the knees, and shiny,
+and was crowned with a well-worn silk top-hat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He walked at a great pace, swinging his arms, which were
+inordinately lengthy, and finished with hands of extra size,
+encased in white knitted woolen bags not distantly
+resembling boxing-gloves.  When he reached the middle of
+the Bridge, he stopped and backed against the west parapet,
+folded his arms, and,&mdash;or so it seemed to P. C. Breagh, who
+was watching him for the sole reason that he happened to
+be the only cheerful-looking, decently-clad human being
+within his range of vision&mdash;snuffed the breeze, and
+considered the prospect with a consciously-possessive air.  In
+moving his head sideways, so as to extend his view, his
+sharp black glance encountered that of his neighbor, and
+he nodded, and thus their acquaintance began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I'm glad to see, young gentleman," said the little
+man&mdash;and "<i>My eye!  Do I still look like anything of that sort?</i>"
+was the young gentleman's unvoiced aside: "I'm glad to
+see that you don't number one among the many thousands&mdash;if
+I was to say Millions I shouldn't be guilty of
+exaggeration&mdash;who under-estimate the value of fresh morning
+air.  For my part, without boasting, I may call myself a
+walking Monument to its healthiness, or as you can't put
+up a monument to a live man&mdash;I'll say, a Living Testimonial."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had a yellow, tight-drawn, wearied skin, with a patch
+of rather hectic red on either cheekbone, and his bright
+black eyes twinkled at the bottom of hollow orbits,
+overshadowed by shaggy eyebrows of the deepest black.  When
+he took off his hat to cool his head, from which quite a
+cloud of steam arose, you could perceive that he was
+baldish, and that his bristly hair and large mutton-chop
+side-whiskers owed, like his shaggy eyebrows, their intense
+and aggressive blackness to a conscientious but unskillful
+dyer, for by the cold and searching light of morning,
+delicate nuances of green and purple were seen to mingle with
+their youthful sable, and here and there the roots showed
+grayish-white.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I was given up by the Doctors at the age of twenty,"
+said the little man, "as I had been previously give up by
+'em at eleven and fifteen.  'The boy's in Rapid Decline,'
+says one, 'keep him out o' drafts and give him boiled
+snails and asses' milk.'  My poor mother did her best,
+stopping up window-cracks with paste and paper, and
+stuffing chimneys with old carpets.  And living as we was
+at Hampstead Village, and the Heath being productive in
+snails and donkeys, the rest o' the prescription was easy
+to carry out.  Still I got lankier and went on coughing o'
+nights.  Says Doctor Number Two, 'It's a case of Galloping
+Consumption.  Feed him up, clothe him warmly,
+encourage him to take gentle exercise, and avoid chills
+whatever you do!'  So my mother swadged me up in flannel,
+made me eat a mutton chop every two hours, and trot up
+and down the front-garden for exercise between chops;
+and she'd pour half-a-pint o' porter down me whenever I
+stood still.  And in spite of all her affectionate solicitude,"
+said the little man with a twinkle, "I kep' on wasting, and
+coughing and spitting, and doing everything that a young
+fellow in a galloping consumption could do, short of
+galloping out o' this world into another.  And Doctor Number
+Three says,&mdash;being called in when I was twenty: 'It's
+<i>phthisis pulmonalis</i> in the advanced and incurable stage.
+You can do nothing at all for this young man but get him
+into an Institute for Incurables.  Codliver Oil, Care, and
+Kindness,' so says he, 'may prolong his miserable
+existence a month or two.  For the rest, there's nothing to be
+done!'  If you'll believe me, that news was the death of
+my poor mother.  She'd expected nothing else for years&mdash;and
+yet it killed her at the end!  And I acted as Chief
+Mourner at her funeral," ended the little man with a
+queer twist of his lean, sharp jaws and a momentary
+dimming of his keen black eyes, "in the pouring rain,
+and walked home without an overcoat&mdash;and got wet to the
+skin, and stripped, and rubbed myself dry, and made a
+rough supper of scalding oatmeal porridge, and went to
+bed and slep' with the windows open top and bottom.
+And that was over thirty years ago, and I've never missed
+my morning sponge-over with cold water since; nor never
+shut a window night or day, nor never run up a doctor's
+bill, and don't mean to!  I left off coddling&mdash;once the
+blessed old soul was gone!  Got better&mdash;better still&mdash;always
+expected to die by those who'd knowed mother.  I traveled
+and saw Foreign Parts,&mdash;not specially going about
+to pick the 'ealthiest climates, knocked about abroad&mdash;came
+home and took to Business, and have taken to it ever
+since, as you may see.  My health is robust," he made a
+show of hitting his chest again, but thought better of it.
+"I live plain, and make a point of getting Fresh Air into
+my system whenever possible.&mdash;This is the place I come to,
+as a rule, for the morning's supply.  I take it on
+Blackfriars Bridge after the dinner-hour, the eating-house I
+patronize being on Ludgate Hill," he added.  "And&mdash;I
+don't know whether you happen to be a student of old
+Bill Shakespeare, but there are some lines of his which
+might be twisted into applying to me."  He drew a deep
+breath and delivered himself as follows:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Some are born Tough, some achieve Toughness&mdash;others
+have Toughness thrust upon them."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He smote his chest hard with a muffled hand, and coughed
+in that rather hollow fashion, adding: "Without vanity,
+I may consider myself as belonging to the latter class!
+Eh?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh agreed that the speaker might be considered
+as belonging to the latter class.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For at this moment I am as fresh as paint," said the
+little man proudly, "and as lively as a kitten, yet I have
+been up and about and on my legs all night!  I left
+our place of business at 3.20 a.m., reached Charing Cross
+by 3.30, was on the platform when the Dover Boat Train
+steamed in&mdash;bringing mails and passengers that have
+crossed in the Night Boat from Cally&mdash;took over a
+shorthand report from a Special Correspondent&mdash;who has been
+to Paris to gather details of a political murder," he tapped
+the breast of his black frock-coat, which showed the bulging
+outline of a thick notebook.  "And in the absence of our
+News Editor&mdash;who's been sent to Brummagem to report
+Mr. Bright's speech on Popular Education, Irish Amelioration,
+and Free Trade,&mdash;Parliamentary affairs being at a
+standstill this holiday season,&mdash;I shall hand 'em to the
+Senior Sub., who'll distribute the stuff and have it set up
+by the time the Chief drops in from Putney at eleven.  It's
+for to-morrow's issue, following the ten-line telegram we
+publish this morning.  A column-and-a-half of Latest
+Intelligence!" the little man screwed up his eyes and licked
+his lips as though reveling in the flavor of some rare
+gastronomic delicacy.  "And if I had the say as to the
+setting of it&mdash;which I haven't!&mdash;and was free to indulge
+my predilection for showy printing&mdash;which I never shall
+be!&mdash;it should be headed with caps an inch high&mdash;and
+spaced and leaded all the way down."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His black eyes snapped: his hectic cheeks grew fiery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Headed with inch-high caps, ah! and spaced and leaded
+from the top to the bottom.  Fancy how it 'ud lay siege
+to the Public Eye, and draw the Public's coppers!  When
+I shut my eyes I can fair see the editions running out."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He recited, marking out the lines and spaces with a
+finger encased in white woolen:
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  A PRINCE MURDERS<br>
+  <span style="font-size: smaller">ONE MAN AND</span><br>
+  FIRES AT ANOTHER<br>
+  <span style="font-size: smaller">IN HIS OWN</span><br>
+  GILDED DRAWING-ROOM.<br>
+  PARIS SENSATION.<br>
+  <span style="font-size: smaller">COUSIN OF</span><br>
+  THE FRENCH EMPEROR KILLS<br>
+  A JOURNALIST<br>
+  <span style="font-size: smaller">ON THE VERY DAY WHEN</span><br>
+  THE FRENCH LEGISLATIVE<br>
+  BODY<br>
+  <span style="font-size: smaller">MEET TO INAUGURATE THE NEW ERA</span><br>
+  <span style="font-size: smaller">OF CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT</span><br>
+  UNDER NAPOLEON III.<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+His eyes snapped, his hectic cheeks flamed, he was
+evidently launched on a subject that was near the heart
+beating beneath the bulgy pocket-book.  He talked fast;
+and as he talked he waved his arms, and gesticulated with
+the large hands encased in the woolly boxing-gloves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I cherish ambitions, perhaps you'll say, above my
+calling, which I don't mind owning is that of Newspaper
+Publishers' Warehouseman.  Perhaps I do&mdash;perhaps I
+don't!  My own opinion is I'm before my time, a kind of
+Anachronism the wrong way round," said the little man
+rather ruefully, "and rightly belong to&mdash;say forty years
+hence.  As the poet Shakespeare says, and if it wasn't him
+it ought to have been!  'Sweet are the uses of
+Advertisement.'  I'm a believer in Advertisement, always have been
+and always shall be!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His garrulity was an individual and not unpleasant trait,
+implying confidence in others' sympathy.  He went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Being Nobody in particular, my views have never been
+took up and acted on.  Though I enjoy a good deal of
+confidence and am&mdash;I hope I am!&mdash;respected in my place.
+For as Solomon said, somewhere in Proverbs&mdash;'Designs
+are strengthened by counsels,' and our Chief himself hasn't
+been too proud to say, on occasion: 'Knewbit, what would
+you do in this or that case?'  Such as you see me, I am
+often at the 'Ouse of Commons, when sittings are late and
+speeches have to be jotted down in mouthfuls and carried
+away and set up in snacks....  For my constitution is of
+that degree of toughness&mdash;sleep or no sleep matters little
+to me, and that I am as fresh at this moment as you are,"
+he bit off the end of a yawn, "I wouldn't mind betting a
+sixpence now!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said P. C. Breagh, at last getting in a word edgeways:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If you lost&mdash;and you would lose!&mdash;and paid&mdash;and I
+expect you'd pay!&mdash;my capital would be doubled.  I'm not a
+young swell who has got up early to look at London.  I'm
+a vagrant on the streets&mdash;and it strikes me I must look
+like it.  To-day I've got to find work of some kind.  Can
+you give me a job in your warehouse?  I'm strong and
+willing and honest&mdash;up to now!  But by G&mdash;! if stealing
+a bunch of turnips off a costermonger's barrow will get me
+a full belly and a clean bed in prison, I expect I shall have
+to do it before long, if I can't find work anywhere!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Bless my soul!" said the garrulous little man
+excitedly.  "And I thought you were a Medical Student or
+an artist (some of 'em aren't over-given to clothes-brushes
+and soap-and-water), and here I stood a-jawing and you
+starving all the time! ... Work&mdash;of course you shall have
+work, though I can't promise it'll be the kind o' work that's
+fit for an educated young gentleman&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Any work is fit for a gentleman," snarled P. C. Breagh,
+"that a decent man can do!  What I want is&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What you want is&mdash;Breakfast and a wash and brush-up!"
+cried the little man excitedly.  "And that you must
+go to Miss Ling and get.  Say Mr. Knewbit sent you&mdash;I'm
+Knewbit,&mdash;Christian name Solomon.  It's No. 288 Great
+Coram Street&mdash;second turn to your right above Russell
+Square.  Cross the Strand and go up Wellington Street and
+Bow Street, cross Long Acre and ... but you're too
+dead-beat to walk it.  Take a growler&mdash;it'll be eighteenpence
+from here unless the cabby's lost to every sense of decency.
+Borrow the money from me&mdash;here it is!  I give you my
+word you shall be able to pay me back to-morrow.  Here
+is a cab!  Hi!  Phew'w!"  Mr. Knewbit whistled scientifically,
+and the preternaturally red-nosed driver of an old
+and jingling four-wheeler pulled up beside the curb as
+P. C. Breagh stammered out:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I&mdash;I can't thank! ... You're too confoundedly
+kind! ... and I'd begun to think that all men were thieves
+or scoundrels&mdash;except a poor, sick beggar of a swell I met
+yesterday, whose wife and children shun him and whose
+valet bullies him!  I can't refuse, you know! ... Things
+are too..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The fare will be two shillings if you talk one minute
+longer!" warned Mr. Knewbit, opening the door of the
+straw-carpeted, moldy-smelling vehicle.  "I can see
+extortion in that man's eye.  I'm a judge of character, that's
+what I am.  Bless my soul!  Is that kitten yours?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the ginger Tom, with arched back and erect tail, was
+walking round P. C. Breagh's legs, purring insinuatingly,
+and his companion of the night's vigil said hesitatingly,
+looking at the meager, homeless mite:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He seems to think so!  And&mdash;he helped me through
+last night.  Would you mind if I took him?  I'll pay for
+his keep as soon as ever I&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Knewbit shouted in a violent hurry:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"In with you!  Cat and all!  Don't apologize!  Miss
+Ling adores 'em!  Three in the house already&mdash;waste bits
+left on the dustbin for needy strangers.  Don't forget!
+288 Great Coram Street, Russell Square.  Drive on,
+cabby!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He added, dancing up and down excitedly on the pavement,
+as the jingling four-wheeler rolled on, with the pair
+of castaways:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Lord!  if I only had the setting up of that young
+fellow's story, how I would give it 'em in leaded capitals!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+He closed his eyes in ecstasy and saw, in large black
+letters standing out across the clear horizon of the new
+day to which London was waking:
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  LONDON DRAMA.<br>
+  BEGGARED HEIR TO WEALTH<br>
+  ROBBED.<br>
+  CAST ON THE STREETS!<br>
+  SOLE COMPANION A KITTEN!<br>
+  PATHETIC STORY.<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+"Not that I know he is the heir to wealth, but it looks
+well, uncommon!  Uncommon well, it looks!" said Mr. Knewbit.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap15"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XV
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+When the Editorial Staff of the <i>Early Wire</i> had gone
+home, or to the Club, by cab or private brougham or on
+foot, in the blackest hours of the night or the smallest
+hours of the morning; when the Printing Staff had filed
+out, pale and respectably attired, or thundered down the
+iron-shod staircases in grimy, inky, oily <i>déshabillé</i>, then the
+Publishing Staff trooped in and took possession.  And, as
+the lines of carts backed up to the curb, and were filled by
+brawny shirt-sleeved men, who tossed the huge bales of
+newspapers from hand to hand with the nonchalant skill
+of jugglers doing tricks with willow-pattern plates and
+oranges, the Business Department began to empty so much
+that you could see the eyebrows of clerks behind the
+iron-nailed unplaned deal counters; and Mr. Knewbit, slackening
+in his terrific energy, would cease keeping count, and
+tallying, and writing cabalistic signs on huge packages with
+the stump of blue pencil that never was used up.  And he
+would mop his face and say&mdash;in the same invariable formula:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Well! we've broke the back of the day's work, and
+lucky if no one can say no worse of us!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later on, when the last newspaper-cart had been gorged
+and rattled away, and the last newspaper-boy had darted
+out with his armful, and his mouth open for the yell that
+would issue from it the moment his bare feet hit the
+pavement of Fleet Street, and the office of the <i>Early Wire</i> and
+all the other offices that had got off the Morning Issue had
+an air of dozing with blinking eyes and mouths half open&mdash;when
+the Evening Papers were at the height of strenuous
+effort,&mdash;Mr. Knewbit would arrange the limited supply
+of hair remaining on his cranium with a pocket-comb,
+titivate his whiskers by the aid of a tiny scrap of looking-glass
+nailed inside his desk-lid, dust the blacks off his
+collar, straighten his cravat&mdash;which boasted a breastpin
+that was an oval plaque of china, painted with a miniature
+of a young lady with flowing ringlets, rosy cheeks, white
+arms and shoulders, pink legs and a diaphanous tutu,
+dancing, crowned with roses in front of a sylvan
+waterfall,&mdash;and betake himself out to dine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sometimes he would patronize the "Old Cheshire
+Cheese" chop-house, where they gave you beefsteak
+puddings on Saturdays.  Or "The Cock" would have his
+custom, or he would drop in at an eating-house in St. Paul's
+Churchyard, where Irish stew, boiled beef with dumplings
+and carrots, or tripe and onions were the staple dishes in
+winter months.  In summer you got roast mutton and
+green peas and gooseberry tart with custard; but whatever
+the season or the dish, it was always washed down
+with whisky-and-water, or gin-and-lemonade, or the
+strongest of strong beer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For this particular tavern was patronized by the penny-a-liners
+of Paternoster Row and the vicinity; out-at-elbows,
+and generally seedy-looking literary free-lances, who picked
+up a living by inditing touching tracts and poignant
+pamphlets for religious Societies bearing arresting titles,
+such as:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"STOP!  YOU ARE OUT AT THE GATHERS!  Or, The
+Tale of a Skirt," and "DEAD LOCKS FOR LIVE HEADS!  By
+A Converted Hairdresser."  Or biographical accounts of
+the brief lives and protracted deaths of Little E&mdash;&mdash;, aged
+seven, or Miss Madeline P&mdash;&mdash; of X&mdash;&mdash;.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bearded men these, with bulbous noses, studded with
+ruby pimples; full of strange oaths, reveling in profane
+jest and scurrilous talk.  Lanky youths with hollow eyes,
+uncut hair and crimson neckties, who boasted of having
+cast off all shackles, bonds and fetters, civil, social, moral
+and religious, and dreamed in their wilder moments of
+the inauguration of a second British Commonwealth, and
+the reign of a New Era of Socialism, and the planting of
+the Tree of Liberty in Buckingham Palace Courtyard....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And over their strong meats, and the stronger liquors
+with which they moistened them, these would discuss the
+plots of tracts, and so forth, seasoning their discourse with
+highly-spiced pleasantries and salacious witticisms, jesting
+in ribald sort at all things upon earth and elsewhere;
+until&mdash;as Mr. Knewbit frequently said&mdash;you expected the ceiling
+to come down and strike 'em speechless, and fancied you
+saw wicked little hellish flames playing about the cutlery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not that I ever read any of their stuff, you know!"
+he explained to P. C. Breagh, "though I am a man that,
+to a certain extent, might be considered a reader.  You've
+seen my library on the shelf by my bed-head, and though
+three books might be held&mdash;in the opinion of some people&mdash;to
+constitute rather a limited library, they're the three
+best books that ever were written or ever will be.  Bar
+none!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was a Christian believer himself; of the easy-going,
+undenominational, non-Church-going kind.  And when
+Sunday came round, Miss Ling, after seeing the beef and
+potatoes and Yorkshire-pudding safely into the oven, would
+charge him to watch over the same and guard them from
+burning; and put on her best bonnet and pop over to the
+Christian Mission Army Hall that used to be in Judd
+Street, W.C., for a supply of red-hot doctrine sufficient to
+stand her in a week of working-days, while Mr. Knewbit
+smoked, kept an eye on the cooking, and occasionally
+dipped into his library.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A popular edition of the Plays and Poems by one William
+Shakespeare, together with a stout and bulky volume,
+"Gallowglass's Encyclopaedia of Literary and Typographical
+Anecdote," and a worm-eaten, black-leather-bound
+copy of the Bible&mdash;as translated from the Latin Vulgate
+and published by the English College at Douay A.D. 1609,
+formed Mr. Knewbit's library.  In the pages of these, their
+owner frequently stated it as his opinion, might be found
+the finest literature in the world.  He always ended:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And I bought Gallowglass for half-a-crown off a
+barrow in Camberwell, and Shakespeare was give me by a
+young fellow who found him dullish reading&mdash;and the
+Book that beats 'em both I picked up in the fourpenny
+box at a second-hand bookseller's in Clement's Inn!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+King Solomon and the son of Sirach of Jerusalem, with
+the Prophets Isaiah and Hosea, were Mr. Knewbit's favorite
+Old Testament authors.  Of the Books of Wisdom and
+Ecclesiasticus he never wearied.  One wonders how much
+he understood, but he quarried diligently in their pages,
+and sometimes emerged into the light figuratively laden
+with jewels.  Marvelous passages would drive home to the
+brain of the man in blinding flashes of illumination, and
+he would lose the place in his excitement,&mdash;being an
+unmethodical if omnivorous reader,&mdash;and never be able to
+find them again....  So he quoted his Prophets from
+memory and generally inaccurately, yet seldom without
+point or inappropriately.  At other times, wearied with
+their glorious obscurity, he reverted to the plainest and
+simplest of all the stories ever written, and the sweetest
+and the saddest too....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He spoke of the Saviour as though he had known Him....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I never could forgive them fellers"&mdash;I conceive he
+meant the Disciples&mdash;"for cutting off and leaving Him to
+be pinched by that gang in the Garden.  It was mean,
+that's what I call it.  Mean!  But I will say they owned
+up their shabbiness in their writings afterward.  Though
+you notice they hurry over that part.  And I'm not
+surprised!  That young feller downstairs yet, Maria?"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+This was at eight o 'clock on the Sunday morning
+following Mr. Knewbit's meeting with Carolan on Waterloo
+Bridge.  Miss Ling, stepping nimbly about the big front
+kitchen in the basement, busy with her task of getting
+breakfast, returned that "Mr. Breagh had got up and gone
+out at half-past six."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For a shave?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Knewbit rubbed his own bristly chin rather dubiously
+as he asked the question.  Miss Ling, impaling a
+round of stale loaf upon a tin toasting-fork, shook her
+neat head and answered in the negative.  Mr. Breagh had
+mentioned that he was going to church.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To church....  We'll hope he has gone," said Mr. Knewbit
+still more dubiously, "though between me and
+you and the toasting-fork it sounds too good to be true....
+And 'The Brunswick Arms' is handy round the corner.
+If the young man don't rattle at the area-gate by the time
+you've finished your toasting, I shall made bold to go and
+look for him at the Bar.  Hulloa!  Here he is!  Now,
+that's what you might call a pleasant disappointment!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For he had glanced up at the strip of area-railings
+commanded by the upper panes of the kitchen window, and
+seen the legs of P. C. Breagh stride by at a great rate, stop,
+turn back, and descend the area-steps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are to see Miss Ling receiving his morning greeting
+with the wide smile that revealed an unbroken row of
+sound white teeth ("every one her own," as Mr. Knewbit
+would say) and made her thin, triangular face so pleasant.
+She was a staid spinster, owning to forty-nine, who would
+have died rather than confess to being fifty.  Her magnificent
+hair, genuinely black and shining like ebony, was
+coiled upon the top of her head too tightly for beauty.
+Her well-marked eyebrows and candid brown eyes slanted
+a little upward at the temples, and her skin was rather
+yellowish than olive.  She was of a flat and bony figure,
+active and sound and tough, and, in a plain way, a
+first-rate cook and caterer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Though when I left her Ladyship the Countess of
+Crowmarsh," said Miss Ling, "after fourteen years spent
+in the Castle nurseries, gradually rising from nursery-maid
+to under-nurse, and then becoming what his Lordship was
+pleased to call Head of the Bottle Department&mdash;a very
+humorous nobleman his Lordship was at times!&mdash;I had
+forgotten all I ever knew of my dear mother's
+kitchen-teaching&mdash;she was a cook, Mr. Breagh, who had lived with
+the first in the land! and when&mdash;being pensioned by the
+family&mdash;I decided to risk the step of taking this house,
+and letting it out to lodgers, preferring single gentlemen&mdash;I
+was forced to engage a widowed person to prepare
+their meals at first."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I remember her," said Mr. Knewbit, with his mouth
+full of poached eggs and bacon.  "She could under-boil a
+pertater and calcine a chop with any elderly female I ever
+yet come across.  Here, pussy! if you ain't too proud for
+rasher-rinds?  And not you!" He leaned to the hearth&mdash;he
+was sitting with his back to the glowing range, and
+dropped his offering under the nose of the ginger kitten,
+which, having already disposed of a saucer of bread-and-milk,
+instantly grabbed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To-morrow," said P. C. Breagh, looking up from his
+rapidly-emptying plate with the smile which Miss Ling
+had already decided was pleasant, "I hope to prove to you
+that, like the kitten, I am not too proud for anything that
+comes in my way."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Presently, presently!" said Mr. Knewbit sharply.
+"Everything in good time! ... I don't like to be hurried.
+And&mdash;what did you say was the property you'd left with
+the&mdash;the Greedy Guts who runs that Euston Road hotel?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There were three boxes of books&mdash;chiefly works on
+medicine and surgery."  Carolan reflected a moment,
+stirring his coffee with one of Miss Ling's Britannia-metal
+spoons.  "And two trunks, with clothes and all that.
+Things I valued.  My student's cap and <i>schläger</i>, and the
+silver-mounted beer-horn the English Colony gave me, and&mdash;a
+Crucifix that was my mother's."  The speaker blinked
+and spoke a little huskily: "Used to hang over my bed
+when I was a little chap in frocks."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Don't be cast down.  Some wave o' luck may wash
+your property ashore at your feet one of these days.  What
+I will say is&mdash;I wish I had the setting-up of that story for
+the paper!" said Mr. Knewbit, handing in his plate for
+fried bread.  "Supposing you,"&mdash;he jerked his eyes at
+Carolan&mdash;"had any talent in the literary line, it 'ud be
+worth your while to throw off a quarter-col. of descriptive
+stuff."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Relating to my experiences in that fellow's bug-ridden
+lodging-house?  Why, I don't doubt I could&mdash;after a
+fashion," said P. C. Breagh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"After a fashion won't do.  Write it the best you know!
+Sit down at the kitchen-table here, when Maria's gone to
+her prayer-meeting and I've got my pipe and Solomon to
+keep me quiet,&mdash;and blacken half a quire o' paper&mdash;there's
+plenty in the drawer there!&mdash;with the story&mdash;told short,
+crisp and plain, and with a dash o' humor, and within
+four hundred words.  It would space out lovely!" said
+Mr. Knewbit, arranging imaginary head-lines on the clean
+coarse tablecloth.
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  LONDON SHARK<br>
+  <span style="font-size: smaller">VICTIMIZES STUDENT!</span><br>
+  HE GRABS HIS GOODS<br>
+  <span style="font-size: smaller">AND LETS HIM GO!</span><br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"Ah, dear me!  If I had had your education.  But it's too
+late to alter that.  What were you saying, Maria?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Ling was hoping that Mr. Breagh had passed a
+comfortable night?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"First rate, ma'am, many thanks to you!" returned the
+object of her solicitude.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For," said Miss Ling, with a homely kind of dignity,
+"if anything was wanting, Mr. Breagh must make excuses.
+The arrival being unlooked-for and the notice very short."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Dropped on you out of the skies, didn't he, Maria?"
+chuckled Mr. Knewbit.  "And you've put him, for the
+present, in Mr. Ticking's bed!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"In Mr. Ticking's bed!&mdash;Mr. Ticking," explained Miss
+Ling, turning to the new arrival, "who rents our
+third-floor front, being in the country for his holidays."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh expressed the hope that Mr. Ticking would
+not be offended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Lord bless you, no!" responded Mr. Knewbit.  "Ticking's
+an agreeable feller.  He'd take you rather as a Boon
+than otherwise.  Contributes a column of cheerful, gossipy
+items weekly to half-a-dozen of the suburban and district
+newspapers that are springing up around us like&mdash;like
+mushrooms.  Always on the look-out for copy&mdash;Ticking is!
+Now Mounteney&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mr. Mounteney&mdash;who is also away on his vacation, and
+rents the front sitting-room on our ground-floor, and the
+bedroom behind it," said Miss Ling, "is a gentleman
+who&mdash;owing to the nature of his professional employment&mdash;is
+very refined and sensitive."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Edits the Health and Beauty column of the <i>Ladies'
+Mentor</i>," said Mr. Knewbit, crunching fried bread noisily,
+"and is altogether too ladylike a gentleman to take a
+liberty with.  For the rest, we are Full Up.  To begin
+with, I occupy a combined bed-and-sitting room behind
+this kitchen, and Miss Ling occupies the large front garret
+bedroom; the back one being partitioned off as a Box and
+Lumber room, and a bedroom for the servant gal, who is
+now having her breakfast in the scullery, as me and Miss
+Ling agreed would be more considerate toward you....
+Coming down again to the first-floor, the front parlor and
+back bedroom are rented by a German gentleman, Mr. Van
+Something&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Herr von Rosius," interpolated Miss Ling, "who is a
+teacher at the Institute of Languages in Berners Street....
+Second-floor front, another combined bed-and-sitting
+... Monsieur Meguet, a French gentleman who is studying
+Prints at the British Museum.  Second-floor back, Miss
+Kindell, who is a copier of Pictures at the National Gallery,
+and a sweet artist.  Third-floor, Mr. Ticking&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You represent him for the present," said Mr. Knewbit,
+nodding at Carolan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The trouble is, and I hope Mr. Breagh will forgive me
+for mentioning it," hesitated Miss Ling, "that Mr. Ticking
+comes back to-morrow night...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And when does Miss Morency go? ... Miss Morency,"
+explained Mr. Knewbit without waiting for an answer,
+"is a young person who don't give satisfaction,&mdash;regarded
+as a lodger,&mdash;and there you have the truth in a
+nutshell&mdash;Brazil for choice!  And Miss Ling's good-nature
+has led her, before now, to take in such people, and be
+taken in by 'em too, I'm bound to say!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The little man broke off as Miss Ling, mindful of
+P. C. Breagh's flushed and uneasy countenance, coughed
+warningly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Miss Morency has been brought up very well, and is&mdash;she
+has told me,&mdash;the daughter of a clergyman in Hertfordshire,"
+she explained as Mr. Knewbit buried his confusion
+in his coffee-cup.  "I cannot but think it right&mdash;under the
+circumstances&mdash;to give Miss Morency a little time to turn
+round."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She's been turning round for eight weeks," said Mr. Knewbit,
+rubbing his nose irritably.  "And&mdash;if I was you,
+I'd have my latchkey back."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To ask it would be a want of confidence, which would
+wound Miss Morency, and upset her," returned Miss Ling,
+who had risen and was gathering the breakfast things
+together in rather an agitated way.  She added: "And
+willfully to hurt a person's feelings is a thing I could not
+bring myself to do, Solomon.  And she goes out, evening
+after evening, poor thing, to call on relatives who live in
+distant parts of London, and is hardly ever back until very
+late indeed!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She come in at two o'clock this morning," said
+Mr. Knewbit, screwing up his eyes meaningly at Carolan.
+"And&mdash;being comparatively early myself on Saturdays&mdash;I
+heard her&mdash;just as I was getting between the sheets.
+And being anxious to solve the problem as to Why a young
+creature like that should go out walking on two feet&mdash;and
+them remarkably small and pretty ones!&mdash;and come back
+with Four&mdash;and two of 'em uncommon big and heavy
+ones, I slipped up the kitchen-stairs and looked round the
+corner-post.  '<i>The seeing eye and the hearing ear,</i>' said my
+namesake, '<i>the Lord hath made them both</i>' ... and then,
+just as I was a-going to ring the garret-bell and bring you
+down out of bed in your curl-papers, Maria, I remembered,
+'<i>Lie not in wait for wickedness in the house of the just, nor
+spoil his rest,</i>' 'him' being understood as 'her,' for you're
+a just woman!  But judgment must be executed upon the
+daughter of Rahab, whether it's Sunday or whether it
+ain't!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"When you begin quoting from the prophets, it takes a
+cleverer than me to understand you," said Miss Ling,
+flushed to the top of her high cheekbones.  "But as a
+woman that's her elder, I will stand up for that poor
+unprotected young creature against any man that tries to
+take her character away!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It's nearly time for the Prayer Meeting at the
+Headquarters Branch Hall of your Christian Mission Army,"
+said Mr. Knewbit, looking at an enormous silver watch he
+wore, and always set by the Tower clock at Westminster,
+and calmly taking the poker from the rail above the
+kitchen-range.  "If you'll put on your bonnet and go,
+what I have made up my mind to do will be comfortably
+over before the General, or the Colonel, or whichever of 'em
+is set down to give you Blood and Fire this morning, has
+fairly warmed to the fight.  But if you want to be upset
+and made uncomfortable in your mind for a week
+afterwards&mdash;you'll stop!  You will?  Very well, and why not
+in your own house?  Mr. Breagh, will you kindly follow
+with Miss Ling and act as Reserve Force in this
+emergency?  I thank you, young gentleman!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And armed with the poker, Mr. Knewbit left the kitchen,
+followed by Carolan and the landlady, closely attended
+by the ginger kitten, and mounted the stairs to the
+third-floor back.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap16"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XVI
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+It was a sordid little scene that followed, but for the
+sake of the good woman whose unaffected charity and
+kindly feeling illumined its murky darkness, it shall be
+recorded here....
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Knewbit, arriving at Miss Morency's door, thumped
+on it, receiving no answer beyond the hurried shooting of
+the bolt, and the scuffling of slippered feet across the
+carpet.  Roused by the meaningful silence to indignation, he
+delivered himself in the following terms:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You inside there&mdash;and you're aware why I don't address
+you as a young lady!&mdash;I'm going to trouble you to
+unfasten that door!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No, you ain't!" said a feminine voice from within,
+defiantly.  "Go downstairs and shave yourself, you silly
+old man!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A thickish masculine chuckle greeted this sally.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"When we have got you and your companion out of
+this respectable house," quoth the wrathful Mr. Knewbit,
+"I may have time to attend to my Sunday twylett.  Not
+before!  Are you a-going to undo this door?  Because, if
+you won't, I am a-going to bust it with the poker!
+Once!"  He applied the end of the weapon named to a panel with
+a crack in it.  "Twice!&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Stop!" cried Miss Ling, and Mr. Knewbit lowered the
+poker.  "One moment, Solomon!&mdash;I want to speak to
+her!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Forgetful of her neat Sabbath attire, she went down
+upon her knees before the door, as Mr. Knewbit joined
+P. C. Breagh upon the staircase, and laid her work-worn hand
+as gently and persuasively upon the threatened panel, as
+if it had been a human bosom housing an obdurate heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Miss Morency!  Don't be afraid, my dear!  Maria
+Ling it is a-speaking to you!"  She waited an instant, and
+receiving no response, went on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mr. Knewbit has got it in his head&mdash;he best knows
+why!&mdash;that you're not Alone in that room, in a manner
+of speaking....  Open the door and prove to him he's
+wrong; or tell me on your solemn honor&mdash;before the God
+who made you and me both women!&mdash;that he's mistaken,
+and I'll believe you&mdash;and ask your pardon&mdash;and we'll all
+go downstairs again!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a silence within the room, and then a thick
+whispering voice and a thin whispering voice held indistinct
+colloquy.  P. C. Breagh and Mr. Knewbit exchanged
+looks, Miss Ling grew pale, rose, and withdrew from the
+door.  Her clean Sunday handkerchief was in her hand and
+the hand shook, and her mouth was shut tightly, as, with
+much shuffling, an obstacle&mdash;probably a chest of drawers&mdash;was
+removed from the other side, the key was turned,
+and the bolt withdrawn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The door opened.  The defiant figure and the angry
+painted face of a good-looking young woman were revealed
+beyond the threshold.  She wore a gaudy dressing-gown
+trimmed with cheap lace, and a butterfly cap in the
+prevailing mode was set upon her mound of dyed hair.  Her
+companion might have been the manager of a restaurant,
+or a West End shopwalker.  His face was sallow with
+debauch, and his eyes were red from liquor or sleeplessness.
+With the rosebud of the previous night still drooping in
+the buttonhole of his fashionably cut frock-coat, and the
+mud of the previous night soiling his trouser-ends and his
+shiny boots and drab spats, and his silk hat fixed firmly
+on his head as though in anticipation of a scuffle, he stood
+behind the woman; maintaining a sulky silence, gripping
+his cane in a hand that was mottled and shaky.  And the
+roll of his eyes said "Two of 'em!" as his glance took in
+Mr. Knewbit and P. C. Breagh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the rouged, defiant young woman in the flyaway
+cap, turning a glare of defiance upon her landlady:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You see now whether that"&mdash;she employed a term
+reflecting on the moral character of her assailant&mdash;"was
+mistaken, or whether he wasn't, I hope?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Returned Miss Ling, looking mildly at the brazen
+countenance:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I see!  May the Lord forgive you, poor ruined young
+creature.  But for Him having given me a good, good
+mother, I might be standing where you are now!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Never!" said Mr. Knewbit under his breath.  The
+kind soul went on without heeding him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Were you led away? ... Was it the first time? ... Whether
+or no, it's not too late to change, and lead a life
+of decency.  As for this&mdash;man...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young woman interrupted, with lowered eyes
+shunning her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"We're to be married!  He's promised me upon his oath!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her companion purpled furiously, and broke out:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You're lying, you&mdash;&mdash;!  I picked you up in the
+Haymarket!  Do you think I'm afraid of you and your bullies
+there?  Stand back!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fulminating threats, he thrust roughly past Miss Ling,
+driving her, possibly not with intention, against the landing
+wall.  She gave a little cry, and the poker fell....  He
+bellowed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"&mdash;&mdash; you!  You've broken my arm, you&mdash;blackguard!
+Where's the police?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A grip of steel shut upon his scruff, and the voice
+belonging to the grip said cheerfully:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"In the street.  Come down and look for 'em, my man!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His protests were drowned in the rattling of his boot-heels
+on the oil-cloth-covered staircase, in the violence of
+his transit to the ground-floor.  There, as Mr. Knewbit,
+dodging past, opened the hall door, he was shot from its
+threshold as a human bullet from a spring-cannon, even
+then supplying a sensational turn at the Royal Alhambra
+Theater&mdash;rolled down the steps, gathering momentum,
+and colliding with a late milk-truck that happened to be
+passing, suffered abrasions and the ruin of his smart
+frock-coat.  Leaving the victim of righteous judgment to appease
+the justly-indignant milkman with some of the silver shed
+from his trousers-pockets in the transit, Mr. Knewbit
+slammed the door, and crowed, slapping P. C. Breagh
+heartily upon the back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Neatly done!  You could get a well-paid job as pitcher-out
+at a West End bar, if you'd nothing better than your
+muscles to rely upon....  Wait a bit!"  He vanished
+upstairs, walking as softly as a cat does, to return and
+explain:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The pumps are at work up there!  Both of 'em
+crying&mdash;Rahab's Daughter and Solomon's Virtuous Woman, I
+mean....  You remember the text?  '<i>Her price is above
+rubies.</i>'  I remembered it when I saw her sitting dropping
+tears upon that trollop's head, that was a-lying in her lap.
+Well, well!"  He led the way down into the kitchen,
+muttering, "'<i>As golden pillars upon bases of silver, so are
+the firm feet upon the soles of a steady woman....</i>' and
+'<i>Her husband's heart delighteth in her!</i>'  Sit down, you
+must want a breather ... '<i>Delighteth in her</i>'&mdash;or would
+have if she'd married one capable of appreciating a
+character like hers."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seeing that the mind of Mr. Knewbit was still running
+upon Miss Ling, P. C. Breagh ventured to ask:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And has she never entertained any intention of&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Knewbit nodded sagely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Once.  You might say&mdash;there has been a Romance in
+her life, without exaggeration.  When in service with that
+family of Nobs you've heard her mention,&mdash;about twenty-four
+years ago, when she was a strapping young woman of
+twenty-six&mdash;she got engaged to an underbutler&mdash;a young
+man with an affectionate nature and a changeable disposition,
+in conjunction with weak lungs.  Weak lungs&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Knewbit opened the oven-door and looked in to
+ascertain how the mutton and Yorkshire pudding were getting
+on.  "I've had weak lungs myself, but never found 'em
+an excuse for villainy!  Mph! ... Don't smell like
+burning&mdash;pretty right, it seems to me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sat down in his Windsor arm-chair near the hearth,
+stretched out his carpet-slippered feet, and broke out:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So&mdash;in the interests o' them weak lungs of his, his
+master's son, Lord Wallingbrook&mdash;to whom he sometimes
+acted as valet, took him in that capacity on a steam-yacht-trip
+from Plymouth, via Trinidad to the Southern Seas.
+And they cruised among the Islands of the Pacific for
+months&mdash;a gay party of bachelors amusing themselves!&mdash;and&mdash;in
+the Paumotu Group&mdash;this precious young man
+of Maria's up-stick and took French leave....  And that's
+all.  And whether his master knew more than he'd tell&mdash;that's
+uncertain.  Anyhow, a letter arrived six months
+after the steam-yacht dropped anchor at Plymouth, to
+say that he was safe and well and happy&mdash;but was never
+coming Home any more.  And she believes ... 'Ssh!
+Here she is!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was Miss Ling, who had been crying, undoubtedly, for
+her Sunday bonnet-strings were spotted as with rain, and
+her clean handkerchief was reduced to a damp wad.  Said
+she:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I have talked to that poor thing upstairs, as a woman
+of my age is privileged to do.  And she has softened
+wonderful, Solomon, and from what she has owned&mdash;has
+seen the shame and wickedness of her life clear, and longed
+to be delivered from it&mdash;this many and many a day, I'm
+sure!  So if you'll kindly whistle up a four-wheeler, I'll
+make bold&mdash;being late for the speaking at the Judd Street
+Branch Hall!&mdash;to take her down to the Christian Mission
+Army Headquarters in the Whitechapel Road.  Where I
+shall find not only the General, as they call Mr. Booth,
+but Mrs. Booth, ready and willing, please Heaven! to help
+the poor soul to a better life!  And though Lilla has gone
+home to spend Sunday with her mother at Southampton
+Mews, I'll stop there passing and send a note in, and she'll
+come round and dish up dinner&mdash;and don't you, either of
+you, dream of waiting a minute for me!  Now, I'm going
+back to Miss Morency&mdash;though her real name is nothing
+like so grand as that, poor creature!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She turned at the door to nod and smile and say:
+"And her and me will carry down her box between us,
+so don't show yourselves to shame her poor swelled face
+before the cabman."
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+"There's a woman!" said Mr. Knewbit exultantly, a
+few minutes later, as the hall-door shut and the cab-door
+banged, and the vehicle containing the Daughter of Rahab
+and the Woman Above Rubies rattled away in the direction
+of Holborn Circus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I wonder you&mdash;&mdash;" P. C. Breagh was beginning, when
+he stopped himself on the brink of an indiscretion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Eh?..." interrogated Mr. Knewbit.  "What? ... Oh,
+but I did, though!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Knewbit rubbed his chin, which needed shaving,
+and shook his head in a despondent way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I did.  She was thirty-one when the Earl and Countess
+pensioned her&mdash;thirty-one pound a year For Life they
+promised....  And it's been paid regularly, going on for
+nineteen year now.  And in the second year I came to lodge
+here early in January, and finding her a comfortable,
+cleanly, kindly creature, I stopped on&mdash;and all but asked
+her to marry me next time New Year came round.  On
+the following anniversary I took the plunge! after reading
+a passage of Solomon's peculiarly applicable to my case.
+'<i>He that hath found a good wife hath found a good thing,</i>'
+it was.  Turned it up by accident, and showed it to her,
+and asked her.  And she said No!  And goes on saying
+it&mdash;though I ask her for the last time regularly every year.
+Here's the gal coming down the area-steps.  Now that
+meat and pudding's off my conscience, I shall put on my
+boots for an airing before dinner.  And while I'm gone&mdash;try
+your hand at a neat article in moderate paragraphs
+describing the methods of that"&mdash;Mr. Knewbit cast about
+for a new term&mdash;"that Man-eating Alligator in the Euston
+Road.  What was the name of the place?  'Royal Copenhagen
+Hotel!' ... Why, it fairly smells of roguery!
+'Royal Greenhorn' would be pretty well up to the mark."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Knewbit returned, just as the little servant pronounced
+dinner to be in danger of spoiling&mdash;in a cab; and
+thereupon ensued much jolting and bumping, suggestive
+of the conveyance of heavy articles up the doorsteps into
+the hall.  Where, being summoned from the kitchen by a
+bellow, P. C. Breagh recognized his own trunks and
+book-boxes, and wrung the hand of his good genius with a
+grateful swelling of the heart, and an irrepressible watering of
+the eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It was so kind!&mdash;and suppose I never am able to pay
+you&mdash;or keep you waiting a devil of a time?" he
+protested incoherently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Young fellow," said Mr. Knewbit, scowling with his
+heavy brows and twinkling pleasantly from under them.
+"You are a gentleman born and bred and taught.  You
+must have your Books to keep up your Latin and Greek
+and other learning&mdash;and to keep up your appearance you
+must have your clothes.  No man is so down in the world
+that he can afford to go downer.  This is my opinion, and
+also Miss Ling's!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And to-morrow Mr. Breagh will find poor Miss Morency's
+room swept and scrubbed and got ready for him,"
+said Miss Ling that evening, during Mr. Knewbit's
+absence.  "And the rent is&mdash;including Kitchen Board with
+myself and Mr. Knewbit, who likes homeliness, sixteen
+shillings per week.  And if I trust Mr. Breagh for a
+month&mdash;that will be a chance for him of getting work to do.  And
+that he will turn from nothing that will bring him in an
+honest living, I am certain; and that he will justify the
+confidence of Mr. Knewbit, I am equally sure!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said P. C. Breagh, rather chokily:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I hope to God I may one day be able to thank you
+both as I should like to!  You don't know what you have
+done for me, either of you!  But I will&mdash;will repay you,
+I swear!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said in her quaint way:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What obligation there may be could be repaid now&mdash;with
+Mr. Breagh's permission.  He saw that most unhappy
+girl to-day....  He has seen a-many&mdash;many like her!
+If he would promise me&mdash;never to bring about a fall like
+that, or help to drag a head so fallen, lower!  Perhaps I
+take a liberty," said Miss Ling, "and presume, being
+almost a stranger....  Yet I ask it of Mr. Breagh, I do
+indeed!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He gave the promise, in words that were broken and
+hurried, and with eyes that shunned her plain, kind,
+earnest face.  She said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There will be a beautiful young lady, one of these
+days, all the happier for that promise Mr. Breagh has
+given.  And I hope he won't think me unjust&mdash;because
+I am a woman! and blind to the wreck and ruin that
+my sex can bring about.  I knew a young man, once; who
+was good, and honest, and worthy; and engaged to marry
+a young person of his own rank in life...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carolan remembered Mr. Knewbit's story of the faithless
+underbutler.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He went Abroad to Foreign Countries," said Miss
+Ling, mildly, "sailing on a ship that voyaged for months
+at a time.  I am told that the women are very beautiful
+in the islands that he visited; and somehow or another, he
+was led away...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Though she looked at Carolan, her regard was curiously
+impersonal.  It was as though she saw the wraith of some
+face once dear, and although changed, never to be
+forgotten, appear within the outlines of the face that looked
+back at her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The ship sailed Home without him.  He wrote&mdash;by
+another vessel&mdash;to the young woman he was to have
+married, begging her forgiveness....  He had loved her, he
+said, and looked to be happy with her.  But the sunshine
+and perfume and color of them foreign places, and the
+spell of the beauty of their wild brown foreign women was
+over him.  He could not come back....  He never may
+come back again....  But if it happened so&mdash;and he,
+being old and worn, and weary of strange ways and distant
+places, was looking for an honest roof to shelter him,
+and a loving heart to lean upon at the last...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He would find both here, I know!" said Carolan, gently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She started and, recalling herself, said in a changed tone:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mr. Breagh must excuse my having delayed him here
+a-talking.  To work and bustle is more natural to me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took her hand, and having learned in Germany to
+pay such pretty homage without looking foolish, he stooped
+above it and touched it with his lips.  She smiled her wise,
+kind smile, and said with a touching simplicity:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mr. Breagh is good enough to honor a poor, hard,
+working hand!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said, and the tone had the ring of sincerity:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I wish, with all my heart, I were worthier of touching it!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so went upstairs to sleep in Mr. Ticking's bed.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap17"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XVII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+"My student-cap and <i>schläger</i> and the silver-mounted
+beer-horn the English Colony gave me, and my mother's
+Crucifix" found their places on the walls of the clean and
+comfortable room, and upon cheap stained-deal shelves
+the books of which Mr. Knewbit had spoken so respectfully
+were ranged, waiting to refresh their owner's memory
+whenever he chose to dip into them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sharkish manager of the "Royal Copenhagen Hotel"
+had been cowed into giving up the detained luggage by
+Mr. Knewbit's assurance that the story of his knavery was
+even then taking literary form under the skilled hand of a
+young and aspiring journalist of his (Knewbit's) own
+acquaintance, and might shortly appear in a newspaper
+to the confusion of the said manager, unless the property
+was surrendered upon payment of a corrected version of
+the bill.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These terms being hastily accepted, the Rules of Fair
+Play, according to Mr. Knewbit, demanded that the written
+record of the manager's iniquity should be consigned to
+Miss Ling's kitchen-fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not that it ain't a pity, for it ain't half bad for a
+beginner, though wanting in what I call snap and sparkle.
+But honor is honor&mdash;and if Mr. Ticking reads this knowing
+you're not going to use it&mdash;you'll find the story cropping
+up presently in the <i>Camberwell Clarion</i> or the <i>Islington
+Excelsior</i>....  Couldn't you do something else&mdash;just
+for a taster?  Or haven't you something finished and put
+away and forgot?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh finally disinterred from the litter of manuscript
+notes at the bottom of a book-box, a scrawled description
+of a duel between two Freshmen at a well-known
+tavern and concert-room outside the walls of
+Schwürz-Brettingen.  The humors of the battle, waged in a
+low-ceiled room in the upper story, crowded with chaffing,
+drinking, smoking students; the marvelous nature of the
+defensive armor worn by the inexperienced <i>Füchse</i>, the
+blows that fell flat, the final entanglement of their swords,
+and abandonment of these unfamiliar weapons in favor of
+fisticuffs, made Mr. Knewbit chuckle, and won the
+suffrages of Mr. Ticking; who said the fight and the bit of
+knock-about at the end was nearly good enough to be put
+on at the Halls.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Ticking was a journalist who possessed a knack of
+rhyme, penned comic ditties for Lion Comiques, when these
+gentlemen would sing them,&mdash;and lived in the hope of
+getting a Burlesque produced at a West-End Theater one day.
+He had educated himself because you couldn't get on if you
+were not educated.  He could not have explained to you
+how the process had been carried out.  By dexterously
+angling matter for short paragraphs from the swirl of
+happenings about him, he contrived&mdash;between the <i>Camberwell
+Clarion</i>, the <i>Islington Excelsior</i>, and the <i>Afternoon</i>,
+a late daily published in Fleet Street&mdash;to net some three
+pounds at the end of each week.  Thirty shillings of this
+went to support an aged and invalid mother resident at
+Brixton; and if you had lauded Mr. Ticking as a heroic
+exemplar of filial virtues, he would have been excessively
+surprised.  Though if you had told him that he wrote
+Burlesque better than Byron, he would have believed you
+implicitly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Mounteney, Miss Ling's ladylike gentleman, proved
+to be a tall, stout, elderly, rather depressed individual,
+whose gold-rimmed glasses, attached to a broad black
+ribbon, sat a little crookedly upon a high, pink Roman nose.
+His light blue eyes were over-tried and rather watery, his
+hair had come off at the top, leaving his crown bald and
+shiny; his customary attire was a rather seedy black
+frock-coat, a drab vest with pearl buttons, and rather baggy
+brown trousers, and he wore turned-down collars and black
+ribbon neckties, and displayed onyx studs and links in a
+carefully preserved shirt.  Pieces of paper protected his
+cuffs, invariably covered with memoranda written in
+violet-ink-pencil, referring to the most delicate and confidential
+affairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For Mr. Mounteney, under the <i>nom de guerre</i> of "Araminta,"
+edited the "Happiness, Health, and Beauty" column
+of that fashionable feminine monthly, the <i>Ladies'
+Mentor</i>, into whose bureau, according to Mr. Mounteney, a
+vast correspondence,&mdash;penned by the wives and daughters
+of what Mr. Mounteney termed the Flower of Britain's
+Nobility and Gentry, as by their governesses and maids,
+and the wives and daughters of their butchers, bakers, and
+candlestick-makers,&mdash;continually flowed.  Signing
+themselves by fancy names, these confiding ones would put
+questions concerning matters of the toilette and so forth,
+the Answers to which interrogations, with the pseudonyms
+prefixed, were inserted month by month.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"<i>Little Fairy</i>.&mdash;A lady who weighs fourteen stone
+need not necessarily give up waltzing.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"<i>Ruby</i>.&mdash;We should recommend you to powder it.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"<i>Ravenlocks</i>.&mdash;To stand in the sun too soon after
+applying is prejudicial to a successful result.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"<i>Peri</i>.&mdash;Try peppermint."
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Or the bosom of Araminta, guarded by the onyx studs
+and the black pince-nez ribbon, would be made, according
+to its owner, the receptacle of confidences calculated, if
+revealed, to convulse Society to its core.  Thus burdened
+with secrets, it weighed heavily on Mr. Mounteney.  When
+lachrymose with gin-and-water, to which cooling beverage
+he was rather addicted, he would with tears deplore the
+wreck of a once noble constitution, caused by reason of
+emotional strain.  But he never gave any of his
+correspondents away.  And being of a kindly disposition, he
+induced the Editor of the <i>Ladies' Mentor</i> to read and
+accept a brief, mildly-humorous article, descriptive of a
+German ladies' cake-and-coffee party; the details having
+been long ago previously supplied by a fellow-student at
+Schwärz-Brettingen, and worked up by P. C. Breagh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Several other social paragraphs by the same hand found
+their way, thanks to Mr. Ticking's introduction, into the
+columns of the <i>Islington Excelsior</i>.  In recognition,
+P. C. Breagh, producing pairs of basket-hilted swords, pads,
+cravats and goggles from one of the cases rescued from
+the hotel manager, instructed Mr. Ticking in the noble
+art of fence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Their thrusts, lunges and stampings seriously threatening
+the stability of the third-floor landing, these combats
+were transferred to the back-yard in fine weather, and
+permitted in the kitchen when it was wet.  And Mr. Ticking,
+though he never mastered the science of the <i>schläger</i>,
+inducted P. C. Breagh into the mysteries of boating and
+velocipeding,&mdash;having a cutter-rigged Thames sailing-boat
+in housing near Chelsea Bridge Stairs, and a huge-wheeled
+bone-shaker of the prevailing type stowed away in a
+decrepit conservatory adjoining the bathroom on Miss Ling's
+second floor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Mounteney could not be prevailed upon to handle
+what he stigmatized as "deadly weapons," or to risk his
+person on the whirling wheel, while even fresh-water
+boating caused him to suffer from symptoms not distantly
+resembling those peculiar to the malady of the ocean.
+But, flabby as the ladylike gentleman appeared, he was a
+vigorous and tireless pedestrian, able to reduce Mr. Ticking,
+who was not unhandy in the usage of his feet, into a
+human pulp, and walk Mr. Knewbit, who had reason to
+pride himself upon his powers of locomotion, completely
+off his legs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Expeditions were made to Addiscombe, in the green
+swelling Surrey country, where the once famous East India
+College was founded in 1812, and sold and dismantled in
+1858 upon the transfer of the Company to the Crown.  Of
+the 3,600 cadets who were trained here, the names of
+Lawrence, Napier, Durand, and Roberts are written upon the
+rolls in letters of undimming gold.  Or to Sydenham with
+its acres of glittering crystal, its matchless fountains, and
+the view from the North Tower, extending over six counties
+and compassing the whole course of the Thames.  Or
+to Ascot, with its stretches of sandy heathland, its noble
+racecourse and its woods of fir and birch, would the lady-like
+gentleman, accompanied by one or the other or both
+of his young friends, betake himself upon a highday or a
+holiday, when duchesses ceased from troubling and
+milliners were at rest.  Or they would make for Hampton
+Court or Bushey Park, or the ancient manor of Cheshunt,
+or to Chigwell, immortalized by Dickens, where in the
+oak-wainscoted dining-room of the King's Head, such rare
+refreshment of cold beef and salad, apple pie and Stilton
+cheese could be had, and washed down by the soundest and
+brightest of ales; then even "Araminta" was tempted to
+forget the crushing responsibilities inseparable from the
+delicate position of adviser upon Health, Happiness, and
+Beauty to the feminine flower of England's nobility and
+gentry, and eat and drink like a navvy free from care.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And upon the return of the three wearied pedestrians
+from these excursions, there would be a cheery supper in
+Mr. Ticking's room, or in Mr. Mounteney's, or, best of all,
+in Miss Ling's clean and comfortable kitchen, with more
+beer and more tobacco,&mdash;though by reason of a digestion
+impaired by the continual wear and tear of his fair clients'
+confidences, or by excessive indulgence in tea, Mr. Mounteney
+restricted himself to the mildest of Turkish
+cigarettes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Knewbit, who reveled in the growing popularity of
+his <i>protégé</i>, though he might in secret have shaken his head
+over the articles and paragraphs published in the <i>Ladies'
+Mentor</i> and the <i>Islington Excelsior</i>, learned very willingly
+to whistle a beer-waltz, knocking the bottom of his tumbler
+on the table in time to the tune; to say "<i>Prosit</i>" when he
+drank, and vocally unite in the final melodic outburst of:
+"<i>O jerum, jerum, jerum, jerum, la la la!</i>"  In which
+historic and legendary burden Miss Ling would also join, and
+laugh until the tears ran down.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Of the junior-staff room of the <i>Early Wire</i>, a bare, gaunt
+place, lighted by three seldom-washed windows looking on
+a sooty yard, or by six flaring gas-jets by night or in foggy
+weather, Carolan was, by the interest of Mr. Ticking, one
+day made free.  Names of power were cut with penknives
+on the ink-splashed deal tables, and the bottoms of the
+cane-seated chairs had given way under the weight of
+personalities now famous, men who were paid for a single
+article as much as Ticking earned in a year.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And thus P. C. Breagh joined the gallant company of
+the Free Lances of Fleet Street, and very soon had its
+offices and eating-houses, its haunts and traditions by heart.
+What demi-gods walked upon those historic flags and
+cobblestones!  Russell, the pioneer and King of War
+Correspondents, and Simpson of Crimean fame, whose
+war-sketches for the <i>Illustrated London News</i> had set England
+ablaze in '54-5, and George Augustus Sala, and Macready&mdash;long
+since retired from the stage in 1870,&mdash;the veteran
+Charles Mathews and Byron of burlesque fame, and
+Bulwer Lytton, and Tennyson and Browning, and Planche
+and Edmund Yates, and genial, handsome Tom Robertson,
+who was to die, with his laurels green upon him, in another
+year.  All these were pointed out to the young man, with
+certain places rendered for ever sacred by the footsteps of
+Dickens and Thackeray, and other of the Immortals who
+have passed beyond these voices into peace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And into the world of Music and the Drama, our fortunate
+youth, by virtue of his initiation into the cheery
+brotherhood of Pressmen, was now admitted.  There were free
+admissions for Popular Concerts where one could hear
+Professor Burnett and Signor Piatti play the piano and
+violoncello, and Santley most gloriously sing, and Sims
+Reeves deliver Beethoven's incomparable "Adelaida" with
+that splendor of voice and style that will never be
+surpassed.  The Christy Minstrels of St. James's Hall
+beguiled our hero of a stealthy tear or two, and made him
+roar with laughter; and Blanchard's Drury Lane
+Pantomime of "Beauty and the Beast," with Kate Santley as
+Azalea, the Peri, and Miss Vokes as the lovely Zemira, was
+an eye-opener to a youth who had witnessed only provincial
+productions in his native country, and half a dozen
+performances of Schiller's "Robbers," "Don Carlos," and
+"The Stranger" of Kotzebu as given by a stock-company
+of Bavarian actors at the Theater of Schwärz-Brettingen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Also our hero was privileged to witness the performances
+of Mrs. Wood as Miss Hardcastle in "She Stoops to
+Conquer," and afterwards in the extravaganza of "La Belle
+Sauvage," at the St. James's Theater, and J. S. Clarke,
+then drawing the town with "Amongst the Breakers"
+at the Strand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the Olympic, Patti Josephs was touching the hearts
+of the British Public as Little Em'ly, Rowe was tickling
+people to laughter with the unctuosities and impecuniosities
+of Micawber, a certain Mr. Henry Irving was holding
+his audiences spellbound with the sardonic slyness and
+hypocritical cunning displayed in his performance of Uriah
+Heep, and beautiful Mrs. Rousby was breaking hearts at
+the Queen's Theater.  And evenings spent with these, or
+with Professor Pepper at the Polytechnic, or the German
+Reeds, who were playing Gilbert and Sullivan's little
+operas, and "Cox and Box" at the Gallery of Illustration,&mdash;were
+crowned by suppers in the grill-room of "The
+Albion" in Drury Lane, or at Evan's at the north-west
+corner of Covent Garden.  And these were merry times
+and merry mimes, my masters, and we shall not look upon
+their like again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And in the environment I have endeavored to depict,
+and with the associates I have tried to delineate, and with
+the pleasant hum and swirl of this new life setting the tune
+for his young pulses and mingling with his blood, Carolan's
+temperament recovered its elasticity, and his character
+developed apace.  The magic gift of sympathy found in
+the gutter on that night of homeless, hungry wandering
+was his now, never to be lost or alienated.  He had learned
+much when he had discovered how to fit himself inside the
+ginger kitten's ragged skin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bond of brotherhood, established between a shaggy-haired
+boy and all other created beings capable of joy and
+susceptible to suffering, would hold unbroken through all
+the years to come.  We are aware that the confidence of
+Mr. Knewbit had been won that morning on Waterloo Bridge,
+and we have heard Miss Ling (not ordinarily given to
+broach the subject of the faithless underbutler) tell him
+in her simple way of the desertion that had left her kind
+heart empty and sore.  We may know also that Mr. Ticking
+revealed, with the fact of the existence of the invalid
+mother resident at Brixton, the secret that he was beloved
+by a certain Annie, the orphan daughter of a deceased
+relative, who lived with the old lady as housekeeper and
+nurse.  Annie, it seemed, had a little fortune of her own,
+and was so kind, so clever and so charming, that only the
+indiscreetly-evident anxiety of Ticking's mother to bring
+about a match, and the too plainly manifested willingness
+of Annie to accept the hand of Mr. Ticking, were it
+offered&mdash;held him back from becoming an engaged man.  As it
+was, he spoke, in somber whispers, of an amatory entanglement
+with a splendid creature, not good as Annie was good,
+but possessing the beauty in whose baleful luster honest
+prettiness pales, and the charm whose sorcery kills the
+conscience, and wakens the scorching desires of man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Passion!&mdash;there's no going against that, you know!"
+he would say, wagging his head dismally, "and if ever you
+see Leah, you'll understand."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when P. C. Breagh did see Leah, who presided over
+the gaudy necktie and imitation gold cuff-link department
+at an East Strand hosier's, he failed to understand at all.
+She had big burnt-out dusky-brown eyes and loops of coarse
+black hair, and a big bust and a tiny waist with a gilt
+dog-collar belt about it.  Ticking had paid for the belt
+when he had taken her to the Crystal Palace, and she had
+admired the trinket on one of the fancy stalls in the
+French Court next the Great Concert Hall.  And there
+had been a display of fireworks on the Terrace, and in the
+dark interval between two set-pieces there had been a
+mutual declaration; and the moth Ticking had singed his
+wings in the flame of illicit passion, and would return to
+flutter about the candle, he supposed, until he met his
+doom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Mounteney spoke of Passion as well as Mr. Ticking,
+but in the exhausted accents of a world-weary cynic who
+had drunk of the cup to satiety.  He knew so much of
+women, thanks to "Araminta," that he had nothing more
+to learn.  Yet when a pert and pretty waitress, who served
+the table at which he commonly lunched at a Fleet Street
+chop-house, proved ungrateful after six months of extra
+tips, trips to Kew and Rosherville Gardens and innumerable
+theater tickets, and told Mr. Mounteney in the plainest
+terms that he was "too bow-windowy in figure for a
+beau," and that she preferred young swells on the Stock
+Exchange to elderly newspaper gents, Mounteney&mdash;the
+expressed preference having been illustrated by
+demonstration,&mdash;was tragically comic in his manifestations of
+wounded vanity, quite funnily touching in his display of
+jealousy and despair.  For a whole week following the
+betrayal his pale blue eyes were suffused with tears, his
+Roman nose was red, and his light hair stood up on end,
+where his despairing fingers had rumpled it.  His black
+ribbon necktie straggled untied over a limp shirt-front, the
+violet-ink-pencil memoranda on his paper cuffs had merged
+into blotches and blurs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then suddenly his dismal countenance recovered its mild
+placidity, his necktie was tied, his hair lay once more in
+smoothly brushed streaks across his shining crown.  His
+nose paled, his eyes reverted to their purely normal
+wateriness.  It seemed that nestling amid the grasses at the
+feet of one who had plucked the fairest flowers that bloom
+in the garden of Passion and sickened of their cloying
+perfume and dazzling hues, the disillusioned Mounteney
+had discovered a simple violet, and that the humble sweetness
+and modest beauty of this shrinking blossom had
+refreshed his jaded senses and solaced his wearied mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In terms less obscure, Mr. Ticking explained that the
+humble violet was a certain Miss Rooper, who for a monthly
+salary attended at the office of the <i>Ladies' Mentor</i> thrice
+a week to assist in the Herculean task of opening the letters
+addressed to "Araminta"&mdash;take down in shorthand her
+representative's replies to the interrogations therein
+contained&mdash;make notes of queries impossible to answer on the
+spot, and ferret out the answers by application at such
+leading centers of information as the Reading-room of
+the British Museum, Heralds' College, the Zoological
+Gardens, the Doctors' Commons Will Office, Marshall and
+Snelgrove's, Whiteley's, Parkins and Gotto's, Twinings',
+the Burlington Arcade, Scotland Yard, and the Coöperative
+Stores.  Ticking added that for years Miss Rooper
+had brought her luncheon-sandwiches to the office in a
+velvet reticule, and consumed them under cover of the lid of
+her desk, but that now, the lady being regularly engaged to
+Mr. Mounteney, he supposed the couple would go out to
+"Araminta's" usual ordinary arm-in-arm.  It would be
+a jolly lark, he added, if Mounteney took his betrothed to
+his customary table, as Flossie had already been thrown
+over by the young jobber from Capel Court.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And when P. C. Breagh saw Flossie, who owned a turned-up
+nose (I quote Mr. Ticking) that you might have hung
+your hat on, and when he was introduced to Miss Rooper,
+who was on the shady side of thirty-five and had a long
+sagacious equine face, and boasted a fringe and chignon
+and waterfall of black hair as coarse as the mane of a
+Shetland pony, and was bridled with bands of red velvet,
+as the pony might have been,&mdash;and caparisoned with leather
+belts and strappings garnished with steel rivets, and tossed
+her head when she was coquettish, and whinnied when she
+laughed, and looked less like a modest violet than anything
+else you could have imagined, he wondered very much.
+For Mr. Mounteney had spoken of Passion in connection
+with the faithless Flossie, and by the latest bulletins his
+sentiment for Miss Rooper had developed into Passion of
+the strictly honorable kind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Could the passion on which Shakespeare had strung the
+pearls and rubies of Romeo and Juliet, and to which the
+lyre of Keats throbbed out the deathless music of
+"Endymion" have anything in common with the loves of Ticking
+and Leah, or the emotion wakened in the bosom of
+Mr. Mounteney by Flossie and Miss Rooper?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Could the emotion of which Carolan himself was conscious,
+the sudden, fierce, stinging temptation born of the
+bold glance of a pair of painted eyes, ogling and laughing
+from under a clipped fringe and a tilted hat, partake of
+the nature, be worthy of the designation?  For Sin beckoned
+sometimes, and the boy would tug at his chain, forged
+of links of instilled religion and honor, instinctive
+cleanliness and a sensitive, secret shrinking from the purchase of
+something that was never meant to be bartered or sold.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+But there were times when, sitting at the rickety but
+useful and capacious old davenport in the room from
+tenancy of which Miss Morency had been ejected, the pen
+would hang idle between the fingers of P. C. Breagh, and
+the article commissioned by the benevolent editor of the
+Camberwell Clarion or the <i>Islington Excelsior</i>, or the more
+ambitious magazine-story that was being written as a bait
+to catch a literary reputation,&mdash;and would return as surely
+as the swallow of the previous summer, from the editorial
+offices of Blackwood's, or the <i>Cornhill</i>, or even
+<i>Tinsley's</i>&mdash;would hang fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With his elbows on the blotting-pad, exposing to view
+the shiny places on the right-hand cuff of the old serge
+jacket, and his eyes vaguely staring at the strip of London
+sky seen above the chimney-pots of Bernard Street,
+P. C. Breagh would fall into a brown study, a dreamy reverie
+of the kind to which hopeful Youth is prone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The outer angles of the eyebrows would lift, giving an
+eager, wistful look to the gray eyes that had specks of
+brown and golden dust in them, the nostrils of the short,
+determined nose would expand as though in imagination
+they were inhaling some rare, strange, delicate fragrance,&mdash;the
+upper lip would lift at the corners, showing the canines
+of the upper jaw&mdash;a mouth of this kind can be fierce, and
+yet you have an example of it in the Laughing Faun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A delicate, rushing sweetness would envelop, enter and
+possess him, body and brain and mind and soul, and his
+heart would beat fiercely for a minute or so, and then not
+seem to beat at all; and he would scarcely be able to breathe
+for the strange new joy, and the subtle, mysterious sense
+of being drawn to and mingled with the being of another,
+some one wholly and unutterably beloved and dear....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A touch, light as a flower, would visit his forehead, and
+a voice, small and silvery-clear, and with a liquid tremble
+in it that might have been mirth or shyness, would sound
+in his ears again.  He would sigh and lean back, shutting
+his eyes, and feel the slight yet firm support of the delicate
+limbs and slender body, and the small soft hand would stir
+and flutter in his palm like a captured bird, and he would
+find himself painting in the choicest colors of his mental
+palette upon the background of London sky or neutral-tinted
+wall-paper&mdash;a face that was not in the least like
+Krimhilde-Brünhilde's.  And then he would frown, and
+shake himself as a red setter might have done, plunging
+back out of dripping sedges at the sound of its master's
+whistle, and hurl himself savagely upon the pile of blank
+pages before him, and never pause again until the daily
+task was done.  Or&mdash;supposing this retrospective mood
+to have seized him at the ending of his stint of labor, he
+would set his teeth, summon up the image of his colossal
+beloved, and savagely add to her inches all that she had lost
+since his meeting with the frozen Infanta at the Convent,
+Kensington Square.  For the truth must be told, and the
+painful fact faced,&mdash;that since that day the heroic Ideal of
+P. C. Breagh had been steadily shrinking; and the hour
+was coming when her golden tresses were to darken to the
+black-brown hue of rain-soaked oak leaves in Winter,&mdash;when
+her roseate cheeks were to blanch to the hue of old
+ivory, when her towering stature and robust limbs were to
+dwindle to the slender shape and delicate extremities of an
+elfin maiden's, and her late worshiper was shamelessly to
+dote upon the change.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But had this been foretold to P. C. Breagh, he would
+have scouted the prophet as an impostor, and laughed the
+prophecy to scorn.  Came a day, when, fastidiously
+groomed, and dressed in well-cut, carefully chosen clothes,
+he called upon Monica at the Convent, this time to apprize
+her of the loss of his inheritance, and to assure her of his
+present well-being, despite the change in his prospects
+brought about by the defalcations of Mustey and Son.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had not intended to ask after the Infanta; the query
+slipped out quite accidentally.  But when Monica returned
+that by the latest advice received from France, the health
+of Mademoiselle Bayard might be pronounced excellent,
+the querist was conscious of a tightness within his collar,
+and a sudden rush of blood reddened him to the hair as
+his sister added:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She may be 'Madame' and not 'Mademoiselle' to-day,
+since what date is uncertain.  For her marriage was to
+take place almost instantly on her return to Paris, she
+told us.  Her father&mdash;he is Colonel of the 777th Mounted
+Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard&mdash;had set his heart on
+this&mdash;she worships him&mdash;she would consent to any sacrifice&mdash;would
+let herself be cut to pieces if he but wished it.
+Dear Juliette!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh got out, with difficulty, "Then&mdash;but&mdash;look
+here, doesn't she love the fellow?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The word last but three got out with difficulty.  His
+throat was hurt by its passage.  He gulped as he stared
+at Monica, moistening his dry lips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The fellow."  Her eyes widened.  "You don't call
+the Colonel&mdash;that?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Of course not.  I referred to the young lady's husband.
+Actual or yet expectant."  He boggled horribly in the
+attempt to seem natural and at ease.  "Why should it be
+a sacrifice to obey her father&mdash;what has the&mdash;the affair got
+in common with cutting to pieces if she&mdash;if she&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stuck there.  Monica, of all Juliette's friends alone
+held worthy to share the aching secret, had not been told,
+for her own peace of mind.  Yet, loving much, she had seen
+much.  Now she sat silent.  But a little line of distress
+came between her placid eyebrows, and tears were gathering
+behind the beautiful, tender eyes, in readiness to fall
+when next they might unseen.  Carolan went on, not
+looking at her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She said he was a noble gentleman,&mdash;master of the
+sword, and brave as a lion.  That doesn't suggest that
+she&mdash;would think herself sacrificed in marrying him?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A sigh heaved Monica's breast and exhaled unnoticed.
+He mumbled with a hangdog grace:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Could you, when you happen to write, just give her
+a message?  Don't ask what it means&mdash;it has to do with
+something we spoke of here the other day when you were
+out of the room."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His eyes sought one particular square in the center of
+the beeswaxed parquet, where he had sat leaning against
+the Infanta's knees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Tell her that the man&mdash;a fellow-student of mine at
+Schwärz-Brettingen&mdash;realized not long after the&mdash;the
+girl&mdash;she will remember the girl's name!&mdash;after the girl had
+made the offer&mdash;she will not have forgotten what that
+was!&mdash;from how kind and generous a heart it came.  And she
+will believe&mdash;she must believe!&mdash;that he has loathed
+himself heartily for the brutal way in which he answered her.
+And he entreats her to forgive, and he thanks her with
+all&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Something splashed upon the clenched hand with which
+he had unconsciously emphasized his utterance.  He wiped
+off the drop furtively, and said, still not looking at Monica,
+but scowling at that particular square in the middle of the
+parquet:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"With all his heart!  You won't forget?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He made her promise it, and left her wondering.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap18"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XVIII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Being a daughter of France, and a Parisienne to the
+finger-tips, it could not be that the return to Paris, delightful
+capital where all the brilliancy, <i>esprit</i>, good taste, and
+refinement of modern life were concentrated, should fail to
+rejoice the heart of Mademoiselle de Bayard.  Her
+characteristic quality of humor, a trait not derived from the
+paternal strain, made her omit three items from the list
+of purchases commanded by M. le Colonel.  To supply
+oneself beforehand with a complete bridal costume in the
+view of immediate union with a husband never to one's
+knowledge previously beheld, could anything be more
+outrageously impossible!  Juliette knew that she would titter
+hysterically behind the stately backs of the powdered and
+frock-coated gentlemen who parade Departments, and
+probably laugh to madness in the faces of the powdered
+and frizzled young ladies who should seek to minister to
+her needs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so, though the fresh and charming toilettes of the
+evening, the promenade and the theater, with the suitable
+lingerie, were added to Juliette's wardrobe, the nuptial
+robe, crown, and veil remained unbought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Paris, a seething pot since the Auteuil assassination
+early in that January, was in a state of ebullition upon
+Juliette's return.  Passing in a <i>fiacre</i> along the Champs
+Élysées, the progress of Mademoiselle's hired vehicle was
+stopped.  A regiment of mounted Chasseurs and a detachment
+of the Guides blocked the Avenue to stem the black
+torrents of people rolling toward Neuilly, to attend the
+funeral of the murdered journalist Victor Noir.  The
+National Guards occupied the Place de la Concorde, and
+in front of the Corps Législatif was a battalion of infantry,
+besides a force of <i>sergents de ville</i>.  Yet by other
+thoroughfares inky streams of men and women poured steadily
+nor'-west, and a vast concourse packed the Passage
+Massena, where the dead man had lived, and when his coffin
+was brought out, weeping friends unharnessed the bony
+black horses from the shabby hearse, and six of them,
+hugging the pole, drew it to the Cemetery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But no speeches were made, though an instant previous
+to the lowering of the coffin a disheveled, red-eyed woman
+leaped upon the plinth of a memorial column that neighbored
+the grave dug in the Jewish quarter of the Cemetery,
+and shrieked:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He was only twenty-two, and was to have been married
+in a few days!  Vengeance upon the nephew of the Corsican
+wild boar!  Death to the murderer Bonaparte and all
+his bloody race!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The rest was lost in the strangled whoopings of hysteria.
+But upon the ten thousand faces that had turned her way
+a crimson glow was thrown, as though, the sun of Imperial
+glory were indeed about to set, and a yell went up that
+might have reached the ears of the princely homicide
+lodged in the Conciergerie by order of his Imperial
+relative, pending that extravagant farce of the Tribunal of
+Tours.  There was a rush of police, and the woman was
+pulled down and spirited away, it is said, by Revolutionists!
+But the <i>Marseillaise</i> had already cried more loudly
+than the red-eyed woman, and had been heard to greater
+effect.  Indeed, upon the previous day M. Rochefort had
+attended the tribune of the Corps Législatif, and protested
+in the name of the people against the decree ordering for
+the trial of the noble criminal a Special High Court of
+Justice composed of Judges notoriously amenable to
+Imperial influence;&mdash;proceeding to draw between Bonapartes
+and Borgias some extremely uncomplimentary parallels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The newspaper was seized upon the morning of the
+interment at Neuilly, and its editor and proprietor served on
+behalf of the Crown with a writ of prosecution for libel,
+by the special authorization of the Corps Législatif.  Thus
+M. Rochefort was rendered too late for the ceremony.
+But one of the huge crowds of assistant mourners, rolling
+back upon Paris, encountered him, in a hackney cab on
+one of the boulevards, and the human torrent surging and
+eddying about the vehicle, turned it round; and so rolled
+and roared with it and its occupant in triumph to his home.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The savage faces, the sinister cries, the significant tokens
+of popular disaffection and incipient revolt affected
+Mademoiselle Bayard but little, it must be owned.  Her
+dear Parisians were for some reason boiling over.  How
+many times had she not beheld them in a state of ebullition?
+French blood is easily heated, see you well!  A
+little patience and the people would quiet down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the eyes of Juliette and how many other daughters of
+the Empire, the personality of the stoutish little gentleman
+with the heavy sallow face, dull regard, spiky mustache
+and dyed brown chin-tuft was invested with an aureole
+of semi-divinity.  To her as to her sisters, the Emperor
+stood for France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Born nineteen years before in the very month of the
+Coup d'État of 1851, what should she know of the betrayals,
+treacheries, crimes that had been so many steps in the
+ladder leading the man on to success.  A tidal wave of
+human blood had set him upon the throne of St. Louis; the
+Church, first duped, afterward to be shorn by him of
+power, had poured her hallowed oils upon his head; titles,
+dignities, gold, had streamed from his open hands upon his
+supporters; the tradition of the Army that had throned
+him was devotion to his name.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Juliette was a soldier's daughter.  How, then, not
+reverence the Emperor, from whose ermined purples
+Field-Marshal's bâtons, Grand Crosses of the Legion of Honor,
+coveted commands, desired steps, constantly dropped.
+That the blind, unreasoning support hitherto accorded to
+him by the Army was weakening,&mdash;that 50,000 private
+soldiers' votes would be recorded against him in the
+forthcoming <i>plebiscitum</i>,&mdash;how was a mere girl to conceive of
+this?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That her beloved Paris, transformed by him into the
+gayest and most splendid of European capitals, was
+tottering on the verge of bankruptcy, she would not have
+believed.  Had she been told that High Finance is too often
+synonymous with knavish trickery, that those who carry
+out great civic works may drain treasuries of the national
+millions&mdash;it would have conveyed nothing to her.  You
+cannot talk to a school-girl in the shibboleth of the Bourse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But one sign of the trend of popular resentment etched
+itself as by a biting acid on her memory.  When the sulky
+driver of the ramshackle vehicle pulled up in the Avenue
+of the Champs Élysées, in obedience to the upraised
+sword-arm and authoritative voice of a lieutenant of mounted
+Chasseurs, Juliette, thrilling with girlish delight at the
+sight of the dear, familiar uniform, let down the window
+and thrust forth her charming head.  And at that moment
+a party of four equestrians, followed by two grooms in the
+Imperial livery, came galloping westward, from the
+direction of the Pont Royal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pray picture to yourself the congested condition of this
+part of the Avenue, the squadron blocking its throat, the
+halted cab, and the lengthy queue of phaetons, Americaines,
+britzkas, dogcarts, and Victorias, forming up on the left
+hand of the road to rear of it, containing ladies old and
+young, pretty or plain, accompanied by the males of their
+species; while nursemaids pushing babies in perambulators,
+elderly gentlemen out for constitutionals, and other
+harmless pedestrians, were marshaled on the right, under the
+surveillance of imperious policemen, who meddled not at
+all with certain isolated clumps of somber-looking persons
+dressed in black; broken links of one of the huge processions
+of mourners, checked upon their way to the Cemetery
+at Neuilly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a stir of interest, and every eye was drawn to
+the little cavalcade, previously mentioned, whose leaders,
+seeing the barrier of humanity, horseflesh and steel drawn
+across the thoroughfare, checked their horses and came
+forward at a walk.  Military Governor was written large
+upon a double-chinned, stiff-necked, gray-mustached and
+imperialed personage who bestrode a high-actioned brown
+charger, and wore the undress uniform of a General of
+Division of the Service of Engineers.  When he leaned to
+speak in the ear of the slender, brown-haired, blue-eyed
+boy who rode upon his right hand, you saw in the wearer
+of the glossy silk topper, the accurately cut, single-breasted
+black coat and dark gray-strapped trousers&mdash;ending in
+the daintiest of little polished boots, with gold
+spurs&mdash;the heir of the Imperial throne of France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A cocked-hatted, white-plumed Imperial <i>aide-de-camp</i>
+in blue-and-gold, and a green-and-silver Palace equerry
+followed in attendance, succeeded at a respectful distance
+by two grooms in the livery of the Tuileries; and a troop
+of the glorious beings known as Cent Gardes came clattering
+after, balanced to a hair on their shiny, prancing black
+horses, the long white horse-tails streaming from their
+polished steel helmets, with tricolored side-plumes and
+eagled brass plates, their brass-nutted steel cuirasses
+reflecting their lacquered mustaches and the adoring glances
+of enamored femininity, their sky-blue tunics with the
+scarlet and golden collars, their golden epaulettes and
+aiguillettes, their gauntleted gloves of white leather, their
+skin-tight breeches of snowy buckskin, their brilliantly polished
+boots with huge brass roweled, steel-spiked spurs, glancing
+and dancing, clinking and twinkling in the sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah me!  Their morals were doubtful, those mustached
+and chin-tufted Antinouses of the Guard, as not only giddy
+work-girls and milliners, but fast variety actresses and
+frisky ladies of fashion were perfectly aware.  But they
+were splendid, stately, expensive creatures, and so worthy
+to clatter at Imperial heels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so gallant was the youthful figure they attended and
+guarded; so well-graced the seat upon the spirited English
+chestnut, so light the boyish hand upon the mare's snaffle-rein,
+so frank and debonair the smile with which he acknowledged
+the scanty salutations of a few of the bystanders;
+that Juliette's heart flew to him with her eyes, and
+there broke from her in a voice so clear and thrilling that
+the object of her homage started in his saddle:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Vive le Prince!  Vive le Prince Impérial!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+The French are tender to youth and beauty, accessible
+to sentiment, lovers of Romance.  Other voices joined in
+the cry, hats not ominously furbished with crape were
+lifted in salutation; a charming dignity was manifested
+in the boy's reception of these tokens of good-will.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You can conceive the picture, set in the beautiful
+scenery of the Champs Élysées, to the roll of carriages in
+the great avenues, the glint of wintry sunshine on still or
+leaping water, the nip of keen sweet air, perfumed with
+the scent of damp grass and dead leaves and wood-smoke.
+Delicate tracery of branches as yet bare, interspersed with
+the hardy green of pines, laurels, and larches against a
+sky pale blue as harebell, streaked with broad floating
+scarves of gray-white vapor, made a background for the
+green-jacketed, red-breeched Chasseurs on their bony,
+brown horses,&mdash;for the knots of strollers, curious or
+contemptuous,&mdash;for the broken masses of the crowd of
+would-be demonstrators, arrested in their progress by the
+blocking of the way.  In the right foreground suppose the slim
+young Napoleon sitting easily on the fidgety, fretful
+chestnut,&mdash;the Military General balanced on his big champing
+charger,&mdash;the blue-and-gold aide and the green-and-silver
+equerry, the grooms and the escort of Cent Gardes looking
+decorously between the ears of their well-trained, shining
+beasts.  To the left place the debilitated <i>fiacre</i> with its
+weary Rosinante and red-nosed sulky Jehu, and leaning
+from the open window of the vehicle&mdash;Juliette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps you can see her, a little toque of Persian lambskin,
+with a blue wing in it, on her high-piled hair,&mdash;with a
+coquettish jacket of corduroy-velvet of the shade known
+in the spring of that year as Bismarck gray,&mdash;trimmed with
+the lambskin, fitting close to her slender shape.  She wore
+a plain black silk skirt looped high over a vivid red cloth
+petticoat&mdash;it was a fashionable style of costume that
+year&mdash;and very much worn.  A bright rose bloomed in each
+cheek, pale as she was ordinarily; and her black brows
+were spread and lifted joyously, and her eyes shone blue
+as sapphires in contrast with a little knot of violets at her
+breast and the big bunch held in her little gray-gloved
+hand.  And with a very fair aim she threw the latter so
+that the bundle of wet fragrance lightly hit the saddleflap
+close to the knee of the Imperial stripling, and behind the
+shoulder of the swerving chestnut, as she cried again:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Vive le Prince Impérial!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boy bowed to her, blushing at her beauty and her
+loyal enthusiasm,&mdash;the equerry, slimmest of the officers in
+attendance, dismounted and picked up the flowers.  A
+trumpet sounded, a short, sharp order was given, there
+was a trampling of hoofs and a clinking of bridles as the
+files wheeled right and left, leaving a broad road open
+between a double rank of saluting troopers, and the Prince
+with his Governor and following rode down this open vista
+and cantered away by route of the Avenue de l'Impératrice,
+in the direction of the Bois de Boulogne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boy held in his whip-hand the bunch of violets
+handed him by the equerry.  Only a little grayish sand
+clung to some of the dark, shining leaves.  He sniffed
+their fragrance and glanced back as the trumpet rang out
+behind them, and the Avenue was once more blocked with
+mounted Chasseurs.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap19"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XIX
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+He was fourteen, delicate and rather backward for his
+age, owing to the inevitable drawbacks of his environment.
+Since the salvo of a hundred-and-one guns announcing the
+birth of a Prince Imperial had crashed from the battery
+of the Esplanade of the Invalides, to be echoed from every
+fortress throughout the Empire; and bells had pealed from
+every steeple, flags had broached from every staff-head,
+and dusk-fall had seen every city, town, or village, ablaze
+with illumination,&mdash;had he not been environed with
+precautions, lapped in luxury?  Where another baby would
+have slumbered in a wicker bassinette, the child of France
+cried in a cradle of artistic goldsmithery.  And the three
+great official bodies of the State, the Delegates from all
+the constituted Authorities paid homage.  And they
+enrolled him in the First Regiment of Grenadiers of the
+Imperial Guard on the day of his birth, and pinned the
+Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor on his bib when he
+was forty-eight hours old.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To gratify the paternal ambition of a father who had
+dreaded the stigma of childlessness, this graft of his race
+was to be forced into precocious maturity.  You might
+have seen the little creature at six months of age strapped
+in a cane chair-saddle upon the back of a Shetland pony.
+At five he could ride a military charger.  Dressed in the
+white-faced blue uniform of the First Grenadiers of the
+Guard, his tiny face hidden in a huge fur shako with a
+white plume and <i>galons</i> and a huge brass-eagled fore-plate,
+you saw him with the Emperor at Imperial Reviews.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is uncertain whether he was ever soothed to sleep
+with the French equivalent of the rhyme of Baby Bunting,
+whether he ever learned of the Archer who shot at a frog,
+or was thrilled by the adventures of Jack the Giant Killer.
+We know that the Napoleonic tradition was his ABC, the
+Third Empire his primer.  At the time of the war with
+Italy, he being then some three years of age, his utterances
+on the subject were quoted in the daily papers as miracles
+of wisdom&mdash;marvels of acumen.  His seventh birthday
+had been celebrated by the production of a Military
+Spectacle, in the course of which real cannon were fired and
+real military evolutions performed upon the stage.  His
+great-uncle on a white horse, in the little cocked hat and
+gray capote of History, was the hero, you may be sure;
+and three hundred soldiers' sons of his own age filled the
+dress circle, stalls and upper tiers.  One likes the pretty
+story of the fair-haired child going down among these
+little comrades to distribute smiles and bonbons.  One can
+understand the father's pride in the laborious pot-hooks
+and hangers that compliment him upon the taking of
+Mexico&mdash;word of ill omen in Imperialist ears!&mdash;and the
+scrawled postscript that tells how his horse kicked at
+exercise that morning, but that he sat tight and did not
+fall.  It was not for a long, long time to dawn upon the
+expanding mind behind the beautiful, bright blue eyes,
+that the Throne Imperial of France was a saddle insecurely
+girthed upon a kicking charger, and that the paternal
+horsemanship had been, and frequently was severely taxed
+in the effort to stick on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You may imagine the query, Why?&mdash;forming in the
+mind of seven years.  Perhaps you see him in his
+lace-collared, belted blouse and wide Breton breeches of black
+velvet, scarlet silk stockings and buckled shoes, curled up
+upon the blue-and-golden cushion of the gilded chair of
+State upon the three-step daïs in the Throne Boom of the
+Tuileries, where, while their Imperial Majesties dined, he
+loved to play hide-and-seek with his tutor and an <i>aide-de-camp</i>
+or so; and wearied with play, conceive him dreaming
+under the gorgeous crimson velvet canopy powdered with
+golden N's and symbolical bees, edged with laurel leaves
+of beaten gold, and surmounted by a great golden eagle,
+perched with outstretched wings upon a laurel Crown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Under the brooding wings of the Eagle on the Crown
+this child of the Empire wondered about many things....
+Did any discovery connected with the peculiar duties
+devolving upon the Cent Gardes and the Tuileries Police
+ever make the bright young head toss restlessly on its pillow
+of down?  For he must one day have learned that noiseless
+footsteps patroled the corridors, that observant eyes
+twinkled at every keyhole&mdash;that sharp ears were listening
+at every chink for suspicious sounds not only by night,
+for the terror that walketh in the noonday is the peculiar
+bugbear of Emperors and Kings and Presidents.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One may be very sure that long ere another seven years
+had browned the fair hair, he was familiar with the fact
+that the guardian angels of M. Hyrvoix and M. Legrange
+kept unsleeping watch over the personal safety of his
+father, his mother, and himself.  That officials,
+functionaries, ladies of the Court, and lackeys, male and female,
+were maintained under constant and vigilant surveillance.
+That there were even Police to watch the Police who kept
+the Police under observation.  That precautions of a
+peculiarly special and delicate nature were observed with
+regard to the food prepared in the Imperial Kitchens and
+the wine that came from the Imperial Cellars, lest deadly
+poison should be mingled therein by those who did not
+love the name of Bonaparte.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He learned, next,&mdash;perhaps the knowledge floated in the
+air he breathed like some strange pollen, or was realized
+from certain experiences garnered during Imperial
+Progresses, Distributions of Awards, Opening Ceremonies, and
+other public Functions,&mdash;that there were many of these
+naughty people, who, while the soldiers and certain of the
+townsfolk in the streets cried "<i>Vive l'Empereur!</i>"  "<i>Vive
+l'Impératrice!</i>" and "<i>Vive le Prince Impérial!</i>" remained
+silent even though they uncovered, and a vast number
+who not only did not cheer, but kept their hats on, and
+sometimes hissed.  Following, came the shocking discovery
+that there existed a party of extremists who were not
+content with being rude and making ugly noises, but had
+even tried&mdash;and tried more than once&mdash;to kill the Emperor....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>To kill papa, who is so good to me! ...</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+In a glass case in the Empress's cabinet were preserved
+the crush-hat and the cloak worn by the Emperor on the
+night of Orsini's attempt outside the Opera, and damaged
+by a splinter from one of the exploding bombs.  Perhaps
+that glass case now yielded up its sinister secret to the
+curious questionings of a child.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The discovery that this father, so indulgent, so tender,
+and so much beloved, should be the object of such destroying
+hate as was cherished by these nameless men was
+terrible.  You may go farther into the thing, and suppose
+its breaking in upon him presently that many thousands
+of his father's subjects, not criminals or murderers, but
+rather estimable persons than otherwise, thrilled with
+something else than tenderness at the mention of the
+paternal name, and that the Empire, which had hitherto
+signified for him the adamantine hub on which rests the
+pivot of this spinning world of ours&mdash;was not as solidly
+founded as his pedagogues had taught him.  That the
+Army, the Peasantry, certain of the Nobility&mdash;not of the
+Ancient Régime&mdash;and a section of the Bourgeoisie
+supported it; but that by the educated middle-class, and by
+the intellectual, professional and working-classes it was
+held in abomination&mdash;execrated and detested; hated with
+a bitterness that intensified from day to day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cat came out of the bag a full-grown tiger.  Revelations,
+discoveries, succeeded one another.  Disillusions came
+crowding thick and fast.  When it was discovered that he
+was backward for his age, and the question of a new
+private tutor was being discussed, he had asked his
+Governor:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Could I not go to a day-school like Corvisart and
+Fleury and the Labédoyère boys?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Impossible, Monseigneur!" was the answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He urged:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But, <i>mon cher Général</i>, you answer that to so many
+questions.  Pray, this time explain why?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Horribly nonplussed, the military governor stammered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The heir to an Imperial Throne could not be sent twice
+daily to a day-school.  Not to be dreamed of!  Such an
+innovation would be the signal for fresh insults,
+provocation of new perils....  Never could it be allowed!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boy's were rather dreamy eyes, under the silken
+plume of hair, chestnut-brown like his beautiful mother's.
+They were proud eyes, too, when they had flashed at the
+word "insult."  And brave, for mention of "perils" only
+made them smile.  He said thoughtfully that morning,
+leaning his elbow on an unfinished Latin exercise that lay
+on the table in the window of his study at the Château of
+St. Cloud:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"An 'innovation' means something that is new.  But
+Primoli and Joachim Murat are being educated at a French
+College, and did not the late King send his sons to be
+boarders at the Lycée Henri IV.?  Could not I be a boarder
+at the Lycée Napoléon, or the Lycée Bonaparte, M. le
+Général?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With labored clearness and a great deal of circumlocution,
+M. le Général explained:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The heir of a Democratic Empire, Monseigneur, and
+the sons of a bourgeois Royalty cannot be regarded upon
+the same level, or educated upon identical principles.  But
+a plan has been devised for bringing your Imperial Highness
+into actual touch with the life of a public school...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"How?  Tell me quickly, M. le Général!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The child's delicate face flushed bright red.  His eyes
+shone.  He sat upright in his chair as though a vivifying
+breath had passed through him, waiting the reply.  It
+came....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"One of the Professors of the Elementary Class has
+been engaged to take your Imperial Highness through the
+course prescribed for the other pupils.  He will attend
+daily here, or at the Tuileries."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The child said, with a catching of the breath that was
+almost a sob, and a look of bitter disappointment:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The boys....  Then I shall not know the boys?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No, Monseigneur, except by hearsay.  The Professor
+will tell you their names, ages, and&mdash;ah!&mdash;leading
+characteristics....  You will learn with them, and every week
+you will write a composition with them, recapitulating
+what you have learned.  And that they will hear of you
+goes without saying.  Frequently, Monseigneur, but
+frequently!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His pupil interrupted:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They will hear of me, but what is that?  They will
+never see me&mdash;I shall never see them!  Never join in their
+games&mdash;never be just another boy with them!  Never be
+friends or foes with them&mdash;never beat them or
+be&mdash;&mdash;  No!  I should not like to be beaten at all!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M. le Général rejoined solemnly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That degrading possibility, and graver dangers still,
+will be averted by the fact that their Imperial schoolfellow
+will not be&mdash;ah!&mdash;bodily present in their midst, my Prince.
+Perhaps your Imperial Highness would like to see the
+Professor now?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so the Professor came, and from him the boy eagerly
+gleaned information about his little schoolfellows of the
+Seventh Form.  He had friends of his own who came to
+him after High Mass on Sundays and on all holidays.  But
+except Espinasse, they had been chosen for him.  The joy
+of selection and choice he was not to know.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus, many men of mark from different Lycées succeeded
+one another in the work-room at the Château and successively
+occupied the arm-chair at the end of the leather-covered
+table in one of the three windows of his corner
+study on the third story of the Pavilion de Flore at the
+Tuileries&mdash;and when he had been attentive and pleased his
+Professor,&mdash;his reward would be to hear about the boys....
+Some were noble, splendid fellows, full of cleverness,
+energy and spirits; others were funny by reason of sheer
+stupidity, or some quaint characteristic or absurd failing
+which had gained them nicknames among the rest.  A few
+were spoken of almost with reverence, as being dowered
+with the magical gift of genius: poets, dramatists, novelists,
+scientists in embryo, budding naval or military commanders,
+explorers who were to plant the Flag of France in
+virgin corners of the earth and proudly add them to the
+Empire that would one day be his own....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He met his longed-for boys at last.  One likes to picture
+him&mdash;having once taken a First Place in the Arithmetic
+Class&mdash;as being permitted to join in the St. Charlemagne
+fête of the Lycée Bonaparte.  He sat in the center of one
+of the long tables, with long vistas of boys, boys, boys
+opening out before him whichever way he turned his head.
+And he was happy, but for this thing; that though most
+of the boys in whom he had been particularly interested
+were presented to him, he did not find&mdash;as secretly he
+hoped to find&mdash;the friend of whom he dreamed....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He tried to be <i>bon camarade</i>; to combine&mdash;and he had
+a special gift in this&mdash;easy good-fellowship with
+graciousness.  But the boys did not respond as he would have
+liked.  They stood to attention, and looked him in the
+face, and answered, "Yes, Monseigneur!  No, Monseigneur!"
+boldly, or they shuffled and blinked, and answered,
+"No, Monseigneur!  Yes, Monseigneur!" mumblingly, and
+that was all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He wished, secretly yet ardently, for brave, proud eyes
+to meet his own, and strike out the sacred spark of chaste
+and mutual fire that kindles the pure, undying flame of
+Friendship's altar.  He longed for a grave, melodious voice
+to match the noble, youthful face and the fine form of his
+chosen friend.  He sought a nature to lean upon, which
+should be stronger, greater, than his own....  Superior
+talents, greater capacities, ambitions to share, successes
+to emulate.  And he found none.  Not a boy here was a
+patch upon the shoe of gay, gallant, lovable, merry
+Espinasse, who had never come up to his Prince's notion of a
+bosom-friend.  Could it be that the other self did not exist
+anywhere?  We turned from that thought, we who were
+lonely when we were young.  It made the world feel so
+big and cold.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+The Fête of St. Charlemagne having passed off without
+any untoward incident or disagreeable demonstration, an
+unhappy inspiration on the part of M. Victor Duruy
+prompted the suggestion that the Emperor's heir should
+preside at the distribution of prizes for the Concours
+Général, and thus be for the second time brought into
+sympathetic touch with the intellectual youth of France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are to imagine the picture of the stately entry into
+the great Hall upon the first-floor of the Sorbonne upon
+an evening in mid-August; the reception by the Minister
+of Public Instruction, gowned and capped and hooded,
+and the Representatives of the Faculties; the ominously
+restricted and frigid applause of professors and students,
+greeting references made in the Rector's Latin speech to
+the presence of an Imperial Prince in the classic groves
+of Akademos.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hostility, hidden behind a mask of frigid indifference,
+was to dash down the brittle sham, and show the fierce
+eyes of scorn and the livid hue of hatred, and the writhed
+lips dumb with reproaches unutterable.  Contempt and
+mockery were to be conveyed in the small sibilant <i>s'ss</i>!
+that rippled from parterre to gallery, and by the
+intolerable jeering titter that replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet all might have passed off tolerably but for the beldam
+Fate, who had arranged that the second prize for Greek
+translation, a trio of calf-bound, gilt-backed volumes
+containing the Works of Thucydides, had&mdash;together with a
+laurel crown&mdash;fallen to Louis-Eugène Cavaignac.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young voice had not faltered in reading the name
+upon the illuminated scroll.  What did its owner know
+of the Revolutionary soldier, the dauntless foe of
+Abd-el-Kader?  The Governor-General of Algeria who had been
+recalled to Paris to assume the functions of Minister at
+War to the Republican Government of 1848.  The man
+who had upheld the office of Dictator during the period of
+terror that had followed the fatal days of June!  The
+candidate for the Presidency of the Republic who had scorned
+to bribe; who had calmly accepted his defeat, and taken
+his place in the National Assembly, when Charles Louis
+Napoleon Bonaparte, the good citizen, was elected to the
+arm-chair upon the tribune, and took the oath of fidelity
+to the Republic of France.  Who had been imprisoned in
+the Fortress of Ham, with other Representatives of the
+Left,&mdash;his gaoler a commandant named Baudot, whom he
+himself had appointed in '48,&mdash;his guards the 40th Regiment
+of the Line, which had been subject to his orders so
+short a time before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of his seven fellow-captives between those grim and
+oozing walls, one was paralyzed upon release, others were
+victims to chronic rheumatism.  Cavaignac had lived in
+retirement until the elections of June, 1857, when he was
+chosen as one of the Deputies for the Seine, in opposition
+to an Imperialist candidate.  A few weeks later he had
+died suddenly, leaving a wife and a son three years old.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+This son, who had half-risen from his place upon the
+bench at the sound of the voice that called upon him in the
+name that had been his father's, had all these memories
+in his flaming eyes.  He did not seem to hear the applause
+that greeted his triumph; he gazed steadily into the face
+of the young Bonaparte, and then looked toward his
+mother.  And Madame Cavaignac, seated, beautiful and
+stern as a matron of old Rome, relentless as Fate, in the
+front of the gallery opposite, signed to him with an
+imperious gesture to sit down.  He obeyed her.  And then
+round upon round of deafening plaudits made the walls
+and rafters of the ancient building shake; and brought
+the gray dust of six centuries drifting down upon the black
+or brown or golden locks of the hopeful youth of France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After that episode the heir of the Imperial dignities was
+not again brought in contact with the students of the
+lyceums.  He made no reference to the prize-winner who
+had refused the prize tendered by the son of his dead
+father's relentless enemy.  But the insult had gone to the
+quick.  Recalling it, he would clench his hands until the
+nails dug deep into the delicate flesh, crying inwardly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Oh! to be a man full-grown, and avenge that day with
+blood!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At other times he would weep passionately in secret over
+the memory of the outrage; for, being of a sensitive,
+affectionate and generous nature, it sorely hurt to find
+himself the object of such hatred from one in whom,&mdash;it seemed
+to him, and perhaps indeed it was so!&mdash;he might have
+found the bosom-friend and <i>alter ego</i>, so keenly longed for
+and so eagerly sought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bright dark eyes and clear-cut features, the well-set
+head and athletic form, the dignified, yet modest bearing
+of this boy, so superior to himself in everything but wealth
+and station, fitted the niche previously prepared.  And
+when he fell to dreaming, young Cavaignac's resolute face
+and calm, contemptuous bearing were invariably opposed
+to his own unslumbering resentment, and finally-conquering
+generosity.  For, varied as the plot might be, the
+<i>dénouement</i> of each little drama would always be the
+same.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They would meet, in manhood, upon some field of bloody
+battle, during the great war beginning with the French
+invasion of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, ending with
+the conquest of Germany and the annexation of the left
+bank of the Rhine.  A youth upon the verge of manhood,
+the dreamer would have performed such prodigies of valor
+in command of his regiment as to justify his appointment
+as Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Army of Invasion.
+He had not decided what would happen.  There would
+be a great charge of cavalry led against overwhelming odds,
+under a deadly fire of infantry and artillery, by himself.
+He would cut down or shoot a gigantic Prussian trooper,
+who had wounded a French officer.  He would lightly leap
+from his own charger&mdash;the Arab "<i>Selim</i>" given him by
+Sultan Abdul Aziz&mdash;and aid the prostrate man to rise and
+mount.  Their looks would meet, the blue-gray and the
+fiery black eyes would strike out a spark of mutual
+recognition.  Oh! the joy of heaping coals of fire upon that
+beautiful, rebellious head!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or Cavaignac would not then recognize his saviour, but
+long afterward, the Prince having become Emperor, would
+head a conspiracy to dethrone him.  Moving, as would
+be the wont of the Fourth Napoleon, in disguise through
+the public places of his capital, mingling with every rank
+and class, a mystery to men, an enigma to women,
+worshiped by all, known by none; he would have discovered
+the plot and laid a counter-plot, which, of course, would
+be successful.  The mine would explode harmlessly&mdash;the
+conspirators would be seized.  Their leader,&mdash;lying under
+sentence of death in a military fortress&mdash;probably Mont
+Valérien&mdash;bedded upon damp straw, loaded with massive
+fetters, would be visited by a young officer.  He would
+recall the features of his deliverer of long ago, and fall
+upon his neck, crying: "Alas! my noble friend, long
+sought, unfound till now, thou comest late, but in time, for
+I am to die to-morrow!"  "Die!  Is it possible!  Of what
+art thou guilty, then?"  Cavaignac would answer coldly:
+"Of having conspired to dethrone the young Emperor!"  "Dost
+thou indeed hate him so?"  "Ay! we have been
+enemies since boyhood's days."  Choking with emotion,
+dissembled under a pale and resolute exterior, the visitor
+would return: "And he hates thee not!  Were he here
+he would say as much to thee!"  "Can it be possible?
+How, then&mdash;&mdash;?"  "I swear it upon the soul of my father!
+Thy Emperor is thy truest friend!  Here is my sword.
+Behold this undefended breast, cage of a heart that has
+ever loved thee!  Thrust, I command thee, if thou hast the
+power!"  "Sire, I am conquered; I have lived for a
+Republic&mdash;I die the Emperor's most loyal subject!"  "To
+my arms, then, Cavaignac!  Embrace me&mdash;thou art forgiven!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Impossible, beautiful dreams, grandiose and absurd,
+ridiculous and touching....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was mentally carrying on one of these endless
+duologues as he rode through the wintry avenues of the Bois,
+and dismounted at my Lord Hertford's exquisite villa of
+Bagatelle, set in beautiful, secluded grounds adjoining the
+park.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Born of a whim of the Comte d'Artois, gay Monsieur,
+brother of the Sixteenth Louis, built in fifty-four days by
+the architect Bellanger, at a cost of six hundred thousand
+livres, Bagatelle had always served as a shelter for gallant
+adventures, not all of them set in what Republicans
+scornfully termed "the night of monarchy."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mademoiselle de Charolais, beautiful and haughty;
+Mademoiselle de Beauharnais, handsome, sensual, and
+unscrupulous; Madame Tallien, constant, noble, and
+courageous; the Duchesse de Berri, and how many other women,
+famous or infamous, had trodden its velvet lawns and
+swept over its floors of rare marquetry or its pavements
+of mosaic?  The blood of the Beauharnais mingled in this
+boy's own veins, with the Corsican and Spanish tides and
+the dash of canny Scots derived from distant Kirkpatricks.
+That Celtic strain was responsible, it may be, for his
+dreaminess and love of solitude.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was dreaming as he rode through the forest; the
+spell of his dream was still upon him as he turned his
+Arab in at the gilded gates of Bagatelle, and dismounted
+before its portico, in the shadow of the Gothic tower.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From childhood many of the happiest hours of this son
+of the Empire had been spent at Bagatelle.  In its
+labyrinths of myrtle and oleander, laurel and syringa, he had
+hidden, bursting with childish laughter, when his playmates
+were seeking him; he had galloped his Shetland
+pony and raced with his dogs over its green lawns.  Upon
+its broad sheets of crystal water he had sailed his miniature
+yacht-squadrons.  At his entreaty, the Emperor, always
+an indulgent father, had endeavored to buy the place from
+its English owner.  In vain! my lord of Hertford was
+not to be tempted by gold, possessing so much of the stuff,
+or allured by rank, who was a premier English Marquess,
+Knight of the Garter, and so forth.  Yet he was a generous
+nobleman, and made the Imperial urchin free of his coveted
+fairyland whenever he, the owner of the place, should be
+from home.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To-day's dream, for a wonder, was not the usual duologue
+between the friend and the unfriend.  Albeit innocently,
+it was tinged by sex, it assumed the shape of the
+triangle; and worked out, though, to the satisfaction of the
+dreamer, the eternal Rule of Three.  Louis and his dear
+enemy, men grown, madly loved one woman; a bewitching
+creature, with a sparkling rose-flushed face, eyes like blue
+jewels under a pile of black hair, crowned with a little
+cap of velvet and gray fur, with a blue wing set at the side.
+She adored the Prince who had won her love in the disguise
+of a simple officer.  Fortified by this passion, she
+could hear Cavaignac plead unmoved.  He, driven to
+frenzy by jealousy, would conceal himself here, for the
+Imperial lover would have settled Bagatelle with all its
+treasures upon his lady-love!&mdash;and at midnight when a
+step echoed in the gallery of arms, and the fair one,
+reclining upon this very fauteuil in the window commanding
+the grass-plot centered by the Cellini fountain,&mdash;sprang
+up with a cry of joy to welcome her lover,&mdash;the rejected
+aspirant would leap from behind yonder trophy of
+sixteenth-century pageant-shields, topped with the
+magnificent embossed and damascened one bearing the monogram
+and insignia of Diane de Poitiers; and, seizing yonder
+rapier from its stand, would challenge his successful rival
+there and then, to a duel <i>à outrance</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Need it be said that the Prince's well-known mastery of
+the sword would enable him,&mdash;by a lightning <i>coup</i>, following
+a feint&mdash;to disarm his antagonist; upon whom he
+would finally bestow not only the lady, but the villa, with
+its treasures of paintings by ancient and modern masters,
+its marvelous miniatures and enamels, its rooms of porcelain,
+cabinets of priceless coins and gems, galleries of
+antique sculpture, its costly furniture, its matchless grounds
+and gardens, ending a great many nobly turned sentences
+with the dignified peroration:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Take her, Cavaignac, with all these riches!  I ask
+nothing in return, but your esteem!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap20"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XX
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Could Juliette have known how she had been disposed
+of in a boy's imagination, perhaps the Spanish Infanta
+would have replaced the rosy nymph.  But while her
+Prince dreamed, her jingling vehicle had crossed the Port
+de St. Cloud, and so by Ville d'Avray up the long avenue
+between the breasting woods, stately and glorious still,
+though stripped by the blasts of January, to the clean
+white town that had sprung up, nearly three hundred
+years before (upon the site of a little village patronized
+by wagoners), where an ancient feudal castle stood on a
+plateau surrounded by lake, forest, and marsh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A touch of a King's scepter changed this ancient castle
+to a Royal Hunting-Lodge, a whim of his successor transformed
+the humbler dwelling to a Palace.  Courtiers, officials,
+functionaries, guards, valets, lackeys, pimps, cooks,
+barbers and innumerable hangers-on are necessary to the
+upkeep of State; and these must be housed in stately fashion.
+Behold whole streets of buildings, with noble avenues,
+radiating like the sticks of a fan from the sunlike center,
+uprising like fungi from the swampy soil.  Behold, as the
+power and glory of the monarch redoubled,&mdash;no less than
+thirty thousand workmen engaged in enlarging and beautifying
+the residence of His Majesty, while a regiment of
+Swiss Guards dig out the lake.  And when pneumonia,
+fever, and ague carry off so many thousands of these hapless
+toilers that the dead have to be carted away by night,
+and secretly dumped into pits dug for the purpose, and the
+bottoms of the Royal coffers are seen through a thinning
+layer of gold, and the Building Accounts of the Crown
+Demesne show totals of unpaid debts sufficiently colossal
+to stagger a lightning-calculator, and Ministers grow dizzy,
+seeing a Kingdom on the brink of financial ruin, the
+sublime forehead beneath the bediamonded hat and the
+towering wig is illuminated by an inspiration.  "Ha!  We
+have it!  Quick! commence new works!  Pile on the
+national taxes, press a million unpaid laborers into the Royal
+service.  Let rivers of tears flow to swell the sources of our
+dwindling fountains.  Upon the uncounted corpses of vulgar
+toilers erect fresh monuments to all the glories of
+France!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No ghastly visions disturbed the royal dreams, no awful
+Finger wrote the dreadful sentence upon the marble
+friezes of his banqueting-halls.  The shadow of the little
+cocked hat that was to overtop his tallest wig by the whole
+height of a Crown Imperial was never shown him in Witch
+Montespan's magic mirror.  The bees that were to swarm
+over his lilies and drain their golden honey were not to be
+hatched for many years yet.  He deemed himself immortal
+in spite of the twinges of the gout, until it took
+him in the stomach and carried him off, at seventy-seven,
+leaving France to shudder in the embraces of a far worse
+man than himself.  Until, aphrodisiacs and apoplexy
+having made an end of the infamous Regent, and Louis the
+Well-Beloved having succumbed to vice and smallpox, and
+the Red Widow having hugged the heads off Louis the
+Locksmith and his fair young Queen, the Terror ushered
+in the Revolution, Era of Liberty, Equality, and Universal
+Phlebotomy; until men, wearied of serving many masters,
+looked about for one to lead them, and the Little Corporal
+with the pale hatchet-face and the inscrutable gray-blue
+eyes under the great marble forehead rose up and said,
+"Here am I!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Court of his nephew was just now at the Tuileries.
+You saw the town of Versailles in its winter slumber,
+undisturbed by the roll of innumerable carriages, luggage
+<i>fourgons</i>, pastrycooks' and tradesmen's vans, and other
+vehicles, over its historic and venerable cobblestones....
+Fashionable people lived there all the year round; many
+of the crack regiments of the Imperial Guard were quartered
+in the innumerable barracks; there was no lack of
+society&mdash;not the cream of the cream, perhaps, but
+charming, lively and gay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard
+were garrisoned in that antique quarter of barracks and
+churches, convents and Royal harems, once known as the
+Parc aux Cerfs.  South of the great central avenue leading
+from the Place d'Armes to Paris, you found its huge
+monumental entrance on the right of the Rue de l'Orangerie,
+once the Hotel of the Gardes du Corps du Roi.  It
+boasted a frontage at once chaste and imposing.  The high
+window of the mess-room, balconied and dominated by a
+lofty pediment, surmounted the great gates of wrought-iron
+rolling back upon a wide sanded courtyard.  If I do
+not err, the quarters of M. le Colonel were upon the second-floor
+upon the left-hand side of the gate, immediately above
+a confectioner's, whence rose delicious odors of baking
+pastry and simmering chocolate to titillate the nostrils of
+Mademoiselle.  The sleeping-chamber and boudoir,
+described in the Colonel's letter as hung with rosebud chintz,
+and elegantly furnished; the little kitchen on the same
+floor, full of pots and bright pans, scoured by the Colonel's
+soldier-servant into dazzling brilliancy, more than fulfilled
+the expectations provoked beforehand.  I rather think
+that the dinner&mdash;an inexpensive and savory little meal,
+consisting of vegetable soup with fillets of sole Normande,
+an infinitesimal steak <i>jardinière</i>, an omelette <i>soufflée</i>, Brie
+cheese (nowhere upon earth does one get such Brie as at
+Versailles), and dessert&mdash;had come from the pastrycook's
+on the street-floor.  After the cooking one got at the
+Convent and in default of the much better dinner
+Mademoiselle could have evolved out of similar materials, it
+was a meal for demi-gods.  And you do not know Juliette
+if you imagine she did not dispose of her share.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am <i>gourmande</i>, me," she would assure her confidantes
+in all sincerity, fitting the tip of a slender finger
+into a dint that would have needed slight persuasion to
+become a dimple.  "I love good dishes, or how should I
+be able to cook them?  One of these days it is possible
+that I may even grow fat.  Believe me, I am not joking.
+Already I perceive the beginning of a double chin!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M. le Colonel had excused himself from attendance at
+Mess that he might dine with his daughter.  Both Monsieur
+and Mademoiselle were prodigiously gay, you may conceive.
+But even while Juliette laughed and clapped her little
+hands in delight at the paternal witticisms, while she leaned
+upon her Colonel's shoulder, or sat upon the arm of his
+chair; while her slender arm twined round his neck, and
+her cheek, no longer ivory-pale, but painted by the delicate
+brush of the artist Joy with the loveliest rose-flush, was
+tickled by the waxed end of his martial mustachio, the
+hateful shadow of the faceless Charles rose up and thrust
+itself between.  It blotted out the last rays of the red
+wintry sun, it sprawled across the shade of the Argand
+lamp.  It was heavy though impalpable, and diffused a
+numbing chill throughout the little apartment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps the father felt it, for as they sat together
+talking by the cheerful fire of crackling beech-billets that
+burned upon the open hearth, he gradually fell silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You can see him in his undress uniform jacket of green
+cloth, braided, frogged, and with fur edging, unhooked at
+the neck and showing the white shirt, stiff linen collar, and
+scarlet tie.  His polished boots and bright spurs, buttons,
+buckles, and so forth, reflected the dancing firelight.  His
+forage-cap, a head-dress gaudy and bizarre enough to have
+come out of a Christmas cracker, crowned a porcelain
+bust of a young negress, chocolate-hued, with purplish-crimson
+lips, pink protruding tongue, and rolling onyx
+eyes (an art-object left behind as too fragile for transport
+by the previous occupant of the quarters)&mdash;while his long
+saber leaned against her wooden pedestal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His handsome face was very grave, almost somber, as
+he pulled his crisp imperial, and stared at the little dancing
+hearth-flames, forgetful of the excellent cigar burning itself
+away to ash between the first and second fingers of his
+well-kept right hand.  The other hand sometimes rested
+on his knee, sometimes touched his daughter's hair; for
+Juliette had slipped from her previous seat to the carpet,
+where she sat leaning against him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And all at once the chill barrier of reserve broke down.
+It was when a heavy tear splashed upon the hand that
+rested on the knee of the crimson overall, a strong, brown,
+manly hand, rather hairy on the back.  It clenched as
+though the single drop had been of molten metal, and
+then Juliette caught it in both her own and spoke:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Oh, my father, why must this marriage take place?
+We have not said one word, but I know well that what is
+in my mind is in yours also.  Feel!"&mdash;she drew the prisoned
+hand closely to her&mdash;"here lies your letter over where
+my heart is beating so.  Much of it I comprehend, but the
+rest is anguish&mdash;mystery!  War is threatened&mdash;that at
+least is clear.  The regiment will sooner or later be ordered
+on active service.  And&mdash;were your daughter the wife of
+a gentleman of her father's profession, you fear that she
+might suffer as her grandmother&mdash;as her own beloved dead
+mother did.  But though my grandmother lost her husband,
+War spared her son.  You returned to her and to my
+mother, not even wounded, darling!  And if you apprehend
+for me a lot less fortunate, why need I marry any
+one?  Take me with you or leave me behind, I am your
+obedient daughter always&mdash;always!  But I had rather you
+would take me, dear!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not trusting himself to speak, the father took the little
+head between his palms and kissed the blue-veined temples
+and the clear space between the wide-arched eyebrows.
+The candid eyes met his, that were cloudy and troubled.
+He searched for phrases to disguise a truth that must stab.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If I met death upon the field, you by my side, you
+would be left alone and unprotected.  Were I to leave you
+behind even, in the care of Madame Tessier, you would
+none the less be alone.  There is safety in permanent ties;
+but only when her husband is by her side does the sacrament
+of marriage open a haven to a young girl where the
+libertine and the seducer dare not enter.  I speak with
+certainty&mdash;only when her husband is by her side!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So women were not to be trusted! ... His palms
+might have been burned had he not withdrawn them, so
+fiery the sudden blush that rose in the clear, pale cheeks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Barely comprehending his meaning, she faltered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Yet my grandmother&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Colonel broke in hastily:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My mother was a Saint!  What I have said does not
+apply to her!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And my mother?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Something like a groan broke from the man.  She felt
+him wince and shudder as she leaned upon him, saw the
+strong square teeth of the upper-jaw nip the ruddy lower
+lip, noted the ashen grayness that replaced the ebbed
+color, and the points of moisture that broke out upon his
+temples where his rich black hair was frosted with white.
+And looking, she bleached and shuddered in sympathy.
+His haunted eyes and haggard face bent over an upturned
+white mask, that had little of the grace of girlhood left in
+it.  The distended pupils encroached upon the blue until
+her eyes seemed inky-black.  He would have withdrawn
+the hand she held in both hers, but the soft little fingers
+turned to living steel, and he could not free himself.  And
+the blue-black eyes staring out of the pinched elfin face
+quested in search of something that his own eyes strove to
+hide.  As though his had been the weaker nature and
+hers the stronger (impossible, the creature being feminine),
+he felt his loathed secret being relentlessly drawn to light.
+The clear, unshaken question:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Was not my mother good?" compelled him to truthful
+utterance.  He heard a voice unlike his own replying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"At the beginning&mdash;yes!  I would stake my soul upon
+it.  But during the war in the Crimea, when the Allies
+watered with the best blood of France and England that
+fatal soil, her loyalty to the absent husband weakened&mdash;her
+heart strayed!"  He struck himself upon the breast
+passionately.  "Yet here beat a heart that would have
+throbbed for love in death, had her lips kissed the shape
+of icy clay that housed it.  It burns now with shame that
+I must strip off the veil of secrecy that until this moment
+has hidden from thee thy mother's sin!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The head bent, a swift kiss touched his hand.  Her
+mouth felt very cold.  He went on, realizing that she
+demanded it:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She fled with her lover upon the very day of the
+re-entry of the Army into Paris.  After the triumph I
+hastened to Auteuil, where she and her child were living with
+my mother.  That sainted soul met me at the door&mdash;the
+first glimpse of her face told the terrible intelligence.
+Had other lips than those beloved ones stabbed me with
+the truth, that night my revolver would have ended it!&mdash;I
+would not have lived to endure the pity in the faces of the
+friends who loved me&mdash;the curiosity in strangers' eyes."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A deep sigh stirred her, quickening in him the knowledge
+that since she had kissed his hand she had listened
+without breathing.  She murmured now:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Poor, dearest, best father!  How old was I when
+she&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said tenderly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Let me see ... it was the August of 1856; thou
+hadst five years, and thy curls were as soft and as yellow
+as chicken-down.  Thy mother used to say, <i>Juliette will
+never be black like me!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That disloyal mother had been the darkest of brunettes,
+ivory-skinned, and ebon-haired, with eyes of tawny
+wine-color, and the tall, lithe, exuberant form of a goddess of
+Grecian myth.  To question the man she had deserted
+with regard to his betrayer seemed hideous, and yet...
+Juliette strung herself to the effort, faltering:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And for whom...? with whom...?  Do not tell
+me if it costs thee too much!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His comprehension was instant.  Very coldly the answer
+came:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He was a personage of rank in his own country.  A
+military attaché of the Prussian Embassy in Paris.  They
+had met at one of the Imperial receptions at the Tuileries."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Is he alive?</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The whispered words might have been shrieked in his
+ear, such a leap of the heart and such a thrilling of the
+nerves responded.  He rose to his feet and said sternly,
+not looking at his daughter, but directly at the wall before
+him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The man is dead!  But he did not fall in a duel.  He
+lived to meet his end during the Prusso-Austrian War.
+He had left Paris <i>en route</i> for Berlin when my representative
+called at the Prussian Embassy.  Strive as I would,
+I could gain no answer from him.  Nor might the utmost
+influence I could command obtain a response to my <i>cartel</i>.
+This being so, the disgrace is his&mdash;not mine!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He grew quite tall in saying this, so dignified was the
+little tubby man, so noble in his soldierly simplicity.  His
+daughter looked up at him, wondering at him, loving him,
+sorrowing over him; yet yearning to hear more of that
+beloved, faithless one who had dealt those bleeding wounds
+he now bared in the sight of the child she had deserted,
+and plowed such deep lines in his wrung and suffering
+face.  The words would break out, though she nipped her
+lips to stop them:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And my mother ... did she repent and ask your
+pardon?  Did you not forgive her before she died?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She did not die!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The little Colonel had a great voice.  His "<i>Garde à
+vous!</i>" roared down the files like a spherical mortar-shell,
+his "<i>Chargez!</i>" might have set dead men and horses up
+and galloping.  Indeed, his nickname among the troopers
+of his regiment was, I believe, nothing less than "<i>Bouche
+à feu!</i>"  When he thundered the answer to Juliette's
+question, not only did Mademoiselle Bayard leap to her feet,
+vibrating in every fiber of her slender, rigid body, but the
+crystal drops of the mantelshelf chandeliers left by the
+previous tenant danced and tinkled, and the panes of the
+windows rattled in their frames.  What more the Colonel
+might have said was drowned, as the customary fanfare of
+trumpets sounded from the Mess, heralding the loyal toast.
+Then the "Vive l'Empereur!" rang out, and the
+regimental band crashed into "<i>Partant Pour La Syrie</i>," and
+very soon afterward, from the uncurtained window
+commanding the barrack-square, lights could be seen moving
+across the shadowy space as the dispersing officers returned
+to their quarters or went about their duty, attended by
+orderlies carrying stable-lanterns of the smoky, smelly,
+tallow-burning kind.  The Colonel's own duty called him
+elsewhere, and he was glad of it.  He muttered an inaudible
+word, his eyes averted from his daughter; took his cap,
+gloves, and riding-whip, and strode jingling from the
+room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah, it would need a great artist in words to depict the
+swift and changing emotions that swelled and wrung the
+heart of the poor girl he left behind him, and give some
+adequate idea of the storm that swept over her in that
+lonely hour.  Joy at the discovery that the adored mother
+of her childish memories yet lived was drowned in anguish
+at the piercing thought, "<i>She lives, but not for
+me!</i>"  Shame burned her cheeks to crimson, grief washed them
+white again; her heart bounded in her bosom, or sank,
+heavy as lead.  Except Madame Suchard, the soldier's
+wife who had been engaged to wait upon Mademoiselle
+de Bayard, and who now might be heard washing up the
+dinner-plates and dishes in the little kitchen, there was no
+earthly woman near to whom she might turn for comfort
+in this her hour of need.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But as she wept, not the freely-flowing tears of girlhood,
+but with the dry sobbings and painful convulsions
+that tortured women know, there chimed from the great
+cathedral Church of St. Louis close by, the first long triple
+of the Angelus, echoed by the thinner-sounding bells from
+the Convent of the Augustinian Sisters, from the Priory
+of the Bernardine Fathers, from the House of the Sœurs
+de l'Esperance, from the House of the Little Sisters of the
+Poor.  Mechanically Juliette's hand went to her bosom,
+her pale lips moved, shaping the sacred words.  And then
+she went to her room and knelt at the little straw-bottomed
+<i>prie-Dieu</i> that stood before her Crucifix, and prayed with
+passionate earnestness that He, Who when hanging upon
+His Cross of Agony gave His Mother to be our Mother,
+would hear Her pure prayer of intercession for that mother
+who had deserted her child.  Wherever she might be, however
+low she might have fallen, whatever the sins, vices,
+follies that yet environed her, held her back or dragged
+her down, the ray of Divine Grace had power to reach
+her, raise her up, and lead her back by the path of
+Penance into the Way of Peace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And pending the miracle, toward which end Masses
+should be offered and Communions given; obedience to
+that father so cruelly betrayed, so bitterly wronged, must,
+more than ever, be the watchword of Juliette.  For the
+conviction began to dawn in her that belief in the innate
+purity and truth of her sex having been destroyed in him
+by the unfaith of that most beloved, most unhappy one;
+he sought to safeguard her daughter's virtue by means
+of a husband, who, being the only son of a widow, and
+therefore exempt from the obligations of military service,
+must always be on the spot.  Sorrowfully she sought her
+bed, to remember, the moment her head touched the pillow,
+that although she had mustered courage to plead against
+the Colonel's sentence of marriage, provoking him thereby
+to reveal the long-hidden secret of his betrayal, she had
+never mentioned Charles except by inference.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What was he like, this young man, pious, virtuous, devoted
+to his mother, energetic, frugal, a manufacturer of,
+and merchant in, the commodity of woolen cloth?  Could
+one build a husband out of such materials?  Was it possible?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She tried once more.  The effort led to tossing and
+turning.  Conscience is most active in the night-watches.
+Juliette's bosom-monitor reproached her with having
+boasted to dear Monica's untidy brother of the faceless
+Charles's mastery of the art of fence.  Other lapses from
+the strict line of veracity had preceded and followed.  She
+had told one curious girl that Charles owned the form of an
+athlete, and hair of ruddy chestnut; another had reaped
+the information that he possessed a profile resembling
+that of Edgar Ravenswood, with dark, melancholy eyes,
+and a jet-black mustache of the kind that is silky and
+sweeps.  Yet another eager inquirer had elicited the
+information that Charles was quite a duodecimo edition of
+a lover, slender, brilliantly fair, and not much taller than
+the bride-elect.  Should it occur to these girls to compare
+notes in some hour of recess or exercise, what would be the
+impression conveyed to the Great Class?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One had left School, however, and one was glad of it.
+To go back with that tragic secret locked in one's bosom,
+and mingle with fortunate girls whose mothers were good
+women, happily alive or safely in Paradise, how could one
+have borne that?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A well-known footstep outside the door of her room,
+which opened from the little salon, and a gentle rustling
+sent a shiver through her.  When the step moved away
+with its soldierly jingle of spurs accompanying it, De
+Bayard's daughter sat up in bed and kissed both hands
+to him, passionately; stretching out her arms with a wide
+gesture as though something of the maternal mingled with
+her love for him now....  When "Lights Out" sounded,
+and the gas was extinguished, and no line of yellow
+showed under the door, and the footsteps retreated and
+his door shut upon them, Juliette crept out of bed, lighted
+the candle, and picked up the scrap of paper that had been
+pushed across her threshold by the strong, beloved hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It proved to be a note dated that day, and addressed
+from the Tessier's house in the Rue de Provence, in
+Madame's angular, spidery caligraphy.  Felicitations to her
+dear friend on the safe return of his cherished one were
+followed by regrets.  "My Charles, alas! will be detained
+in Belgium at least until the Mardigras.  The meeting of
+these dear young people must necessarily be deferred until
+that date.  But to-morrow being the Feast of Saint
+Polycarpe, possibly M. le Colonel would bring Mademoiselle to
+visit a friend, old and most affectionate, punctually at the
+hour of one <i>midi</i>?"  With tender remembrances the note
+concluded.  Beneath the signature&mdash;Marie-Anastasie
+Tessier&mdash;M. le Colonel had scrawled in pencil the curt
+intimation: "Arranged.&mdash;H.A.A. de B."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Knowing Charles safely bestowed in Belgium, Juliette
+sank back upon her pillow, and soon was calmly sleeping
+between her two great hair-plaits.  But slippered footsteps
+patroled the Colonel's room until gray dawn showed
+between the slits of the window-shutters, and the heavy
+sighs and muttered words that broke from him would have
+wrung his daughter's faithful heart.  Sleepless and
+haggard, the first pale beams of January daylight found him
+still pacing his brown-striped drugget, a letter&mdash;the cause
+of his own and another's misery,&mdash;crushed in his strong
+right hand:
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+  "555, AVENUE DE L'ALMA, PARIS,<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"<i>December</i> 18, 1869.<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"MONSIEUR,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Acting upon instructions received from the senior
+partner of the Berlin branch of our firm, we beg to
+acknowledge your reply to his communication of the 7th
+instant, and must point out to you that the attitude you
+assume with regard to our client is equally unjust and
+indefensible.  No legal remedy was sought by you for the
+injuries you allege that you sustained through the infidelity
+of the lady who until the autumn of 1856 occupied&mdash;and
+without reproach&mdash;the position of your wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Further, during the years of her absence from your
+side, she has neither asked nor received from you any
+monetary payments toward her support and maintenance,
+facts which certainly appear to suggest consent and
+knowledge upon your part.  You may further be aware that
+His deceased Excellency, Count Maximilian von
+Schön-Valverden, late junior military <i>attaché</i> to the Prussian
+General Staff, fully atoned for an indiscretion of his earlier
+years, by making an ample settlement upon Madame de
+Bayard; and that she is now in a position to render liberal
+assistance to relatives whom Fortune has not dowered with
+ample means.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Under the circumstances, we have advised our client,
+whose natural affection for her daughter strongly urges
+her to assert her maternal rights to the society of
+Mademoiselle de Bayard, to enforce her claim by the
+reëstablishment of personal influence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The young lady in question is still unmarried, under
+age, and therefore subject to maternal authority; and our
+client does not disguise her hope that, by awakening the
+long silent chords of filial tenderness, she may gain a
+powerful advocate upon the side of reconciliation, reunion, and
+that unblemished and peaceful happiness which is only
+to be found by the domestic fireside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Recollect, Monsieur, that no legal bar exists to this
+most virtuous and irreproachable aspiration.  And understand
+that unless a favorable answer is shortly received
+by our firm to the application now made by us to you on
+behalf of our client, her next appeal will be made to your
+daughter and hers.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+  "We remain, etc.,<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"WIEGELT, NADIER AND BIDUQUET,<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"<i>Solicitors</i>."<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+By the chill light of the new day the Colonel for the
+twentieth time re-read the letter, and its cunning mixture
+of truth and falsehood, the venomed hint at knowledge
+and complicity, struck fangs once more into his quivering
+heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A devout Catholic, he had never sought to divorce the
+wife who had betrayed him.  Thus a civil marriage with
+her paramour had been rendered impossible to Adelaide,
+even had the Count desired it.  Now, furnished with
+ample means by the generosity of her dead lover, did the
+false wife seek at the hands of the injured husband
+rehabilitation, in return for a heap of tainted gold?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Horrible thought!  The walls of the room seemed to
+close upon De Bayard suffocatingly.  He opened the
+window and leaned out, drawing in deep drafts of the frosty
+morning air.  It cleared his brain; he realized, in the event
+of his contemptuous rejection of the hideous bargain, a
+menace to his daughter's peace of mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Motherhood is of all earthly relationships the most
+sacred.  Yet there are mothers who in revenge for
+disappointed hopes and thwarted ambitions have not hesitated
+to strike, through their own offspring, at husbands
+abhorred.  More than ever the husband of Adelaide bent to
+his determination of placing Juliette, at the earliest
+moment, safe out of reach of that spotted maternal embrace.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap21"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XXI
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Upon the following afternoon the Colonel duly escorted
+Mademoiselle to the dwelling of Madame Tessier.  You
+may conceive that the portly little warrior, when panoplied
+in the full-skirted, black frock-coat, gray peg-top trousers,
+black cravat and vest, and curly-brimmed silk chimney-pot
+of private life, looked a very gallant gentleman; and
+that his daughter, attired in a new and charming costume
+of fine blue cloth, trimmed with velvet and loops of black
+silk cord, and wearing a sealskin coat and a minute bonnet,
+consisting of a knot or two of blue velvet, a froth of lace,
+and half-a-dozen richly-tinted oak-leaves on her coils of
+black hair, conveyed an effect of elegant simplicity and
+youthful grace, such as only a well-bred French girl knows
+how to combine perfectly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During the walk, which absorbed the best part of a
+quarter of an hour, Juliette occupied herself in the
+endeavor to glean a few meager items of information with
+regard to her destined husband.  To her timidly-cast bait
+the Colonel barely vouchsafed a rise.  One may imagine a
+dialogue of timid interrogations and baffling replies,
+running somewhat after this fashion:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Dear father, upon reflection, I find myself unable to
+recall the features of M. Charles Tessier with anything
+approaching clearness.  I pray you be kind enough to
+describe him to me?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My daughter, I myself experience&mdash;how shall I phrase
+it?&mdash;a difficulty in verbally portraying the form and
+features of that excellent young man.  But his mother carries
+his image in her heart, and doubtless has it on her walls
+and in her albums.  Look in the one before you search
+the others; it will be wise."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Assuredly.  But, my father&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Chut!"  The Colonel twirled a waxed end of his
+magnificent mustache, and resumed presently: "M. Charles
+Tessier is a gentleman of honor, an excellent man of business,
+and a most desirable <i>parti</i> for any young girl of good
+family and limited fortune.  Could the most exacting
+bride-elect demand more than this?  In addition, he has
+a fine hand&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Indeed, dear father&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A fine hand was something tangible.  The owner of the
+commended extremity might in addition be possessor of a
+good figure, broad shoulders, a handsome nose....  And
+yet hunchbacks occasionally have neat hands, and the
+Colonel had only testified to one.  That idea might be
+dismissed as fanciful.  Of course, Charles had the proper
+complement of legs and arms.  Half-smiling at her own
+terrors, Juliette murmured:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Pray go on, dear father!  You said&mdash;a fine hand..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Hah&mdash;aha! yes.  A fine hand for a stroke at billiards.
+In addition, it cannot be denied that Charles has a
+magnificent head&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am listening, dear father!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A truly magnificent head for figures!  Book-keeping
+by double-entry is infant's play to this admirable young
+man.  He must teach thee the logarithms, my child, when
+thou art married....  Docile and intelligent as thou art,
+thou wouldst quickly learn to be his secretary and
+head-clerk.  It should be a true wife's ambition to help her
+husband in business, and this is alone possible when his
+avocations are of the strictly civil kind."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was tragic.  In her dreams Juliette Bayard had aided
+to put on the casque, and buckle the cuirass of a stately
+warrior.  Now she must perforce mend the gray goose-quill
+of a knight of the counting-house.  You might have
+seen how her slender throat swelled against the encircling
+band of velvet.  Tears sprang to her eyes.  To keep them
+back she bit her lip, straightened her back, and
+shrugged,&mdash;one barely perceptible shrug.  The Colonel said,&mdash;was his
+kind glance a little troubled as it turned on her?&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The letter of Madame Tessier has made it clear to
+thee, that although thou wilt see thy future husband soon,
+the meeting will not take place upon the present occasion.
+Since October M. Charles Tessier"&mdash;the Colonel twisted
+his mustache&mdash;"has been detained by affairs at Mons-sur-Trouille
+in Belgium.  I understand that at this country
+hamlet&mdash;near the town of Mons&mdash;is situated the manufactory
+of his partner, M.&mdash;the name for the moment escapes
+me.  He is a wealthy gentleman of excellent Flemish
+family.  The daughter, I remember, was called Clémence or
+Clémentine."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Colonel cleared his throat.  Juliette expressed a
+preference for the name of Clémentine.  The Colonel
+begged her pardon.  After all, it was Clémence.  That did
+not matter.  Mademoiselle liked the name of Clémence
+nearly as well as Clémentine.  The Colonel tugged at the
+other side of the fiercely-waxed mustache, and changed
+the subject.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The pavement rings beneath the heel; I prophesy
+frost to-night.  Thou art cold, my child, I saw thee shiver.
+Shall we walk more quickly?  It will be better so."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She quickened her steps at the suggestion.  There had
+already been frost, and the air was keen and sparkling as
+champagne.  The young blood in her veins answered to
+the pleasant stimulus of exercise.  Her cheeks were rose-tinted
+porcelain, her eyes blue stars, despite her wretchedness,
+by the time they reached Madame Tessier's door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The house of the Widow Tessier was in the Rue de Provence,
+which runs north from the Avenue de Saint Cloud,
+not far from above its junction with the Carrefour de
+Montreuil, and ends at the corner of the Boulevard de la Reine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A quiet, retiring street, its houses separated by ample
+gardens, hidden by high walls of brick faced with fine
+gray Caen stone, generally festooned with pretty creepers
+and overtopped by stately trees.  A noble pine shaded the
+green glass conservatory, large enough to be termed a
+winter-garden, which projected on the south side, from
+what was a solidly built villa plastered yellow, with a
+raised ground-floor, second story and attic story with
+Mansard windows; the short sloping roof, and these&mdash;indeed,
+the whole of the attic story to the floor-line, where a
+fine-worked cornice of stone ran round the building&mdash;being
+covered with grayish-blue slates.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You rang at a gate of open ironwork, white-painted, in
+which was a smaller gate to admit pedestrians, and while
+you were waiting for someone to answer the bell, you had
+leisure to admire the heavy <i>porte cochère</i> upon your left,
+of solid oak timbers, studded with iron bolts, surmounted
+with a fine arch of stone, centered with a blank lozenge; and
+the neat balcony railing topping the wall to your right,
+in which was a modest little iron-studded door leading to
+the kitchen and servants' offices, always secured by a huge
+lock, and opened with much groaning of inward bolts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are to understand that the roof of the kitchen
+formed a leaden terrace upon which the bay of the
+drawing-room and other ground-floor windows opened; these,
+like the windows on the basement and upper stories, being
+furnished with outside shutters, the slatted wooden pattern
+with which Continental travelers are familiar, yellow-painted
+to match the plaster of the walls.  The terrace
+could be gained by a short flight of stone steps rising upon
+your right as you entered.  But upon a visit of ceremony
+you went on to the main entrance, which was reached by a
+handsome ascent of five broad, shallow steps of the Caen
+stone, continued along the north and east sides of the
+house, so that from any of the ground-floor windows, which
+were all of antique French door-pattern, you could descend
+into the garden at will.  The hall-door commanded a view
+of the stables and the cottage attached to them, whose
+tenant combined the office of coachman with the duties of
+a gardener.  You could not call those buildings
+unpicturesque, covered as they were with the now leafless
+branches of a great vine and a magnificent wistaria.
+Beyond there stretched a kitchen-garden, with beds of flowers
+and vegetables, under glass and in the open; and splendid
+espaliers, whence many a basket of luscious cherries, huge
+blue plums, brown Bon Chrétien pears, and melting
+nectarines, were gathered for the table in the season of such
+luscious fruits.  And behind and to the north side of the
+villa was the pleasance, which must have formed part of
+a nobleman's park at one time.  For winding walks
+bordered with ground-ivy led you in and out and among
+clumps of oak and chestnut, and stately limes and acacias
+stood upon the sunlit spaces of its velvet-lawns; while near
+its bounds shrubberies and thickets of Portugal laurel and
+lilac, bird-cherry and hawthorn, syringa and arbutus
+harbored thrush and blackbird, and in spring rejoiced the lover
+of beauty and perfume; and one great tulip tree opened its
+crimson-purple chalices beneath the rains and suns of
+early June.  From the eastern boundary-wall jutted a stone
+pipe, ending in a mask, from the mouth of which fell a jet
+of clear water, forming a tiny pond, and a brook that ran
+away between stones covered with moss and overgrown
+with ferns and water-plants.  But just now the pond was
+frozen, and a great icicle hung from the jaws of the
+grinning Satyr, and the blackened leaves of the water-loving
+plants and club-mosses were hidden under a thin covering
+of recently-fallen snow.  What strange uses this place was
+to serve before the terrible year of 1870 was ended!  How
+many letters signed "Charles" were to be drawn by the
+tiny hand of P. C. Breagh's Infanta from that grinning
+satyr-mouth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Entering the house&mdash;for you are to see it plainly, serving
+as it did for a theater upon whose table the life-blood of
+France was to flow; and her body, beneath the steady,
+skillful hands of a man well fitted to perform such operations,
+was fated to undergo a terrible mutilation&mdash;entering
+the house by the double glass-doors, you found yourself
+in a parqueted hall, furnished with Empire consoles and
+large mirrors in frames of tarnished gilding.  The chief
+staircase, covered with striped drugget in gray-and-red,
+you found immediately upon your right.  Under this was
+the opening to a servants' stairway leading down to the
+kitchen beneath the terrace.  Upon your left was a small
+door masking another servants' stairway leading to the
+attics; and beyond this two large folding-doors, covered
+with green baize, led into a medium-sized but lofty
+apartment, used as the dining-room, looking out on the garden,
+and hung with a crimson flock paper patterned with gilt
+palm-leaves, against which hung some large landscapes
+and antique hunting-scenes in oils.  There was a handsome
+white marble fireplace, with a high mantel-slab
+supported by terminal figures, one a nymph, wanton-lipped
+and languid-eyed, her full voluptuous bosom partly veiled
+by a leopard skin, her disheveled hair crowned with ivy,
+like that of her companion; a faun, and young, judging by
+his budding horns.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A third pair of folding-doors facing the hall-entrance
+opened into the drawing-room; a fourth to the right of
+these gave entrance to the billiard-room, from which access
+might be gained by a low glass door into the winter-garden,
+a high-domed glass house full of palms and tree-ferns,
+boasting a little fountain, whose leaden dolphin, balanced
+almost perpendicularly on his tail in the center of a
+moss-stained basin, could spout high enough to wet the green
+roof when any charitable hand might set him going.  A
+door at the farther end of this winter-garden gave access
+to a small room lined with books, classical works by standard
+French authors for the most part, smelling moldy,
+and apt, when a curious hand strove to remove them from
+their shelves, to stick to their neighbors on either side.
+And looking at the conservatory from outside, one
+perceived, running along the entire length of the rounded
+glass roof, a wrought-iron gangway, or double-sided
+balcony.  From which, according to the testimony of Madame,
+the late M. Tessier, from whose dressing-room this aerial
+promenade could be gained by a glass door had been,
+accustomed to enjoy the prospect and breathe the air.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap22"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XXII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Madame, a discreet and sensible-looking person, with very
+little more mustache than is becoming to a Frenchwoman
+of sixty, embraced Juliette warmly on both cheeks, and
+graciously received the Colonel's salute upon her mittened
+left hand.  The mittens were invariably black in tribute
+to the memory of the late M. Tessier.  Madame's
+half-mourning, gray poplin gown, trimmed with black gimp
+upon the gores, round the bottom of the expansive skirt
+and upon the waist and shoulder-lappets, might have been
+the same she had always worn, in Juliette's memory.  Her
+cap had lavender ribbons, her front was bay, whereas it
+had been chestnut, and the net of black chenille-velvet, in
+which she confined her back hair, plentiful in quantity
+and iron gray like her mustache and eyebrows, had silver
+beads upon it here and there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Father and daughter were made welcome, were entertained
+with wine of Madeira, raspberry-vinegar&mdash;for which
+sweet, subacid beverage, diluted with water, young ladies
+were expected to express a preference&mdash;macaroons, ratafias,
+and little pink ice-cakes.  The Colonel, having
+accepted a glass of the good vintage and consumed a biscuit,
+expressed a desire to walk round the garden; Madame,
+who had suggested the excursion, and Juliette, who had
+gone goose-flesh all over&mdash;were left to a <i>tête-à-tête</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During the collation described above, Mademoiselle's
+blue eyes had discreetly raked the walls of the dining-room
+in search of portraits.  Nothing rewarded her search but
+a highly varnished oil presentment of a simpering young
+woman in the vast flowery bonnet, the bunches of
+side-curls, and the high-waisted gown of 1830, in whom one
+must perforce discover Madame in her twentieth year.  A
+case of three miniatures hung beside the copper wood-tongs
+on the left of the fireplace.  When Madame affectionately
+leaned to her young guest, patted her hand, and
+bade her take her seat upon a green velvet fauteuil between
+Madame's own high-backed arm-chair and the carved-oak-framed,
+glass-covered embroidery picture of Dido on her
+funeral pyre that served as fire-screen, Juliette, in the act
+of transit, cast a rapid glance at this case.  In vain.  Only
+M. Tessier, in a high satin stock, gray curls and strips of
+side-whisker, Madame in a lace cap, fiddle-bodied brown
+silk gown, berthe, and cameo brooch, and a chubby infant
+of indeterminate sex, with sausage curls and tartan
+shoulder-knots, rewarded her anxious scrutiny.  She could not
+restrain a sigh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To be taken by the chin is not unpleasant to a young
+lady, under the right conditions and given certain
+circumstances.  But when the ringed and bony fingers enclosed
+in Madame's black mitten, turned the small, pale oval to
+the light, a choking lump rose in Juliette's throat, and the
+black lashes veiled the eyes her aged friend would have
+peered in.  She felt given over to harpies, abandoned and
+alone.  Almost she could have rushed to one of the long
+French windows, wrenched it open, and fled to the shelter
+of her father.  I wonder whether the Colonel was as ill at
+ease as his daughter, as he paced the winding paths under
+the leafless trees, between the beds of snow-powdered
+ground ivy, already sprinkled with patches of aconite in
+partially thawed places, shining yellow as little suns
+against dark leaves and wet brown earth....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She could see him from the nearer of the three long
+windows opening on the steps that led to the garden.  He
+walked among the trees bare-headed, holding his high silk
+hat and gold-topped Indian cane behind him, his handsome
+double chin bent upon his breast, his fine face full of care.
+Even his boldly-curled mustaches seemed to droop under
+the weight of sorrows that were no longer hidden from
+his child.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the bottom of his heart he distrusted her, she was
+almost certain.  And from the bottom of her own heart
+she forgave the cruel wrong.  He had come to believe,
+since the great betrayal, that every woman save the Mother
+of all mothers, and his own, had it in her to play the
+traitress, given the opportunity.  Thus the opportunity
+was not to be given to Juliette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame was speaking.  She no longer held the little
+chin, though the chill of her hard finger-tips still seemed
+to cling to it.  She smiled benevolently, making curves of
+parenthesis in her well-powdered cheeks, and sometimes
+punctuating her sentences by a rather disconcerting click
+of teeth that were too startlingly white and never seemed
+to fit properly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"One understands, my cherished" (<i>click</i>), "that this
+visit is a little <i>triste</i> for thee....  One who should have
+been here to welcome thee does not appear.  To repress the
+feelings is <i>convenable</i>" (<i>click</i>) "in a young girl of good
+education, but nevertheless one cannot hide the oppression
+of the heart.  Rest assured, my little one, that my
+Charles&mdash;who is to be thy Charles so soon"&mdash;Madame's playfulness,
+emphasized by the click described, was more than a
+little grisly&mdash;"suffers as thou dost.  He is chagrined to the
+very soul, believe me! that he cannot be with thee here
+to-day.  Detained in Belgium, at Mons-sur-Trouille (where
+he has a manufactory for the production of woolen
+fabrics)&mdash;by important business in connection with an
+immense order given by a Paris firm of" (<i>click</i>) "drapers,
+thou canst picture him counting the hours that must elapse
+before the happy moment of his return.  He is ardent, my
+Charles&mdash;noble, sincere, religious, and candid.  I, his
+mother, say to thee: Thou art happy" (<i>click</i>) "to have
+won the love of so estimable a young man!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And with this maternal peroration two gray poplin
+sleeves went out and enfolded Mademoiselle de Bayard, and
+two rapid touches of Madame Tessier's mustache visited
+first her left cheek and then her right one.  Fluttering like
+a caught robin, Juliette faltered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You are so good, dear Madame, but when did I win
+it?"  She added, released from the imprisoning sleeves,
+and with a bright red rose of agitation blooming in the
+center of each pale cheek: "Alas!  I refer to the love of
+M. Charles Tessier....  If I might know where he has
+seen me? ... I cannot recollect his ever having been
+presented to me.  In my mind, Madame, your son has no
+form, no features....  It is terrible, but there you have
+the fact!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The truth was out at last.  Now that the room had left
+off whirling, Madame's benevolent smile shone forth
+unchanged.  She clicked, and returned with archness that
+was labored.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My Juliette, I comprehend.  Thou wert just a little
+bewildered....  Thy father has not made it quite clear....
+Ah, naughty M. le Colonel, I shall scold him by-and-by!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Pray, no!"  Juliette's little hands went out entreatingly.
+"Only explain, dear, dearest Madame, for I am
+bewildered, as you say truly.  My father's command that
+I should leave school, provide myself with a <i>trousseau</i>, and
+come here to be married&mdash;instantly&mdash;to M. Charles Tessier!&mdash;was
+so brusque&mdash;so sudden&mdash;that I might be pardoned
+for saying I have felt less like a young girl than a poor
+lamb, hurriedly taken from the fold and driven to the
+butcher's yard."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Poor little lamb!" drolled Madame, still portentously
+playful, and displaying a gleaming double row of teeth
+between the parenthesis.  Juliette felt more than ever like
+the lamb of her analogy, as she strove to read the meaning
+of the smile.  Madame continued: "Too much boldness&mdash;an
+excessive display of <i>sangfroid</i>&mdash;my Charles has ever
+disliked in women.  When I tell him how <i>gentille</i> thou art,
+how sensitive, and how <i>spirituelle</i>, he will say to me,
+'My mother, thou hast chosen well! and when he sees
+thee...'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Something in the well-powdered elderly face of the
+speaker sent an electrical shock of comprehension through
+Juliette's being, evoking the cry:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Sees me....  But then ... he has never seen me?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was necessary to hold on with one's own eyes to
+Madame's, they so spun and whirled in their rather small,
+round orbits.  Then they steadied, as though she had made
+her mind up.  She said, and though the treacly suavity had
+gone out of her voice, Juliette liked it better:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No, my child&mdash;Charles has never seen thee.  This is a
+betrothal&mdash;this will be a marriage exclusively arranged by
+the parents of the young people concerned.  Thy father,
+the son of my beloved friend Antoinette de Bayard, does
+not desire that the husband of his Juliette should be a
+member of the military profession,&mdash;I am averse to the idea
+of my son's bestowing his name upon the Protestant daughter
+of a Flemish woolen-manufacturer&mdash;for that that was
+originally my son's intention, I will not seek to deny.
+Wounded in my tenderest and most susceptible spot by the
+announcement of Charles's infatuation, I might have
+estranged him for ever&mdash;even hurried on the catastrophe I
+feared, had not the advice of my director, Dom Clovis,
+of the Carmelite Fathers&mdash;fortified and sustained me in
+the trying hour!  I wrote to my son.  I poured out my
+maternal heart in pleadings the most earnest&mdash;the most
+tender.  I recalled to him the dispositions of his late
+father's will.  Under this document," Madame went on,
+drying a tear with a deep-hemmed cambric handkerchief,
+"I possess the power at pleasure to divert from Charles
+and his heirs a considerable portion of his sainted father's
+funded property.  And that power," said Madame, drying
+another tear, "I solemnly assured my child, would&mdash;in the
+event of his union with Mademoiselle Clémence
+Basselôt&mdash;unhesitatingly be used."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Words might have come from the pale parted lips before
+her.  Madame tapped them to silence with a mittened
+finger and pursued her way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Charles is profoundly reasonable&mdash;a quality he inherits
+from both parents.  He wrote to me a letter inexpressibly
+touching in its expressions of filial trust and
+confidence, over which, I assure thee, I have shed the most
+consoling tears."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Something had previously crackled in the pocket of
+Madame's black silk apron, when she had smoothed it over
+her knees in seating herself.  Now she drew it out, and
+Juliette saw a blue envelope directed in a handwriting of
+the business-like, copper-plate description.  The sheet of
+white paper the envelope contained had an engraved
+picture-heading of a square building possessing many
+windows&mdash;no doubt the Belgian cloth manufactory possessed in
+partnership by MM. Basselôt and Tessier.  From the page,
+closely covered all down one side with regular lines of
+mercantile handwriting, Madame read:
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+"Sentiments of the most profound agitated me as I
+read thy letter.  These sentences penned by a mother's
+hand, have touched me to the quick.  Thy arguments, so
+delicate, yet so powerful, have convinced me of the
+impossibility of the union toward which&mdash;I will own!&mdash;my
+wishes urged me.  I abandon the idea henceforth!  Since
+Mademoiselle Clémence is not to be mine, choose then for
+me, best and noblest of women.  Let her who taught my
+infant lips to murmur the beloved name of mother select
+for me some virtuous young girl upon whom I may confer
+the equally sacred title of Wife.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"THY CHARLES."
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+And there, with a flourish like a double lasso, M. Tessier's
+letter ended, leaving Juliette swaying between the impulse
+to shriek with laughter and the urgent desire to melt away
+in tears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame came to her rescue by proposing a visit to the
+billiard-room, built and appointed by the late M. Tessier
+to afford his son wholesome recreation at home.  For
+otherwise, Madame explained, the young man might have
+been allured by the amusements to be found in the saloons
+of the Hôtel des Réservoirs and other brilliant and fashionable
+lounges, full of dissipated civilians and officers of
+every branch of the military and naval services.  Clubs
+Madame regarded as gateways to eternal perdition.  She
+dried another tear as she thanked Heaven that her beloved
+child did not belong to one.  When possible, she
+added, Charles avoided restaurants.  A congenital delicacy
+of constitution rendered over-seasoned dishes little less
+than poison to him; he habitually suffered from nettle-rash
+after the consumption of shellfish.  Green salad was, upon
+this count, pernicious to his well-being.  Nor should he
+ever be permitted to sleep without a nightcap, having been
+subject to earache from his youth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mental picture of Charles, suffering from an attack
+of nettle-rash and crowned with his protective nightcap,
+sent the listener's balance dipping toward hysteria.  They
+were in the billiard-room, a pleasant, longish salle, with
+two high windows opening on the frontward terrace.  The
+glass door stood open leading into the winter-garden: from
+whence came a smell of hot-water pipes, damp moss, and
+mold, with an added whiff of ferniness, and a suggestion
+of the cockroaches and mice that pervaded the place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then: "Thou seest, my sweet Juliette"&mdash;pray
+imagine Madame, indicating with a lifted mitten a
+gilt-framed square of canvas hanging between the two French
+windows&mdash;"a speaking portrait, painted but two years ago,
+of my&mdash;I should say, of our beloved Charles."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Obediently the eyes of Mademoiselle Bayard followed
+the direction of the pointing finger.  The painter or the
+evil genius of Charles Tessier had induced him to sit for
+his portrait in the habiliments of the chase; thus in
+sporting checks of the chessboard pattern, with the addition of
+yellow leather leggings, gun pads, and a game bag, and
+holding between his knees a weapon which obviously
+embarrassed him, he was presented for the first time to the
+gaze of his future bride.  Those eyes of Juliette's fastened
+on the canvas a single moment before their dusky lashes
+dropped.  But in that moment Mademoiselle had classified
+Charles as belonging to the Order of Invertebrates;
+comprehended his profound insignificance, and realized that
+from the owner of a head so commonplace, eyes so round,
+and a nose so blunt, a mouth so lax, and cheeks so pink
+and chubby&mdash;possibly the artist had been liberal of
+carmine&mdash;nothing more of originality, decision, manly force,
+or power of will might be expected than is commonly
+demanded of the child's whirligig of stick and cardboard,
+as seen gyrating madly or spinning feebly under the
+impetus of its owner's breath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was impossible, Mademoiselle told herself, to detest
+a being so utterly devoid of character&mdash;a human pad of
+blotting paper&mdash;as uninteresting as a counting-house stool.
+One could only pity him, and hope for his mother's sake
+that sound business capacities were concealed behind that
+characterless forehead, topped with brown hair cut very
+short and standing upon end&mdash;and wonder at or congratulate
+Mademoiselle Clémence.  Flamandes are generally big
+and muscular.  One could only hope that she had taken
+Charles by his sloping shoulders and soundly shaken him
+when he had backed out of his proposal of marriage.
+Though possibly he had never spoken to the girl at all.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+M. le Colonel found his daughter silent during their
+walk back to the Barracks.  After a questioning eyeshot
+or so at the dainty little figure that moved so demurely
+beside him&mdash;abandoning the vain endeavor to read her
+mood from the droop of the pure eyelids, the chiseled lines
+of the exquisite profile&mdash;the father relapsed into his own
+sad thoughts.  And then Juliette, stealing a glance at him,
+realized, with a pang, that his once luxuriant black curls
+were thinning in places, and already thickly sown with
+white hairs.  The upright martial carriage was marred
+by a rounding of the shoulders&mdash;the stoop of a man upon
+whose back sits perched Black Care.  The seams of the
+immaculately brushed frock-coat of civil ceremony were
+shiny in places&mdash;the rosette of red ribbon at the lapel was
+frayed and faded&mdash;the tiny medal tarnished and dull.
+Perhaps the mood of the wearer, be it hopeful or despondent,
+can affect the apparel, as the chameleon's wrinkled
+skin changes from the hue of dead bark to the vivid green
+of young leaves when sunlight touches it, and fades back
+to the neutral tint when the golden ray is withdrawn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette would not have thanked me for that analogy
+of the prehensile-tongued, long-tailed lizard.  Inconstancy
+as described by the poets is typified by the chameleon,
+and her faith in the sincerity and truth of her Colonel was
+founded upon the living rock.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We know that she had, or thought she had, discovered
+why he dared not trust her to a husband whose career
+must lead him from her.  "My blood," she had murmured
+to herself sorrowfully, "it must" (she meant unfaith)
+"be in my blood!"  The reason for his desperate
+haste was all beyond her.  It must be cruel, because it
+hurt him so.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That heart of hers was as great as she herself was tiny.
+Titania at need could love like a Titaness.  And the blood
+of Antigone runs in the veins of living women even to this
+day, though the noble daughter of Œdipus died a virgin
+unspotted.  When the fairy hand in the perfectly fitting
+gray glove crept under the Colonel's elbow, it gave, with
+the smile that accompanied it, a silent pledge of fidelity
+to the death.  But oh, blind father, could you have seen
+her, in that inmost chamber of the heart where the most
+innocent maiden shrines the imaginary portrait of a
+lover&mdash;taking down the stately canvas bearing the presentment
+of a soldier-hero unknown, and hanging up in its place
+the picture of a mere Charles Tessier, your eyes, like those
+of the protagonist of the Greek drama, would have wept
+tears of blood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That night a letter was penned to Monica in the small,
+delicately pointed handwriting that seemed appropriate
+to Juliette.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+"To you, dear friend, who have exacted of me the
+pledge that I will write to you before all, a faithful description
+of the person of my future husband, I hasten to fulfill
+the vow.  M. Charles Tessier has a fine head and a fine
+hand, my father praises his capacity for business and his
+skill at the billiard-table with equal fervor.  Of his powers
+of conversation I have as yet not sufficient experience to
+afford you an opinion.  In the presence of his mother he
+has been silent and reserved.  His letters, however, are
+eloquently expressed and forcible.  When I mention his
+letters, it should be explained that affairs have entailed
+upon him the necessity of a journey to Belgium, where
+he remains for the present, at the house of his partner,
+M. Basselôt.  Thou wilt draw from this the correct
+conclusion that I am not yet married.  Do not forget to pray
+for thy faithful
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"JULIETTE."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"See you well, I am happy&mdash;content&mdash;I dream not of
+impossibilities.  <i>J'ai pris mon parti</i>.  I am sensible, me!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+In answer to a second letter from Monica received upon
+the ending of the month there came:
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+"Tell M. Breagh that I have received his message, so
+generously worded.  Alas! the poor young girl had no
+intention of wounding a heart at once so courageous and so
+proud.  His fellow-student is unjust to himself.  Why term
+that 'brutality' which was merely honest <i>brusquerie</i>?  Yet
+if he gave pain&mdash;and I do not deny it was so&mdash;he may rest
+assured he has been forgiven.  Tell this to thy brother,
+from
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"JULIETTE."
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+"M. Charles Tessier is still delayed by affairs in Belgium.
+I visit his mother nearly every day.  An excellent
+housekeeper and cuisinière, she is charmed with my skill in
+cooking.  For her and for my father, who dines with her
+frequently, I plan delightful little menus.  They eat, and
+praise the dishes and cry&mdash;at least, Madame cries: '<i>Ah,
+Heaven! if my Charles were only here!</i>'  In a letter which
+this morning's post brought me from the person mentioned,
+he dwells with that impassioned luxuriance of
+imagery, warmth of color and fullness of expression not
+denied to his sex, upon our approaching union.  One cannot
+deny that it is pleasant to be the sole object in life
+of a young man so worthy and so amiable, and&mdash;ah, my
+dearest! were the sacrifice of a personal wish demanded of
+me, could I, <i>knowing what I</i>" (<i>scratched out</i>) "refuse to
+gratify the cherished desire of my dear father's heart?
+Each day that finds me by his side closes in deeper
+respect and love more ardent.  Our Lord, Whose will it was
+to leave me motherless, decreed that in him I should find
+the tenderness of a father and that of a mother too.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"J. M. DE B."
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+For the delectation of those readers who are anxious to
+sample the luxuriant imagery, glowing color and plenitude
+of expression ascribed to the epistolary communication
+received by Mademoiselle de Bayard from M. Charles
+Tessier I append the letter referred to as above:
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  "BASSELÔT AND TESSIER,<br>
+  "WHOLESALE MERCHANTS.<br>
+  "WEAVERS AND DYERS OF WOOLEN FABRICS.<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+  "MONS-SUR-TROOTLLE.<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"BELGIUM.<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&mdash;th <i>January</i>, 1870.<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"MADEMOISELLE,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That I have been tardy in personally assuring you
+of my profound regard and unfaltering devotion you will
+pardon, knowing me detained in a foreign country in the
+interests of my business affairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Assured that all that concerns my welfare will naturally
+possess for you the deepest interest, I hasten to inform
+you that jointly with my partner, M. Felix Basselôt,
+I have entered into a scheme to facilitate the manufacture
+of our woolen cloths and other textile fabrics by the
+purchase and installation of the most recently invented
+machines.  Raw cloths are now subjected to perching, knotting,
+milling, washing, hydro-extracting, gigging, cutting,
+cropping, boiling, brushing and steaming processes of the
+latest invention, and we claim that the output of our
+manufactory will henceforth vie with the first qualities of goods
+advertised by the leading firms of Belgium, England and
+France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My mother's letters palpitate with your praises.  What
+happiness, Mademoiselle, awaits the man who shall be
+privileged to confer upon such beauty, goodness, and
+amiability, the sacred name of wife.  You will be interested
+to hear that for Saxonies, tweeds, merinos, and cashmeres
+for ladies' drapery our house maintains its old reputation,
+as well as for the heavier fabrics of masculine wear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Were I now at your side, how enchanting it would be to
+confide to you that we have struck out a bold and original
+line in dress-stuffs, dyed with the new agent called Aniline.
+It is extracted from coal-tar, and the magenta so much
+admired by our Parisian <i>mondaines</i> is obtained from it, by
+treating the crude substances with the chloride of tin.
+From magenta we derive rosaniline, a dye as delicate yet
+as passionate as a lover's fondest wishes.  In an experiment
+recently made in my presence I beheld a pure young
+girl immerse in a solution of this extraction containing a
+little ammonia, a spotless lily, when instantly the virginal
+blossom's whiteness was changed to the loveliest roseate
+hue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Thus, dear Mademoiselle, your soul, so chaste, so spotless,
+and so innocent, being plunged in the consecrated vat
+of marriage, will assume the glowing hue of Love.  Bleu
+de Lyons with Violet Imperial, all the most fashionable
+shades of mauve and other colors can be obtained by
+methods equally simple, and with the addition of aldehyde
+and sulphuric acid, we secure a green of the most brilliant,
+and a yellow that enchains the eye.  By a simple process
+these colors may be fortified to stand the test of washing,
+as firmly and unchangeably as the affection I am privileged
+to offer you; which is hallowed by the blessing of the best of
+mothers, and of a father noble as your own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Receive then, dear Mademoiselle, the tenderest assurances
+of devotion,
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+  "From yours eternally,<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"CHARLES JOSEPH TESSIER."<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Over this epistle, apparently begotten between a trade-circular
+and a polite letter-writer, Juliette had wept helpless
+tears of mirth.  Reading it, one may conjure up a
+picture of the excellent Charles, spurred by the maternal
+threat of partial disinheritance to a desperate effort,
+bending over the paper in the throes of composition, diluting the
+ink with the sweat of a non-intellectual brow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Also, one may suspect the anonymous heroine of the
+experiment with the lily to have been none other than
+Mademoiselle Clémence Basselôt, but the suspicion has not,
+to the present date, been verified.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap23"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XXIII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+In the July of that year, while the gilding was yet
+untarnished upon France's brand-new Constitution&mdash;ratified by
+a <i>plebiscitum</i> obtained after the usual methods, and
+recording seven millions of pinchbeck votes&mdash;while the
+Imperial Court of the Third Napoleon played at Arcadian
+pastorals under the mistletoe-draped oaks and spreading
+beeches of St. Cloud, the question of the Candidacy of
+Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern for the vacant Throne of
+Spain appeared in the firmament of European politics
+(even as the voice of Lord Granville prophesied a lengthy
+period of unbroken fine weather)&mdash;and broke about the
+ears of the Power most concerned like a stinging shower of
+hail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Spanish crown upon the head of a Hohenzollern.
+Rather a Montpensier, intolerable as that would have
+been.  True, the Almanach de Gotha had offered (to General
+Prim, President Zorilla, and the Cortes, assembled in
+solemn session) only the unwelcome alternative of the legal
+heir to the throne going begging; true, the Spanish people
+were very well satisfied with the idea of being ruled by a
+Catholic gentleman of Royal blood, suitable age, handsome
+person, and military experience, married to a Portuguese
+princess, and possessing two healthy sons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But that a Prussian Prince, holding a commission in
+Prussia's Army, should be set up like a signpost of warning
+on France's southern frontier, as though to keep her in
+mind of what would happen in the event of another war
+on the Rhine&mdash;was, from the Gallic point of view, intolerable.
+"The security and the dignity of the French nation
+are endangered by this candidacy!" cried Jules Favre.
+According to M. Thiers, "the nominacy was not only an
+affront to the nation, but an enterprise adverse to its
+interests."  Gambetta cried aloud that all Frenchmen must
+unite for a national war.  Marshal Vaillant made a
+memorandum in his notebook.  "<i>This signifies war, or
+something very like it!</i>"  And at the Council of Ministers
+hastily summoned to St. Cloud on the morning of the sixth
+of July, the Emperor passed to the Duke de Gramont,
+his Foreign Minister, a penciled communication.  "<i>Notify
+Prince Gortchakoff at Petersburg that if Prussia insists
+upon the accession of the Prince of Hohenzollern to the
+throne of Spain, it will mean war!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What haste to clutch at the <i>casus belli</i>.  When the
+Ministers quitted the Imperial Council, and the Corps
+Législatif opened its session, long-continued applause greeted
+the declaration of Gramont from the tribune that a certain
+unnamed Third Power, by placing one of its Princes on
+the throne of Charles V., threatened to disturb the
+equilibrium of Europe, to imperil the material interests and
+endanger the honor of France.  "If it be impossible to
+prevent this," ran the peroration, "strong in your support,
+Messieurs, we shall perform our duty without hesitation
+or faltering!"  Here was an ultimatum that sounded the
+very note of war.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Do you hear the echo of the thunderous acclamations
+that attended the Foreign Minister to his seat, the clapping
+of hands, stamping of feet, roaring of lungs that have
+been dust for more than forty years, or are now on the
+point of dissolving into their native element?  Naturally
+because the Right were defiant, the Left called their
+utterances bellicose.  Had the Right manifested a disposition to
+turn the other cheek in Scriptural fashion, the Left would
+have passionately taunted this band of politicians with
+cowardice, lack of patriotism, indifference to the sacred cause
+of national freedom,&mdash;would have accused them of being
+traitors to their country, and Heaven knows what else.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Press threw oil upon the roaring conflagration.
+Were this affront submitted to, cried the <i>Gaulois</i>, "there
+would not exist a woman in the world who would accept
+a Frenchman's arm!"  The <i>Correspondant</i> was "relieved
+to find that Frenchmen once more have become
+Frenchmen."  The <i>Moniteur Universel</i> was charmed to discover
+that the blame for this momentous conflict could never
+be attributed to the French Government.  The <i>Figaro</i> left
+off making a cockshy of the Imperial dignity, to admit that
+for once the Emperor's official mouthpiece had spoken the
+right word.  And the <i>Débats</i> praised the attitude taken by
+the Government.  "Silence at this juncture would," it
+cried, "have been pusillanimous.  Shall the nation be
+accused of bowing its head for the second time, before the
+cannon of Sadowa?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lord Granville, replacing the recently deceased Clarendon
+at Great Britain's Foreign Ministry, mentioned to the
+Spanish Ambassador to England that the choice of Prince
+Leopold would create a sore.  He wrote to Layard at Berlin
+that he considered France had been given good cause of
+resentment.  Lyons, in the shoes of Lord Cowley, at the
+English Embassy in Paris, wrote to his chief that the
+unhappy affair had revived all the old animosity, though
+it seemed to him that "neither the Emperor nor his
+Ministers really wish or expect war!"  The <i>Times</i> of July 8th
+was severe on the policy of Prussia; the <i>Standard</i> for
+once expressed the same opinion as the <i>Times</i>.  The <i>Daily
+Telegraph</i> prophesied that the succession of the Prussian
+Prince would mean France's present humiliation and
+future peril.  The <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i> poked mordant fun at
+the attitude of unconsciousness assumed by King William,
+who, between sips of Ems water, declared his ignorance
+of the whole affair.  The <i>Early Wire</i>, backing and filling,
+kept an even keel for a day or two.  Then said Mr. Knewbit
+confidentially to P. C. Breagh, one midsummer evening,
+after the early supper:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My opinion is we are a-going to give a leg-up to this
+'ere 'O'enzollern business, our Chief being&mdash;when England,
+Home, and Duty permit him to indulge the weakness&mdash;a
+red-'ot admirer of a Certain Person at Berlin.
+Who"&mdash;Mr. Knewbit's wink was infinitely sagacious&mdash;"is said on
+the strict Q.T. to have put up Field-Marshal Prim and the
+Government at Madrid to making the proposal to the young
+gentleman.  For the sake of giving a jolt-up to the elderly
+swell at the Tuileries.  We all have our ideal 'eroes,"
+Mr. Knewbit added, "and our Chief's partiality dates from his
+acting in an emergency as Special War Correspondent for
+his own paper, durin' the Prusso-Austrian War of 1866.
+It was at the Battle of&mdash;&mdash;that name always beats me&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Königgratz, perhaps?" suggested Carolan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Königgratz&mdash;when this 'ere Bismarck spurs his big
+brown mare up to Colonel von Somebody to ask him why,
+seeing the 'eavy losses occurring in his neighborhood from
+Austrian Artillery&mdash;he didn't ride forward with his
+Cuirassiers to find out where the shells came from?  Took our
+Chief's fancy uncommon, that did, as the iron sugar-plums
+was dropping freely in the neighborhood, and when he
+had rode on, swearing at the Colonel like anything you
+can imagine&mdash;the old man picked up a cigar-stump he'd
+pitched away, and keeps it to this hour in the pen-tray of
+the silver inkstand the Proprietors presented him with
+when he came home."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said P. C. Breagh reflectively:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It's the rule, invariably.  Men love Bismarck or lampoon
+him&mdash;swear by him&mdash;or swear at him.  He's the devil
+or a demigod&mdash;there's no alternative!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Good!" said Mr. Knewbit, leaning back in his Windsor
+chair, and rubbing the ear of the ginger Tom with the toe
+of one of his carpet slippers.  "Tell us a bit more.
+Anything you can lay hold of.  I want to see him stand out a
+bit clearer in my mind."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He gets his name from the Wendish&mdash;I've read in the
+<i>Kleine Anekdotenbuch</i>," said P. C. Breagh, "that 'Bismarck'
+really means 'beware of the thorns.'  And there's
+a golden sprig of blackberry-bramble among the family
+quarterings, so perhaps there's something in it, after all.
+An ancestor of his who lived in the sixteenth century was
+a tailor&mdash;and a natural son of Duke Philip of Hesse, by the
+way!  Duke Philip was a lineal descendant of St. Elizabeth
+of Hungary&mdash;who in her turn was descended from the
+Emperor Charlemagne&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Lor' bless my soul!" said Mr. Knewbit, rubbing his
+knees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And he&mdash;this man you want to know about!&mdash;was born
+the younger son of a Pomeranian country squire, and
+entered the University of Göttingen in 1831.  They say
+that he permitted study to interfere so little with the more
+serious business of amusement that the name of Mad Bismarck
+was given him then, and had stuck to him even when
+he passed his examination as Referendar, and began to
+practice law in the Municipal Court of Aix-la-Chapelle."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Knewbit, drinking in the information at every pore,
+nodded "<i>More</i>"&mdash;and P. C. Breagh obliged him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He served his year as Volunteer at Potsdam in the
+<i>Jägers</i> of the Guard, and then went home to the paternal
+estate of Kneiphof, and began sowing wild oats&mdash;acres and
+acres of them.  The officers of the garrison were a
+hard-drinking set of fellows, and the county Junkers scorned to
+be outdone by them&mdash;so they hunted and shot and danced
+and made love to the local beauties&mdash;they dined and
+supped and gambled and fought duels.  In fact, they did
+all the things men usually do when they mean to have a
+high old time and don't care a damn for the consequences,"
+said P. C. Breagh, "and when you regularly hail smiling
+morn with cold punch, beer, and corn-brandy, and wind
+up the night with quart-beakers of champagne and porter,
+the consequences must be&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A taut skin and a fiery eye next morning," interpolated
+Mr. Knewbit, "and a tongue like a foul oven-plate or a
+burned kettle-bottom.  But&mdash;my stars!&mdash;what a constitution
+that man must have to be as hale and as hearty, and
+as upright as they say he is, at fifty-five, and with a family
+of grown-up sons!  One wonders how his sweetheart ever
+had the courage to marry such a&mdash;such a Ring-tailed
+Roarer....  But Love's a thing you can't account for
+nohow."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I have heard that the Fräulein Puttkammer's family
+objected to the engagement," said P. C. Breagh, "but he
+seems to have got over their prejudices in a way peculiarly
+his own.  By betrothing himself privately to the Fräulein
+first, and then calling openly to inquire how the family
+felt about it," he added, in response to the interrogative
+hoist of Mr. Knewbit's eyebrows, "and taking the
+precaution, upon entering the room&mdash;to hug the young lady
+before all her friends."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The hugging would settle the thing&mdash;in Germany?"
+asked Mr. Knewbit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To a dead certainty."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Without any male cousin or anything of that kind
+getting up and calling the hugger out?" asked Mr. Knewbit
+dubiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"When a man is six feet two inches in height, is as
+strong as a bull, and possesses a well-earned reputation
+as a fencer and pistol-shot, even male cousins," returned
+P. C. Breagh, "are content to sit still and let him hug."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And then he married her and went into politics&mdash;and
+to-day, when the Press says 'Prussia,' it means him!"
+cried Mr. Knewbit.  "What our Chief likes, and what
+fetches me!&mdash;is his cool owdaciousness.  If ever I chance
+to find myself in Berlin," he added, "before visiting any
+State Collection of Art Objects ever brought together&mdash;I'd
+choose to 'ave a look at that man!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said P. C. Breagh:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I've seen the Iron Chancellor just once&mdash;in '67&mdash;passing
+through Schwärz-Brettingen on his way to Berlin.
+It was in my first semester at the University, and just after
+the Constitution of the North German Bund was put into
+force by Royal Patent.  The Social Democrats had protested
+against the withdrawal of the Prussian garrison from
+the independent State of Luxembourg&mdash;wanted to rush
+Germany into war over the business, and they, as well
+as the <i>Ultramontaine</i>, having plenty of followers among
+the students&mdash;both parties formed up on the platform of
+the railway-station, and gave the Count three groans."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"How did he take 'em&mdash;the groans, I mean?'
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Rather as if he liked them, now I come to think of it.
+I can see him now, in civil dress, black frock-coat, vest and
+trousers, with a white choker something like a Lutheran
+clergyman's.  And he jammed his great black felt hat down
+on his head and thrust his huge body half out of the
+carriage window.  His eyes&mdash;fierce blue eyes heavily pouched
+underneath, and blazing from under shaggy eyebrows&mdash;swept
+over us as though we were a lot of squeaking
+mice&mdash;though he was laughing in a good-tempered sort of way.
+And he shouted something in dialect&mdash;they said it was a
+common Pomeranian proverb, '<i>Let not live men fight
+over a dead dog!</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Meaning&mdash;&mdash;?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Meaning, one would suppose, that the Luxembourg
+garrison was a right which had been given up as
+unimportant, and therefore was of no more value than a dead
+dog, set against the cost of a new war."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I'm obliged for your information," said Mr. Knewbit,
+pushing back his chair and getting up to reach his brass
+tobacco-box from the high kitchen mantelshelf.  "In
+return I'll give you a bit o' news&mdash;which may be of walley
+to you.  You have been talking A.1 journalism, young
+man, as different from the stuff you commonly put on
+paper as gold is from this metal"&mdash;he tapped the brass
+tobacco-box&mdash;"and&mdash;my advice is&mdash;For the future, write
+only of what you know; have felt, and heard and seen!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sucked despairingly at the wooden pipe he was
+filling and, finding it foul, stuck the stem in the spout of
+the boiling kettle&mdash;a practice abhorred of Miss Ling&mdash;and
+left it to be cleaned as he continued:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Big things are going on in the world at this moment&mdash;things
+worth watching and waiting for.  Damme!&mdash;though
+I'm not a swearer as a rule," said the little man, "if I
+don't wish I could change places with something that has
+wings.  The great man we have been a-talking of is at this
+minute at his country-seat in Pomerania&mdash;that's the
+estate he bought with the grant&mdash;sixty thousand pounds
+English, it came to&mdash;the German Parliament voted him
+after the Prussian-Austrian War.  And the King of Prussia
+is at Ems, a-drinking the waters, and the French Ambassador
+has been sent there by the Emperor Napoleon III. to
+obtain a special audience, I'm told.  And if you or me
+could swop jobs with a fly on the wall at one place or the
+other&mdash;being a German insect it would be likely to
+understand their crack jaw language&mdash;me or you would be able
+to supply a leaded half-column for Special Issue that would
+fairly set the world afire.  See this!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took the short poker from the top of Miss Ling's
+kitchen-range, and, pushing back his chair, rose and
+approached the wall, which was destitute of pictures, and
+distempered in an economical brown color.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Look here, I say!..." began P. C. Breagh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The breath of genius inflates me," said Mr. Knewbit,
+who had had more than his allowance of beer at supper.
+"The impulse to prophesy stimulates me.  Look at this!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He wielded the poker deftly as he spoke.  And on the
+brown distemper appeared in huge white letters:
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  WILL THERE BE WAR?<br>
+  YES!<br>
+  HOHENZOLLERN QUESTION NO DEAD DOG TO FRANCE!<br>
+  GAUL, AND TEUTON RIPE FOR CONFLICT.<br>
+  BISMARCK'S VIEWS!<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+"But, there, my inspiration gives out," said Mr. Knewbit,
+replacing the poker on the range and shaking his head
+mournfully, "unless it was possible to change with that
+fly on the wall&mdash;and take him at one of his expansive,
+confidential moments&mdash;if he ever has any&mdash;neither me nor
+any other man living will ever be able to give Bismarck's
+real views upon this or any other subject dealing with
+Politics.  Who's this?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hall-door had slammed a moment previously.  There
+had been a step upon the oilcloth-covered basement staircase,
+and now it bore Miss Ling's first-floor lodger, Herr
+von Rosius, the "quiet gentleman," who taught German
+to English students and English to Germans at the Institute
+of Languages in Berners Street, W.&mdash;across the threshold
+of her tidy kitchen, pipe in mouth and hat in hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Meine Herren, I haf to beg your pardons!  I seek
+the Fräulein Ling&mdash;&mdash;" he was beginning, when suddenly
+the tall, broad-shouldered figure in the ill-fitting checked
+tweed clothes was petrified into rigidity.  The felt hat he
+had civilly removed dropped from his hand, his jaws
+clenched on his inseparable meerschaum.  Bolt upright,
+crimson to the hair, and staring through his steel-rimmed
+spectacles, he stood confronting the huge white letters
+that disfigured Miss Ling's brown distemper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Kreuzdonnerwetter! was ist dies?</i>" Carolan heard him
+mutter in his own tongue.  "<i>Es ist in jedermanns Mund!</i>"  Then
+he recovered himself almost instantly, picked up his
+hat, and gave good-evening in his stiff, yet civil, way.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap24"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XXIV
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+"Good evening!  Miss Ling is out, and won't be back
+for an hour," explained Mr. Knewbit, "but if there was
+anything you were wanting in a hurry, I'll see that you
+get it, somehow."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Thanks, thanks!" said Herr von Rosius pleasantly.
+"So that I shall have my bill within an hour I shall need
+nothing.  Pray inform the Fräulein I haf just received a
+cable from my family in Germany.  They tell me I am
+wanted at home."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Sorry, sorry!" said Mr. Knewbit in his pouncing
+manner.  "Sudden, sudden!  Hope no bad news?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Von Rosius's pale blue eyes might have been stones,
+they were so hard, and had so little expression.  He
+removed and wiped his glasses with his silk handkerchief,
+and said, carefully replacing them:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Nein, ganz und gar nicht</i>, but my mother is in need of
+me.  So I have resigned my post at the Berners Street
+Institute of Languages, and got my passport from our
+North German Consul in your city.  Be so good to give my
+message to the Fräulein.  I go upstairs to pack my trunks
+and bags!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Von Rosius's long legs had carried him to the first-floor
+before Mr. Knewbit had done rubbing his ear and thinking.
+When his sitting-room door had banged, and the
+kitchen gaselier ceased to vibrate at the concussion, the
+little man said, looking at Carolan:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You have an eye in your head, young chap, and have
+lived in that gentleman's country, and speak his language.
+And yet the setting of his upper lip and the blank expression
+he throwed into his spectacles when I put a plain
+question to him, have told me more about him than you've
+learned.  I'll bet you a ginger-ale that Germany is his
+mother, and he has been recalled to serve in the Reserve
+Force, I forget what they call it just now."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They call the Reserve the Reserve, but I expect you
+mean the <i>Landwehr</i>," returned Carolan, wondering at the
+little man's sharpness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That's it.  Listen to him singing," said Mr. Knewbit,
+as the first-floor sitting-room door banged open again,
+heavy steps crossed the landing, and the robust baritone
+of Herr von Rosius trolled forth a fragment of song:
+"Now, if that might be anything in the 'Rule Britannia'
+line, my ginger-ale's as good as won."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It's the <i>Wacht am Rhein</i>," said P. C. Breagh, returning
+enlightened from an excursion to the bottom of the
+kitchen staircase, "and I believe you've hit the nail on
+the head."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He served in '66 he told me," said Mr. Knewbit,
+indicating the unseen Von Rosius with an upward jerk of his
+chin, "and now he's got to go back and be a cog or a
+screw-nut somewhere in the big war-machine you've told me of.
+What did he call Service of the Active kind?  'Camping
+under the helmet-spike.'  We shall miss him, for a quieter
+and civiler lodger never wore out oilcloth.  Hark!&mdash;that
+was the hall-door.  Monsieur Meguet's back uncommon
+early.  As a rule, after the Museum Print Room closes he
+goes to his club in Leicester Square."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The French gentleman who lived on the second floor had
+ascended the doorsteps simultaneously with Mr. Ticking.
+Mounting to the hall on his way upstairs, attended by the
+ginger Tom&mdash;no longer a kitten&mdash;P. C. Breagh found them,
+surrounded by a blue haze of Sweet Caporal and Navy Cut,
+finishing a political discussion on the mat, while
+Mr. Mounteney, languidly leaning against the door-post of
+the ground-floor front-parlor, listened with a detached
+and weary air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>C'est de bouc émissaire</i>&mdash;I tell you he is the scapegoat
+of a diplomat's malice!" declared the French gentleman.
+"Of himself he is without designs&mdash;unambitious! a
+good child, nothing more!  Brave as he is&mdash;has he not
+been trained from infancy to hardihood and acts of
+daring?&mdash;has he not slept with but a blanket for covering, and
+eaten the soldier's sausage of pea? ... Brave as he is,
+he dare not draw upon his unhappy country the terrible&mdash;the
+devastating&mdash;the exterminating wrath of France!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The French gentleman whose profession was Prints had
+spoken loudly,&mdash;possibly without the design of being heard
+upon the first floor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, as he paused to wipe his streaming brow with a
+brilliant green silk handkerchief, a door upon the landing
+immediately above was suddenly thrown open, and as a
+trunk was dragged across the landing, a stave of the
+German equivalent to "Rule, Britannia," boomed forth in
+Herr von Rosius's powerful baritone:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+  "<i>While there's a drop of blood to run,<br>
+  While there's an arm to hold a gun&mdash;<br>
+  While there's a hand to wield a sword&mdash;<br>
+  Brum&mdash;brum brum brum&mdash;&mdash;</i>"<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+The German words were lost in the racket accompanying
+the violent ejection of heavy articles from the bedroom.
+Comparative calm ensued as M. Meguet continued:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Disciplined, well drilled, energetic, and brave, the Army
+of France is unmatched and invincible.  Our Emperor
+assures us upon the honor of a Napoleon, that, equipped
+and ready to the last buckle&mdash;to the final gaiter-button, it
+waits but the signal to roll on.  Its musket is infinitely
+superior to the Prussian needle-gun, that feeble invention
+of an ill-balanced mind!&mdash;its artillery is commanded by a
+picked corps of officers&mdash;is enforced by that terrific weapon,
+the <i>mitrailleuse</i>.  The Army of Prussia is a bundle of dry
+bones, fastened together&mdash;not with living sinews&mdash;but with
+rusty wire.  The Prussian Monarch is a tottering
+pantaloon of seventy-three, crowned with dusty laurels; who
+submits to be the puppet of a demon in human form!
+The Genius of France is a divine and glorious being, whose
+soul burns with the noble thirst for warlike achievements,
+whose blood courses with the fire and heat of unimpaired
+youth...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From upstairs came the big baritone, buzzing like a
+gigantic bumble-bee:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+  "<i>The oath is sworn&mdash;the hosts roll on,<br>
+  In heart and soul thy sons are one.<br>
+  Dear Fatherland, no fear be thine,<br>
+  We'll keep our watch upon the Rhine!</i>"<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+"I tell you!" cried M. Meguet passionately, and pitching
+his voice so as to be heard, if possible, still more distinctly
+on the floor above; "France will cross the Rhine!  Her
+hosts will inundate the soil of Germany like a vast tidal
+wave, and in one moment obliterate&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Silence had prevailed above during the utterance of the
+above-recorded sentences.  At the word "obliterate," a
+heavy canvas holdall dropped over the balusters of the
+upper landing, missing the speaker by a calculated inch;
+and as the ginger Tom, with an astonished curse,
+disappeared in the direction of the kitchen:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Prut!</i>" said the voice of Von Rosius from above,
+"that was an uncommonly near shave.  Pray pardon," he
+added, appearing on the staircase, emitting volumes of
+smoke from his big meerschaum.  "I so much regret the
+accident!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was attired in rough traveling-clothes, and wore an
+intensely practical woolen cap with ear-flaps, though the
+July night was oppressively hot.  And his spectacles were
+inscrutable as he gathered up the boots, slippers, and
+clothes-brush that had escaped from the holdall, leaned
+the bulky brown canvas mass against the hall-wainscoting,
+and felt in the drawer of the rickety hatstand that never
+had hats on it, for the cab-whistle that was wheezy from
+overwork.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is nothing, Monsieur, you have not deranged me for
+an instant," returned M. Meguet, with ominously smiling
+bonhomie.  Then refixing his late audience with his eye, he
+went on as though the interruption had never happened:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&mdash;"and obliterate from the face of the earth the entire
+German nation."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Von Rosius opened the hall-door, letting in the sultry
+smell of the hot street.  He stood upon the threshold, and
+blew for a four-wheeler, one tittering, mocking trill.
+M. Meguet continued, quavering, and clutching his brow
+in the character of the terrified Hohenzollern, and
+imparting a tremor of agitation to his legs:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Is it, then, to be wondered at," cries this unhappy
+Leopold, "that the opinion of Queen Victoria and the
+observations of the Czar of Russia have quickened scruples
+already existing in my breast?  Will my royal relatives
+wonder that I say: <i>This shall not be</i>?  The brand
+designed to set a world on fire has been quenched by my
+mother's tears, and the entreaties of my wife and infants.
+Let M. de Bismarck mount the Spanish Throne, and adorn
+his crafty temples with this crown of piercing bayonets.
+I withdraw from this fatal candidacy, though the whole
+world should say&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M. Meguet shrugged his shoulders and struck the blow
+for which he had been saving himself:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&mdash;"should say what the latest edition of that admirably-informed
+journal, the <i>Evening Gazette</i>, quotes from this
+morning's edition of <i>Le Gaulois</i>:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'<i>La Prusse cane!</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Von Rosius was standing on the threshold of the open
+door as the words hissed past him.  Distant wheels were
+rumbling up the dusty cobblestones of Coram Street from,
+the cabstand at the corner of Russell Square
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Now, what's the English of that?" asked Mr. Ticking,
+rashly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Possibly," remarked M. Meguet, with a sardonic smile
+at the tall figure and broad shoulders that blocked the
+hall-doorway, "Herr von Rosius might be able to inform
+you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Von Rosius signaled to the driver of the approaching
+cab before he turned.  In his rough, loosely-fitting clothes,
+he bulked large and menacing, though his spectacles were
+as inscrutable as ever, and under his light mustache his
+excellent teeth showed quite smilingly.  He felt for money
+in his trousers-pocket as he answered composedly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"With pleasure.  It is a slang expression used by the
+blackguards of the lowest quarters of Paris.  '<i>Cane</i>' is
+to 'back out' or to 'climb down,' as the Americans would
+say.  Excuse me!  I go to pay my bill."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded slightly as he passed Ticking and Mounteney,
+and bestowed the same civility on P. C. Breagh.
+Then his heavy footsteps thundered down the kitchen
+staircase, from whose hatchway he emerged a few minutes
+later, accompanied by Mr. Knewbit, who had volunteered
+to help with the luggage, and this being stacked on the
+cab, their owner got into it, and Herr von Rosius, rigidly
+shaking hands with his English fellow-lodgers, and
+exchanging a distant salute with M. Meguet, got into the
+fusty vehicle and was driven away to the triumphant
+strains of the Marseillaise, performed by his racial
+antagonist on the piano appertaining to the first-floor
+sitting-room he had a moment previously vacated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'Prussia climbs down,'" murmured Mr. Knewbit,
+standing before the inscription on the kitchen distemper.
+"With the 'and on her 'elm that she 'as&mdash;&mdash;" he went on
+shedding "h's," as was his way when deeply meditative,
+"I should doubt the correctness of that report.  Still, I
+shall advise Maria to keep them first-floor apartments
+vacant a day or two&mdash;in case Mr. von Rosius's mother
+doesn't want him after all....  What does Solomon
+say?  '<i>Designs are strengthened by counsels, and wars are
+to be managed by Governments.</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The kettle was boiling madly, and a volume of steam
+was issuing from the pipe-bowl.  Mr. Knewbit rescued
+the blackened briar-root, mechanically filled it, and looked
+for a light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a crumpled pale green paper lying near his
+boot upon the worn linoleum.  He picked it up, and saw
+that it was a cablegram issued by the North German
+Submarine Telegraph Company, addressed to Von Rosius, and
+containing a message of four words:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Lanze inden Schuh, Uhlan!  Hauptquartier, Berlin.</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Now, which shall I do?" asked Mr. Knewbit, scanning
+the baffling foreign words written in the familiar English
+characters.  Torn between conscientious scruples and a
+characteristic thirst for information, the little man was
+pitiable to see.  "Which shall I do?" he repeated.  "Use
+this here for a pipe-light&mdash;or show it to my young shaver
+upstairs?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Deciding on the latter course, he climbed to the attic
+rented by the young shaver, and knocked at the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Come in! ... I'm not working to-night," said P. C. Breagh
+out of the darkness.  Upon Mr. Knewbit's striking
+a match, the young man, who was leaning back in his chair
+before the venerable davenport, contemplating the dusk
+oblong of starry sky visible above the chimney-pots of
+Bernard Street, shook himself free of thought as a setter
+shakes off water, and got up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Feel out of sorts?" asked Mr. Knewbit, burning his
+fingers, and striking another match as he bustled to the
+single bracket over the narrow wooden mantelshelf and
+lighted the gas.  "Anything wrong?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I feel out of the swim," said P. C. Breagh, sitting down
+again astride his chair, and cupping his square chin in a
+fist that had ink-smears on it, as he stared at the wobbling
+blue flame that presently spread itself into a yellow fan of
+radiance, "and hipped and beastly.  I've no right to
+quarrel with my bread-and-butter, but I'm doing it
+to-night.  The fact that I'm a Nobody doesn't prevent me
+from wanting to wind up as Somebody.  Putting the case
+roughly, that's what's wrong."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"This here house," said Mr. Knewbit in his pouncing
+manner, "belonged to a man who was a Nobody, if you
+like.  A Master Seaman, who used to tramp it to his ship
+at Wapping, and pick up the outcast babies lying in the
+kennels, and roll 'em in his big boat-cloak and carry 'em
+home.  Them foundlings was nobodies&mdash;yet two of 'em
+lived to be Lord Mayors of London.  Old Captain Coram,
+who founded the Hospital, died neglected and forgotten,
+but nobody looking at his tomb in the Chapel yonder will
+deny he wound up as Somebody at last!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh yawned hugely and rumpled his hair
+discontentedly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The chap you're talking of was a philanthropist, and I
+want&mdash;I'm not ashamed to want&mdash;to build a career for
+myself instead of founding a charity-school.  I want&mdash;your
+own talk has made me want!&mdash;to get out of this little
+squirrel-cage&mdash;even though there are nuts and sugar and
+bread in it all the year round.  And"&mdash;his scowl was
+portentous&mdash;"if this Hohenzollern hadn't backed out of the
+Spanish Crown affair, when France cockadoodled, and
+there had been a racket on the Rhine frontier&mdash;I'd just
+have rummaged round to find an editor who'd be ass
+enough to pay a raw hand for letters sent from the seat
+of hostilities&mdash;and if I couldn't have found one&mdash;and of
+course I couldn't&mdash;when seasoned men are as plentiful
+as nutshells in the Adelphi gallery&mdash;I'd have gone to the
+war as a camp-follower&mdash;and got experience that way!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Mr. Knewbit, turning and scanning the resolute,
+dogged young face, with black eyes that twinkled like jet
+beads:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I don't agree with you that seasoned Correspondents
+are plentiful.  There are thousands who're ready to sit in
+an office behind the Compositors' Room, and write
+eyewitnesses' accounts of thrilling charges.  But them that
+are ready to go out with a Permit and get attached to a
+Staff; them that are ready and willing to march with an
+Army on the War path&mdash;starve when there are no rations,
+lie in the fields in the sopping rain when no roof's to be
+had to cover 'em&mdash;write accounts of the day's fighting
+under shell-fire, and cheerfully get killed if a bullet comes
+their way in the course o' things!&mdash;you can't call the
+journalistic profession overstocked with them.  If you do,
+just name me one such man for each finger of these two
+big hands of mine.  I defy you to, so there!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were very big hands, and as Mr. Knewbit held
+them up side by side, with the palms toward his young
+shaver, they not undistantly resembled a pair of
+decent-sized flatfish.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To become a man like one of these&mdash;and they're the
+Pick of the British Nation," said Mr. Knewbit, "you must
+be pitched into the midst of things neck and crop, and left
+to sink or swim.  I compliment you when I say that I
+believe you one of the swimming kind.  Now, supposing
+War broke out after all&mdash;how much Hard Cash would you
+want to carry you through a Campaign?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I've got five pounds put away in the Post-Office Savings
+Bank," returned P. C. Breagh, after a moment's mental
+calculation, "and I believe I could manage if I had
+another fifteen."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Making Twenty Pound," said Mr. Knewbit, biting a
+finger thoughtfully.  He threw the finger out at P. C. Breagh,
+and his black eyes twinkled more than ever.  "For
+Fifteen Pound down would you undertake to write and
+send home to the person advancing you the money, for&mdash;say
+four weeks (that'd give two nations comfortable time
+to have it out and settle their differences in a
+Christian-like manner, with a little burning of powder, and
+bloodshed)&mdash;three letters per week, describing in a style
+readable by plain, ordinary, everyday people&mdash;what you've
+seen, and heard&mdash;and felt&mdash;and smelt&mdash;don't forget that!"
+said Mr. Knewbit, shaking his finger warningly at
+P. C. Breagh, "on the march, or in the bivouac, or while the
+fighting was going on?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh would have broken in here, but the held-up
+finger stopped him on the verge of utterance:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Avoid sham Technicality," said Mr. Knewbit sternly.
+"Don't let me have stuff like: '<i>Sir&mdash;On the morning of
+the &mdash;th the Field-Marshal von Blitherem&mdash;or General
+Parlezvous&mdash;shifted the left wing of his Division nearer to his
+center, and shortly after nine o 'clock the forces under
+command of What'shisname and Thingummy began to move
+in column of so and so.  A light 'aze lay upon the
+fields&mdash;the droppin' fire of the enemy's Artillery made itself
+felt at the Advance Posts nor' and nor'-west.</i>'  Nor don't
+you ladle me out sentimental slumgullion, after the fashion
+of&mdash;'<i>All is Peace, while I pen these 'asty lines and sip
+my morning coffee.  Yet ere the radiant beams of Sol
+will have dried the pearly dew from these smiling fields,
+the 'ideous roar of cannon and the withering burst of
+shrapnel will have devastated and blighted Nature's
+choicest 'andiwork, and Man, that noblest work of the
+Creative Power&mdash;will be engaged in the 'orrible task of
+destroying fellow-men wrought in the image of hisself.</i>'  For
+the Lord is a Man of War&mdash;according to the Scriptures,"
+said Mr. Knewbit, ignoring P. C. Breagh's amusement.
+"And it is written that He shall overthrow Kingdoms
+and break the scepters of Kings, and cause that
+nations shall be swallowed up in nations."  He added,
+with a sharp change to his business tone, "And bad or
+good, these letters of yours are mine, to burn or print as
+I think fit and necessary?  All right!  I'll draw up a
+little agreement&mdash;and whenever you choose to sign
+it&mdash;there's your Fifteen Pounds.&mdash;Lord! to think I should live
+to send out a Special Correspondent, all to my own cheek!
+It's&mdash;a&mdash;a luxury I should never have anticipated."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Correspondent won't be much use without a war
+to correspond about," said Carolan, growing weary of
+Mr. Knewbit's humor.  "And I suppose there won't be
+one now."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"We shall know for certain, I dare say, when you've
+thrown your eye over this paper here," said his patron,
+producing a crumpled oblong of pale green.  "That it's
+addressed to another person ain't your business.  I mean
+that person no injury&mdash;and naturally no more don't you.
+What you're asked to do is to English these words for
+me."  He handed over the cablegram and expanded himself
+to hear.  P. C. Breagh read with lifting eyebrows:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Lanze inden Schuh, Uhlan!  Hauptquartier, Berlin.</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And what's that mean?  English it, can't you?"
+snapped Mr. Knewbit, rabid with curiosity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh Englished it as requested:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Lance in rest, Hussar.  Headquarters, Berlin."
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Said Mr. Knewbit later on, warming his calves despite
+the heat of the weather, at the low coke fire in the kitchen
+register, while Miss Ling bustled about clearing away the
+supper-cloth:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That there cable was received in London at six-thirty
+this evening, and the <i>Evening Gazette</i> Meguet quoted from
+was the latest issue&mdash;about eleven a.m.  I shall go down
+early to the office to-night!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+His Excellency Field-Marshal General Count von Moltke
+had said that day, having dropped in at the Berlin
+Headquarters of the Reserve <i>Landwehr</i> for the purpose of
+perusing certain lists sent from London a few days
+previously by the Teutonic gentleman who taught English
+to German immigrants at the Institute in Berners
+Street, W.:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It was an excellent idea of Colonel von Rosius to fish
+for missing Prussian conscripts and deserters from our
+<i>Landwehr</i> in the character of a teacher of English to
+foreigners in London.  He has netted in a year, two
+thousand privates and non-commissioned officers, would-be
+waiters, clerks, porters, valets, and tradesmen&mdash;men of
+all ages, from forty to nineteen.  A useful officer&mdash;a very
+intelligent officer.  We shall make up much leakage in
+adopting his plan!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+In the dimly gaslit murkiness of three o'clock in the
+morning Mr. Knewbit sallied forth to business, carrying
+his hat in his hand as he went, for the weather was
+oppressive, yet walking at his usual red-hot pace, and making
+as much noise with his boots as three ordinary men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I'm not in my usual mood for Nature," he said, on
+reaching the bottom of gray, grimy Endell Street, "and I
+flatter myself on being tough enough&mdash;at a pinch&mdash;to do
+without my customary dose of fresh air.  So I'll twist
+down Long Acre and take the Drury Lane short-cut.  Not
+that there is any special reason for hurry to-night."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet hurry seemed abroad to an observation as strictly
+professional as Mr. Knewbit's.  Cabs rattled over the stones
+of the Strand, dashing Fleet Streetward; panting messengers
+clutching envelopes dived under the horses' noses;
+hurried pedestrians carrying little black bags jostled
+Mr. Knewbit every moment; windows of offices glowed like
+furnaces, and the champing of steam-engines made a
+continual beat upon the ear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The last report from the late Debate in the Commons
+is in by now," said Mr. Knewbit, looking at his stout silver
+timekeeper, under a gas-lamp, "and Gladstone 'as made
+short work of that last batch of Bills for the Session.  Fee
+Fo Fum was nothing to 'im.  Merchant Shipping, Ballot,
+Turnpikes, Inclosures&mdash;and a baker's dozen of Scotch Bills
+'ave been offered up in a regular 'ecatomb, and anathemas
+'ave been 'urled at the 'eads of the Opposition with the
+usual inspiritin' effect.  The gentleman who is a-trying to
+put a stop to the employment of young children in
+Factories and Workshops 'as been put down with the powerful
+argument that the kids like their work, and would get up
+at four in the morning to do it for nothink if they wasn't
+paid for it.  What a headin' I could make out of that!
+The stoker who was drivin' the engine to give the reg'lar
+driver a rest when the Carlisle Railway Disaster happened
+has been released without a stain on 'is character, and
+complimented by the Committee on his 'umanity into the
+bargain.  Mr. Bright is better, and will wake up the Board
+of Trade presently.  That's all we shall have for our bill
+of fare this issue, includin' the City Correspondence,
+Sportin' Intelligence, Markets, Stocks, and state of the
+weather, Railway Shares, Law and Police reports, and
+Births, Deaths, and Marriages, and not leavin' out the
+new midsummer drama at Sadler's Wells Theater or the
+letters written by gentlemen with grievances, signing
+theirselves 'Pater-familias,' or 'Englishman,' or 'Verax,' who
+have been sauced by hackney-cab drivers or over-rated by
+the Income Tax, or overcharged for a cold-mutton, lettuce-salad
+and cheese luncheon in a country inn.  That's all,
+and no more than bound to be!  And yet I feel as if
+something was going to happen.  I'm not due in my Department
+for another hour.  I shall do a bit of a Look Round."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He entered by the swing-doors of the Fleet Street
+general entrance, meeting a rush of hot air, powerfully
+flavored with gas and machine-oil, and was instantly borne
+off his feet by an avalanche of telegraph-agency
+messengers in oilskin caps and capes.  The place was ablaze
+with gas, shirt-sleeved men and grubby boys ran hither
+and thither like agitated insects.  The walls shook with
+the panting of engines getting up steam.  Perspiring
+printer-foremen shot in and out of little baking-hot glass
+offices where sub-editors were cutting down heaps of
+"flimsy," ramming sheets of copy on files, correcting
+proofs, and curtailing pars....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Mr. Knewbit, fanning himself on a landing after
+climbing a great many iron-shod staircases, and passing in
+and out of a great many swing-doors emitting puffs of the
+hot gas-and-oil-perfumed air already mentioned, and
+leading to glass-roofed departments, where shirt-sleeved and
+aproned men labored for dear life, and huge steam-power
+machines at high pressure trembled and panted like
+elephants gone mad:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Foreign Telegrams are in type and the Leaders
+are in the chases.  The forms are in the machines, and in
+another minute the word will be given to Print.  Halloa!
+Beg pardon, sir!  I'm sure I didn't see you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a little red-hot, perspiring gentleman had leaped up
+the staircase like a goat of the mountain, had charged at
+the swing-doors immediately behind Knewbit, collided with
+him, sworn at him breathlessly&mdash;and vanished with a double
+thud of the swing-doors, and a shout of "Matheson!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A clang of voices seemed to answer him, there was a
+brief minute's delay, ages as it seemed to the waiting
+Mr. Knewbit; then the mad elephants, unchained, began to
+heave and stamp and snort.  And&mdash;at the rate of twenty-five
+thousand an hour, began to roll, from the great
+cylinders of damp paper, the day's issue of the <i>Early
+Wire</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They rolled out&mdash;as similar cylinders were rolling up
+and down Fleet Street and all the world over, the Report
+of the late Debate in the Commons, the list of Bills
+beheaded by the Prime Minister, the ineffectual efforts of
+the gentleman who was trying to stop the Factory Owners
+from employing Infant Labor, the result of the Commission
+of Inquiry upon the Carlisle Railway Disaster, and
+all the News of the day.  And in a space reserved for the
+Latest Foreign Intelligence appeared a telegram sent from
+Ems by the King of Prussia, as condensed at a dinner-council
+of three convivials, in the Wilhelm Strasse, Berlin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And all the world read it and commented, as British
+stocks went up and Continental Stocks played seesaw:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The King of Prussia refuses to receive the French
+Ambassador! ... This most certainly means WAR!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap25"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XXV
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Perched on the wall,&mdash;hung with an old-world Chinese
+paper, figured with sprays of bamboo, pagodas, bridges,
+mandarins promenading under yellow umbrellas, and fair
+Celestials reclining on the banks of a meandering, bright
+blue stream&mdash;the German fly of Mr. Knewbit's envy would
+have reaped scant information from the conversation of
+the three men sitting at the dinner-table, for the reason
+that they conversed in English&mdash;perhaps for privacy's
+sake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The apartment, not ordinarily used as a dining-room,
+possessed three sets of folding-doors, and beyond a sofa
+and twelve heavy chairs, upholstered with a Chinese
+brocade matching the paper, was scantily furnished.  The
+table plate was solid and handsome.  A pair of huge
+silver-gilt wine-coolers displayed a goodly array of
+champagne bottles, a cellar-basket with rows of horizontal
+wicker-nests contained claret, Burgundy, and Rhine wine.
+The second course was under discussion, but the servants,
+after placing the dishes on the table, had withdrawn.  By
+a bell kept on a dumb-waiter at the host's elbow, bearing
+sauces, clean plates, spare glasses, bread of white and
+black, and other requisites, the attendants could be
+summoned at need.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hostess's chair at the table-head was vacant.  The
+two guests' places were laid on the right and left hand of
+the host.  All three men were in uniform, two were well
+stricken in years; and Time had not left sufficient locks
+among them to furnish a wig-maker with material for
+covering a bald patch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Also, they were men of whom the world had heard much
+already, and was, before the ending of the year, to hear a
+great deal more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tall, heavily-built man of sixty-seven, in the uniform
+of a General of Division, who sat upon the host's right
+hand, boasting a hair-tuft above either ear, a pair of
+shaggy eyebrows, and a bristling mustache dyed to savage
+blackness, any intelligent Berliner would have recognized
+as Von Roon, the Prussian Minister of War; while the
+mild-looking veteran of seventy who opposed him, displaying
+the crimson badge of the Great General Staff upon a
+plain dark close-buttoned military frock, with the ribbons
+of a dozen decorations showing in a narrow line on his left
+breast and the coveted Cross of the Red Eagle of the
+First Class hanging at the black regulation stock that
+clipped his unstarched linen collar, would have been
+claimed by the veriest street urchin as "Our Moltke!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You saw in this hale, lean, stooping Staff Officer, who
+covered a scalp as bare as a new-born babe's with an
+obvious auburn wig, the first soldier of the day, the
+past-master in war-craft.  His fine, transparent beaky profile,
+tight mouth, clear light eyes, set in a net of innumerable
+knowing little wrinkles, and the cross-hatching of tiny
+scarlet veins that made his hollow cheeks ruddy as Cornish
+apples, might have belonged to some aged, ascetic Cardinal,
+or venerable Professor of Science, rather than to Baron
+Helmuth Carl Bernhard von Moltke, General, Field-Marshal,
+and Chief of the Great General Staff of the
+Prussian Army; whose heraldic motto, <i>Erst wagen dann
+wagen</i> summarizes his strategical policy; whose conduct of
+the Danish War of '64 and the Austrian War of '66 had
+placed Prussia in the forefront as a military nation, under
+whose banner were soon to gather the Confederated
+German States.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Questioned as to the identity of the man at the head of
+the table, the long-limbed, heavily molded, powerfully
+built personage of five-and-fifty, attired in the
+undress-uniform of a Colonel of White Cuirassiers, and wearing
+the Order of Commander of the Red Eagle, the citizen
+would most likely have scowled, the street-boy spat forth
+some unsavory epithet, tacked on to a name that was
+destined to be inscribed upon the era in divers mediums,
+inclusive of marble and iron, brass and gold and silver;
+lead and fire; bright steel and red blood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For this was the Minister to whom diplomats, Parliamentary
+orators, and political leader-writers referred when
+they mentioned Prussia; the accursed of Ultramontane,
+the abhorred of Socialists.  Walking alone through the
+streets, as, indeed, he loved to do, his keen eye and huge
+physical strength had saved him, ere now, from the
+assassin's bullet or knife.  And you could not look upon
+him without recognizing a Force, all-potent for good or
+all-dominant in evil, an enemy to be execrated or a leader
+to be adored.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The massive, high-domed head was scantily covered, save
+for a grayish lock or so above either temple, and a thin
+thatching behind the finely shaped, sagacious ears.  The
+eyebrows were thick&mdash;of gray mixed with darkish brown;
+the luxuriant brown-gray mustache covering the large,
+mobile, sarcastic mouth, grew heavily as any trooper's.
+The short, straight nose was rounded at the end like the
+point of a broadsword.  And in the indomitable, vital
+regard of the blue eyes, partly hidden under thick and
+level lids, you felt the master-mind, as they coldly
+considered some question of finance or diplomacy, or blazed
+challenge and defiance, scorn and irony.  And in the
+sagging orbital pouches, as in the puffy jowl, you read
+the unmistakable signs of bygone orgies, deep potations,
+marvelous vital powers taxed to the utmost in the past
+pursuit of pleasure, as by present indefatigable, unsleeping
+labors with brain, voice, and pen in the service of Throne
+and State.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The table-talk dealt chiefly, at first, with culinary and
+gastronomical matters.  Asparagus soup iced and a clear
+soup with vermicelli had preceded the course of fish, placed
+on the table by the servants, who had then been dismissed.
+A huge dish of Waldbach trout with green sauce and
+another, as capacious, of crayfish stewed in cream with
+mushrooms, vanished before a double onslaught on the part of
+the War Minister and the Chancellor, the Chief of the
+General Staff partaking sparingly, as was his wont.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said his host, smiling and setting down an empty wine
+goblet:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You eat nothing, Herr Baron Field-Marshal, whereas
+I, who come of a family of great eaters, and His Excellency,
+who boasts a similarly inherited capacity, have taken twice
+of each dish."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Thanks, thanks, dear Count," said Moltke mildly,
+glancing downward at the well-marked hollow behind his
+middle buttons; "but I do not like to overload my stomach,
+particularly at my time of life."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Being aware of Your Excellency's objection to dishes
+that are heavy," the Chancellor continued gravely, but
+still smiling, "I took pains to select a menu of light, easily
+digested things.  What are three or four dozens of oysters
+at the commencement of a dinner?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Von Roon agreed, in a hoarse bass, that set the
+chandelier-glasses vibrating:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Or a few half-pound trout, or a helping or so of stewed
+crayfish?  Mere nothings&mdash;to a strong digestion."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mine cannot be strong," the great strategist remarked
+modestly, "for I find that an over-plentiful meal oppresses
+the brain, and hinders steady thought."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Chancellor, filling from a long-necked bottle
+one of the three large crystal goblets that served him as
+wine-glasses, emptying it at a draught and setting it
+down:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Hah!  Were that known in a certain high quarter at
+Paris, what a cargo of delicacies you would presently
+receive from the Maison Chevet!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Von Roon's big voice came in:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Was not Chevet the Parisian purveyor who supplied
+the banker-minister Lafitte with fish for a Dieppe dinner
+in the time of the French Monarchy?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So!"  The Chancellor, holding his napkin delicately
+in both hands, dried the wine from his mustache, and
+added, turning his great, slightly bloodshot eyes upon
+the interrogator.  "And who is now chief caterer for the
+Emperor Napoleon the Third."  He added, glancing back
+at Moltke, and observing that his glass stood unemptied:
+"Since Your Excellency will not eat, let me recommend
+you the wine, which is of special quality.  Not only
+Rüdesheim, but good Rüdesheim.  Ha, ha, ha!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The veteran's clear eyes became mere slits in the mass
+of puckered wrinkles.  He pushed back his auburn peruke,
+showing his high-arched temples, and laughed, revealing
+gums as healthy as a child's, and still accommodating
+three or four staunch old grinders inclined at various
+angles, like ancient apple-tree stumps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Nu, nu</i>!  You are twitting me with my candor to
+Sultan Mahmoud in 1835; but what else could I say when
+Chosref Pasha intimated that His Sublimity required my
+opinion?  Directly I tasted his wretched wine, I knew
+some rogue had sold him an inferior brand, and thus I
+told him honestly: 'It is Rüdesheim, Your Majesty, but it
+is not good Rüdesheim!'  And with the first of the boxes
+of tobacco and cigarettes that came from Constantinople
+after my return to Germany, I received the message that
+the <i>tutun</i> was not only Turkish <i>tutun</i>, but good Turkish
+<i>tutun</i>."  He drank off his wine, ending: "And so my
+nephews say it is, for I smoke neither cigarettes nor
+pipes."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I smoke pipes," said the Chancellor, stretching a white,
+muscular hand toward the bell on the dumb-waiter,
+"when my doctor prohibits cigars."  He added: "Pipes
+of all materials and descriptions&mdash;one sort excepted.  I
+have no doubt Your Excellency could give it a name."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The War Minister, pondering, knotted his heavy tufted
+eyebrows, and presently blew out his cheeks as a man may
+when the jest baffles his wit.  The Field-Marshal began to
+laugh, a gentle chuckle that began by agitating his lean
+abdomen, and shaking his bowed but vigorous shoulders
+before it widened his mouth into a slit curved gaily at the
+corners, and squeezed tears of merriment out of his
+puckered eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I'll wager half a pfennig I will name it at the first
+guess!  You mean the Calumet of Peace!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Von Roon barked out a laugh.  The Chancellor nodded,
+smiling.  Then two middle-aged, grave-looking male servants
+in plain black entered with the third course, and the
+faces of the diners underwent a curious change.  They
+were more suave, and all expression seemed as though it
+had been wiped from them.  Until, following on the heels
+of the servants (who brought the <i>entrées</i>), there appeared
+a colossal boarhound, dark tawny in color, with black
+pointings, short, rounded ears, massive chest, square
+muzzle, and red-rimmed eyes.  Fixing these fierce orbs
+upon his master with an affection proved not altogether
+disinterested by the copious dribbling of his jaws, the
+great brute sat upright at his left hand, flogged the carpet
+with his heavy tail, and saluted the placing of the dishes
+on the table with three gruff barks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Aha, Tyras!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Hey, then, Tyras!  So they have cut short your
+furlough, boy!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He would tell you, like that sergeant of infantry who
+was made postman of a country district after the war of
+'66, and at whom the illiterate population&mdash;who never got
+anything but bad news or dunning letters&mdash;used to shoot
+as a mild hint to keep away altogether, that all the days
+are field-days to him.  Speaking as a dog with a master
+who walks when he does not ride, and must be waited for
+when he is neither riding nor walking."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor, smiling, looked at the huge brute, which
+rose and laid its massive jowl entreatingly upon his
+chair-arm, and receiving no immediate return in caress, lobbed
+a heavy forepaw pettishly upon the tablecloth.  A chased
+silver-gilt salt-cellar, in the shape of a Bavarian
+peasant-girl carrying two milk-pails, toppled, and might have
+fallen to the floor, but that the Field-Marshal caught it
+dexterously, though without being able to prevent the salt
+being spilt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No harm done.  See!"  He triumphantly set the milk-maid
+in her place again: "Only the salt is spilled upon
+the cloth!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Now, if Tyras were superstitious!" commented the
+host, as a servant hastened to repair the damage with the
+aid of a napkin and a porcelain dessert-plate, "he would
+be convinced that Madame Tyras and her sons were not
+doing as well as might be hoped."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The bitch has pupped, then?" said Von Roon as a
+trio of corks exploded; and the servants, having carried
+round the dishes, placed them on the table, set an open
+bottle of champagne, dewy from the ice, and enveloped in
+a damask napkin, at the right of each diner, and
+noiselessly quitted the Chinese room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the door shut, the Chancellor continued, responding
+to Roon's question with a nod, and looking at the Chief
+of the Great General Staff:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"However, Tyras is not one of those nervous sires who
+rend heaven and earth with outcries if danger threatens
+one of their offspring.  The Pomeranian breed are possibly
+less nervous than the strain at Sigmaringen.  I think
+Prince Antony&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Blurted out the Field-Marshal, bolting a mouthful of
+cutlet and crimsoning to the edges of his wig with sudden
+anger: "May the great devil fly away with that pompous
+old sheep's-head!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It was not without reason," said the Chancellor, without
+slackening in his onslaught upon an <i>entrée</i> of duckling
+stewed with olives, "that I arranged for us three to dine
+without the servants.  Did I not foresee that the hot
+blood of the warlike youth would effervesce in some such
+expression as that I have just heard!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the old man, still flushed, but laughing, and sipping
+at a bumper of dry Sillery:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He is a sheep's-head, and a pompous one!  He negotiates
+with Prim, as head of the Hohenzollern family, quite
+forgetting the King, it would appear!  He is very well
+pleased&mdash;he thinks the place will suit his son capitally!
+He sends him on second thoughts to ask the King if he
+does not think so.  Then when France hurries her
+Ambassador to Ems to inform the King, who has not said
+'Ay' or 'Nay' in the matter, that she will not tolerate a
+Prince of Prussia on the Throne of Spain, he writes to
+the King saying that he is much impressed by the turn
+things are taking at Paris, and though he thinks he
+cannot in decency break off the affair, perhaps the King will
+do it for him!  Meanwhile Prince Leopold, who is the
+chief person concerned&mdash;where withdrawal or acceptance
+is in question&mdash;has quitted Ems and gone where you
+please....  Not to his parents' country castle of
+Sigmaringen, but to the Tyrol....  Now why to the Tyrol?
+This marching and countermarching&mdash;with no definite
+purpose in it, makes my blood boil.  Phew!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And really the perspiration fairly bubbled from the
+pores of the old warrior, as he took off his auburn peruke
+and mopped his dripping head and face with a large white
+handkerchief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor, who had been discussing a second helping
+of the dish before him, laid down his knife and fork
+upon their silver-gilt supporters, unfastened a hook of his
+undress frock, and said, withdrawing a small roll of tissue
+papers and separating one thin penciled sheet from the
+rest:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There is some reason for the Prince's agitation.  This
+morning a telegram in cipher&mdash;of which this is a fair
+transcript&mdash;was dispatched from Sigmaringen to Olozaga, the
+Spanish Ambassador at Paris.  It conveys the intimation
+that Prince Antony withdraws from the candidacy in the
+name of Prince Leopold.  It was sent by the French
+Emperor's secret agent, a Roumanian named Straz."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He went on informing himself, with a quiet side-glance
+to right and left, of the effect his communication was
+producing:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Perhaps you do not know Straz&mdash;a man with the profile
+and curls of one of M. Layard's man-god bulls of Nineveh,
+a living tool that might have been tempered in the
+workshop of an Alexander Borgia, or a Catherine de
+Medici&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stopped to fill one of his great crystal goblets from
+the champagne-bottle that stood beside him.  Moltke,
+indifferent to the dishes that stood temptingly within reach,
+had been wiping the inside of his wig dry with his
+handkerchief.  Now, oblivious of the wig, and crumpling it
+with the handkerchief into a ball, he was squeezing the
+ball between his narrow palms as he listened to the speaker.
+Von Roon, who had been busy upon some sweetbreads
+cooked in sour cream, paused in the act of helping
+himself again largely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So&mdash;so&mdash;this fellow&mdash;Straz&mdash;&mdash;"  The Chancellor stuttered
+now and then, and he did it here effectively&mdash;"This
+uns-scrupulous f-fellow of whom I am t-talking&mdash;&mdash;"  He
+drained the big glass to the dregs, wiped his mustache
+carefully, and began delicately unfolding more thin sheets
+of paper from the small but pregnant wad.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah, yes, where was I?  Th-this morning, the twelfth of
+July, the originals of these three telegrams, which are not
+in cipher, were sent from Sigmaringen by Prince Antony.
+The first, to Marshal Prim, at Madrid, withdraws his son
+from the candidacy.  The second, to Olozaga, recapitulates
+the wording of this.  The third, ostensibly addressed
+to the principal journals of Berlin and Germany, and to
+the German Submarine Telegraphic Agencies by order of
+Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern, abandons all pretensions
+to the Spanish scepter, and restores to Spain her freedom
+of initiative."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Von Roon bellowed like a nine-inch siege gun:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What May-madness has the confounded old billy-goat?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chief of the Great General Staff put on his wig,
+and said, folding his lean arms upon his sunken chest:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"How has he at Paris managed to frighten the old man?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor said, fixing his full, powerful eyes upon
+the light ones twinkling through their wise old puckers:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The mission of M. Straz, privately sent, upon the
+advice of the Duke de Gramont, by the Emperor of France
+to Sigmaringen (while Count Benedetti repairs to the
+King of Prussia at Ems, and a third emissary, Bartholdi,
+is sent to menace President Zorilla at Madrid)&mdash;the
+mission of M. Straz is to terrify the Prince and Princess
+with threats of the assassination of one, if not both their
+sons."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Commented Moltke, shrugging a shoulder:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To work on the woman, always&mdash;if there is one! ...
+Badinguet's tactics are not new&mdash;but they are effective
+beyond doubt."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Knave!" came from Roon, in a blurt of indignation
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Says Straz to Prince Antony of Hohenzollern&mdash;I give
+you the exact words;&mdash;'Highness, His Imperial Majesty
+the Emperor authorizes me to inform you that a group of
+Roumanian conspirators are plotting against the life of
+your elder son, Prince Charles von Hohenzollern&mdash;now
+Charles of Roumania.  The threads of this plot being
+centered in Paris, it is in the Emperor's power to sever
+them&mdash;he will do so if Prince Leopold withdraws from
+the candidature,&mdash;he will not seek to deter the conspirators,
+should the Prince prove obstinate.  Reflect in addition
+that Prince Leopold, as King of Spain, will have
+to contend against the plots of Alfonsists and Carlists&mdash;as
+against the intrigues of Montpensier and other aspirants
+to Isabella's vacated throne.  He will not be summoned
+to reign&mdash;he will be called to a disaster.  Death
+will sit beside him, under the Royal canopy.'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The reader's muscular white hands drew another crackling
+sheet from the little roll of papers.  He went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The mother of the two young men was present&mdash;as
+was intended&mdash;when Straz delivered this message from
+the Emperor.  Naturally the Princess brought her
+batteries to work upon the Prince and her younger son,
+who, though it is not admitted, was actually present.
+She has wept, implored, prayed, fainted, argued for
+forty-eight hours&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Field-Marshal muttered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Poor soul!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And with his wrinkled hand he rubbed a glistening
+drop from his cheek, that was not perspiration.  Von Roon
+snorted like a dyed old war-horse:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Meanwhile, the Imperial Ambassador, Count Benedetti,
+will be setting forth the object of his mission to the
+King!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Chancellor, letting the words come out softly
+and distinctly,&mdash;and one would have expected so huge a
+man to roar after the fashion of giants, rather than to
+speak in such mellifluous tones:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"His instructions run thus: '<i>Say to the King that we
+have no secret motive, that we do not seek a pretext for
+war&mdash;and that we only ask to reach an honorable
+solution of a difficulty that was not created by us.</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is honorable, then," said Von Moltke in a tone of
+childlike wonder, "to threaten to murder that old woman's
+two sons?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Meanwhile," said the mellifluous, pleasant voice of the
+Chancellor, "the Emperor and Marshal le Bœuf have sent
+Staff-Colonel Gresley to Algiers with secret orders to
+MacMahon to embark those troops from Africa which are
+most available for service on the Continent, and to warn
+the most distant regiments to be at Algiers on the 18th.
+The Generals of his Artillery and Engineers have been
+dispatched upon a plain-clothes confidential visit of
+inspection to the fortresses of the North-East, all leave has
+been stopped, and the commanders of brigades have
+apprised the staffs of the mobilization offices to dispatch
+the orders of recall of the reserves.  This was put into
+effect on the 8th.  Upon the same day the order was given
+to bring the Infantry regiments up to War strength by
+the creation of their Fourth Battalions, and General
+Blondeau, of the Administrative Branch of the War
+Department, has been authorized to exceed his credit by the
+sum of a million francs."  He ended, showing his small,
+regular teeth, as he smiled agreeably upon his hearers:
+"The Tuileries system of Secret Intelligence is certainly
+excellent, but I do not think we are so badly served!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Badly served!" echoed Roon.  "One would say not!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You must be served by the great devil himself and all
+his devilkins, Otto, my dear fellow!" said the Chief of the
+Great General Staff, with a merry chuckle, "to have all
+this dished up to you before it is cold!  Well, well!
+Thanks be to the good God&mdash;we are not so far behind
+these French as we might be!  No, no! not at all so far
+behind! ..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said this musingly, his startlingly limpid eyes almost
+hidden by the wrinkles and puckers, his long, humorous
+upper lip drawn down and set firmly on the lower one,
+as he cupped his sharp chin in the palm of one wrinkled
+hand, nursing the elbow appertaining to it in the palm
+of-the other hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'So far behind,' do you say?" growled Von Roon.
+"<i>Sapperlot</i>!  I should call it a day's march and a
+half-day's march ahead!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It may be&mdash;it may be!" said the Field-Marshal
+placidly.  "God grant that it prove so!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You are as pious as the King to-night," said the Chancellor,
+laughing heartily.  "And your God is the God of
+Battles, we all know!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Yes, yes, the Friend Above does not forget this old
+fellow!" said the Field-Marshal simply.  "The thousand-ton
+Krupp gun&mdash;whose acquaintance the Parisians made
+at the Exposition of 1867,&mdash;has been waiting ever since to
+make upon them an impression of a different kind!  Like
+the gun, I have <i>bided my time</i>, as the Scotch say.  Neither
+the cannon nor myself will last for ever, but to worry is
+folly! ... Heaven will not let us rust upon the shelf!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'<i>Mensch ärgere Dich nicht</i>' is a good proverb," said
+the Chancellor, "not only for Your Excellency!  Chained
+to my study-table all yesterday and this morning,&mdash;horribly
+handicapped by the absence of my First Secretary
+Abeken, who is doing duty with the King at Ems.&mdash;listening
+to reports, receiving showers of telegrams, dictating
+replies in answer to the appeals or expostulations of
+Foreign Ministers&mdash;sending instructions to Ambassadors,
+and drinking Mühlbrunnen water,&mdash;which must not be
+taken when one is vexed or worried, if one wants it not
+to play the very devil in one's inside, I chewed the cud
+of that proverb, '<i>Man, do not vex thyself!</i>' to keep myself
+from gnawing my tongue.  That official international
+threat of Gramont, uttered in the session of the Corps
+Législatif of July 6th,&mdash;the filth hurled by the Paris
+Press&mdash;did not cost me a sleepless night.  But that, after such
+insults, the King of Prussia should treat with Benedetti
+at Ems while the Prussian Foreign Minister remained at
+Varzin&mdash;stuck in my gizzard as though I had swallowed
+a prickle-burr.  It was worse than Olmütz....  I saw
+nothing but resignation ahead of me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Von Roon agreed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To me also it seemed a slight not to the Foreign
+Minister alone&mdash;but to His Majesty's Government in your
+person."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Field-Marshal added, his wrinkled face lengthening
+dourly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I may tell you&mdash;there being no ladies present!&mdash;the
+whole affair acted on me like unripe gooseberries, especially
+after reading that sentence in the <i>Gaulois</i>, written
+by a <i>gamin</i> with a finger to his nose...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Von Boon thundered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'<i>La Prusse cane</i>!'  Only say black-dose, rather than
+sour gooseberries, and there you have the effect of the
+words on me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Chancellor, with a twinkle of humor:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They wrought upon myself as an emetocatharsis.  For,
+repudiating the slight, and simultaneously expelling from
+my system the last remains of compunction, I decided
+then and there to hurry off from Varzin to Ems for the
+purpose of urging upon His Majesty the urgent necessity
+for summoning the Reichstag.  The words I meant to use
+kept drumming in my skull&mdash;<i>We shall be traitors to
+ourselves if we do not accept this challenge.  Without an
+instant's delay, we must mobilize!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Roon:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why not, when we are prepared to take measures for
+the safety of the Rhenish provinces?  We can put
+Saarbrück in a state of defense in twenty-four hours, and
+Mainz in less than forty-eight.  Is it not so, Herr General
+Field-Marshal?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Von Moltke's dry, level voice returned quietly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My plan of invasion was drawn up in 1868.  All my
+arrangements are made, as I have said.  When His
+Majesty&mdash;when the Chancellor of the Confederation and Your
+Excellency give the signal&mdash;I go home to my quarters on
+the first floor of the south-east wing of the Great General
+Staff Department, and dispatch a telegraphic message of
+three words..."  He began to laugh, rubbing his hands
+together.  "Then&mdash;you will see whether I am ready!  All I
+ask is Opportunity&mdash;like Krupp's thousand-tonner gun!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap26"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XXVI
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor said, emptying another bumper of champagne:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"This morning the opportunity lay within grasp.  So
+strongly convinced was I of this that as my phaeton passed
+through the village of Wussow, on the way to the station,
+'War is Inevitable' seemed written on every house.  The
+old clergyman stood before his parsonage door and greeted
+me with a hand-wave.  My answer was the gesture of a
+thrust in <i>carte</i> and <i>tierce</i>.  For me the three words: 'War
+is Declared' replaced the lettering of the advertisement
+posters on the walls of the stations the special rushed
+through.  Yet, though I had notified His Majesty of the
+advisability of summoning me to his assistance, I received,
+even as I stepped out of the train at the Stettin Station,
+a vacillating telegram from him, enjoining delay."  He
+added, laughing: "Together with a message in cipher from
+our Prussian Ambassador at Paris, informing me that it
+has been given forth from the tribune of the Corps
+Législatif that had not Prince Leopold retreated from the
+Spanish candidature, to prevent the war with which the
+Emperor threatens us&mdash;the Government of Napoleon III. would
+have extorted a letter of apology from the King."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Roon could not speak.  Said Moltke:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Gallic cock crows loudly!  Such a letter would
+nicely recoup France for the humiliation of Sadowa."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Did France succeed in extorting it," retorted the
+Chancellor, "but she has got to get it first!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The forehead of Roon was black as thundercloud.  He
+unhooked his collar, and wiped his congested face.  The
+Field-Marshal thrust his hand under his wig perplexedly,
+saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That His Majesty should continue to treat with Benedetti
+after all these insults and outrages....  It passes
+my understanding, I am fain to confess!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Count himself would have no difficulty in reading
+the riddle," said the Chancellor, shrugging.  "He
+is&mdash;according to his own conviction&mdash;a diplomat of the first
+water, a statesman of infinite finesse and irresistible
+persuasions.  Yet he did not coax us into the Emperor's trap
+in 1867.  Speaking of that, I have in my pocket something
+that will presently jump out of it, a testimony in his own
+handwriting that he is not quite so clever a fellow as he
+thinks!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To-day," boomed Roon, "I met Prince Gortchakoff.
+We were riding in the Unter den Linden when he stopped.
+He spoke of the King's age&mdash;the merest allusion in reference
+to a site he pointed out as being suitable for a statue.
+His Majesty was to be represented holding a wreath of
+laurel with the dates of 1864 and 1866 upon it.  While
+emblematical figures of Peace, and the Genius of the
+Domestic Hearth, were shown disarming him of his helmet
+and sword."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A sneer thoroughly merited," said the Chancellor, "by
+these days of hesitation!"  He added: "The Genius of the
+Domestic Hearth is for the moment at Coblenz.  However,
+wifely expostulations can be conveyed by telegram.  Her
+Majesty's cry is, '<i>Remember Jena and Tilsit and avoid war,
+even at the cost of national dishonor!</i>'  Should these
+entreaties of the Queen prevail, she will merit the reproof of
+Sir Walter Scott&mdash;I think it was Sir Walter Scott!&mdash;who
+addressed to his grayhound, Maida, who had torn up&mdash;unless
+I err?&mdash;the manuscript of a newly-completed novel.
+'<i>Poor thing! thou little knowest the injury thou hast
+done!</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Women are less reasonable," declared Von Boon,
+"than bitches, to my mind!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Nay, nay!" said the Field-Marshal with sudden anger.
+"Maida was not a bitch, and I cannot agree with you!
+Great and noble female characters have been, and exist
+now&mdash;not only in the pages of history-books.  It may be
+that Her Majesty is prejudiced&mdash;her influence has not
+always been favorable to the adoption of measures I
+would have counseled.  But she is high-minded!&mdash;a great
+lady, and truly devoted as a wife.  And with this ring
+upon my finger"&mdash;he held up his wrinkled left hand and
+showed the narrow band of gold&mdash;"it would ill become
+me to sit still and hear women likened to the unreasoning
+beasts that perish, when for all I know my beloved wife
+Mary is standing by my side!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He drank a sip of wine, and continued more mildly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The good God took her to Himself twelve years ago,
+in the fullness of life and strength and English beauty!&mdash;while
+I, more than thirty years her senior, hang yet upon
+the tree.  On the top of the hill at Crusau is her tomb,
+where one day I shall lie beside her.  But before that
+day"&mdash;the brave old eyes snapped fire, and he wrinkled up his
+ancient eagle-beak as though he savored the fumes
+already&mdash;"it may be that I shall smell powder again!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Let us drink to that!" said the Chancellor.  As they
+filled their glasses there came a peculiar, scratching knock
+on the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Come in, Bucher!" cried the host harshly, and the
+summons was answered by one of His Excellency's Privy
+Councillors of Legation, a little, stooping old gentleman,
+with a large hooked nose and a grizzled mustache and
+whiskers, who was dressed in a chocolate-colored,
+single-breasted frock-coat, tightly fastened with gilt buttons,
+and who wore a black satin stock, with the tongue of the
+buckle sticking up among the locks at the back of his
+neck, and baggy black cloth trousers ending in the feet
+of a Prussian Lifeguard, encased in huge and shapeless
+cloth boots; these moved him noiselessly to the elbow
+of the Chancellor, to whom he whispered, handing
+him a card, large and square, and unmistakably feminine:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And so, as Madame was urgent ... Your Excellency
+knows what women are!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Thanks to some early studies in femininity, I am
+credited," said the Chancellor, "with knowing a great
+deal too much about the sex.  Where have you put
+Madame?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bucher answered, raising himself on his toes to approach
+his lips to the large, well-shaped ear; for even seated, the
+Chancellor overtopped him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"In the gracious Countess's little red damask back
+drawing-room."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is doubtful, my good Bucher, whether&mdash;did she know
+how she was honored&mdash;the gracious Countess would welcome
+her visitor."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Alas!  Your Excellency!" pleaded the Councillor, "but
+Her Excellency does not know!&mdash;and the room contains
+nothing valuable.  Only a few family pictures&mdash;no china,
+silver, or <i>bric-à-brac</i>.  Nothing that it would be any use
+to steal!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Come, come!" expostulated the Minister, his blue eyes
+alight with cynical amusement, "you must not speak of
+Madame as though she were a house-thief.  Our good
+Bucher," he went on, turning jestingly to his table
+companions, "sees little difference between a person who picks
+brains for pay, and sells the pickings, and another person
+who picks locks and steals silver vases and cups.  Rather
+a reflection on the Diplomatic Service, now I think of it!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Ach!  Herr Gott!</i>" said the Councillor in alarm, "I
+cast no reflection, Your Excellency knows it!  Only the
+woman is of light reputation&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And may be light-fingered into the bargain.  Possibly&mdash;"
+said the Chancellor, "and all the better if she
+be so!  We will risk my wife's family portraits in her
+vicinity until after dinner.  Have coffee and liqueurs sent
+to her, and beg her to wait a while."  He added, "Let
+them put cigarettes on the tray&mdash;I have no doubt she
+smokes tobacco.  And as the smell will have passed off
+before my wife and daughter return from Varzin, neither
+of the ladies will ever know of the desecration of the red
+damask back drawing-room."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as Bucher shuffled out of the room to execute his
+errand, his Chief rang the bell for the third course.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"By the way, Excellency," said the War Minister, as
+the demure servants out of livery removed the empty
+dishes: "that Frenchwoman of poor Max Valverden's is
+driving about Berlin."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So!" commented the host, turning an inscrutable face
+upon the Minister.  "She must find it very warm, and
+insufferably dull."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She consoled herself," said Roon, "not long after
+Count Max's suicide."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There," burst out the Field-Marshal, "was an
+incomprehensible catastrophe!  That young man&mdash;who was
+military attaché at our Embassy in Paris until the return
+of the Allied Armies of Great Britain and France from
+the Crimea in 1856; and in 1866, ten years later, joined my
+staff in Austria as third <i>aide-de-camp</i>&mdash;I cannot
+understand it&mdash;he must have been demented!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He unbuttoned the frock-coat, showing an unstarched,
+but scrupulously clean white shirt and vest of white nankeen,
+and taking a little silver snuff-box from his waistcoat
+pocket, laid it down carefully upon the tablecloth as he
+said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"In '56 he brought his mistress from Paris with him&mdash;he
+was infatuated with her spirit and beauty.  They said
+she was the wife of an officer in Grandguerrier's Division,
+who had served throughout the whole of the War in the
+Crimea."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A <i>chef d'escadron</i> of Mounted Chausseurs, who seems
+to have taken his wife's desertion philosophically,"
+commented the Chancellor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Field-Marshal took a pinch of snuff, and gravely
+shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Of that I know nothing, but there was no meeting.
+Max Valverden assured me, on his honor, that an
+opportunity for the challenge had been given.  Otherwise the
+young Count could not have continued in our Prussian
+Army&mdash;one would naturally have been obliged to retire
+him."  He sneezed and went on: "My personal acquaintance
+with Valverden began ten years later.  He served
+me&mdash;excellently.  One should always give due praise to the
+dead.  But when he returned from Austria&mdash;then happened
+the tragedy, at Schönfeld in the Altenwald, where
+lies his patrimonial property, and where the lady waited.
+And&mdash;he shot himself, upon the very night of his return
+to her."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not," interposed the cool, level voice of the Chancellor,
+"not being expected until noon of the day following."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Of that I know nothing," said Moltke, turning his
+ascetic hairless face full upon the speaker.  "What I know
+is that an officer who faithfully served his country and
+whom I had recommended for distinction, at the earliest
+opportunity&mdash;died by his own hand!  How the woman
+was left, I cannot tell you."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Count Maximilian von Schön-Valverden had provided
+for Madame de Bayard when summoned upon active Service,"
+said the Chancellor.  "His family did not contest
+the will, and she is not badly off.  Therefore," he added
+with a smile, "when she condescends to serve my Intelligence
+Department as a spy, you may suppose she does not
+do it too cheaply.  I must refer to my perambulating
+ledger, Bucher, before I quote you the exact figures of the
+sum I am to hand her to-night.  She is a true daughter
+of the horseleech, who cries '<i>Give, give, give!</i>' incessantly.
+But all the same I am indebted to her for those remarkably
+interesting particulars concerning the Mission of
+M. de Straz to Prince Antony."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So!" ejaculated Von Roon in astonishment.  The
+Field-Marshal rubbed his chin and turned his clear eyes
+upon the speaker, who went on smilingly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"M. de Straz is susceptible&mdash;a fatal fault in a conspirator.
+Madame is still seductive, with a figure like Circe,
+ropes of black silk hair, a skin of cream, though the roses
+are bought ones! and eyes the color&mdash;exactly the color
+of old, pale tawny port.  Now, when you reflect that she
+is waiting in my wife's red boudoir to interview me in my
+next spare moment&mdash;do you fear for my hitherto unassailable
+virtue, or regard me as proof against such charms?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I never bet more," said Moltke, "than half a pfennig,
+and then only when I play cards with my niece."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I will wager you proof," cried Roon, "for two hundred
+thalers!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I can hardly bet upon my own marital infidelity!"
+said the Chancellor, laughing, as a servant uncovered the
+dish newly placed before him.  "Will Your Excellency
+take some of this?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"This" was the savory <i>pièce de resistance</i> of the
+masculine banquet, a lamb of six weeks, roasted to a golden
+brown, basted with marrow, and surrounded with tiny
+cucumbers stuffed with seasoning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moltke accepted the offer with alacrity, indifferent to
+the charms of veal with tomatoes and aubergines.  Von
+Roon, declining, hurled himself upon a fillet of beef
+<i>jardinière</i>, and hacked a huge steak from its surface as with
+a sword, rather than a carving-knife.  The Chancellor, plying
+his gleaming weapons delicately, liberally supplied his
+guest and piled his own plate, saying as he launched
+himself upon its contents with unabated appetite:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Confederations may disappoint us&mdash;Kings may deceive
+us&mdash;while our teeth and our digestions faithfully serve us,
+we can find some zest in life.  When I retire, I shall cultivate
+vegetables, plant forest-trees, rear trout, breed cattle,
+sheep, pigs, and poultry&mdash;drop my hereditary patronymic
+as I shed my titles of office and be known to all posterity
+as the Farmer of Varzin!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hall-bell had been heard to ring a moment previously.
+There was another scratching signal on the door,
+and Bucher appeared, manifestly excited and carrying a
+telegraphic dispatch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What now?" asked the Chancellor, finishing a mouthful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A telegram from Ems&mdash;&mdash;" began the Councillor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The imperious hand whipped it from between his pudgy
+fingers; the masterful voice demanded, as the envelope
+was rent open:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The decipherer has not left?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Excellency, no!" twittered the Councillor, agitated by
+the portentous frown of his Chief, and by the grave faces
+of Moltke and Roon.  The paper was thrust back to him
+with the curt order:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Get this deciphered&mdash;do not delay!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as the Legation Councillor vanished, Bismarck said
+with a short laugh, bending his powerful regard on the
+gaunt, black stare of the War Minister:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is from the King, and will not please us.  We may
+make up our minds beforehand to that.  Yet I drink this
+glass to the honor of Prussia!"  And filling his great
+bumper glass from a fresh bottle that had been placed at
+his elbow, he gulped down at least a pint of the creaming
+nectar of the Widow Clicquot, and his guests, in smaller
+measures, pledged the same toast.  After that they sat in
+silence, the Chancellor alone continuing to eat with
+appetite&mdash;until the Councillor's big feet came shuffling back
+again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The copy, Excellency, 200 groups altogether," he
+began, "signed by the Herr Privy Councillor von Abeken,
+at His Majesty's command."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The papers he held were whipped away from him.  The
+Chancellor read&mdash;and his countenance most grimly altered.
+His brows grew thunderous, trenches dug themselves along
+his forehead, caves appeared about his blazing eyes, and
+the pouches under them portentously bagged.  The heavy
+mustache might shade the mouth and chin, but could not
+hide that they were changed to granite.  He passed his
+firm hand over them and said, his incisive tones veiled
+with a curious hoarseness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mr. Councillor of Legation, you will now leave us.
+When I ring the bell it summons you.  Pray tell Dr. Busch
+that his services will be needed.  Some articles must be
+written for the Press to-night."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said, as the door closed behind Bucher, and the smile
+that accompanied the words was grim and cynical:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Well, gentlemen, we have got our final slap in the
+face!  The Press organs of the Ultramontane and the
+Democrats will call us by our nicknames to-morrow: 'Old
+Hellfire' and 'Death's Chess-Player' and 'The Pomeranian
+Ogre' and all the rest.  But&mdash;I swear to you that no enemy
+of mine will ever despise me as I now despise myself!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Roon and Moltke regarded him in silence.  He went on
+speaking, still with that strange hoarseness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Some have called me the Iron Chancellor.  I will tell
+you by what title Wilhelm the First of Prussia will go
+down to posterity.  Men will speak of him as the Fluid
+King.  It is written in the Scriptures,&mdash;all day the phrase
+has haunted me,&mdash;'Unstable as water, thou shalt not
+excel!'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At a glance from the War Minister, Moltke rose up
+suddenly.  His stooping scholar's body sprang upright as a
+lance.  He said, and the words rang clear as steel on steel:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your Excellency, I deplore the necessity of imposing
+silence upon you.  But the obligation of my military oath,
+and your own&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused as the great figure of his host reared up at
+the head of the table.  He saluted the Field-Marshal and
+said coldly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Herr General Field-Marshal, the rebuke is merited.
+Holding the King's commission as Colonel of White
+Cuirassiers of the <i>Landwehr</i>, I have spoken treasonably.
+Does your Excellency wish me to ring for my sword?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moltke's wrinkled face flashed into amusement, as the
+Chancellor imperturbably stretched his hand to the bell
+beside him.  He said, laughing:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Colonel Count von Bismarck-Schönhausen, I accept
+your apology.  I will limit the period of your arrest to
+confinement to this room until conclusion of dinner, on
+condition that you read now this message from Ems."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor saluted, and glancing at Roon, who was
+now standing, gloomy and downcast, "We look," he said,
+"like three mourners about a bier.  It is, in fact, Prussia
+who lies dead upon the table.  However, judge of the
+situation for yourselves."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he read out the famous telegram handed in at Ems
+at three-thirty:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Count Benedetti spoke to me on the Promenade in order
+to demand from me finally, in a very important manner,
+that I should authorize him to telegraph at once to Paris
+that I bound myself for all future time never again to give
+my consent if the Hohenzollerns should renew their candidature.
+I refused at last somewhat sternly, as it is neither
+right nor possible to undertake engagements of this kind
+</i>à tout jamais<i>.  Naturally I told him that I had received no
+news; and as he was earlier informed from Paris and
+Madrid than myself, he could clearly see that my
+Government once more had no hand in the matter.</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ei-ei!" broke in Moltke, "'<i>Somewhat sternly</i>' ...
+'<i>Naturally I told</i>' ... '<i>Neither right nor possible,</i>' and
+then '<i>no hand in the matter!</i>'  Do I hear the King&mdash;or
+have my ears played tricks on me?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Kreuzdonnerwetter!</i>" exploded Roon.  "Well might
+one ask 'Is this the master or the servant speaking?'  But
+go on, go on, I pray your Excellency!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The reader had transformed his face to an expressionless
+mask that might have been wrought in stone or metal.
+Now the tell-tale huskiness of fierce emotion cleared from
+his voice.  He resumed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"This closes His Majesty's personal communication.
+Herr Privy Councillor Abeken continues to the end."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Moltke: "Let us hear what little Abeken has got
+to say to you."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cold, incisive voice recommenced reading:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>His Majesty commands me to inform you, that he has
+since received a letter from the Prince.  His Majesty,
+having told Count Benedetti that he was awaiting news from
+the Prince, has decided, upon the representation of Count
+Eulenburg and myself, not to receive Count Benedetti
+again, but only to let him be informed through an
+</i>aide-de-camp<i> that His Majesty has now received from the Prince
+confirmation of the news Benedetti has already received
+from Paris, and has nothing further to say to the Ambassador.
+His Majesty leaves it to Your Excellency whether
+Benedetti's fresh demand and its rejection should not be at
+once communicated both to our Ambassadors and to the
+Press representatives.</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The close of the Royal communication plopped into a
+pool of silence.  The Chancellor coughed, and said with his
+characteristic stutter:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The-the laxity and diffuseness of the verbiage of this
+dispatch l-lul-leave me in no doubt as to the favorable effect
+the Ems waters have already wrought upon the constitution
+of His Majesty!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Roon barked his laugh.  Moltke raised his thoughtful
+head from his breast and said laconically:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It gives me the belly-ache to listen to such rubbish.
+Are we German men or German mice?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor shrugged and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"More than ever it is clear that my position is untenable.
+The King, under pressure of threats mingled with
+entreaties, has permitted himself to be heckled by the
+Emperor's Franco-Italian emissary.  He ignores my urgent
+request that he should refer Benedetti to his Foreign
+Minister.  Now, by the medium of an inferior official, he tells
+me that I may acquaint the representatives of the State
+and the Press&mdash;that nothing is settled and no definite end
+in view!  What is settled is, that I resign!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Von Roon called out harshly, striking a sinewy fist upon
+the table:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your Excellency will not leave your friends in this
+extremity?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moltke turned to him half whimsically, half pleadingly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For our sake, Otto, stick by the old wagon!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor said, with a sudden softening of the grim
+lines of his strong face, and of the eyes that had been
+fixed and expressionless:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You talk, both of you, like two babes in the wood.  As
+far as regards my personal influence to sway the King or
+control the feeling of the Reichstag&mdash;another hand may
+guide the State as well as this of mine.  Yet, were it
+possible&mdash;having already the King's permission&mdash;to produce a
+somewhat concentrated version of this verbose telegram....
+Has either of you a pencil?&mdash;mine has been mislaid.."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Here, take mine!" said the Field-Marshal eagerly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor took the offered pencil with a brief nod
+of thanks, swept the silver-gilt milkmaid ruthlessly aside,
+and spreading the forms containing the Royal dispatch
+on the space she had occupied, pored over them for a
+moment, frowning heavily, before the red-chalk crayon
+began to play its part.  Words were struck out&mdash;then
+whole sentences....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah, ah!" said Moltke, beaming.  "He has finished at
+last.  Now let us hear what it sounds like with its mane
+cropped and its tail docked?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Reduced," said the Chancellor, lifting his great eyes
+from the red-crayoned papers, "without addition or
+alteration, the message might run thus..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He read:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>After the news of the renunciation of the hereditary
+Prince of Hohenzollern had been officially communicated to
+the Imperial Government of France by the Royal Government
+in Spain, the French Ambassador at Ems further
+demanded of His Majesty the King that he would authorize
+him to telegraph to Paris that His Majesty the King bound
+himself for all future time never again to give his consent
+should the Princes of Hohenzollern renew their candidature.</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Good, very good!" growled Roon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That seems to me excellent!" said Moltke, twinkling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor finished:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>His Majesty the King thereupon decided not again to
+receive Benedetti, the French Ambassador, and sent the
+aide-de-camp on duty with the information that His
+Majesty had nothing further to say to him!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Bravo, bis!</i>" roared Roon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why," said Moltke, rubbing his hands delightedly,
+"now it has a different ring altogether.  Before it sounded
+like a parley.  Now it is a fanfare of defiance!  Sentences
+like these are worthy of a King!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And there can be no accusations of falsification," said
+the Chancellor, bending his powerful regard upon his two
+colleagues.  "The Bund Chancellor carries out what the
+Prussian monarch commands.  He communicates this text
+by telegraph to all our Embassies and to the Press agencies.
+Is it his fault if its published words provoke the Gallic
+cock to show fight?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I understand," said the War Minister joyfully, "that
+we should be the party attacked first.  And we shall be,
+and we shall win!  Our God of old lives, and will not let
+us perish!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Has Your Excellency nothing to say to me?" asked the
+Chancellor, fixing his great eyes on the face of Moltke, now
+radiant with childlike happiness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Were I a poet," returned the joyous old artist in war,
+seizing the hand outstretched to him across the table, and
+wringing it between both his own, "I should crown you
+with a wreath of laurel inscribed '<i>Hail to thee, Guardian of
+Prussia's honor!</i>' or something of that kind.  Being what
+I am, I say that you are what my English nephews would
+call '<i>a trump</i>!'  As you said this morning when you quitted
+Varzin, 'War Is Inevitable!'"  He added, hitting himself
+a resounding thump in the chest: "And if I may but live
+to lead our armies in such a war&mdash;then the devil may come
+directly we have conquered these Frenchmen and fetch
+away this crumbling old carcass!"  He added, with a
+change to gravity: "I do not say my soul, for I am
+a decent Christian.  Hey, look here, our dinner has got
+cold!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was true; the viands were stagnant in the dishes.
+The fillet sat in the center of a stagnant lake of congealed
+gravy; the roasted lamb, reduced by the onslaughts of the
+Chancellor to a partial skeleton, was covered with a
+frosting of rich white fat.  He said, with a laugh that
+clattered against walls and ceiling like a discharge of
+musketry, and reaching for the bell that would summon
+Bucher:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It does not matter; my cook has always a second menu
+ready in case of delays or accidents.  While Bucher
+communicates to our Embassies and the European Press
+Agencies the concentrated essence of His Majesty's
+telegram&mdash;while hundreds of thousands
+of handbills are being printed
+that shall disseminate the text throughout Germany, and
+Busch writes the articles that shall put the needful
+complexion on this affair&mdash;we will order up the Moet and
+Chandon White Star&mdash;I am thirsty after so much
+talking!&mdash;and eat our dinner again!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap27"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XXVII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Ever since the King, returning from the baths of Ems,
+had been met at the railway-station by his Under-Secretary
+of State bearing France's declaration of war,&mdash;a huge,
+orderly crowd, compact of all classes and callings, had
+ceaselessly rolled through the streets of Berlin, chanting
+with its thousands of sturdy lungs "<i>Heil dir im Siegerkranz</i>"
+and the "<i>Wacht am Rhein</i>" until its patriotic
+fervor reached a state of ebullition only to be relieved by
+volleys of cheers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jammed in the solid mass of bodies blackening the Unter
+den Linden and packing the Opera-Platz to suffocation,&mdash;until
+the bronze equestrian statue of the Great Friedrich,
+opposing the eastern courtyard gateway of the small stuccoed
+Palace, reared above a tossing sea of heads,&mdash;P. C. Breagh
+tasted the raptures of emancipation from the
+mill-round, and drank in news at every pore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For this was life in earnest....  With the red-hot
+cigar-end of a corpulent merchant burning the back of his neck,
+and the crook of a market woman's blue-cotton umbrella
+imperiling his left eye; while the sword-hilt of a gigantic
+Sergeant of Uhlans insinuated itself between his third and
+fourth ribs on the right side, and the huge flaxen chignon
+of a servant-girl, armed with a capacious market-basket
+crammed with meat, fish, and vegetables for family
+consumption, bobbed itself into his mouth whenever he opened
+that feature to cheer, or gasp for air, heavily burdened with
+the fumes of beer, schnaps, herring-salad, garlic,
+sauerkraut, and perspiring humanity, he was happier than ever
+he had been before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The King, it was said, was holding a council with his
+Ministers and Generals in his study on the ground-floor of
+his Palace looking on the Opera-Platz.  Presently His
+Majesty might be expected to come out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tall, elderly, white-whiskered officer in the undress
+uniform of the Prussian foot-guards&mdash;a blue tunic with
+red facings, silver buttons and epaulettes&mdash;had already
+appeared upon the balcony of a window overlooking the
+Linden, and touched his spiked helmet in response to the
+frenzied acclamations of his scarlet, perspiring subjects,
+whose staring eyes and open mouths a Berlin dust-storm
+was filling with peppery grit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Presently the King had moved back into the room
+behind him, and returned with the Queen, a tall, thin,
+elegant lady in half-mourning, who was weeping; people said,
+because she hated the thought of war, and had besought
+her husband, on her knees, to truckle to the Napoleon at
+Paris, and thus avert hostilities.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the royal couple had retired amid plaudits of a
+somewhat less enthusiastic kind, the people had demanded
+the Crown Prince; and the King had stepped out yet
+again with his hand on the shoulder of the heir-apparent, a
+tall and stalwart man of thirty-nine, with a clear red-and-white
+complexion, setting off his well-cut features, kindly
+blue eyes, and flowing beard of yellow-brown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Unser Fritz!</i>&mdash;his manly good looks and the Order of
+Merit shining on his general's uniform had provoked fresh
+outbursts of patriotic enthusiasm, in which the gray-powdered
+foliage of the overrated linden-trees, limply resting
+during a sudden lull of the dust-storm, had been wildly
+agitated, and the very street-lamps had rocked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when the King, turning to his heir, gave him his
+hand,&mdash;when the son, reverently bending, raised it to his
+lips, and the father with manifest emotion embraced
+him,&mdash;there had fallen a silence of sympathetic emotion....
+Then the great martial figure had reared erect again and,
+stepping to the front of the balcony, had shouted to the
+people:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Krieg!  Mobil!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mobilization!... War!..."
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+All the shouting that had gone before was no more than
+the squealing of a kindergarten compared with the mighty
+roar that greeted these two pregnant words!  The scorching,
+dusty blue sky-dome, now tinged with sandy-pink sunset
+toward the Brandenburg Gate, seemed to quiver with
+the upward rush of it.  And&mdash;not by accident&mdash;from the
+forest of flagstaffs mounted on the Palace, the Opera House,
+and the buildings contingent,&mdash;as down the whole length
+of the Linden to the Ministerial palaces of the Wilhelm
+Strasse,&mdash;the black-and-white Flag of Prussia and the
+Hohenzollern banner of white with the black eagle and
+the cross of the old Teuton Order, broke and fluttered on
+the sandy breeze.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The National Anthem broke out once more, and the war-song,
+"<i>Ich bin ein Preusse</i>."  The King retired on his son's
+arm manifestly overcome with weariness.  Still the vast
+crowd of heated faces, set with shining eyes, and holed with
+roaring mouths, persistently turned toward those ground-floor
+windows of the Palace.  <i>Something more yet!</i> asked
+all the gaping mouths and staring eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+But the blinds of the monarch's study were pulled down,
+unmistakably signifying that all was over for the present....
+The central valves of the great gilded Palace gates
+were now shut, leaving open only the smaller carriage-way,
+through which mounted <i>aides</i> and orderly officers conveying
+dispatches presently began to stream.  The carriages
+of Ministers and other State officials followed these, while
+lesser personages, emerging from the exit left for
+pedestrians, began to hail cab-drivers from the stand of
+hackneys on the Linden side of the Opera House.  Swearing, the
+frustrated Jehus of these vehicles laid about them with
+their whips in the endeavor to force their animals through
+the solid crowd....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A man went down under the hoofs of a wretched Rosinante.
+There were cries for "Police!" and spiked helmets
+appeared in the crowd.  It surged and swayed....  The
+guardians of the law had drawn their cutlasses and were
+beating their fellow-children of the Fatherland upon their
+heads with the flat of these weapons, in the attempt to
+effect a junction between the cabs and those who wished to
+hire them.  Thus the pressure on the flanks, ribs and
+breast-bone of P. C. Breagh became suffocating.  Lifted
+from his feet, he was carried backward and forward by
+rushes, growing less certain of his own identity as the
+roaring in his ears became louder.  Just as his eyelids
+dropped and he passed out of his own knowledge, a powerful
+hand caught him by the coat-collar, and a solid rampart
+of human flesh interposed between his lately-drifting body
+and the waves of the human sea that raged beyond.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gulping, P. C. Breagh became aware that he was spread-eagled
+against the railings of the Palace courtyard facing
+the Unter den Linden, and that a big man in a loose black
+waterproof rain-cloak and broad-leaved black felt hat was
+holding to a railing on each side of him and warding off
+the rushes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Th-thanks!  I'm tremendously obliged!..." he was
+beginning, when the swish of the cutlasses and the shrieking
+of the cutlassed drowned his voice.  Yet another voice,
+masculine, resonant, and imperious, dominated all others;
+it cried:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The King commands the police to sheath their swords!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And upon the instant lull in the tumult that followed
+came another order:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"His Majesty has work to do for the Fatherland.  Let
+the people disperse quietly to their homes!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the crowd, pacified and quieted, answered, "We
+will so!" in a crashing volley of Teutonic gutturals, and
+began to split up and move away in sections, singing "<i>Heil
+dir im Siegerkranz</i>" in sonorous unison.  When through
+the Palace gates came a small and shabby brougham drawn
+by a venerable bay, and driven by an elderly coachman
+in gray-and-black livery, the sight of whose military
+cockade evoked another whirlwind of enthusiasm....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Moltke!  It is our Moltke!" men shouted to one
+another, and the old General, who sat alone in the carriage,
+the lean, stooping, septuagenarian in the spiked helmet,
+whose thin, ascetic face was rosy with suppressed
+excitement and whose pale blue eyes twinkled good-humoredly
+between their narrow lids at the seething ocean of humanity
+in which the shabby brougham labored, saluted in
+acknowledgment of the cheers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Moltke!  Long live our Moltke!  But where has Otto
+got to!" hiccuped an alcoholic seaman, clutching the ledge
+of the brougham window.  He continued in the midst of
+a silence born of consternation: "What has become of the
+Big Pomeranian?  We would have&mdash;hic!&mdash;carried him
+home shoulder-high for this week's&mdash;hic!&mdash;work he has
+done!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Zealous hands dragged the presumptuous speaker back,
+as the venerable expert in war doffed his spiked helmet, and
+said, popping his auburn-wigged head out of the brougham
+window:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Where Count Bismarck is needed there he will be, depend
+on it!  Now, children, let me get back to my maps!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Tell us first how things are going in France yonder?"
+bellowed another Berliner, and the great Field-Marshal
+answered, pointing the jest with his keenest twinkle:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You want to know how things are going there?  Well,
+the wheat has suffered from the drought, but acorns and
+potatoes promise to be plentiful, and pumpkins will be big
+this year!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the crowd, splitting with laughter, made way for
+the brougham of the Chief of the General Staff, and the
+joke was sown broadcast over Germany before the end of
+half an hour.  For were not Moltke's acorns the oblong,
+round-ended bullets of the Prussian needle-gun, as his
+potatoes were the shrapnel shell cast by the six-pounder
+steel breech-loaders designed by Krupp for the Prussian
+field-artillery, and the big pumpkins the seventeen-pound
+projectiles fired by the siege-guns of nine centimeters'
+bore? ...
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+The massive ribs that had acted as buffers between
+P. C. Breagh and the battering onslaughts of the crowd
+shook with laughter as the brougham moved on through
+a lane that continuously opened in the mass of bodies and
+closed when it had passed....  Then their owner settled
+the wide-leaved felt hat more firmly on his head, and said
+in well-bred, fluent English, turning his heavily-jowled
+face and powerful, fiery-blue eyes on P. C. Breagh, who
+was thanking him in his best German for his timely
+assistance:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Do not thank me so effusively.  I have a habit of
+sometimes saving a man's life!  Yours happened to be in
+peril; there is no need to say more!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The clear incisive tones had an inflection that was almost
+contemptuous, yet a smile, curving the heavy mustache,
+showed the small and well-preserved teeth it shadowed,
+as he added in his admirable English, fastening a button
+of the thin black waterproof cloak which had been
+disarranged in the recent struggle sufficiently to show that it
+covered some sort of military uniform:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Save this,&mdash;that I happen to possess a son about your
+age, and should not care to lose him!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And with this he was gone, leaving P. C. Breagh breathless
+with the greatness of the adventure that had befallen
+him.  For the owner of the bulldog face with the fierce
+blue eyes blazing over their heavy orbital pouches, was
+the unpopular Minister who had been booed by the Ultramontane
+and Socialist students three years before, as the
+Berlin express-train passed through the station of
+Schwärz-Brettingen&mdash;the all-powerful Chancellor, who was meant
+when diplomats and Press leader-writers referred to
+"Prussia."
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+What did he on foot in those packed, roaring thoroughfares,
+where the assassin's dagger or revolver might play
+its part so safely?  Perhaps, like the Third Napoleon,
+whose peacock bubble of Empire might now have reached
+the point of bursting, Count Bismarck believed in his
+fortunate star....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah! what was that round bright object lying on the
+pavement?  P. C. Breagh, still dazed with the magnitude
+of the thing that had befallen him, stooped and picked,
+it up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a medal of silver, with the Prussian Eagle
+enameled in red upon the obverse, and a name which left no
+doubt as to the identity of P. C. Breagh's rescuer.  Upon,
+the reverse was the inscription: "<i>Fur Rettung aus
+Gefahr</i>"&mdash;"For Saving From Danger."  With the date of the
+24th June, 1842....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No doubt the Chancellor prized this, the decoration
+earned at twenty-four for saving his orderly-groom and
+another private from drowning, when serving as <i>Landwehr</i>
+cavalry officer with the Stargaard Regiment of Hussars.
+Well, he should have it back,&mdash;but into no hands but his
+would P. C. Breagh surrender it,&mdash;P. C. Breagh, who had
+been cast out with mockery from the editorial offices of
+one daily and two evening newspapers, when he had
+offered&mdash;at a rate of astounding cheapness,&mdash;to supply their
+columns with material drawn from the experiences of one
+who had never previously enjoyed an opportunity of seeing
+the thing called War.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One Editor had dealt with him drastically, pitching his
+card into the waste-paper basket, and saying, "No!  Get
+out with you!"  A second had whistled up a tube and
+called down a sub-editor, and said to him, "Look at
+this!"  The third had preached a brief but pithy sermon on
+presumption and cocksureness, winding up with the intimation
+that if P. C. Breagh ever found himself at the seat of
+war and in possession of any experiences worth recording,
+he might submit them for consideration if he chose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These men would never know it, but they were profoundly
+humiliated.  At least one of them had lost a half-column,
+striking the note of personal adventure to the
+clink of shekels of fine gold.  As for Mr. Knewbit
+... P. C. Breagh could almost hear him chuckling&mdash;had only
+to shut his eyes to see the poker, sketching out headings
+on the Coram Street kitchen wall:
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  "ADVENTURE OF YOUNG ENGLISHMAN.<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  WAR CORRESPONDENT IN BERLIN.<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  CRUSHED BY THE CROWD.<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  RESCUED BY BISMARCK.<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  THE IRON HAND SAVES A LIFE!"<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile, the medal had to be returned to the hands
+of its owner, who must, P. C. Breagh was firm on
+that!&mdash;consent to receive it from the hands of the finder, if he
+wanted it back again.  P. C. Breagh knew the Foreign
+Office, in the Wilhelm Strasse&mdash;the shabbiest residence in
+all that street of official palaces&mdash;with its high-pitched,
+red-tiled Mansard roof, its shabby gray stuccoed front (a main
+building with two short wings, pierced by twelve windows,
+and decorated with a sham-Hellenic frieze and shallow
+pilasters),&mdash;and its big, park-like garden stretching away
+behind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So, clutching the precious token, P. C. Breagh plunged
+back into the crowd.  It was dense, but no longer solid,
+and, still lustily singing, with intervals of cheering, it bore
+him down the Linden as far as the Brandenburg Gate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There it split into three vociferating rivers of
+humanity.  One of which streamed north-westward toward the
+offices of the Great General Staff, where Moltke, the ancient
+war-wizard, was busy over his maps!  Another, desirous
+of refreshment, surged onward in the direction of the
+Thiergarten.  The third flowed down the street of palaces,
+and with it went P. C. Breagh.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap28"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XVIII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+The Foreign Office knocker was a colossal funereal wreath,
+of sooty bronze laurel, that wakened hollow startling echoes
+in the tomb-like void of a grim stone vestibule.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The vestibule lay at the end of a glass-roofed passage.
+On the right was a window, behind the window gleamed
+an eye, belonging to the Chancery janitor who had manipulated
+the door-levers.  The door banged behind P. C. Breagh,
+and his hope climbed a central flight of stairs,
+gray-white marble, with bronze balusters badly in need of
+cleaning.  The staircase was covered with worn Turkey
+carpet, was lighted from above by a green and gold cupola,
+and guarded by two conventional figures of sphinxes,
+carved in shiny blackish stone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All these details the eye of P. C. Breagh gleaned over
+the arm of the Chancellor's door-porter, a seven-foot East
+Prussian, who wore plain black official livery and carried
+no gold-headed staff, yet would have snubbed the Rector
+of the University of Schwärz-Brettingen had he presented
+himself in this unceremonious way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What does he want?  The young man must know
+that His Excellency the Royal Chancellor of the North
+German Confederation is engaged upon State business&mdash;not
+to be approached by strangers having no appointments
+or credentials previously obtained.  An introduction to His
+Excellency is indispensable.  Where has the young man
+lived that he does not know that?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To which the young man thus addressed could only
+reiterate that he deeply regretted the absence of a letter
+of introduction, and that his credentials could only be
+displayed to His Excellency himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is likely!"  The porter's forehead corrugated with
+suspicion: "Thus is he approached by lunatics and
+dangerous persons, armed with crazy petitions or lethal
+weap&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Bosh!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The English word made the porter leap in his square-toed,
+steel-buckled half-shoes.  Recklessly P. C. Breagh
+went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I'm neither a lunatic nor an assassin...  It's just a
+case of <i>Rettung aus Gefahr</i>.  Two lives saved in the year
+1842, and another less than an hour ago....  Send that
+message to His Excellency, and he'll see me, I believe!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He believes!" ... snorted the porter indignantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A little, stooping, shabbily dressed old man in a
+chocolate-colored frock-coat with gilt buttons came shuffling
+across the vestibule carrying a handful of papers, telegrams
+they appeared to be.  He had paused to listen to the latter
+part of the colloquy, holding his head on one side, as
+though the better to focus his sharp gray glance on the
+dusty, obtrusive young Englishman crowned with a
+sun-burnt Oxford straw hat, attired in a well-worn brown
+Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers and heather-mixture woolen
+stockings, and shod with stout, black, leather-laced,
+hob-nailed boots.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He believes!" exclaimed the porter as though referring
+to the chocolate-coated old gentleman.  "Will not the
+highly well-born Herr Legation-Councillor order that I
+summon Grams and Engelberg, and have this presumptuous
+person thrown into the street?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Softly, softly, my good Niederstedt!" advised the
+little chocolate-coated old gentleman.  He added, shuffling
+forward in his immense black cloth boots over the slippery
+marble pavement of the vestibule: "It has occurred to me
+that an utterance of this young man's referred to an
+article that has been lost by His Excellency."  He added,
+fixing his sharp, gray, jackdaw's eyes on the face of the
+young man: "Not valuable, but worth recovering&mdash;purely
+as a memento of the past!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Carolan bluntly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I did refer to such an article.  In fact, I have it on me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A finger and thumb, stained with snuff, dipped into the
+Councillor's waistcoat pocket.  He said, secretly conveying
+an order to the watchful porter with a twirl of one
+jackdaw-eye:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For a couple of thalers," he displayed the coin, "a
+box of smokable cigars may be purchased in Berlin."  He
+added, having cast for a bite, and missing the rise: "Four
+thalers secures a really excellent article!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Certainly," agreed P. C. Breagh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But for ten thalers," continued the old gentleman with
+forced enthusiasm, coaxingly beckoning P. C. Breagh to
+approach nearer, "one may smoke the choicest Havana
+brands.  Give me the medal, fortunate young man, and
+take the money.  Such a sum is not often picked up in the
+street!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the young man, thus adjured, thrusting out his
+square chin obstinately:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If His Excellency consents to receive me, I will
+personally return the medal to him.  Be good enough to let
+him know as much."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Unhappy young man! you realize not the greatness of
+your own presumption!" expostulated the old gentleman,
+lifting up his warty eyelids and puffing out his whiskered
+cheeks over his old-fashioned black satin stock.  "Is the
+Chancellor of the Realm to be&mdash;and at a national crisis
+such as this?&mdash;at the beck and call of every English
+traveler?"  He added with warmth: "For I know you to be
+of that nation, young man, though you speak German
+with some approach to facility.  Hence!  Trouble here no
+more, but give me that medal before you take your
+departure.  Otherwise you will be forcibly relieved of it by
+the hands of those who are accustomed to deal with
+bumptious and obstinately-authority-defying persons of your
+description...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He added, as the arms of P. C. Breagh were pinioned in
+an iron grip that clamped the elbows together behind the
+shoulder-blades, drew his arms down, and pinioned his
+wrists: "He, he, he!  That was a capital stratagem of
+yours, my excellent Niederstedt!  Really very smartly
+done!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The grim, sable-clad porter, in whose huge hands P. C. Breagh
+vainly struggled, relaxed into a smile at the compliment.
+He said, as from different points two stalwart
+liveried attendants appeared, hastening to lend assistance:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"One has not served in the Prussian Guards for nothing.
+Once a soldier, always a soldier!  Will the highly well-born
+Herr Legation-Councillor order Grams and Engelberg
+to hold this English pig-dog while I take His Excellency's
+medal out of the fellow's clothes?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Snarled P. C. Breagh, livid with rage and glaring at
+the hostile faces like a young male tiger-cat:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Add robbery to violence if you think well!&mdash;you are
+four to one&mdash;and in your own country.  But as an English
+journalist I protest against the outrage....  And the
+British Ambassador shall take the matter up!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was an instant's pause of indecision, during which
+P. C. Breagh heard the opening of a door on the landing
+above.  Then, with the rustle of silk, and the soft fall of
+footsteps traversing heavy carpets, a resonant voice called
+down the stair that led up between the basalt Sphinxes:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Meanwhile, you will allow me to apologize for the
+too-excessive zeal of my servants.  Do me the favor to come
+up here!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The grip of the giant porter became flaccid as an
+infant's.  The voice spoke again from the summit of the
+stair:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Herr Legation-Councillor, will you kindly see Madame
+to her carriage?  Au revoir, Madame, et bon voyage!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A liquid voice responded:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Au revoir, Monseigneur</i>!  At Paris&mdash;who knows!&mdash;before
+the Noël!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She pulled down her veil, curtsied with demure elegance,
+and came softly rustling down in pale-hued, trailing silks
+and laces, one snow-white hand blazing with splendid
+emeralds lightly passing over the bronze baluster-rail, the
+other holding the ivory and jeweled stick of a dainty
+parasol.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madame!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As by an afterthought he had called her.  Midway in
+her descent the lady turned to look up at him.  He said,
+bending his powerful eyes upon the face of sensuous
+loveliness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Pardon! but I believe&mdash;you are a native of France?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hint stung.  She returned, with the stain of an
+angry blush darkening the roses purchased from Rimmel;
+and a hard line showing from the angle of each delicate
+nostril to the corner of the deep-cut, scarlet lips:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monseigneur is correct ... I am a Frenchwoman....
+But the heart is free to choose its own country....
+And&mdash;mine has learned to beat for the Fatherland!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So exquisite was the cadence with which the words were
+uttered, that P. C. Breagh heaved an involuntary sigh.
+The Legation-Councillor took snuff&mdash;it may have been his
+way of showing emotion.  The huge porter sighed like a
+locomotive blowing off steam.  His colleagues, who, like
+himself, stood waiting in rigid military attitudes, suffered
+no sympathy to appear in their wooden faces, yet may
+have felt the more.  But the heavy mask of their master
+was divested of all expression.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Even," said he, in his clear, resonant voice, "to the
+point of outdoing Agamemnon, King of Argos.  For he&mdash;but
+doubtless you are familiar with the classic story!&mdash;merely
+sacrificed Iphigeneia on the altar of the virginal
+Artemis...."  He added with a tone of intolerable
+irony: "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!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had shuddered and winced as though his words had
+been vitriol,&mdash;dropped from above&mdash;corroding her delicate
+flesh....  The costly toy had fallen from her hand as the
+shudder had passed over her, and rolled down the stair,
+as she continued her descent.  P. C. Breagh picked it up
+and handed it to her, as she set foot upon the lowest step
+of the staircase.  She looked at him, and bent her head.
+And the beauty that had been hers a moment back was
+so strangely, bleakly altered, he could scarcely repress an
+exclamation of dismay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus Circe might have stared, thought P. C. Breagh,
+when her feeding hogs leaped up as men frantic for
+vengeance.  Thus Duessa, when the spotted image of her own
+vileness was reflected in the glassy shield of Truth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The change in the boy's face stabbed Madame to
+consciousness.  She caught at her mauve tulle veil, forgetful
+that it was already lowered, and tore it horizontally, so
+that her full white rounded chin emerged with fantastic
+effect, like the moon through a bank of storm-wrack.  And
+then, with her head held high, she swept through the
+vestibule in a frou-frou of silks and a gale of perfume, and
+down the passage ending in the hall-door with the funereal
+knocker.  The Legation-Councillor trotted after her.  One
+of the servants followed him, and P. C. Breagh, mounting
+the staircase between the Sphinxes, reached the landing
+and the summit of his ambitions in a breath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Time is scarce!" said the man who was meant when
+Prime Ministers and political leader-writers referred to
+Prussia.  "I have no more than five minutes to spare,
+but you shall have them.  Come this way!  So you are
+an English journalist!  What paper do you represent, here
+in Berlin?  Sit down and tell me in as few words as
+possible!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were in a small but lofty room on the first-floor,
+hung with green flock paper.  It had a fireplace as well
+as a stove, and it was a study, yet it contained no
+bookcases, only a couple of shelved stands laden with pamphlets
+and papers of the official kind.  The two high windows&mdash;open
+and unblinded, though the green-shaded reading-lamp
+upon the big carved mahogany writing-table was
+alight&mdash;looked across the extensive gardens reaching to
+the Königgratzer-Strasse.  Beyond lay the Thiergarten,
+all black with masses of people under the sultry red-gold
+sunset of middle July.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps you can see&mdash;like Scaramouch and the Sultan
+in the Eastern story&mdash;P. C. Breagh, hot and dusty, flushed
+and rumpled, seated opposite the most formidable
+personage of the day.  He who dictated to Kings and carried
+his Foreign Office trailing after him whenever he chose to
+go campaigning, stood upon the skin of a white lioness
+that served as hearthrug, and bit off the end of a huge
+cigar.  He looked bulkier than ever, and the powerful
+modeling of his scant-haired temples, the splendid dome
+of the skull that housed the keenest intellect in Europe,
+the masterful regard of the great eyes, the sarcastic humor
+of the mouth shaded by the heavy mustache&mdash;traits and
+features reproduced so constantly in the illustrated
+newspapers of the period,&mdash;conveyed to Carolan the impression
+that a portrait moved and spoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was attired, as usually represented, in a dark blue,
+braided military undress-frock, and trousers tightly
+strapped over boots with cavalry spurs.  An Order hung
+at his collar.  As he threw back his head in the act of
+lighting his cigar, P. C. Breagh recognized it&mdash;the Cross of
+a Commander of the Red Eagle.  While on the left breast
+of the blue frock-coat was a small three-cornered rent in
+the cloth from which the lost medal had been somehow
+wrenched away....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sight of that tear in the dark blue-faced cloth sent
+the blood racing to P. C. Breagh's forehead.  He knew
+himself for a presumptuous young man.  He plunged his
+hand into the pocket of the brown Norfolk jacket, and
+brought out the red-and-white enameled decoration, and
+said, awkwardly laying it upon the edge of the big writing-table,
+in the yellow radius thrown by the lighted lamp:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I found this after Your Excellency had gone!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Hand it here!" said the heavy blue eyes imperiously.
+P. C. Breagh got up and obeyed.  The Chancellor's long
+arm shot out, and the muscular white fingers whipped the
+medal from the palm that offered it.  Its owner assured
+himself by a brief scrutiny that the token had sustained
+no injury, nodded, and re-pinned it on the breast of his
+frogged military frock-coat.  When this was accomplished,&mdash;the
+small solution in the continuity of the cloth being
+covered by the decoration,&mdash;he said, taking the cigar from
+his mouth, and knocking off the long crisp ash upon the
+edge of the white earthenware stove:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I should have been sorry to have lost that.  But, while
+thanking you for having restored it, let me say that had
+my servants taken it from you by <i>force majeure</i> they would
+not have been robbing you,&mdash;though in law they might
+have been held guilty of a personal assault.  Now as to
+your business.  You have had one of your five minutes!
+You have just now said you are an English journalist.
+Does your business concern the War?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh stammered&mdash;for the heavy eyes that rested
+on him seemed to oppress him physically:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To be frank with Your Excellency, I represent no
+newspaper.  I have some slight experience as a journalist,
+that is all,&mdash;War Correspondence seems to me the highest
+branch of journalism,&mdash;and I want, naturally, to fit myself
+to practice it.  Therefore, as no newspaper would employ
+me, I accepted a private commission given, out of
+good-nature, by a friend, who has helped me before.  And&mdash;my
+first day in Berlin&mdash;I fell in with Your Excellency.  I
+won't deny it seemed a hopeful augury!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For the future! ... I understand!" said the Chancellor,
+sending out a long cloud of cigar-smoke.  "And in
+what way do you suggest that I should help you?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He put the question so bluntly that P. C. Breagh, in the
+effort to answer, floundered and boggled.  He had suddenly
+realized his own insect-like insignificance in the eyes that
+were so intolerably heavy in their regard.  His own eyes
+sank to the neat, small, polished boots of the big man.
+who stood smoking upon the white lioness-skin.  To the
+wearer of those boots he was merely a beetle who could
+be crushed by them.  The slight ironical smile that altered
+the curve of the mustache said as much.  But the Minister's
+tone was suave as he went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I think I have grasped the mainspring of your reasoning.
+To begin with, you desire to accompany one of our
+armies on the campaign?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Yes&mdash;sir!  Your Excellency, I should say!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A lambent light of humor danced in the blue eyes
+that were bent on him.  The faint ironic smile broadened
+into a laugh.  The Chancellor took his cigar from his
+mouth, knocked off the ash, and said quite pleasantly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And deducting from this premise, I conjecture
+that&mdash;because I have been privileged to save you from being
+trampled to death under the feet of the mob upon the
+Linden, you naturally take it for granted that I would
+further your ambitions.  Gratitude, one of your English
+authors has admirably defined as a lively sense of favors
+to come...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh, who had been for some time shrinking in
+his own estimation, suddenly saw himself in a newer,
+meaner light.  His torturer went on in mellifluous
+English:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I do not know that any classical German author has
+defined gratitude quite so cleverly.  But we in Pomerania
+have a folk-story which may be new to you."  He drew
+sharply at his cigar, then laid it glowing on the edge of
+the stove:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You speak German quite passably, so I will tell it in
+our Pomeranian dialect.  If this is not done, the dialogue
+lacks salt.  Thus it goes: Wedig Knips, a peasant of
+Dalow, whose horses wanted watering, went one winter's
+day to break the ice that covered the drinking-hole....
+'Bless us! what have we here?' says he, when he finds a
+kerl called Peders, frozen in the ice, with his head down
+and his heels up.  To make a long story short, he chops
+out Peders, takes him home, and sets him up to thaw
+before the fire....  'Now, neighbor,' says he, 'go about
+your business!'&mdash;'How can I when my jerkin is wet and
+my breeches are full of muddy water?'&mdash;Says Wedig:
+'Poor devil!  I will give you my Sunday trows!'&mdash;'And a
+jerkin too, for you saved my life, you must remember!' ...
+Wedig scratches his head, but hands over a jerkin with
+the rest.  'Come, now be off!' says he.  '"Off," with
+my under-pants and shirt all sopping!  Do you want to
+kill me&mdash;now that you have saved my life?'&mdash;So Wedig
+pulls a wry face, but hands over the underclothes....
+'Put these on and be off, we are busy people in this
+house!'  'What,' says Peders, 'without paying me the value of the
+good duds spoiled in your stinking horsepond?'&mdash;'Must I
+pay?' ... 'Certainly, you have saved my life!  Nobody
+asked you!&mdash;I had thrown myself in because I was tired
+of living.  Now it is your bounden duty to make things
+tolerable for me!'&mdash;'How make things tolerable?'&mdash;'To
+begin with, I want a cottage to live in, and a plot of
+kail-ground to it, and a wee pickle furniture.'&mdash;'But I have
+only this cottage, and the bits of sticks you see!'&mdash;'Well,
+give me them!  Didn't you save my life?' ... Wedig gets
+confused, sees no way out of it.  'The devil!' says he,
+'this is a nice affair!  However, take them, man!'&mdash;'I
+will take them,' says Peders, 'but you must give me the
+cart and plow, the cow and the two
+horses?'&mdash;'<i>Himmelkreuzbombenelement</i>!  Have I got to give you all that
+because I saved your life?'&mdash;'Ay, undoubtedly!&mdash;and you
+must let me have your wife into the bargain.  It's your
+bounden duty&mdash;&mdash;'  'I know! because I saved your life!
+Shan't make such a mistake next time, you may be sure
+of that!'&mdash;'No, but you did, so to grumble is no
+use.'&mdash;'Thunder! my old girl will make a terrible squawking.'&mdash;'Not
+when you have explained how you saved my life!' ... Wedig
+scratches his head, rubs his chin, gets a bright
+idea....  'Help me to explain to the wife, do you agree?'&mdash;'Ay,
+of course!  What is it you want me to say to
+her?'&mdash;'Oh! say nothing.  Only let me show her exactly how
+I got you out of the water-hole.'&mdash;'Willingly!'&mdash;'But to
+do that I must put you back just a minute!'&mdash;'Put me
+back?'&mdash;'Only for a minute.'  'Promise when I cry
+"<i>Genug!</i>" you'll take me out directly!'&mdash;'All right!
+Come along!'  So Wedig takes Peders by the legs and
+sticks him back where he found him, driving his head
+well down into the mud at the bottom of the pond....
+So&mdash;he never cried '<i>Genug!</i>' and Wedig left him there....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hard blue eyes that had been all alight with laughter,
+the heavily molded face that had unexpectedly proved
+itself capable of comic changes, the voice that, as the droll
+dialogue proceeded, had conveyed with slight, admirably
+restrained mimicry the complacent assurance of the knave
+and the dull bewilderment of the victim, changed, became
+the Minister's again.  He said, in his smoothest tones:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I cannot put you back into the crush of the crowd,
+because by an appeal to its loyal feelings and domestic
+instincts I was so fortunate as to disperse it.  What I might
+do, of course, is to deliver you to the tender mercies of my
+servants, to whom,&mdash;when you brought back the medal,&mdash;you
+blustered about delivering it to me personally.  This
+not-exactly-very-clever ruse would have failed&mdash;had I not
+happened to step upon the scene.  Your English policy is
+often more fortunate than masterly....  Fortune certainly
+has favored you to-day.  Not in the fulfillment of
+your ambition to accompany a Prussian Army to the field
+of action&mdash;that is a wish impossible to gratify.  For we
+put up a general defense against the presence of any save
+the most highly accredited Correspondents, and the War
+Minister will only grant Legitimations to two or three.
+But in obtaining for an obscure paragraphist a special
+interview with the Prussian Minister for Foreign Affairs
+on the eve of a world-crisis, Fortune has certainly favored
+you.  Go back now to your hotel and write your article;
+then telegraph to Fleet Street and make your own terms!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I'll be shot if I do!" choked out P. C. Breagh, flaming
+scarlet to his hair-roots.  "And I thank Your Excellency
+for a lesson, and I beg to take my leave!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why does he go?  Why does he talk about a lesson?"
+asked the broad, cynical gaze that rested on him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As though he had spoken aloud, P. C. Breagh answered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Because I set my personal advantage above common
+gratitude and honor.  Your Excellency lost the medal in
+pulling me out of the scrimmage at the risk of your own
+life, and when I found the thing&mdash;I used it,&mdash;exactly as
+you say!  True, you'd snubbed me when I'd tried to
+thank you! yet I did believe your having saved me might
+help me in some way....  But it would be better to cadge
+in the dustbins for a living, than make money out of
+information gained by trickery.  And I apologize sincerely
+for having been such a cad!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'Cad' is the slang for vulgarian, is it not?"  He
+added: "Yes, they inculcate a code of honor at the
+English public schools."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The voice grated.  P. C. Breagh hated its owner.  But
+he answered, looking squarely in the bulldog face that
+bent on him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They do, and I am sorry to have broken at least one of
+its articles.  May I wish Your Excellency good afternoon!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The speaker bowed, not clumsily, and turned to quit the
+room, when a ferocious growl behind him, and the scraping
+of heavy claws on slippery parquet pulled round his head.
+Savage, red-rimmed eyes challenged, and the bared gleaming
+fangs of a huge boarhound couched at length under a
+wrought-iron sofa at the west end of the longish room
+menaced the stranger's throat:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Down, Tyras!" ordered the Minister harshly, and with
+a deep groan the heavy brute dropped its nose between its
+forepaws, and lay still, shaken by occasional rumbling
+growls.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You see," said the Minister, laughing, "that I can afford
+to dispense with the services of detectives when this
+good servant is at hand.  Come, sit down another moment....
+I am really willing to help you....  You have not
+come so badly as you imagine out of the affair!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But I have said I will not write the article, and I am
+intruding on Your Excellency's privacy."  The soul of
+P. C. Breagh yearned for the freedom of the streets.  To
+be shut up in the study of the greatest of living
+Ministers,&mdash;set beak-to-beak with the man who was occupying the
+attention of Europe&mdash;the master-mind in statecraft, who
+used blunt truth as a weapon to beat down diplomatic
+falsehood, and comported himself amidst the striving
+parties of his national Parliament as a giant surrounded
+by dwarfs;&mdash;had seemed, previously, a thing to boast of&mdash;a
+dazzling feather in the cap of achievement.  Now it was no
+triumph, but a torture.  He writhed under those keen,
+amused, analytical glances, knowing himself worthy to be
+so despised.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I have twenty minutes in which to refresh and rest,
+not having eaten or sat down since ten o'clock this morning.
+You have had ten&mdash;I will give you another five.  Sit
+down again there!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tyras emitted another savage growl as though in support
+of his owner's authority, and P. C. Breagh, loathing
+his host even more intensely than he hated P. C. Breagh,
+obeyed the imperious hand that pointed to the chair he had
+vacated, and sat down, white-gilled now, and sick with
+longing to be out of this presence into which he had thrust
+himself&mdash;beyond the reach of the icy, contemptuous tones
+and the arrogant, domineering eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor had turned away to pull at one of the
+red woolen bell-ropes that hung on either side of the
+fire-place, shabby things, threadbare with use, like the Persian
+carpet that was trodden out in paths by the spurred feet
+of the man who stood for Prussia; worn like the leather
+cushions of the great wrought-iron sofa, under which the
+great man's faithful attendant couched, with one eye on
+the familiar face, and the other on the strange one that
+might mask an enemy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Above the sofa, beneath a trophy of fencing-swords and
+masks, reigning over a rack supporting a number of red
+and white military undress-caps in all stages of wear, and
+another containing a collection of pipe-sticks and
+unmounted pipe-heads, hung the half-length oil-portrait of a
+beautiful girl in ball-dress.  Below was a large-framed
+photograph of a noble-looking woman, with a mass of black
+braided hair framing a long, serious face, with grave dark
+eyes, thick straight nose, and full-curved, humorous lips
+recalling published engravings of the English author of
+"Adam Bede."  Probably it was the Countess&mdash;that same
+Fräulein Johanna Puttkammer who had been hugged under
+the gaze of her assembled family.  She looked strong,
+serene and courageous, fit&mdash;thought P. C. Breagh&mdash;to be
+the wife of a man destined by Fate and framed by nature
+to become a leader of men.  Also, she looked like a woman
+who could love with old-world, elemental, forceful passion.
+She had bestowed such love upon this man&mdash;who had
+begun life as a roaring, hard-drinking young Pomeranian
+squire, well worthy of the sobriquet of "Mad Bismarck,"
+bestowed upon him by his native county.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had sifted the gold out of the sand....  She had
+never openly displayed her influence....  All the same it
+had been there, guiding, sustaining, controlling....  He
+had written to her, years after, when he had begun in
+earnest to be a power in politics....  "<i>You see what you
+have made me!  What should I have done without you?</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Arrogant, harsh, domineering, merciless, as his enemies
+had reason to term him, there must be something noble in
+the man who had written like that.  He was said to be a
+kind, if not over-indulgent, father to his two big sons, even
+then serving as private soldiers in a well-known regiment
+of Dragoon Guards, and to be worshiped by his daughter,
+a feminine copy of himself, if that oil-portrait were
+anything like....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Have you taken any food to-day?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The interrogation brought P. C. Breagh's head round.
+A servant must have appeared, and gone, and come again
+in answer to the bell-summons.  For on a clear corner of
+an étagère otherwise piled with official papers and pamphlets,
+stood a tray, bearing glasses and a vast crystal jug of
+creaming golden-hued nectar with miniature icebergs floating
+on the surface; and several dishes of rolls, split,
+profusely buttered, and lined with something savory, the sight
+and scent of which awoke tender yearnings within....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No!&mdash;I thought not.  Drink this and eat some of
+these sandwiches.  I myself have fasted longer than is
+agreeable!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And a huge goblet of the ice-cold creaming nectar was
+handed to P. C. Breagh, who immediately realized that his
+tongue and palate were dry as the sun-baked asphalt of
+the Linden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Prosit!</i>" said his host, and drained his glass, adding,
+as the guest duly responded according to the classic formula
+and drank: "You are University-bred, I see!  What Alma
+Mater had the preference?  Schwärz-Brettingen! ... Ah,
+they thought very badly of me there about the time of
+the Luxembourg Garrison Question.  Nearly all the little
+foxes barked at me as I passed through.  However, we are
+now reconciled, and more than a thousand of the students
+have applied to serve as volunteers in this war,&mdash;there's
+an item of interest for your paper!&mdash;though you have
+Quixotically determined, you say, not to make use of any
+information that I may be enabled to offer you.  All
+Quixotism is weakness, in my estimation; a man, according
+to my code, should pursue his advantage where he finds it
+irrespective of ethical laws or religious prejudice.  Now eat
+some of these stuffed rolls.  Here are caviar, smoked
+goose-breast, Westphalian ham and liver-sausage.  You see I
+set you an example!&mdash;and a would-be campaigner should
+be able to sleep soundly under any and all conditions; and
+eat whenever anything eatable is obtainable, with
+unflinching appetite!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The savory rolls were vanishing under the speaker's
+repeated attacks, and the golden tide in the great crystal
+decanter was sinking visibly.  He said, lifting and holding
+it so that between the light of the green-shaded table-lamp
+and the red glow of sunset pouring through the
+unblinded western windows, the liquid in it shone ruby
+and emerald....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Come, let me fill your glass again, and then I shall send
+you about your business.  Absolved, you understand, from
+that ridiculous vow of yours&mdash;and with a magic talisman
+to enable you to use your eyes."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The steady hand set down the now emptied jug, and
+took from the red marble mantelshelf a small and
+perfectly-finished pair of field-glasses, covered in black Russia
+leather and mounted in ivory.  An inlaid silver shield bore
+a monogram, "O. v. B.-S.," and a date.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You can shoot with a pistol?&mdash;Good!&mdash;then I should
+advise you to buy one, if possible.  A revolver of the
+American Colt's invention&mdash;six-barreled&mdash;a feature which
+increases weight in proportion as it adds to effectiveness&mdash;would
+be useful.  Indeed, I carry one myself!  One day
+they will turn out such things with one barrel&mdash;but we
+must wait for that, I am afraid.  Here is the case belonging
+to the glasses, with a strap to sling it round your
+shoulders&mdash;and one thing more I will give you&mdash;though I am less
+certain about its ultimate usefulness!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The writing-table stood in the middle of the room.  He
+moved to it with one of his long, heavy strides, sat
+down&mdash;dipped quill in ink&mdash;and penned a few lines rapidly,
+glancing at the sunburned, freckled face as though to
+refresh his memory&mdash;holding up an imperious baud for
+silence when the recipient of the field-glasses seemed about
+to protest against the value of the gift.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your nationality?&mdash;'British.'  Name, 'Patrick Carolan
+Breagh&mdash;pronounced "Brack."  Your height?&mdash;Be very
+accurate.  One half-inch too much or too little might bring
+you into trouble of a serious kind.  'Five feet nine'
+... you promise to be taller.  Your age ... twenty-three last
+January....  Shoulders broad, good muscular development.
+Your hair ... Reddish, is it not? ... You have
+gray eyes with what the French would call <i>taches</i> of
+yellow in them.  Complexion fresh, considerably freckled.
+Nose short and straight, ears small, teeth white and regular.
+Chin square and with a cleft&mdash;weaklings have not such
+chins!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He added a brief sentence to the hastily scrawled
+description, signed and blotted it, rose and came to
+P. C. Breagh and thrust it in his hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Do not thank me!  It is my passing whim to help you&mdash;regard
+it in that light.  As to this pass, safe-conduct or
+whatever one may call it&mdash;it may forward you or hinder
+you....  <i>Potztausend</i>!  I am a mere officer of Cuirassiers
+of the <i>Landwehr</i>&mdash;General by courtesy&mdash;not
+Generalissimo! ... You, Bucher! ... What is there wanted
+now?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a scratch on the door-panel had been succeeded by
+the flurried entrance of the little Councillor of Legation,
+breathing hard, and red in the face.  He gabbled in
+Spanish:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Pardon, Your Excellency, that I enter without knocking.
+But His Highness the Crown Prince is coming upstairs!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And almost in the same instant, as Tyras uttered a deep
+"wuff" of friendly greeting, the open doorway was filled
+by the stateliest and most martial figure in Europe, and a
+pleasant, manly voice said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not finding you in your official quarters below-stairs,
+I ventured, my dear Count Bismarck, to follow you to
+your private study.  It is a question of whether Le Sourd
+delivered the war-gauntlet from Paris, or&mdash;&mdash;  Pardon!
+I had no idea that you were not alone!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tall, broad-chested, golden-bearded Viking in the
+undress uniform of the First Regiment of Guards touched
+his cap in acknowledgment of P. C. Breagh's respectful
+salutation.  Then, as in obedience to a glance from the
+Minister, the lean claws of the little Councillor closed upon
+P. C. Breagh's arm, and he was plucked from the room,
+the Prince asked, glancing after the queer couple:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"May one ask who your young friend is?" and got answer:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is only an English schoolboy, Your Royal Highness,&mdash;who
+thirsts to try his hand at War-correspondence&mdash;having
+had a few articles printed in some London rag.  And
+this being so, he applies to me, who am the least leisured
+person in His Majesty's dominions&mdash;-for a moment of my
+spare time!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is annoying, my dear Count," answered the mellow-voiced
+Viking, "but cannot your people keep such troublesome
+persons outside?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister returned, laughing:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He caught me on my doorstep,&mdash;as the polecat waylaid
+the badger!&mdash;and as he brought back a decoration I had
+lost, and which he, luckily for himself, had found!&mdash;I
+could not refuse him a minute's interview.  But with
+regard to Your Royal Highness's question of an instant
+since&mdash;Le Sourd, the French Chargé d'Affaires, placed the
+Emperor's declaration of war in my hands about an hour
+after the opening of Council in the Palace to-day."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Prince:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Unhappy man! driven to risk the loss of an Empire
+that he may continue to rule a nation of enemies.  One
+can hardly doubt the issue&mdash;yet at what cost of lives shall
+we not purchase victory!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bismarck said in harsh, metallic tones, bending his brows
+upon the Prince, who all the world knew loved peace, and
+loathed the thought of the red months of strife that were
+approaching:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your Royal Highness is aware that I look upon this
+war as necessary, and that I should not have returned to
+Varzin without giving in my resignation to His Majesty
+had the issue been other than what it is....  As for this
+weak-backed Napoleon, this Pierrot stuffed with bran,&mdash;who
+is kept in an upright attitude only by the slaps I deal
+him on one cheek and the buffets the Monarchists and the
+Revolutionists lend him on the other!&mdash;it will be better
+for him to meet his end by a bullet or a sword-thrust on
+the banks of the Rhine, than to be blown to pieces by some
+bomb in the streets of Paris, or to die of apoplexy in the
+bedroom of some nymph of the theater-coulisses!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He drew himself to his full height and, folding his
+powerful arms upon his breast, said, looking full at the
+Prince, who had declined a seat and who was standing
+near the window, his hair and beard glowing golden-red
+in the full rays of the setting sun:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your Royal Highness speaks of the effusion of blood.
+I am of those who have drawn the sword in the service of
+their King and country.  I do not regard war from the
+point of view of the man who stops at home.  More than
+this! ... His Majesty is not the only father who has a
+son serving in our Army....  I have two.  Herbert and
+Bill...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A pale purplish tint suffused his heavy face and crept
+to the summit of his rugged forehead.  His fierce blue eyes
+dimmed.  He said, in slightly muffled tones:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am not given to pompous phrases.  Yet if German
+unity can only be brought about by a great national war
+waged against our near-hand enemy&mdash;our old, cunning,
+sleepless foe&mdash;I hail that war, even though it leave me
+without posterity!  If the gulf that divides the Northern
+and Southern sections of the Fatherland can be better
+bridged by my boys' dead bodies ... I would give them as
+freely as I would give my own!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A spasm twisted his under-jaw.  He said, laughing in
+his stern way:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Three long-legged Bismarcks should equal one
+eighteen-foot-seven plank.  And I speak not only for myself.  My
+wife would echo me."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Prince in his cordial way:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My mother has a great admiration for Her Excellency.
+My wife, too, speaks of her as a woman of antique nobility
+of mind."  He continued, with a smile that curved the bold,
+frank mouth under the glittering mustache into lines of
+exceeding pleasantness: "And her personal solicitude for
+Your Excellency pleases my father much!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The heavy face that opposed him lost its dogged, set
+expression.  The Minister broke into a hearty laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So!  I have been waiting to hear somewhat of that
+voluble telegram of hers to Abeken: '<i>Pray ask the King
+not to bother Count Bismarck about State matters just now,
+when he is taking Carlsbad waters for the gout!</i>'
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ha, ha!"  The Prince joined gaily in the laughter.
+"The Councillor was working with the King and myself,
+when he received that wire.  It came with a sheaf of
+others&mdash;he read it aloud without a change of expression.....
+Then you should have seen his face ... a study for
+a comedian...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister said, still smiling:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My wife pours many confidences of the domestic sort
+into Abeken's bosom.  She said to him during the Constitutional
+Conflict of '66 ... 'Bismarck cares really nothing
+at all about these stupid political matters.  A cabbage well
+grown, or a fir-tree well planted, means more to him than
+the Indemnity Bill.'  Yet when the Bill passed she was
+all-triumphant.  And to-day she remarked to me: 'War
+is horrible to me on principle.  But it would be equally
+horrible to me if you said to me to-morrow: "<i>All is over!&mdash;we
+do not fight!...</i>"'  I made her angry by telling her
+that one might parody in application to the mental
+attitude of her sex the lines of the English Poet Laureate,
+and say:
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  "Her reason rooted in unreason stood."<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+"When our German women become too highly educated,"
+said the fair-haired giant, "love will take wing
+for a land where the culture of the feminine intellect is
+still unpopular.  We males hold our supremacy on the
+very insecure tenure of a carefully inculcated belief that,
+being men, we must be wise!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Minister:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There is a Pomeranian proverb bearing on that question.
+'<i>In the house where a strip of green hide hangs
+handy, the wife will never know better than her old man!</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Unless she happened to be the stronger of the two,
+bodily as well as mentally, dear Count," the Prince
+rejoined; "in which case the husband would be well advised
+to accept the inferior place.  For against brute-strength
+and brains combined, there is no remedy but patience."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bismarck retorted:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Possibly&mdash;but what if the muscular brute with the
+brains possesses a share of patience also?  There is nothing
+like knowing how to wait&mdash;I assure Your Royal Highness!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Prince looked at the great figure topped by the stolid
+bulldog face, and recalled something that the English
+Princess, his wife, had said to him that day:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"This fearful struggle will set the coping-stone upon
+that man's colossal labors and ambitions!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he was all grave, gracious cordiality as they passed
+from the lighter vein of talk to serious questions, though,
+as he took leave of the Minister at the hall-door and
+stepped into his waiting carriage, he said to himself
+mournfully:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Alix was right.  He has what he has waited and
+schemed for.  To light this international conflagration he
+would have ventured down to fetch a burning brand from
+the nethermost Hell.  And what oceans of blood will be
+poured out before the fire may be extinguished&mdash;none
+knows but God alone!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap29"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XXIX
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Von Moltke, the ancient war-wizard, went home from the
+Council-Extraordinary to his private quarters at the offices
+of the Great General Staff.  He dispatched the three-word
+telegram, and the vast machine began to work....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All had been ready for two years.  Nothing was left to
+finish at the last moment.  Not a speck of rust marred
+shaft or spindle or bearing, not a drop of oil was clogged
+in any slot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Days back, the Heads of Departments had been recalled
+by a brief telegram from the Chief who knew how to be
+taciturn in seven languages.  Now, while in Berlin, as in
+every other city and town of Prussia Proper and her
+Eleven Provinces, palaces, mansions, restaurants and <i>cafés</i>,
+beer-gardens and schnaps-cellars blazed with gas and
+resounded with the clinking of glasses, and people sat late
+into the grilling July night discussing and rediscussing
+that special supplement of the <i>North German Gazette</i>&mdash;which
+was being distributed gratuitously by hundreds of
+thousands,&mdash;predicting the next move of the Man of Iron,
+and the latest ruse of the Man of Paris,&mdash;consuming tons of
+sausage, caviar, pickled salmon, herrings in salad, and
+potted tunny, with strawberries and other fruits and sweet
+dishes, all washed down by floods of cooling beer, or iced
+Moselle and champagne&mdash;the numberless huge barracks
+and other military establishments displayed another kind
+of activity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here no outbursts of patriotic song and festivity checked
+the rapid, organized, methodical scurry of warlike
+preparation.  Soldiers ran about like busy ants, purposeful and
+unblundering.  Long trains of Army Service carts and
+wagons streamed in at divers lofty gates, to emerge at
+others after the briefest interval, heavily laden with Army
+stores, Army baggage, War material of all kinds.  Night
+and day, huge Government factories and foundries dithered
+and roared, filling up newly made vacuums in those huge
+magazines and storehouses which must always be kept full.
+In the gloomy dominions of the Iron King, Herr Krupp,
+that stout-loined Teuton who begat great guns instead of
+tall sons, and had them godfathered by Prussian Royalty&mdash;what
+forests of tall chimneys belched forth smoke, canopying
+begrimed and prosperous Westphalian towns, populated
+by innumerable swarthy toilers in the gigantic iron and
+steel foundries!  At Essen, where mountains of coal kiss
+the sooty skies, and heavy locomotives ceaselessly grind
+over networks of shining steel rails, dragging strings of
+trucks, containing yet more fuel for the ever-hungry
+furnaces,&mdash;within an impregnable rampart of solid masonry,&mdash;he
+dwelt in a Babylonian palace.  The panting of innumerable
+steam-power engines, the banging, moaning, crashing,
+groaning, and grinding of forges, lathes, and planing-machines;
+cutting, shaping, boring, and polishing machines;
+with the beating of sixty-two steam-hammers, of all weights
+up to that of fifty tons, which cost £100,000 to manufacture,
+sounded like a cannon whenever it was used, and was kept
+working without pause, so as not to lose a fraction of the
+interest of the capital sunk in it&mdash;made his concert by day,
+and by night served for his serenade and lullaby.  He made
+laws for the control of his grimy subjects, this Briareus of
+ten thousand hands&mdash;and enforced them by the aid of his
+own police and magistrates.  With orders in course of
+execution for Turkey, China, Egypt, Russia, and Spain, he
+was yet able to deliver eighty cannon per week to the
+different artillery depots of his Fatherland.  His steel,
+tempered by his secret process, the new ore being brought
+him from his Spanish mines by his own fleet of transports,
+surpassed even Bessemer's.  Yet he was not a conceited
+or purse-proud man.  By the chief entrance of the biggest
+of all his factories stood the little soot-blackened forge
+where forty years before young Krupp had labored with
+his father and a couple of workmen.  Small wonder the
+powerful Iron King had honor from his over-lord.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Conceive next the well-ordered bustle at the headquarters
+of the different Army Corps, when the withered finger of
+the Warlock pressed upon the button, and the spark of
+electricity leaped along a thousand wires, carrying with it
+the vitalizing word....  Moltke's methods were then
+fire-new, and made the world sit up.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+You might have seen the Reserve men of the Twelve
+Provinces&mdash;whose summons for assembly lay ready in the
+Landwehr office of every city, town, village, or
+hamlet&mdash;streaming in at the district depots, bringing each Line
+regiment up to war-strength (nearly double its numbers in
+time of peace).  Mobilization was no foreign word to them,
+for once a year, after Schmidt, the field-laborer, had done
+getting in the harvest, and when Schultz, the bank-clerk,
+and Kunz, the chemist's assistant, had got their annual
+autumn holiday, Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz were accustomed
+to perform a series of carefully rehearsed physical
+exercises ending in maneuvers, and a safe if inglorious
+return to the domestic hearth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz were only remarkable by
+their unlikeness to each other&mdash;Schmidt being the brown,
+uncouth, and unshaven husband of a stout wife and
+numerous tow-headed babes.  Schultz was more recently
+married to a young lady remotely connected on the maternal
+side with a family possessing the right to inscribe the
+aristocratic prefix "von" before its surname.  The couple lived
+frugally on Herr Schultz's salary of thirty pounds a year,
+somewhere upon the outskirts of the select quarter of the
+country town (some four miles distant from Schmidt's
+native village)&mdash;while Kunz, the graduate of a University,
+and author of a text-book of Analytical Chemistry, sold
+impartially to both, squills, rhubarb-tincture, and porous
+plasters over the counter of his employer's shop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Served by the Burgomaster's clerk, or a wooden-faced
+orderly-corporal, with the compelling bit of paper, Schmidt,
+Schultz, and Kunz, having taken farewell embraces of their
+nearest and dearest, would sling over their shoulders
+canvas wallets containing a lump of sausage, a shirt or so, a
+huge chunk of bread, white or black, with a bottle containing
+wine or schnaps, and stowing next their skins leather
+purses containing a few coins, and a parchment volume
+resembling the English soldier's "small book," would hasten
+by rail or road in the direction of their regimental
+rendezvous, toward which bourne the Reserve contingent of
+other towns, villages, and hamlets would also betake
+themselves, until the roads were blackened with their tramping
+bodies and the trains would be packed chock-full.  Arrived
+at Headquarters, batch after batch,&mdash;subsequently to a
+brief but exhaustive medical overhauling&mdash;would be
+dispatched to the arsenal, where attaching themselves to a
+tremendous queue of other Schmidts, Schultzes, and
+Kunzes, they would mark time in double-file outside a vast,
+grim, barn-like structure, until the moment arrived for
+entering; when with well-accustomed quickness, each would
+find his way to a certain hook or group of hooks,
+surmounted with his regimental number, from which
+depended a certain familiar uniform, with accoutrements
+and weapons equally well known.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Picture innumerable alleys formed by these dangling
+uniforms, radiating away to the point of distance,&mdash;and
+suppose Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz equipped in something
+answering to the twinkling of a Teutonic eye.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In&mdash;supposing Schmidt, Schultz, or Kunz to belong to
+the Infantry&mdash;a pair of dark gray unmentionables,
+red-corded down the side-seams, and a pair of mid-leg-high
+boots, very roomy and strong.  Inside the boots were no
+stockings, tallowed linen bands being bound about the legs
+and feet.  A single-breasted tunic of dark blue cloth with
+red facings followed, and a flat forage-cap of blue cloth
+with a red band, or a glazed black leather helmet with a
+brazen Prussian eagle front-plate and a brass spike-top.
+With the addition of a zinc label, slung round the neck,
+and bearing a man's name, number, company, and regiment,
+an overcoat made into a sausage and tied together at
+the ends, a canvas haversack, glass leather-covered canteen,
+a pipeclayed waistbelt with two cartridge-boxes of black
+leather, and a knapsack of calf-skin tanned with the hair,
+stretched upon a wooden frame, and slung by two pipe-clayed
+straps hooked to the waistbelt in front and then
+passing over the shoulders.  Two shorter straps, going
+under the armpits, would be fastened to the knapsack,
+which had a receptacle for a packet of twenty cartridges
+at either end of it.  Within, suppose the usual soldier's
+kit, with spoon, knife, fork, comb, and shaving-glass; and
+on top imagine a galvanized iron pot, holding about three
+quarts, with a tight-fitting cover which became, at need, a
+frying-pan.  Arm with a strong waistbelt-sword about
+fifteen inches long, an unburnished needle-gun heavily
+grease-coated, and Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz, having
+hung their civilian garments on the hooks that erst
+supported the martial panoply, tugged at a final buckle-strap,
+wheeled and passed out, transformed, by yet another door.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Always the three had known that an hour would come
+when these familiar exercises would not end with half-a-dozen
+exceedingly strenuous field-days, and a return,&mdash;on
+the part of Schmidt and Schultz,&mdash;to the arms of their
+respective wives.  Schmidt, on whose breast shone the
+war-medal of '66, and who must now be addressed as
+"Herr Sergeant" by his social superiors, seemed not to
+mind at all, though he swore at his boots, quite unjustly,
+for pinching.  But the bank-clerk's espousals were too
+recent, and his first experience of paternity too near at
+hand, for any display of hardihood, while Herr Kunz was
+but newly betrothed to the apothecary's daughter Mina,
+and could not forget how the tears had rolled out of her
+large blue eyes at the prospect of parting with her beloved
+Carl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therefore, although the mouths of the trio were, when
+not professionally shut, busily engaged in bellowing "<i>Die
+Wacht am Rhein</i>," "<i>Ich bin ein Preusse</i>," and other
+patriotic songs, or sending up deafening "Hochs" for the
+King, the Crown Prince, Prince Friedrich Karl, "Our
+Moltke," and another public personage recently very much
+elevated in the popular esteem,&mdash;the mental visions of at
+least two of them were occupied with prophetic visions in
+which blue-eyed sweethearts pined and faded away out of
+grief for absent betrotheds, and young wives wept over
+empty cradles until they too expired, with faltering
+messages of love for the husband so far distant on their dying
+lips....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Sapperlot</i>!  What in thunder are you gaping at, you
+<i>gimpel</i>, you?" a rough, loud voice would shout, and a
+terrific thump from the hard and heavy hand of Sergeant
+Schmidt would visit the shoulders of Private Schultz, or
+Kunz.  Who thus addressed would jerk out:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Oh, nothing, nothing, Herr Sergeant, truly nothing at
+all!" and receive from their recently despised inferior the
+rude counsel to look alive and keep cheery:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For this will be a war worth fighting in, mark you!
+The Man on the Seine has played the part of the Evil
+Neighbor too long.  France and Prussia have got to come
+to clapperclaws&mdash;there's no help for it!  The soup is
+cooked, so let us eat it.  He is the luckiest who gets the
+spoon in first!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You may suppose precisely similar scenes and dialogues
+occurring in the experience of Kraus, Klaus, and Klein,
+who, having served their time with the active Army and
+passed from the Reserve into the <i>Landwehr</i>, were now
+fetched out with the First Call, not only to replace the
+garrisons of Saxony, Prague, Pardubitz, and all the other
+fortified points on the lines of communication, but to
+guard and patrol those lines of road and railway over which
+the three marching armies were to receive supplies of food,
+ammunition, clothing, stores, and medicine; and maintain
+telegraphic communication with Berlin.  Meanwhile Grein,
+Schwartz, and Braun, men of riper years, stiffer joints, and
+older experiences, remained at home; waiting the hour
+when, Death having thinned the ranks of the fighters in
+the forefront of the battle, the Second Call should sound.
+When these hardy veteran battalions, formed into divisions
+of the same numerical strength as those of the regular
+Army, would roll over the frontiers, to fill up the bloody
+gaps left by the scythe of the Red Mower, and play their
+part in the vast, chaotic, multi-tableauxed drama of War.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Prussia contributed some 652,294 actors of small parts
+to the said drama, not counting the leading men, stars of
+the war-theater, who supported the heavier roles.  And
+Bavaria, Würtemburg, and Baden contributed their
+contingents, bringing up the strength of the cast to 780,923
+performers.  The equine actors numbered 213,159.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+The vast machine worked wonderfully.  It is interesting
+to know that the German Staff maps of France showed
+recently made roads which in July, 1870, had not been
+marked upon any map issued by the Imperial War Office
+at Paris, and that within three days from that three-word
+signal-wire of Moltke's, military trains full of men,
+guns, horses, ammunition, and proviant, began to run at
+the rate of forty per day, from north, east, and south,
+toward the narrow frontier between Strasbourg and
+Luxembourg.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For God and Fatherland!" and "Watch well the
+Rhine!" said the miniature banners carried by thousands
+of people.  You could see them fluttering from crowded
+roofs and packed windows, and variegating the sidewalks
+of thoroughfares below, as regiment after regiment
+marched to the station, in shining rivers of <i>pickelhaubes</i>
+and bayonets, or Dragoon helmets, Hussar busbies, and
+Uhlan schapkas, flowing between upheaped banks of
+waving women and cheering men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Speedily, in response to communications addressed by
+the Crown Prince to the South German sovereigns, notifying
+these potentates of his appointment as Commander-in-Chief
+of their armies, came replies expressing satisfaction
+of different shades and qualities.  The Grand Duke of
+Baden's bubbled with joy, and expressed the determination
+of his troops to gain their Royal Commander's confidence
+by fidelity and bravery.  The King of Würtemburg
+rejoiced likewise, but in cooler terms, "in our German
+affair" being brought to a head at last; and was anxious to
+have the opportunity of saluting the heir of Prussia.  The
+King of Bavaria telegraphed "<i>Very happy.  Many thanks
+your Royal Highness's attention!</i>"  A message which
+conveyed no more warmth than was felt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His telegram of martial support, addressed at the outset
+of affairs to Onkel Wilhelm, had seemed quite genuine.
+Had not Count Bismarck quite a sheaf of documents, more
+or less compelling, signed in the youthful monarch's
+scrawling hand?  King Ludwig had ordered immediate
+mobilization of the dark green and light blue
+uniforms&mdash;expended millions of gulden in variegated lamps, public
+fountains of white beer and red wine, bands, Royal
+Command Opera performances, patriotic set-pieces in fireworks
+(representing the tutelary genii of Prussia and Bavaria,
+cuirassed and armed, upholding the standards of
+black-and-white and blue-and-white), joined in the "<i>Wacht am
+Rhein</i>" as though he liked the tune (which he abhorred),
+and certainly enjoyed the tumultuous plaudits with which
+his subjects greeted their monarch's first and last
+appearance in the character of a man of action.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But instead of riding away at the head of the South
+German Army, Nephew Ludwig sent an excuse to Onkel
+Wilhelm&mdash;one has heard a gumboil named as occasion of
+the disability&mdash;and Cousin Fritz was dispatched to take
+over chief command.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Prince Luitpold of Bavaria accompanied the First Army
+Headquarter Staff.  Alas, the appointment but served to
+inflame the gumboil of the jealous King,&mdash;the accounts
+that were daily to reach him of the prowess of his martial
+cousin of Prussia worked like poison in his blood.  He
+drew the hood of his mantle of dreams more closely over
+his head to shut out those fanfares of triumph, those
+"Hochs!" and cheerings, and plunged more deeply into
+the solitudes of his forests and mountain-caves.  Blood and
+iron were his bugbears, and yet they might have been his
+tonics too.  They might have staved off the black hound of
+Destiny, already baying at his heels, and saved him from
+vicious decadence, ultimate madness, and a strange and
+sordid end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet, how did his chivalrous cousin die, at the
+meridian of robust manhood, under the newly imposed
+weight of an Imperial Crown?  Not the swift, soldierly
+death that is given by the bullet of a chassepot&mdash;the
+projectile from a mitrailleuse&mdash;the flying fragment of an
+exploding shrapnel-shell&mdash;but a straw-death, a bed-death
+such as angry seers and cursing Valkyrs of Scandinavian
+legend foretold as the speedy punishment of warriors who
+had broken faith and tarnished by false oaths the
+brightness of their honor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But no shadow of the grim fate that was to befall him
+darkened those brave blue eyes at this period.  Laboring
+night and day at the mobilization of his Third Army, in
+concert with his Chief of Staff, Von Blumenthal, he was
+buoyantly happy, despite his hatred of the shedding of
+blood and his undisguised compassion for the conjectured
+plight of the Man on the Seine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With whom Britannia at first expressed a sympathy not
+at all restrained or guarded, and for the success of whose
+arms she was openly eager, until, toward the close of this
+momentous month of July, 1870, the text of a brief but
+pithy diplomatic document, penned in precise and elegant
+French, and dated a few years previously&mdash;made its
+appearance in the columns of the Times.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The movements of the opposing forces camped on the
+banks of the Meuse and the Saar lost interest for the public
+eye in perusal of this rough memorandum of a proposed
+treaty between the Third Napoleon and the King of Prussia,
+scrawled in Count Benedetti's flowing Italian hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Since the spring of '67 it had been hidden away in a
+snug corner of Bismarck's dispatch-box, waiting to jump
+out.  You recall the terms of the thing&mdash;one of many overt
+attempts to seize a coveted prize.  The Empire of France
+was to recognize the acquisitions made by Prussia in the
+war of 1866 with Austria.  Prussia was to aid Napoleon
+III. to buy from Holland the debatable Duchy of
+Luxembourg.  The Emperor was to shed the luster of his smile
+and the <i>ægis</i> of his approval upon Federal Union between
+the North German Parliament and the South German
+States&mdash;the separate sovereignty of each State remaining.
+In return, Prussia was to abet the Bonaparte in the
+military occupation and subsequent absorption of the
+Kingdom of Belgium.  And in furtherance of these laudable
+ends, an alliance, offensive and defensive, against any
+Power, insular or otherwise, was to be compact between the
+great gilt eagle of the Third Empire and the black-plumaged
+bird across the frontier.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Britons, with inconveniently good memories, perusing
+this draft, recalled the existence of a treaty existing
+between France, England, and Prussia, mutually binding
+these Powers to protect the neutrality of Belgium, and
+drew reflections damaging to the betrayer and the betrayed.
+French diplomatists asserted that the project had been
+drawn up by Benedetti at Bismarck's dictation.  Why
+preserve so explosive a document, they argued, if it was
+never to be drawn out and supplied with detonators in the
+shape of signatures?  Later on M. Rouher's boxes of official
+papers, found at his château of Cercay, gave up the original
+draft-treaty annotated in the Emperor's handwriting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For it was his nature, may God pardon him! to be false
+and specious, ungrateful and an oath-breaker.  He must
+always repay great services with great wrongs.  Thus in
+the red year 1870, England, who in '54 had poured out
+blood and treasure lavishly to aid him, receiving this plain
+proof of treachery, stood sorrowfully back and saw him
+rush upon his fate.  Sick and desperate, madly hurling
+his magnificent Army hither and thither upon the arena,
+a Generalissimo out-generaled before the War was a week
+old.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had made France his mistress and his slave, and now
+her fetters were to be hacked apart by the merciless sword
+of the invader.  Through losses, privations, and humiliations;
+through an ordeal of suffering unparalleled in the
+world's history; through an orgy of vice and an era of
+infidelity; through fresh oceans of blood shed from the veins of
+her bravest; she was to pass before she found herself and
+GOD again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile, North, East, South and West, prevailed a
+great swarming scurry of military preparation, the tunes
+of the "<i>Wacht am Rhein</i>" and "<i>Heil dir im Siegeskranz</i>"
+clashing with "<i>Partant pour la Syrie</i>" and the
+"<i>Marseillaise</i>"; and the solemn strains of masses rising up
+together with Lutheran litanies, as two great nations strove
+to convince Divine Omnipotence that Codlin deserved to
+whip, and not Short.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Strange! that Christian men, who frankly confess themselves
+to be sinners, worms, and dust-grains before the
+supreme Majesty of the Creator, should be so prone to offer
+Him advice.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap30"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XXX
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+The lovely lady whose lace parasol P. C. Breagh had
+picked up at the bottom of the Prussian Chancellor's
+staircase was driven, by the tipsy-faced Jehu of a debilitated
+hack-cab, to a semi-fashionable hotel situated in a graveled
+courtyard facing toward the Linden.  The bureau-manager
+looked out of his glass-case as she swept her rustling
+draperies over the dusty Brussels carpets of the vestibule,
+and muttered to the pale-faced ledger-clerk at his side:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A representative from the firm of Müller and Stettig,
+Charlotten-Strasse, has called three times to see the lady in
+Suite 35.  With a jewelry account for payment, promised
+and deferred."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The clerk assented with a nod of the double-barreled
+order, and reaching an envelope from a numbered
+pigeon-hole offered it for the inspection of his superior.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Baroness von Valverden," sniffed the bureau-manager,
+and in his turn reached a squat red Almanach de Gotha
+from the top of a pile of ledgers, and ruffled the leaves
+with an industrious thumb.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is as I thought&mdash;there is no Baroness von Valverden.
+Baron Ernst von Schön-Valverden is a minor and a bachelor,
+private in the &mdash;th Regiment of Potsdam Infantry
+of the Guard.  This must be the Frenchwoman I have
+heard of as mixed up in the scandal connected with the
+death of Baron Maximilian at Schönfeld in the Altenwald
+some years ago.  He left Madame a lapful of thalers&mdash;I
+suppose she has played skat with the money.  Not that that
+matters if the hook-nosed, long-haired Slav she has got
+with her upstairs has the cash to settle with us!  But if
+not&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The manager's tone was ominous.  The clerk scratched
+his nose with the feather-end of his pen, and said
+admiringly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If not, the Herr Bureau-Director will give orders to
+detain their valises and trunks?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bureau-manager smiled, and said, jerking his chin
+at another envelope reposing in the numbered pigeon-hole:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Send that up at once and let them know we will stand
+no nonsense.  Keep Müller and Stettig's back for the
+present.  Understand?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the clerk nodded again, and whistled down a tube,
+and evoked from regions below a brass-buttoned,
+gilt-braided functionary, to whom he entrusted the missive
+indicated, which bore the monogram of the hotel-company,
+and indeed contained their bill.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was handed to Madame by the brass-buttoned functionary
+just as she reached the ante-room of her second-floor
+suite of apartments.  She took it from the salver, and
+said without looking at it:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Presently!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The functionary gave a peremptory verbal message.  She
+repeated:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Presently, sir, presently....  At this moment I am
+exceedingly fatigued!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The brass-buttoned functionary begged to remind the
+gracious lady of similar excuses previously received by the
+management.  At this she turned upon him the battery of
+her magnificent eyes.  Always economical of her forces, she
+had removed her torn tulle veil during the cab-drive, and
+with a delicate powder-puff drawn from a jeweled case
+dependant from her golden <i>châtelaine</i>, removed from her
+lovely face all traces of emotion.  Only a spiteful woman
+would have called her thirty-five....  And the functionary
+was a man, despite his brass buttons and gilt braiding.
+When she smiled, he caved in, bowed, and left her.  But
+he did not forget to leave the bill.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had it in her hand as she entered the drawing-room
+of the suite of apartments, one of those impossibly shaped,
+fantastically-uncomfortable salons, possessing a multiplicity
+of doors and windows, upholstered with rose-satin
+and crusted with ormolu, such as are only seen in foreign
+hotels and upon the stage.  Despite the sultry heat of the
+July weather the windows were shut, their Venetian blinds
+lowered, and their thick lace curtains drawn over these.
+And in a rose-colored arm-chair with twisted golden legs
+and arms and an absurd back-ornament like an Apollonian
+lyre, huddled a dark, hawk-featured, powerfully built man
+of something less than forty, wrapped in a short, wide coat
+lined, cuffed, and collared with black Astrakhan; wearing a
+traveling-cap similarly lined, and presenting the appearance
+of one who suffers from a cold of the snuffly, catarrhal
+kind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sneezed as Madame surged across the threshold, and
+would have told her to shut the door, only that she divined
+his intention and forestalled him, throwing her parasol
+upon a sofa and sinking into a chair as ridiculous as his
+own.  Yet when her wealth of pale-hued draperies poured
+over it, and the ripe outlines of her voluptuous form
+concealed its crudities of design and coloring, it could be
+forgiven for being in bad taste.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked in silence at the traveling-cap, not at its
+sulky wearer, until, conscious of her sustained regard, he
+raised his hand to his head.  In haste then, as though she
+dreaded the shock of his purposeful abstention from the
+customary courtesy, she said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Do not take it off!  Pray keep it on!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Thanks!"  He uttered the word laconically, drooping
+his immense, black-lashed eyelids over his fierce and
+staring eyes.  They, too, were black, with the white, hard
+glitter of polished jet; black also were the great curved
+eyebrows, the coarse and shining hair that fell to his
+shoulders, the parted mustache, and the wedge-shaped
+beard that depended from his boldly curved chin.  Rippling
+in small, regular waves, suggestive of the labor of a
+primitive sculptor's chisel, the inky <i>chevelure</i> of this man
+with the cold,&mdash;taken in conjunction with his large,
+aquiline nose, deep chest, fleshy torso, and thick muscular
+limbs, reproduced the type of an ancient Assyrian warrior,
+as represented in some carved and painted wall-frieze of
+Nineveh or Babylon, marching in a triumphant procession
+of Shalmaneser or Sennacherib.  Even the conical
+head-dress was reproduced by the modern cap with ear-pieces,
+and turned-up border; and the deep yellowish-white
+of the alabaster in which the ancient sculptor wrought his
+bas-relief was reproduced in thick, smooth, unblemished
+skin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Handsome as he undoubtedly was in his exotic, Oriental
+style, even in spite of influenza, Madame contemplated him
+with ill-concealed distaste.  To a woman who loves, what
+matters the temporary thickening of the beloved object's
+profile, even when accompanied by attacks of sneezing and
+a running at the nose and eyes?  She can wait the day
+when his voice will clear, and his leading feature will regain
+its former beauty.  That is, as long as she continues to
+love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The passion of this man and this woman had in its brief
+time burned high and fiercely.  So does a fire of paper or
+straw.  Now Passion lay dying, and Satiety and Weariness
+were the only watchers by the death-bed.  Every twenty-four
+hours that passed over the heads of the couple brought
+nearer the hour when these would give place to Hatred and
+Dislike.  And meanwhile both were infinitely hipped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Every window....  Every curtain....  Must we,
+then, asphyxiate?..."  At the end of her patience, she
+made an angry gesture as though to loosen the ribbon of
+mauve velvet that held a diamond locket at the base of her
+round white throat, bit her full lip&mdash;and let her hand drop
+idly into her silken lap again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her companion stretched out a pair of muscular, but
+shortish legs, encased in dark green trousers with braided
+side-stripes, and looked with interest at his patent boots.
+Then he answered, speaking with a drawling, nasal accent:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Unless M. de Bismarck has supplied you with the
+means of averting a singularly-unpleasant catastrophe, it
+may be that the answer to your question should be 'Yes'!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She understood that he questioned, and said, drooping
+her proud, languorous eyes under the hard black stare of
+his:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You would be wiser to speak in a lowered tone, when
+you refer to&mdash;that personage.  One does not trifle with
+him&mdash;here or elsewhere!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Pomeranian bear," said her companion, pouting
+a slightly swollen lip, and dabbing gingerly at his reddened
+nostrils with a voluminous cambric handkerchief exhaling
+the heavy perfume of opoponax, "has claws and fangs.
+Also a hug, in which friends of mine have stifled.  But they
+were men and you are an enchanting woman!"  He removed
+his cap and bowed; resuming: "Besides you went
+to M. le Ministre with a trump in your hand&mdash;a little
+Queen of Diamonds, fresh as a rosebud.  Have you played
+her, may I ask?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He got up, pocketing his handkerchief, came over to her
+and stood beside her, in the upright attitude which called
+attention to the disproportion between his huge torso and
+his too-short legs.  He held his furred cap upon his hip with
+one hand, and with the other stroked his waved
+wedge-beard.  The rasping sound made by his heavily-ringed
+fingers as they passed through the thick, crisp hairs
+irritated her to anguish.  Yet not so long ago it had thrilled
+her to sensuous ecstasy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I played the girl&mdash;and I have lost!"  Almost against
+her will a cry broke from her.  "My God! what things he
+said to me!  My God! what humiliations we women endure
+for men!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I had imagined, my Adelaide," said he of the Assyrian
+hair and profile, showing in a smile a double row of teeth
+so perfect that they struck the imagination as being carved
+out of two solid curves of ivory&mdash;"that you were playing
+for your own advantage&mdash;even when you played my game.
+Did M. le Comte mention me at any point of the interview?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She started at the unexpected question.  Her voice shook
+a little in the reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He said that he had heard&mdash;that M. de Straz had lately
+visited Berlin.  That his agents would tell him.  Of
+course!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He said nothing of&mdash;a flying visit of mine to Sigmaringen?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She answered hastily:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I think not.  No!  I am quite certain he did not."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Straz sniffed and whipped out his handkerchief, grumbling:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Yet the purport of my mission to that South German
+crow's-nest was known to him&mdash;here in Berlin&mdash;I can prove
+it!&mdash;by nightfall of the day I interviewed the Prince."  He
+added, trumpeting in his handkerchief, "Of course,
+M. Bismarck has spies everywhere.  But all the same it
+was quick work!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her face was immovable.  No guilty flush stained its
+smooth ivory surface.  Only the lines about her scarlet
+mouth sharpened, that was all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Straz went on, peevishly, strolling to the fireplace, and
+leaning an elbow on the corner of the mantelshelf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I suppose they call that princely hospitality&mdash;to send
+a man who has traveled night and day, and is decanted
+out of a crazy railway-station droschke at the door of their
+confounded Stammschloss at five o'clock in the morning&mdash;to
+an inn!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said in a velvet tone of amorous insinuation, and
+with a glance of sleepy fire:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To an inn where Love lay waiting!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Truly," he admitted, "but how were they to know
+that you were there?  What possible connection could
+have been imagined between two chance travelers&mdash;I&mdash;arriving
+from Paris&mdash;you coming from Berlin?  Besides&mdash;to
+send me to a summer tavern on the banks of the Danube!&mdash;when
+they have two hundred bedrooms at the Schloss!
+If that is princely hospitality, I tell you that I spit upon it!
+I grind it under the heel of my boot!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her nostrils dilated with disgust as he demonstrated by
+spitting on the hearthrug.  She said, meeting his angry
+black stare with eyes that were of the color of tawny
+wine:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Prince cannot have regretted his omission to
+accommodate you with an apartment, when the Emperor's
+message was made known to him!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He demanded:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Am I a hired bravo?  <i>Pardieu</i>! your words suggest it.
+Were either of the old man's sons in danger personally,
+from me?  Not at all!  I but repeated a lesson&mdash;gave a
+warning as it had been given....  But I understand&mdash;you
+have been chagrined by the nature of your reception from
+the Federal Chancellor!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She returned, now flushed and breathing deeply:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is true.  I suffocate at the recollection.  Give me
+time to breathe!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She rose.  Straz said, going over to her, taking both her
+hands, kissing them and replacing her in her chair:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Compose yourself.  Let me understand the attitude
+M. le Ministre is taking.  I need not remind you that not
+until I had learned from you that, through the lamented
+Count Valverden, you were sufficiently acquainted with
+M. de Bismarck to obtain an interview, did I suggest that
+you should seek one.  Well, you did, and it has taken
+place.  You told him of the little episode I witnessed
+in January&mdash;on the day of the funeral of Victor Noir at
+Neuilly.  Monseigneur the Prince Imperial was riding
+with his governor and escort&mdash;the Avenue of the Champs
+Elysées was blocked by troops.  A charming girl threw
+M. Lulu a bunch of violets&mdash;made a little scene of loyalty
+and enthusiasm in contrast with the unamiable attitude
+of the crowd assembled.  An equerry dismounted and gave
+the flowers to Monseigneur.  He carried them with him as
+he galloped toward the Bois de Boulogne.  Nothing of
+importance in that, perhaps, had he not afterward sent for
+the equerry who had picked up the flowers, and said to
+him, blushing, '<i>Pray tell me who was she?</i>'  So skilled a
+master of phrases as M. de Bismarck could hardly have
+undervalued the question from the heir to an Empire,
+taken in combination with the blush.  Or discounted the
+importance of the fact that, later, when the equerry
+brought him the information that the charming unknown
+was the daughter and only child of a certain gallant
+Colonel commanding the 777th Regiment of Mounted
+Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard&mdash;at that moment quartered
+at Versailles,&mdash;Monseigneur said, with another blush
+as ingenuous as the first, 'I am glad she is the daughter of
+so brave a soldier!  Possibly I may meet her one of these
+days.'  Being told that her baptismal name was 'Juliette'
+he blushed once more, and wrote it down,&mdash;together with
+Mademoiselle's surname and address,&mdash;in a little
+memorandum-book he habitually carries....  And there, my
+exquisite Adelaide&mdash;if your narrative style did credit to my
+teaching, the interest of M. de Bismarck should have been
+engaged."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She lowered her chin and drooped her somber eyelids,
+and said with curling lips:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It was.  He took out his watch, and told me: 'I can
+hear you for three minutes longer!  Has the Prince
+Imperial&mdash;with the disinterested assistance of those about him,
+altered that possibility into a certainty?'  I explained to
+him then that nothing further had come of the
+<i>rencontre</i>,&mdash;though measures had been taken to preserve
+Monseigneur's interest from dying for lack of excitement, bouquets
+of violets being sent to him at regular intervals, with a slip
+of paper attached to the stems, upon which had been
+written in an unformed, girlish hand&mdash;'<i>From one who
+prays for the Hope of France!</i>'
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And then?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Then M. de Bismarck spoke, keeping his thumb all the
+time on the watch-dial: 'So!  The girl plays the part of
+an ingenue for the present!  Will she keep these airs of
+candor and innocence when she has got her claws on that
+poor stripling?  And do you suggest that the Prussian
+Secret Service should supply her with funds for the
+carrying out of her design, whatever it may be?  Are we to lay
+our heads together, like the Brethren in the libretto of
+Mehul's opera "Joseph," and sing in chorus: <i>This is the
+heir.  Come, let us kill him!</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Even Beelzebub," said Straz, "can quote from Scripture
+when it suits him.  I suppose you were annoyed, and
+showed it&mdash;which was an error of judgment on your part!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I rose up," said she, and suited the action to the word,
+"with indignation, assuring M. de Bismarck that his
+suspicions were unjust.  That the young girl mentioned was
+of ancient family and irreproachable morals, convent-bred
+and highly educated.  And that I, myself, being her nearest
+living relative of her own sex, was able to vouch for
+the fact.  I added that the interest displayed in her by
+Monseigneur the Prince&mdash;who until that moment had
+never been known to look at a woman&mdash;led me to conceive
+that by aid of a few deft hints, a little discreet
+encouragement&mdash;another distant glimpse&mdash;a meeting
+accidentally brought about in some retired spot favorable to
+the revival of first impressions, an influence might be
+brought to bear upon the Imperial boy which might develop
+his mind and mold his character.  Somehow in my agitation
+the name of Juliette de Bayard escaped me.  'De
+Bayard,' exclaimed M. de Bismarck.  'So!  You are her
+mother!'  Great Heaven!&mdash;the intolerable tone in which
+he uttered the words!  Only the most abandoned of her
+sex could have supported the insulting irony of the look
+accompanying them.  Choking, I took my leave....  He
+accompanied me to the staircase, with a false appearance
+of courtesy.  As I turned to descend, he hurled the last
+insult of all!  Nicolas, do not ask me to repeat the
+sentences!&mdash;and yet, I must have them written in another
+memory....  He twitted me with my nationality before
+his secretary and servants.  He likened me to a
+mythological character with an unpronounceable name....  He
+said only a modern mother would be infamous enough to
+devote her only daughter to Venus Something-Or-Other....
+Next to my husband, I detest that man!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Straz had been pulling at his moist red underlip as she
+raved out her story in a frenzy of rage and resentment,
+intensified by the necessity of speaking in a lowered tone.
+Now he dragged the feature out as though it had been made
+of india-rubber, let it snap back, and said, shrugging his
+bull's shoulders and getting up:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You are a woman and he is&mdash;Bismarck!  He does not
+for the moment want the wares you desire to sell him.  It
+is unlike him&mdash;the diplomat who could encourage M. Benedetti
+to lay before him the Emperor's <i>projet de traité</i>
+in writing&mdash;and lock it away for use at a future
+opportunity&mdash;not to be willing to secure an advantage&mdash;placed
+before him with clearness and skill&mdash;in the newly awakened
+fancy of a schoolboy who, if he lives, will be an Emperor&mdash;for
+a charming and innocent young girl!"  He pronounced
+these words as though they were smeared with something
+sweet and luscious, licking his lips gently, and rolling his
+dead black eyes in sensual enjoyment.  "As regards your
+husband, he has certainly not replied to the letter of your
+solicitors, but why do you hate the unlucky man?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Do you ask?" Adelaide demanded, with glittering
+eyes and heaving bosom.  "Did he not refuse to divorce
+me?  Should I not have legally borne the title of Baroness
+von Valverden if his sentimental prejudices had not
+blocked the way?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Straz pulled his waved beard, and said, delicately
+separating a strand of it from the rest, and keeping it between
+his thick white fingers:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Sentimental, why sentimental?  Do you not even give
+him credit for sufficient spirit to resent being made
+ridiculous?  The desire to be revenged&mdash;you will not even allow
+him that?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She bit her scarlet underlip and answered, breathing
+quickly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He was too good, too high-minded&mdash;too chivalrous&mdash;oh! 'tis
+ridiculous, I admit!" for Straz commenced to
+titter silently, screwing up the corners of his eyes and shaking
+his shoulders, as he sat with his thick, short arms folded
+on his chest.  "An idea to make you hug yourself as you
+are doing.  But true, nevertheless!  He would have said&mdash;at
+this distance of time I can still hear him preaching: '<i>I
+will avenge the injury to my honor when I am confronted
+with my enemy.  I will not revenge myself upon the
+woman who deserted me for him!</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The words came, not in her own voice.  Straz left off
+sniggering.  He said to himself, considering her through
+narrowed lids:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Those were De Bayard's actual words.  I wonder, since
+she has neither seen nor heard from him since she left him,
+how it is she knew that they were spoken?  Some obliging
+mutual friend may have repeated them.  Or she read them
+in some letter of his, written to Count Valverden.  That
+is quite possible.  But the question is, whether she would
+detest him so bitterly if her passion for him were absolutely
+extinguished.  She is even jealous when one speaks of
+their daughter, whom he worships....  I will play her on
+this string&mdash;it may be useful, who knows?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Aloud he said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Detest your husband, dear friend, if it affords you
+entertainment.  Probably he deserves it, though women I
+have met who knew him vowed him <i>un crème d'homme</i>,
+worthy of the name he bears."  He smiled in his beard,
+hearing her foot tap upon the shining parquet, and went
+on.  "Men have praised his gallantry and his
+disinterestedness&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'Disinterestedness!'" she mocked.  "Truly&mdash;to the
+point of fanaticism he is disinterested.  Have we not to
+thank that characteristic for the ruin of our plans?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Straz:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A little more subtlety upon the part of your solicitors,
+and you might have found M. le Colonel less obstinately
+inclined to discourage the idea of a reconciliation.  To have
+entrusted a portrait to the hands of the lawyers would have
+been an excellent move.  Once convinced that the thirteen
+or fourteen years that have elapsed since you&mdash;parted&mdash;have
+increased rather than diminished the beauty that
+once he worshiped&mdash;and I fancy De Bayard would have
+accepted your terms!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sniggered, and waited as the violet shadows about her
+brilliant eyes deepened, and she breathed more quickly.
+Then he went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They were generous&mdash;I allude to the conditions.
+Ninety men out of a hundred would have accepted them.
+For what has De Bayard to condone that others have not
+winked at?  You were a mere girl, weary of separation
+from a husband who doubtless consoled himself after his
+own fashion, for his detention in the Crimea.  Bored to
+desperation&mdash;condemned to spend your days in the care of
+a child, and in listening to the imbecile grumblings of a
+sick old devotee,&mdash;point out to me the woman, young,
+beautiful, brilliant, and ambitious&mdash;who would not&mdash;in
+your place&mdash;have done precisely as you did?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She threw her head a little backward, bringing into
+prominence the superb modeling of her columnar throat
+and the heavy lines of the lower jaw.  Her wine-colored
+eyes considered him between their narrowed lids.  She
+savored his words, silently, with palpitating nostrils, and
+rippling movements of the muscles of her tightly closed
+lips.  And the qualities of treachery and cruelty, mingling
+in her strange character with sensuality, and pride, and
+recklessness, were written upon her beauty as plainly as
+they are stamped upon the individuality of a tigress, or a
+poisonous snake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You speak of weariness ... of boredom..."  She
+spoke between her teeth, accentuating the vowels and
+prolonging the sibilants: "Nicolas, it was hellish&mdash;that <i>ménage</i>
+at Auteuil!..."  She clenched the white hand that
+rested on the chair-arm and continued, looking with
+burning eyes through Straz into the past.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That woman&mdash;my husband's mother, with her parade
+of devotion for the absent.  With her ceaseless repetition
+of 'my son,' 'my son's child,' and 'my son's wife!'
+... Grand Dieu!&mdash;how she enraged me!  How she made me
+hate&mdash;hate&mdash;hate them!&mdash;yes! all three....  Perhaps
+myself also, most bitterly of all!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"We have a curious proverb in my country," commented
+Straz, with his snigger: "'<i>I draw water from a
+well that has no bottom when I tell my gossip of the faults
+of my mother-in-law!</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said, with undisguised scorn:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am not a collector of curios from your country!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah, but wait!  Hear the rest of it!" said Straz,
+dexterously embroidering on the original: "'<i>But when my
+mother-in-law wishes to acquaint my husband with my good
+qualities, she will write them with the plume from a gnat's
+head, on the paper that wrapped a butterfly's egg, when
+she has bought her ink at the shop where they sell none!</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide continued, ignoring the labored witticism:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"In the letter of farewell that I wrote to De Bayard I
+said '<i>Your mother will console you, I have no doubt!</i>'
+... How often I have imagined I could hear her talking to
+him....  He would weep on her knees, like a schoolboy.
+She would lead him to look at the child, asleep in its cot by
+the side of her bed, and tell him, '<i>Do not fear!  She will
+not be like her mother!  She will grow up candid and
+discreet and virtuous!</i>'  Everything that Adelaide was not,
+you understand....  Ha, ha, ha!  Absurd old creature!
+Were she not dead, I should detest her still!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Straz mentally commented: "The daughter has inherited
+the hatred, unless I am mistaken."  Aloud he said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The prophecy, if made, has not been fulfilled, my
+Adelaide....  Mademoiselle, if inferior to her mother in
+splendor and beauty, certainly has been dowered with her
+elegance and charm."  He bunched the fingers of his right
+hand, kissed them, and launched the kiss, conjecturally, in
+the direction of Paris.  "A pocket edition of Psyche before
+that little affair with Cupid!  A rare jewel!  A <i>chic</i> type,
+give you my word!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The daintily shod foot had beaten time, as Straz
+enlarged upon the theme of Juliette's perfections, to what
+might have been the tune of a tarantella: now it ceased.
+She laughed in the Roumanian's face, and cried, still
+laughing:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A child! ... A schoolgirl&mdash;who has seen no more of
+the world than the pearl in the oyster!  All this is too
+funny&mdash;<i>give you my word!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Straz, lolling his head against the chair-back and
+licking his red lips cattishly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah, but when the pearl-diver opened the oyster, he
+said: '<i>Here is a gem worth a Kingdom, or an Empire,
+when it shall be polished and properly set!</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'Or an Empire!'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She echoed the three words, throwing her head back in
+imitation of Straz's attitude, and looking at him with
+languid provocation.  Then she yawned, showing her
+perfect teeth and the tip of a rosy tongue, and remarked
+with an air of boredom:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My friend, whether your pearl be worth an Empire
+or a cabbage-plot, your chance of proving its value is
+forever forfeited, thanks to the obstinacy of M. de Bayard."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Straz:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Our plan would have been easier to carry out,&mdash;had
+M. de Bayard been more&mdash;complaisant."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She rose up, her beautiful face livid and gray under its
+artificial roses.  Her eyebrows writhed like little live snakes,
+her eyes burned like wind-blown torches.  She spoke,
+looking past her confederate in the chair, and with a
+voice he barely recognized:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"His mother must have prayed her Saints for this," she
+said, "that I should always fail in the moment when
+triumph seemed most sure.  Max Valverden would have
+married me&mdash;it is absolutely certain!&mdash;had not Fate sent
+him back on leave from the Staff in Austria but a couple
+of hours too soon.  Weak, sentimental Max! always
+threatening extreme measures.  Who would have believed him
+capable of carrying out that menace so often reiterated!
+But this I know.  Had he confronted me with what his
+letter termed '<i>the unmistakable proofs of my appalling
+treachery,</i>' I would have convinced him even against the
+testimony of his own ears and eyes.  But De Bayard&mdash;but
+my husband!&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had forgotten Straz; she saw nothing but her own
+frustrated ambitions, the dead body of the man whose
+suicide had robbed her of a title, and the living husband
+whose stern rejection of her overtures had left her forever
+outside the social pale....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Do I not know the man he is!  With another it would
+have been so easy.  He would have granted an interview,&mdash;I
+would have been suppliant and humble&mdash;I would have
+told my tale in such a voice! ... <i>You were away....  I
+was young and inexperienced....  I foolishly yielded to
+the persuasions of another....  Once I had let Valverden
+kiss me I felt myself smirched for ever.  I fled with him
+because I dared not meet your eyes!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Straz sniggered.  She went on, not hearing him....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He would have taken me to his heart again.  Once
+reinstated there I would have regained the <i>entrée</i> to
+Society.  For a woman who has lived within the pale&mdash;even
+if she finds it better fun outside&mdash;it is hideous to be
+<i>déclassée</i>.  A few triumphs,&mdash;a little intriguing&mdash;and I
+should have been received at Court....  For the Emperor
+is above all a man of the world; and the Empress loves to
+surround herself with beautiful and witty women.  With
+gifts, talents, charm like mine, I should have carried all
+before me!&mdash;I should have reigned&mdash;I should have drunk
+the wine of Success from a goblet of diamond."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Without doubt," agreed Straz, "had M. le Colonel
+consented to receive you.  Yet I contend, his refusal is a
+hopeful sign, if it means that he is afraid."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She winced as though he had thrust a knife in her side,
+and cried out:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Afraid!  You do not know him....  No!&mdash;I tell you,
+that it is to him as though I had never existed....  Did
+we meet, he would look me in the face&mdash;pass me by without
+the twitch of a muscle&mdash;without the flicker of a glance....
+But you have shown me how I may reach his heart&mdash;and
+one day I shall thrust my hand into his breast and
+tear it out and trample on it....  It is she&mdash;my
+daughter&mdash;who will accomplish this!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Straz, pushing back his chair, getting up and
+blowing his nose loudly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Then the sooner we exchange these avenues of dusty
+lime-trees, choked with crowds of bellowing Teutons, for
+the boulevards of Paris, the better.  We shall, of course, be
+forced to return by a <i>détour via</i> Brussels&mdash;the Rhine
+Valley railways being reserved for the transport of troops.
+Passports can be had on application to the usual authorities.
+The only insuperable obstacle to our departure is&mdash;the
+bill!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame came back to consciousness of sordid things as
+the Roumanian ostentatiously turned out his trouser-pockets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You are at an <i>impasse</i> for lack of funds?" she asked
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Upon my life, my soul!" Straz smilingly assured her,
+"I am at present without a radish!  A sum of two thalers
+negotiable currency constitutes my stock of cash.  Although,
+as I have told you, I carry secreted on my person an order
+for"&mdash;he tapped his bosom&mdash;"ten thousand francs payable
+from the Secret Funds of the Imperial Government.
+This I tried to cash before I left Paris&mdash;&mdash;"  He measured
+off an infinitesimal quantity of finger-nail and displayed it
+to her.  "Do you think I got a franc from anyone?  No!&mdash;you
+know better!  The Emperor's methods are understood
+too well.  And thus it is that the disinclination of
+M. de Bismarck to finance our plan for the union of two
+young and ingenuous lovers has hit me in the midriff.  A
+thousand curses on his niggardliness!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As though prompted by some recollection of Adelaide's
+previous display of tragic passion, he scowled portentously,
+spat at the fireplace, then began to strut about, vaporing
+and waving his ringed, hairy-backed hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Penniless....  What damnable absurdity!  The
+Emissary of a Potentate!  The Bearer of the Bowstring&mdash;with
+Life or Death in my hand.  For lack of cash I travel
+second-class to that accursed South German Principality&mdash;I
+stoop to put up at a third-rate inn.  My Mission
+performed, I yield to the promptings of my ardent nature.
+In the company of her who reigns sultana of my soul,&mdash;who
+for my sake has shared the discomforts of that abominable
+caravanserai&mdash;I return to the barbarous capital of
+the Hohenzollerns&mdash;I risk my person in the streets of
+Berlin.  Had my brain been cooler&mdash;had your image glowed
+less seductively before my mental vision"&mdash;he rolled his
+black eyes amorously and laid a thick ringed hand upon
+his breast&mdash;"it may be that I should not have accompanied
+you,&mdash;that I might have hurried back express to
+Paris&mdash;presented myself to my Imperial master&mdash;and
+reaped the golden prize!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Say rather," responded Madame, in a tone not untinged
+with acrimony, "that as the result of your unsuccessful
+endeavor to enlist the interest of M. de Bismarck
+in that charming plan to unite two ingenuous young
+people&mdash;you are placed in a position that is not without
+unpleasant possibilities.  My <i>beaux yeux</i> are less to blame
+than your ambition '<i>to kill</i>,' as the English say, '<i>two birds
+with one stone!</i>'  You&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Say 'we,' not 'you,' my divine Adelaide," corrected
+Straz, with tender insistence, "for if not in actuality
+husband and wife, we are thus inscribed upon the
+bureau-register.  'One in sorrow, one in joy,' to quote a poet of
+my nation.  I wish you were acquainted with the verses
+of Stepan Mieciwycz.  They would afford you exquisite
+delight."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Possibly," said Madame, with an ominous hardening
+of the facial muscles, and a whiteness about the lips.
+"What does not afford me delight is that these brigands
+downstairs have threatened to seize our luggage if their
+claim is not satisfied within an hour."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Sapristi!</i>" commented the Roumanian.  "A beautiful
+imbroglio!  And&mdash;as I have no luggage&mdash;beyond a traveling
+valise," he added with a gentle snigger, "your trunks,
+bonnet-boxes, imperials, traveling-bags, and so forth&mdash;must
+become the prey of the management.  It grieves me
+to the soul that you should suffer this denudation at the
+hands of these coarse Germans.  But what I cannot
+prevent, I can but deplore!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And if," she said in a vibrating voice of anger, "these
+coarse Germans should lay hands upon your person, for
+the purpose of ascertaining for themselves the state of
+your purse! ... What then?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What then?" Straz's cynical composure broke up.
+"<i>Istenem!&mdash;Istenem</i>!  Nothing could be more dangerous!
+My letter of instructions from M. de Gramont, annotated
+in the Emperor's own hand!  The official letter, of
+introduction from the Minister to Prince Antony&mdash;the copies of
+those three telegrams His Highness sent from Sigmaringen&mdash;the
+order on the Privy Purse&mdash;all concealed in a silk
+belt I am in the habit of wearing&mdash;these Prussians will find
+the papers should they search me to the skin.  Then I,
+<i>with my wife</i>&mdash;&mdash;"  He italicized the sentences.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"One in sorrow as in joy, I think you said!" interpolated
+Madame, bitterly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"We should be arrested&mdash;dragged before official
+interrogators!&mdash;imprisoned!&mdash;Oh! do not imagine I am laying
+on the colors too thickly.  Is it incredible that M. de
+Bismarck might welcome an opportunity&mdash;pending the
+result of this war&mdash;to turn the key on us?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why on us?" demanded Adelaide.  "Do <i>I</i> wear a
+silken belt containing incriminating letters?  Orders on
+the Secret Funds ... copies of Hohenzollern telegrams?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Straz looked at her, and his black stare hardened
+suspiciously.  The swift Oriental blood that pigmented his
+eyes and skin, and fed the luxuriant growth of hair upon
+him, leaped in the dark to the conclusion that he had been
+betrayed.  He said, smiling, and speaking with a lisp, a
+trick of his that boded ill, had she but known it:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not to my knowledge....  I have never searched
+while you were sleeping,&mdash;or spiced the draught that made
+the sleep profound."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My thanks," she said, keeping her countenance
+magnificently, "for the glass of mulled Burgundy I gave you
+when you returned from the Schloss.  You were suffering
+from chill&mdash;you shivered and burned alternately....
+Like a woman, I did what I could&mdash;and you are ungrateful,
+like all other men."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My soul," simpered Straz, "I adore you madly.  But
+like every other man, I am a son of Adam, and you are a
+daughter of Madame Eve.  And a little snake hisses in
+my ear whenever I am not looking at you: '<i>She would be
+truer to her sex if she were false!</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+"Nicolas!  This is too much!  No, no, I beg of you to
+let me leave you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide had put her hand to her heart, given him a
+look in which passionate tenderness seemed to strive with
+wounded pride, quitted her chair, and hurried, the
+Roumanian hot upon her heels, to the door communicating
+with the boudoir.  Detained by his feverish grasp upon
+her hand, prisoned by the muscular arm about her waist,
+she could only reiterate her desire for freedom.  Straz
+asseverated:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Yes! when you have forgiven me!  Pardon, beloved
+Adelaide!  Life of my life, you know we Slavs are
+naturally suspicious&mdash;it is always in our blood!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He thrust his face to hers, amorously ogling.  The slight
+thickening of the consonants, due to catarrh, made his
+passionate speech sound grotesquely ridiculous.  The
+approach of his mouth, the contact of his breath, reminded
+the fastidious Adelaide that such colds could be
+transferred.  So she smiled dazzlingly upon him, and gently
+freed herself from his enfolding tentacles, leaning her
+softly-tinted cheek downwards to the shoulder her own
+overtopped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You are pardoned, my beloved one!  But think with
+me how this bill may be settled!  What if you really
+should be in danger in this place!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shrugged hopelessly, and ejaculated:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Sapristi</i>!  I can conceive it possible....
+But&mdash;hampered by the lack of money, what are we to do?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said with a start, as if suddenly enlightened:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Dearest, I have some jewels....  Think nothing of
+the sacrifice! ... Will it not be made for him who is
+more to me than all?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Angel! ... Now I know, indeed, that Adelaide is true
+to me!  Pardon thy slave, who dared to deem otherwise!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Straz devoured her hand with kisses, became more
+enterprising as she grew, or seemed to grow, more yielding.
+But she put him from her, suffering her bright glance to
+linger on him amorously, saying in tones of liquid
+sweetness, with a bewitching accent of rebuke:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Be good now!  I am tired, and must positively dine
+in my room to-night.  My maid will bring you in a few
+moments a case containing&mdash;what I mentioned just now.
+Late as it is, shops are still open ... there is a firm
+of jewelers&mdash;Müller and Stettig in the Charlotten-Strasse,
+who will buy such things for ready money....  It should
+bring sufficient to supply us with funds for a long time....
+Poor Valverden paid eighteen thousand thalers for
+it!"  She added as Straz licked his lips appreciatively:
+"It is a star of emeralds and brilliants you have often seen
+me wear."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Thou art my star!  O incomparable Adelaide!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She pushed him from her, yet oozing with impassioned
+admiration.  She gently shut the boudoir-door&mdash;and noiselessly
+shot the bolt.  Then her face changed, and all her
+disgust for Straz, his cheap compliments&mdash;his slovenliness&mdash;his
+arrogance and self-satisfaction, his impecuniousness
+and his cold in the head, was written on her face and
+expressed by every movement of her body.  She ran across
+the boudoir, abandoning her air of languor, burst into the
+bedroom beyond, and aroused a dozing maid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Wake up, Mariette!  Find me&mdash;it is in the red morocco
+jewel-case in the brown leather imperial&mdash;the diamond star
+with emerald points!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While the woman rummaged, the mistress swiftly reviewed
+the situation.  The cold, clear brain that dwelt
+behind that velvet mask of sensuous beauty had
+formulated a plan for getting rid of the Slav.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He would be an enemy dangerous as a rattlesnake, she
+told herself.  But&mdash;trap your rattlesnake, and he cannot
+bite.  On the other hand, his subtle capacity for intrigue&mdash;his
+swift Oriental cunning&mdash;even his masculine strength,&mdash;made
+of him a useful ally, even when he had no more
+secrets for a clever woman to ferret out and sell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the brief telegram in cipher, dispatched by Madame
+to a studiously unsuspicious address in Berlin before
+nightfall of the day of the arrival in Sigmaringen&mdash;with the
+later-sent copies of Gramont's letters&mdash;the formal
+introduction which had secured the Agent from the Tuileries
+an audience of Prince Antony, and the four pages of
+secret instructions margined with the Emperor's
+annotations, had brought in a handsome sum of money, thanks
+to the potency of mulled Burgundy heavily dosed with
+laudanum.  Adelaide had known a moment of deadly terror
+when the Slav's black eyes had looked at her with that
+sinister stare of suspicion, and his conjectures had leaped
+in the dark, so very near the actual verity.  She felt no
+desire to encounter that look again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So she pondered, fingering the bulky roll of Prussian
+banknotes paid her by Privy Councillor Bucher a few days
+previously,&mdash;how she might best get rid of Straz without
+another scene.  His Oriental cunning, his childish vanity,
+his petulance and sensuality, his colossal greed of money
+and money's worth, blinded her to the ruthlessness and
+ferocity of his tigerish nature, and provoked her to brave
+a risk far greater than she guessed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She would get rid of him&mdash;play the game he had devised,
+without him; and win, in spite of cold water thrown by
+M. de Bismarck.  The trap he had planned to catch the
+son of the Emperor should yet be set successfully.  Was
+not the intended bait of living maiden's flesh her own?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She felt no pity for the innocence of the girl, or for the
+inexperience of the stripling.  She was curious to know
+how&mdash;under given circumstances&mdash;they would comport
+themselves; she was eager to bring to terms the Minister
+who had contemptuously rejected her proposal&mdash;she
+thirsted above all for revenge upon the husband she had
+wronged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Straz stood in the way, therefore Straz must be swept
+aside.  His mission to Prince Antony performed, the
+Napoleon would have no more use for the instrument.
+Perhaps that order on the Privy Purse would never be
+paid?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She arrived at this conclusion as the maid brought the
+red morocco jewel-case.  She unlocked it with a key she
+wore in a bracelet, and drew out a shagreen-covered box
+containing the vaunted ornament.  It had not been given
+her by her dead lover; the story of the thousands spent on
+it was no more reliable than the doubleted emeralds, and
+the thin central star of diamonds set flush with the gold
+setting of the toy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it looked well; and Straz was no good judge of
+jewels, and she had not paid Müller and Stettig the
+moderate sum demanded as its price.  The merchants had been
+rude enough to dun her, and when Straz should appear
+and tender the article for sale to them, the manager would
+summon a policeman, and the Roumanian would be detained.
+He would refer to herself, but long before a
+representative of the firm could appear to interrogate her, she
+would have paid the hotel-bill and departed, leaving the
+price of the trinket in the hands of the management.
+Flaws in the plan, no doubt, but on the whole it was
+workable.  She rose, took the star from the case stamped
+with the too-revealing names of Müller and Stettig, glanced
+in the mirror, left the bedroom and swept through the
+boudoir.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Nicolas!" she whispered, unbolting the door noiselessly,
+and opening it a little way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My Peri, I am here!" snuffled the impassioned Roumanian.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She opened the door a little further, and thrust out a
+white palm cradling the glittering gewgaw.  He pounced
+on it, leaving a kiss instead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Remember, Müller and Stettig, 85 Charlotten Strasse.
+Fly!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Sultana, I depart upon the wings of Love, to return
+like the bee to the rose, laden with golden pollen."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your wings, unlucky bee, will be clipped by a policeman,"
+Madame said inwardly, as the drawing-room door
+shut and the Slav's footsteps crossed the little ante-room.
+There was a murmur of voices, that of Straz raised as if in
+surprise or interrogation.  Probably the gilt-buttoned
+functionary had been lying in wait for him with the
+hotel-bill.  She listened a moment, heard no more, and went
+back, saying to her attendant:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Pack everything.  We leave at once for Brussels."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The maid said, with peculiar demureness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And Monsieur, Madame?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her mistress told her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur has gone to call upon his bankers."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The maid responded with even greater demureness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madame should know that in her absence Monsieur
+endeavored&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame said hastily:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Pay no heed.  These are customs common in Roumania!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman continued, bridling with all the scorn
+Lesbia's waiting-maid feels for the penniless gallant:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur endeavored to borrow of me ten thalers...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame shrugged and bade her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Go on with your packing!  Monsieur does not accompany us!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And without the exchange of another word the mistress
+and maid understood each other perfectly.  The impecunious
+Straz was to be jettisoned for the lightening of the
+ship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile, Fate willed the Slav should encounter on the
+threshold of the ante-room the emissary of Messrs. Müller
+and Stettig, who had called for the third time to demand
+payment of the bill.  This being offered for his inspection
+as the responsible male of the party, threw unexpected
+light on the intentions of Adelaide.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Sixteen hundred thalers," he murmured.  "Reasonable,
+too&mdash;most reasonable!  I have seen Madame wearing
+the ornament, and admired it very much.  Yes, if you
+desire it, I will speak to the lady.  It is doubtless mere
+forgetfulness that has deferred the settlement of your
+claim.  Wait here!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He unwound a knitted silk scarf that was folded round
+his bull-neck.  He turned down the collar of his Astrakhan-lined
+coat, and went back with noiseless steps.  The door
+of the boudoir was ajar.  He satisfied himself that Adelaide
+was in the bedroom beyond it.  He stepped in, glanced
+about him, formulating his plan, then locked the boudoir-door,
+put the key in his pocket, crossed the room, and
+knocked upon the door of the bedroom, swiftly stepping
+aside, so that the door&mdash;which opened outward,&mdash;should
+conceal him from those within.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Who is it knocks?  Open and see!" he heard Madame
+command her maid within the bedroom.  The maid
+appeared, crossed the boudoir, found the door fast, and
+returned to tell her mistress.  But then she found the door
+of the bedroom she had quitted was bolted on the other
+side.  There was no sound within, but a kind of rustling,
+and once or twice a footstep on the carpet.  So, with the
+patience of her caste, the maid sat down upon a sofa
+until it should please her lady to undo the bedroom-door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her lady was incommoded by the grip of Straz's thick
+hairy hands upon her windpipe.  He freed one in a
+moment&mdash;and then Adelaide was being blinded by the folds
+of a silken scarf....  Long, wide, and elastic, it served
+the Roumanian's purpose admirably.  Perhaps it had been
+useful in that particular way before.  And as he rolled
+and twisted it, he whispered sniggeringly in the little
+pearl-white ear that jutted from between the crimson swathings,
+almost as though it had been purposely left free:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So, my Sultana!&mdash;so,&mdash;you would betray me!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Enveloped, she stammered through the silken meshes
+some barely intelligible sentences.  The folds tightened
+chokingly&mdash;and the words died in a gasp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mercy!... Forgive!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Surely, my proud Sultana," said the thickish voice
+with the catarrhal snuffle in it.  "What will men not
+pardon to beauty such as yours!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She moaned and strove to tear away the smooth bands
+that were suffocating her.  He whipped a velvet ribbon
+from the toilet-table, brought down her hands, and bound
+them behind her back.  That little shell-shaped ear was
+purplish by this time.  At the point of losing consciousness,
+she felt him softly groping for the treasure hidden in
+her bosom&mdash;she heard the crackling of the roll of notes
+withdrawn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Do not...!</i>" she tried to say, but no sound came
+from her but a groaning; and through the roaring of her
+blood she heard him answer back:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Do not rob you! would you plead, my peerless Adelaide?
+Far from it.  I merely take from you what is my
+own!  For&mdash;there was the taste of opium in my mouth
+when I awakened in Love's embraces.  And conviction,
+stronger than proof, convinces me that I have been sold.
+Else why this store of honey in the breast of the Queen of
+the garden, while the black bee was sent roaming to gather
+store elsewhere?  Eh, eh!  I think I could manage to guess
+at the reason why I was to have been detained by those
+jewelers on suspicion of theft!  My Sultana would have
+vanished, leaving no address behind her....  <i>Istenem!</i>
+but the emerald star would have served your purpose
+well!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a silence.  Rings of fire, stars of emerald
+whirled before Adelaide's blinded vision.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Do not be afraid, my Queen, I am not going to murder
+you!" chuckled the thick voice in the little swollen
+blackening ear.  "Only to spoil your beauty a little&mdash;nothing
+more terrible.  Your eyes will be less clear, your skin
+less dazzlingly unblemished, after this experience.  You
+will never again look in your mirror without remembering
+me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rocking and swaying, ready to fall, she was only kept
+upright by the arm of Straz about her body.  She felt him
+free that arm, shifting her weight against his great chest,
+and as she lay blind and helpless there, his snigger vibrated
+through her horribly.  Then&mdash;the smooth, slippery folds of
+the silk scarf tightened murderously, stopping all breath,
+shutting out consciousness.  Whelmed in an abyss of
+Nothingness, she felt and knew no more....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madame is a little unwell," said Straz, who regained
+the ante-chamber by the way of a dressing-room
+communicating with Madame's bedroom.  "She will call on
+Messrs. Müller and Stettig to-morrow, and settle their
+account.  Meanwhile"&mdash;for the representative of the firm
+was beginning to expostulate&mdash;"she returns the emerald-pointed
+star with her regrets."  He added smilingly as the
+relieved <i>employé</i> gratefully pocketed the trinket: "Ladies
+are not business-like in these little matters of money.
+But Heaven, who inspired in man the desire to see them
+well-dressed, has conferred on him the privilege of paying
+their bills."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He accompanied the jeweler's foreman down to the
+vestibule, chatting agreeably.  He carried no valise, so
+was allowed to pass out with the man.  Keeping one thick,
+hairy-backed hand thrust down into a pocket of his
+Astrakhan-furbished shooting-jacket, close-clutched upon the
+solid roll of Prussian banknotes, reft from that smooth
+and perfumed hiding-place.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap31"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XXXI
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+"The Crown Prince," wrote P. C. Breagh, "and the Red
+Prince&mdash;as people nickname Friedrich Karl of Prussia, in
+virtue of his partiality for the crimson uniform of his
+regiment, the Ziethen Hussars,&mdash;have departed amidst
+scenes of overwhelming enthusiasm, to take over the
+respective commands of the Third and Second Army Corps.
+On July 31st, at half-past-five noon, the very day on which
+I pen these lines, the aged Sovereign drove in an open
+landau drawn by two superb black Hungarian horses to
+join his Ministers and his Chief of the Great Staff at the
+station, where waited the special train destined to convey
+the venerable Commander-in-Chief of the Field Armies of
+Germany to the immediate Seat of War."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a jolt, the pencil bucked furiously, and the
+writer's skull came smartly into contact with the
+uncushioned seat-back of the gray-painted, semi-partitioned
+railway transport-car, in which, with some forty
+blue-uniformed infantrymen of the Prussian Guard,
+P. C. Breagh was being hurried toward the Rhine frontier, in
+a din so comprehensive that you could only make your
+neighbor hear by putting your mouth to his ear and
+bawling, and in an atmosphere so thick with dust and
+smells, of varied degrees of intensity and picturesqueness,
+that you drew it into your lungs in gulps and exhaled it
+with sensible effort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The partly-glazed windows did not let down, bars began
+where the glass left off, and therefore the N.C.O.'s of the
+eighth of a company appropriated to themselves the
+corner-seats.  Sandwiched between two large and heated
+warriors, with his unstrapped knapsack on his knee, and
+his elbows jammed immovably against his lower ribs,
+P. C. Breagh abandoned the impulse to rub his bump, and
+continued to write, using the old straw hat which crowned
+the knapsack as a support for a notebook.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Queen," he went on, "who was evidently laboring
+under the influence of emotion, accompanied His
+Majesty.  A thunderstorm coruscated and detonated
+overhead as the Royal salute of guns crashed out, and King
+Wilhelm's subjects greeted him with round upon round of
+enthusiastic '<i>Hoch's</i>.'  The object of their acclamations
+kept continually smoothing his heavy white mustache
+with the right, ungloved hand, between the salutes with
+which he acknowledged the plaudits of his people&mdash;a
+characteristic gesture of the veteran monarch when..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The pencil faltered.  "Under the influence of emotion"
+could not be used again, because it had already done duty
+for the Queen, whose eyes, poor lady! had been red with
+crying.  P. C. Breagh knocked off to sharpen his pencil
+and read over what he had set down.  "Coruscated and
+detonated" pleased him, though to have said that the
+thunderstorm had growled and blazed would have been a
+good deal nearer the mark.  And "characteristic gesture"
+was loftier language than "familiar trick" or
+"habit." Mr. Knewbit would have snorted at it, it was true, but
+this was not one of Mr. Knewbit's stipulated-for letters,
+"describing in a style readable by plain, ordinary, everyday
+people, what you've seen and heard, and felt, and
+smelled."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still, one could not hope to please everybody&mdash;and this
+was a descriptive article&mdash;not a chatty news-letter.  When
+complete, it would be forwarded to the Editor of a Leading
+Daily, with the brief intimation that more like it might be
+had&mdash;at a price.  That it would draw commissions, P. C. Breagh
+believed implicitly.  There was a stately stodginess
+about the style that could not fail to impress.  So he
+continued as "<i>Die Wacht am Rhein</i>" broke out once more;
+and the deep bass notes emitted by his burly right-hand
+neighbor tickled his ribs and made him goosefleshy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The aged monarch seemed weary, it appeared to me."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ach, ach! but the old man looks tired!" people in the
+front had holloaed to one another.  All the week-end one
+had seen the King bowling up, and down, and round-about
+Berlin in his little one-horse carriage, with a single,
+mounted orderly-officer in attendance; giving out colors,
+addressing the regiments, conversing in short, soldierly
+sentences with the field-officers in command.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Baron von Moltke, Chief of the Great General Staff,"
+went on the pencil, "the War-Minister General von Roon,
+and the Federal Chancellor and Minister-President General
+Count von Bismarck-Schönhausen, with the personnel
+of the Great Headquarters Staff and the mobilized Foreign
+Office, received His Majesty at the railway-station,
+tastefully adorned with black-and-white bunting, carpeted with
+red, and garlanded with roses, said to be the favorite
+floral emblem of the septuagenarian potentate...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It could not be denied by P. C. Breagh,&mdash;the painfully
+hammered-out paragraphs smacked of the sample supplied
+by Mr. Knewbit for avoidance.  "Sham technicality and
+sentimental slumgullion," he seemed to hear that rigorous
+critic saying, so loudly and in such a pouncing manner,
+that P. C. Breagh hurriedly scratched out the sentence
+about the floral emblems, though "septuagenarian potentate"
+must be reserved for use later, as offering a refreshing
+change from "aged King" and "veteran" or "venerable
+monarch."  "Hoary-headed Ruler" would come in
+usefully by-and-by....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Bump&mdash;bump&mdash;jolt, ker-link-ker-lank ker-lunk!</i> ...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The two powerful engines, pulling a train-load of fully
+two-thirds of a regiment at fullest war-strength, were
+slowing up at a station: ...  A roar of voices kept
+continually at crescendo hailed the arrival.  Another roar,
+mixed with fragments of patriotic song, replied.  The
+platform presented a sea of heads of both sexes, backed by an
+imposing array of shelves, decorated with foliage, dangling
+lamps and national bunting; surmounted by a bust of the
+King between busts of Moltke and Bismarck, and literally
+groaning under piles of sausages, loaves, cheeses, oleaginous
+packages of sandwiches and pastry&mdash;rows of gilt and
+silver-foiled wine-bottles, and then more rows....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Barrels of genuine Berlin beer, adorned with the Hohenzollern
+colors, stood hospitably ready to replenish glasses
+and mugs.  Filled with the amber nectar, trays of these,
+suspended from the shoulders of stalwart youths, wearing
+Red Cross arm-badges, and white-muslin-draped maidens
+adorned with crimson sashes, waited to quench the thirst
+of Prussia's soldier sons.  And taking in the condition of
+things at a glance, said one of the two N.C.O.'s in charge
+of the party:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Himmeldonnerwetter!</i> ... Lads, there seems no help
+for it.  We have got to tuck in again!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And simultaneously with the bass response: "At your
+service, Herr Sergeant!" and almost before the
+slow-going locomotives stopped, panting Samaritans hurled
+themselves upon the carriages, and arms ending in hands
+proffering packages of comestibles and tobacco, bottles of
+beer or frothing glasses, or packets of cigars, were thrust
+in between the window-bars, until every man's jaws were
+busy, and every man's hands were laden....  Until even
+the modestly retiring P. C. Breagh had been compelled to
+accept a mighty hunk of iced plum-cake and a giant package
+of liver-sandwiches, and forced to empty a foaming
+beaker of brown Bavarian.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why not, why not, when they have plenty for everyone?"
+hiccoughed a stalwart private, who had emptied
+many mugs: "Won't every fellow of the regiment find
+his double-pint waiting him, when the next train comes
+up?"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+There was plenty for everyone.  Not only the troop-train
+that would follow this, containing the odd thousand
+rank-and-file and the rest of the regimental officers, would
+find the "cool blonde" and the "dark brunette," the
+savory snack and the soothing weed, as ready for the
+alleviation of possible requirements as they had been
+at every halting-place&mdash;the City of Hanover severely
+excepted&mdash;since the huge send-off at Berlin on the afternoon
+of the previous day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every class contributed to the refreshment of the
+soldiers.  Wealthy brewers sent drayloads of barrels, rich
+aristocrats gave wines from their cellars.  The bakers
+bestowed bread, the pork-butchers contributed hams and
+sausages, the tobacconists cigars and pipe-tobacco.  While
+the cook baked cakes with her perquisites of lard and
+dripping: and the servant-maid took from her scant savings
+for the purchase of a gross of match-boxes, to distribute
+at the station when the military trains came in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Poor was the wight who could be liberal in nothing.
+And thus thought the little old woman when she cooked
+her dozen ginger-snaps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was a tiny little monkey-faced old peasant, in a
+frilled white mutch, jaded red shawl, blue apron and
+brown-striped drugget petticoat; and she stood quite alone
+in a clear space left upon the platform of a little country
+station, as the eager philanthropists about her crowded to
+lavish hospitality on the inmates of the incoming train.
+As the pastry and the cakes, the coffee, beer, and spirits
+flowed in at the windows and down the throats of the
+wearers of the blue, white-faced Guard uniforms, this little
+old woman made no effort to offer her ginger-snaps, which
+were ranged in three rows of four on a dingy white cloth
+in a little broken basket, and were palpably melting under
+the rays of an ardent July sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her timidity and her feebleness had kept her back, but
+when the Colonel in command issued the order to entrain,
+and the officers who had clanked in pairs up and down the
+platform, good-humoredly answering the questions of old
+ladies, and gallantly returning the admiring glances of
+young ones, accepting a leaf-full of fruit here, or a glass
+of Rhine wine or a cigarette there,&mdash;began to take their
+places,&mdash;she mustered courage to hold up her basket to
+a dandy young subaltern and murmur: "Please to take!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Next moment&mdash;the dandy could not have meant it,&mdash;but
+as he pushed away the extended basket, and swung
+round upon his heel, his silver sword-knot caught in the
+frayed cloth or broken wicker-work, and down went the
+basket, and the snaps were spilt upon the ground....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Thou dear God!" the little old woman cried in anguish.
+"<i>Ach&mdash;ach!</i> the good, the delicious ginger-snaps! ... Who
+now will eat them?  <i>Ach!&mdash;Ach!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And up to her poor eyes went her blue apron.  It was
+a terrible tragedy to her.  Some people pitied her.  Others
+were heartless enough to laugh after the fashion of the
+blond, red-lipped officer&mdash;and to laugh once more at the
+summary fashion of his setting-down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a terrible, rasping voice said, speaking behind the
+dandy subaltern, and full four inches above the level of his
+ear:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Under-Lieutenant Fahle will remedy the damage done
+by his carelessness before he resumes his place in the
+train!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus the train waited while the offender, blood-red with
+rage and confusion, picked up the sticky brown cakes
+with his snowily gloved fingers, and replaced them in the
+broken basket, amidst the little old woman's humble
+apologies, and entreaties that the gracious gentleman would
+not trouble himself.  When the Colonel, owner of the
+rasping voice above referred to, in conjunction with a
+bushy scarlet beard and bristling mustaches, a stately
+height of six feet four inches, a regulation waist, and three
+rows of decorations, performed an act of bravery for which
+he deserved another medal still.  For, selecting the snap
+that looked cleanest, this dauntless warrior gravely took it
+between his thumb and finger, bit a piece out, and declared
+it excellent.  Then, amidst the rapturous plaudits of the
+onlookers, he solemnly saluted the twittering old lady, and
+swung himself loftily back into his carriage, thundering
+out once more the order:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Entrain!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Conceive the banging of doors, the bumping and clanking,
+the cheers and the tears <i>da capo</i>, and the curtseys
+the little old woman dropped, one after another, almost
+faster than one could count.  Suppose the train moving
+slowly on, and a tricksy spirit inspiring a wag among the
+rank-and-file aboard, to shout to her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Hey there, Mother Ginger-snaps! give us one before we go!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Twenty voices took up the cry, and blue cloth-covered
+arms were thrust out between the carriage window-bars.
+Hands waggled, soliciting the sugary boon.  And the little
+old woman, torn between the desire to give and the
+impossibility of giving,&mdash;danced like a hen on a hot griddle,
+until a giant porter, compassionating her plight, snatched
+her up like a large doll, and ran with her beside the
+moving carriages, holding her out at arm's length, as she
+upheld her basket, until all the ginger-snaps were gone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Instinctively as P. C. Breagh had felt that the cumbrous
+grandiloquence of his descriptive article would be snorted
+at by Mr. Knewbit, so he knew that the little incident of
+the ginger-snaps would afford his patron delight.  Therefore
+he tucked it away in a safe pigeon-hole of his memory,
+with a description of the rough, gay-painted, crowded
+wooden box he sat in, odoriferous with its conglomeration
+of smells, based on the combined stenches of tallow
+and perspiring humanity, laced with the sharp sour of
+malt, and mercifully tempered with the fumes of strong
+tobacco.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Piff!  The hot, cinder-flavored draughts that raced in
+over the glazed half-windows were powerless to freshen or
+dilute the atmosphere.  Yet among the varied types of
+men who, their heavy knapsacks disposed in iron racks
+above them, sat packed as close as sardines on the narrow
+benches, were not a few, who, judging by the mute evidence
+of their well-groomed skins and carefully kept finger-nails,
+their finer hair and more clearly modeled features,
+belonged to Germany's upper class.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Shriek!  The train plunged into a cutting ending in a
+tunnel of sheer blackness.  Bursting, with another shriek,
+into the light of day, she raced for a while neck-and-neck
+with a cavalry-train.  They were Red Dragoon Guards and
+White Cuirassiers of the Great Headquarters Staff, and
+they exchanged cheers and sharp, staccato shouts of
+"<i>Hurrah, Preussen!</i>" with the infantry of the Guard, as
+the latter were hurried by.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing was left to Chance.  All was deadly, methodical
+accuracy.  The keen, clear brain under Moltke's wig
+controlled the speed of every train upon the six Rhine and
+Moselle railways over which the Army of United Germany
+was rolling to inundate France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Trains, trains, trains!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Trains of trucks, laden with gabions woven of split
+beech-saplings, with oaken lascines and bales of empty
+earth-bags.  Commissariat trains of wagons packed with
+sheep and cattle, and the ubiquitous pig of the Fatherland.
+Coffee-and-sugar trains, trains of pea-sausage and the
+rock-hard brown biscuit wherewith "Our Moltke" fed his
+soldier men.  Trains of spare arms, clothing, trenching-tools
+and cooking-utensils; trains of cartridges, gunpowder,
+blasting-powder, solid shot, shrapnel, and the big
+projectiles destined for the siege-guns; with trains upon trains
+close-packed with the men who were to use these things,&mdash;took
+precedence or gave it, because the withered finger
+beckoned or waved....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Our Moltke," so mild and affable and courteous, truly,
+when the Genius that possessed thee spread his steely
+wings and soared, thou wert a very terrible old man, or
+so it seems to me.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+The descriptive article laid by, you found P. C. Breagh,
+in the interests of Mr. Knewbit, studying his fellow-travelers.
+The weak-eyed, spectacled young soldier on his
+left-hand, whose fingers were burned and yellow-stained, as
+though their owner had dabbled in chemical experiments,
+and who had remained mute as a fish throughout the
+journey, only opening his mouth to eat or drink, or reply
+to a remark addressed to him by a non-commissioned
+officer, was reading the "Iliad" of Homer in the original,
+from a little parchment-bound, Amsterdam-printed Elzevir
+edition, that he seemed to cherish as the apple of
+one of his short-sighted eyes....  A handsome young
+bugler in the next compartment had a well-thumbed copy
+of "The Pickwick Papers."  The huge tanned Guardsman
+on his right, whose broad breast displayed the medals of
+1866 and of the Schleswig-Holstein campaign, and whose
+powerful bass notes had reverberated through the
+diaphragm of his neighbor when he sang, was chatting with
+a younger comrade who sat opposite.  Holding the well-greased
+unburnished needle-gun between their solid thighs&mdash;to
+hang the silver-spiked Guard's helmet on the muzzle
+seemed a popular way of disposing of the headpiece&mdash;they
+exchanged experiences in a genial roar, subdued to a growl
+at confidential passages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Grete came to the Barracks to bid me God-speed....
+There were a few tears&mdash;dried when I promised to bring
+her a wedding-gift from Paris.  Thou seest, she is going
+to turn over a new leaf, and get married to a waiter at a
+Sommer-garten&mdash;a club-footed man who is not called upon
+to serve&mdash;being on the Exempt List."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They guffawed at the picture of the happy bridegroom.
+Said the senior, wiping his overflowing eyes with a
+hand as brown and broad as an undersized flitch of
+bacon:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I looked up 'Mina in the Landsberger-Strasse.  She
+could not meet me, as her old woman had a betrothal-party
+for one of her daughters.  A young student from a
+Conservatoire, in a tail-coat three sizes too small for him,
+and a pair of linen cuffs as big as starched table-napkins,
+was the victim served up.  I saw him as 'Mina carried in
+the spiced wine and rum-punch, and a longer pair of
+lantern-jaws I never saw.  But when they sat down to
+table, and I took another peep through the door-crack, I
+promise you those jaws of his were grinding away like
+steam!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Nu, but the punch?" asked the other Guardsman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Sapperlot!</i>&mdash;do you suppose I went without my whack
+of it?&mdash;and 'Mina's eyes as red as preserved cherries with
+crying about my going to the War?  I had had a mug of
+the good stuff, and a bottle of something or other!&mdash;gilt
+paper on the neck of it&mdash;nothing at all but fizzle inside.
+Then I settled down to a jug of cool beer and the breast
+of a turkey, while 'Mina was waiting on the parlor-folks.
+Heard her step coming along the passage&mdash;thought I'd
+play the fool with her a bit&mdash;so I turned the kitchen-gas
+low and hid behind the door.  In she comes!&mdash;I'd got my
+arms round her and kissed her&mdash;a regular juicy smack or
+two, before&mdash;by the yell she gave!&mdash;I knew it wasn't
+'Mina at all...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Potzblitz!</i> who was it, then?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Who but the old woman?  But for the thumping size
+of the waist I'd squeezed, and the taste of violet-powder
+in my mouth, I might have thought I'd got hold of one of
+the young Fräuleins.  'Help, murder, thieves!' cried she.
+'How dare you insult a respectable mother of a family!
+Give your name, you rogue, or I'll have in the police!'&mdash;'Don't
+do that,' says I.  'I'm only 'Mina's brother&mdash;dropped
+in to take leave before going to the War!'&mdash;'A
+fine brother!' says she.  'Do brothers hug their sisters in
+that bearish way?  Be off with you quick march! and
+think yourself lucky to escape so easily!'..."  He
+wound up: "But if she had reported me to the <i>Herr
+Oberst Leutnant</i>, nothing much would have come of it.
+He'd have said: '<i>Was sol Ich!</i>&mdash;but we're off to the
+War!'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A sentence or so more, and the conversation resolved
+itself into strong tobacco-smoke.  Twilight was fading into
+dusk.  Dortmund&mdash;Elberfeld&mdash;Düsseldorf had paid tribute
+of beers, cheers, and tears to the defenders of German
+Unity, the most inveterate songsters and conversationalists
+were getting sleepy, and it would be midnight before the
+troop-train, traveling, like the others that followed it, at
+a speed strictly calculated to permit of the somewhat slower
+transit of six supplementary trains bearing the King and
+his Great Headquarter Staff&mdash;could reach Cologne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lamps, adding the flavor of hot kerosene to the
+conglomeration of odors&mdash;had been lighted at Düsseldorf.
+The tobacco-reek had grown so dense that below their band
+of yellow light was a sharply defined band of opaque blue
+fog, in which medium colors were neutralized to monochrome,
+and outlines of sleeping, or chatting, or card-playing,
+or reading soldiers blurred into vagueness, wavered,
+and were blotted out for P. C. Breagh in a sudden doze.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+He wakened at a late hour, to the iron measure clanked
+and ground and beaten out by couplings and brakes,
+wheels and axles.  Snores of all kinds&mdash;from the shrill
+clarionet-note of the spectacled student of Homer to the
+deep 'cello-bass of the Guardsman who had hugged 'Mina's
+mistress in mistake for his sweetheart&mdash;resounded on all
+sides; the tobacco-fog had somewhat thinned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finding it possible to move, because his burly neighbor
+was soundly sleeping, pillowed upon the body of the man
+upon his right hand, P. C. Breagh yawned&mdash;recovered his
+knapsack, which had slipped from his knees to a floor
+which in point of cleanliness left much to be desired,
+removed from it with a fragment of newspaper the worst
+impurities it had contracted by contact, threw the
+newspaper out of the nearest window and, in the performance
+of this act, caught a not unfriendly eye.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Its owner, a huge young man, who, occupying a place on
+the end of the same seat, had been hitherto screened by
+the body of the huger private who had kissed not wisely,
+said, and in English of the Oxford brand:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You find our men lacking in good manners?  Yet there
+is much spitting on the part of English soldiers, when they
+are standing at ease, or off duty.  I have myself observed
+this."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Then you know England?" P. C. Breagh interrogated,
+and the private, who was very tall, very blond, very
+broad-shouldered, straight-featured, blue-eyed, and small-waisted,
+answered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Pretty well.  I have a relative who married a lady
+who is your countrywoman.  I have been the guest of her
+family at their London house.  You speak our language,
+for I have heard you.  And with a North Prussian accent,
+by the way."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh returned:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I spent three years at Schwärz-Brettingen.  With the
+sole result that I can make myself understood by
+Germans who don't speak English.  And that I owe to my
+landlady."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Guardsman, yawning and smiling:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My father sent me to Oxford.  Three terms have
+yielded this result,&mdash;that I can converse with Englishmen
+who know German.  Thanks to a charming young lady, a
+niece of the relative I spoke of just now, who was so good
+as to read the poems of Tennyson with me.  'The Princess,'
+'In Memoriam,' and 'Maud,' were her chief favorites&mdash;I
+preferred his epics founded on the Arthurian legend.
+Though my charming English cousin was often vexed with
+me for saying that our Wagner's verse-drama of the
+Nibelungen-Ring possessed far truer inspiration, and that
+'Die Walküre' and 'Tristan' would have been finer than
+anything Tennyson has ever written,&mdash;had they existed
+simply as poems, and never been wedded to music at all.
+At that the young English lady was angry; she said things
+to me in her indignation which were terrible; but she
+forgave me, because I was compelled to leave the University
+and return to Germany to put in my term of service as a
+private, before I present myself as a candidate for an
+officer's silver sword-knot in the usual course of things.
+You are, perhaps, acquainted with our German methods
+of qualifying for a Commission?  Bismarck has two sons
+serving as troopers with the 1st Dragoon Guards; whereas
+a private of Ours is a nephew of Moltke's, and two or three
+others are cadets of princely families&mdash;representatives of
+what your countrymen would call the 'aristocracy of
+Germany.'  Perhaps one or two of them will find that silver
+sword-knot they are looking for&mdash;across the frontier,
+somewhere between the Rhine and the Moselle!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"When do you think there will be fighting?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inexpressibly P. C. Breagh yearned to know when and
+where the dance was expected to begin.  But his eagerness
+seemed to freeze the loquacious Guardsman, whose blue
+eyes narrowed, whose smile stiffened, whose smooth voice
+instantly diverted the current of the talk to other things:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Were you at the Gala Performance at the Opera, the
+night before last?  Delphine Zucca could hardly sing; her
+husband, young Baron von Bladen, of the Jastrow Hussars,
+has been appointed first galloper on the Staff of General
+Manteuffel, Chief of the First Corps, First Army.  So
+the Zucca is naturally inconsolable, as they've only been
+married a month.  But Elise Hahn-Tieck, as the Genius
+of United Germany, in a corslet of gilt chain-mail, and a
+helmet crested with oak-boughs, with a green Rhine
+meandering over her white muslin robe, was tremendous when
+she came down to the center of the stage to sing '<i>Die
+Wacht am Rhein</i>,'&mdash;-carrying our East Prussian Flag and
+the banner of the Hohenzollern, and followed by other
+operatic actresses in character as the Auxiliary States.
+<i>Sapperlot</i>!  When she drew her sword, she was tremendous!
+And when she fell upon her knees, the big chandelier
+in the auditorium jumped.  She sang the part of
+<i>Gretchen</i> last season, and looked not much over thirty.
+Make-up, because, you know, she has a grandson who is a
+junior-lieutenant in the Duke of Coburg's Regiment of
+White Cuirassiers, and must be sixty if she's a day.
+<i>Prime donne</i> are like wines, no good till they've arrived at
+a ripe old age.  Though I could introduce you to a little
+girl of eighteen or so, just now doing a song-and-dance at
+the Schützen-Strasse Tingel-Tangel, who has a voice that
+pleases me better than the warblings of any of the highly
+paid Opera House nightingales.  And what a figure! round
+and tempting and seductive.  And such arms,
+and&mdash;<i>Sapperlot!</i>&mdash;what a pair of legs!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus prattled the twenty-year-old sprig of German
+aristocracy, to the other youngster, his senior in years if his
+junior in knowledge of the world.  He went on in his
+Oxford English:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not that I'm inclined to ruin myself for women, though
+I must say a good many pretty ones have been uncommonly
+kind to me.  That sort of thing runs in my family,
+though! and I ought to be obliged to my Cousin Max for dying a
+bachelor.  Killed himself in '66 about a mistress who was
+playing the double game.  A regular French adventuress,
+diabolically handsome, who eloped with him when he was
+<i>attaché</i> of our Prussian Embassy at Paris in '57, and has a
+husband living, they say.  Colossal impudence&mdash;actually
+passes herself off as my cousin's widow, in society of a
+certain sort.  So, out of the desire to deal Madame Venus
+a slap in the face, I got a comrade who knew her, to
+introduce me at a festive supper-party....  Said he:
+'Countess von Schön-Valverden, permit me to present my most
+intimate friend,' and reels off my name.  Would you
+believe it, the woman never turned a hair.  It was I who
+got flustered when she stared me in the face.  Colossal
+coolness&mdash;I can hear her now, lisping: '<i>The Herr Count
+is doubtless a relative of my poor, dear Maximilian!  Even
+had he not borne the name, I should have been struck by
+his resemblance to my beloved lost one.</i>'  And then I got
+out, not half as cleverly as I had planned it: 'And even
+had you borne the name that is your own, Madame, I
+should have been shot through the heart by the beauty
+that has already proved fatal to one member of my
+family!'"  He added, "I laid an emphasis on those four
+words, '<i>shot through the heart</i>,' because my unlucky cousin
+actually met his death after that fashion....  Will you
+have a cigar of mine?  They are better than the weeds
+our patriotic friends have bestowed on us."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh accepted a smooth light-hued Havana from
+the offered case, asking with interest, due to the lurid flare
+of tragedy in the background of the other's lively chatter:
+"And the lady of the Venusberg&mdash;how did she take your
+reference to her past?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Guardsman, cigar in mouth, stopped in the act of
+striking a fusee-match to answer: "She took it&mdash;as a
+woman of Madame de Bayard's stamp might be expected
+to.  With a <i>sangfroid</i> that one could only admire somewhat
+less than her superb skin and hair, her shape of a
+goddess and her marvelous eyes&mdash;almost the color of
+Brazilian tourmaline."  He sent out a spiral of fragrant
+brownish-blue smoke and added: "Had I actually stood
+four years ago in the shoes which I have legally inherited,
+I'll be hanged if I'd have shot myself and left her
+to my rival.  For the other was at Schönfeld&mdash;actually in
+the house, you must know!&mdash;when Cousin Max came home
+on leave.  Hence the tragedy at three o'clock in the
+morning.  Such a depressing hour to commit suicide.  Now,
+had it been after supper..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shrugged, and sent out another spiral of cigar-smoke,
+and, perceiving that his whilom listener heard no longer,
+ceased to talk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The while P. C. Breagh plunged into a brown-study by
+the chance utterance of a stranger's name, and unblushingly
+abandoning the effort to remain true to his gigantic
+type-ideal, hung fondly over the mentally evoked image
+of an Infanta in miniature.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Where was Juliette de Bayard now?  Had the outbreak
+of war hastened or delayed her marriage with the happy
+master of swordsmanship?  And&mdash;worshiping her father
+as Monica had said she did&mdash;how had she borne the parting
+from him?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She would be very calm....  P. C. Breagh pictured
+the little face drawn and pinched with misery; saw the
+sapphire eyes dimmed with tears unshed, imagined the
+slender throat convulsed with sobs that were kept
+resolutely back, heard the silver-flute voice saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My father has honored me with his confidence as long
+as I can remember, sir!" and, "See you&mdash;I will be trusted
+absolutely, or I will not be trusted at all!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Strange that his elfin queen&mdash;his carved ivory
+Princess&mdash;should bear the same name as the woman the Guardsman
+had gossiped of&mdash;the beautiful, evil creature with the eyes
+like Brazilian tourmalines.  And, what particular color
+in Brazilian tourmalines might have been intended?  Some
+were purple, others pink, and yet others reddish-brown.
+The woman who had dropped her parasol on the staircase
+at the Chancellor's had had eyes of tawny wine-color.
+With the remembrance, came back the perfume shaken
+from her rustling silks and laces, and the languid echo of
+her caressing voice.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Drowsiness came next, and then oblivion, in heavy
+slumber.  And, as the unconscious form of P. C. Breagh
+lapsed this way and that, and his chin burrowed deeper
+into his bosom, the Sergeant who occupied the corner-seat
+facing the sleeper,&mdash;shading his eyes from the lamplight
+with a broad brown hand that wore a thick silver wedding
+ring upon the little finger, lowered the hand, and,
+leaning forward, stared in the young man's unconscious
+face, with small, suspicious, unwinking eyes.  Now the
+eyes looked round so sharply, that every waking man in
+the compartment, save the blue-eyed patron of the
+Tingel-Tangel girl, found it necessary to assume the appearance
+of slumber, and the Sergeant's voice said hoarsely:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Private von Valverden!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"At your service, <i>Herr</i> Sergeant."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Private von Valverden, is this one, then, an Englishman?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Undoubtedly, <i>Herr</i> Sergeant!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Gut!</i>" said the Sergeant.  "But what is his calling?
+Is he of the newspaper-offices that he sits and scribbles
+so?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That question I cannot answer, Herr Sergeant, but
+if he be on the staff of any paper, he cannot accompany us
+without a <i>Legitimation</i>, and a letter from someone in
+authority."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Sergeant sucked in his bearded lips, and rolled his
+sharp little eyes more suspiciously than ever.  Valverden
+went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Doubtless he has them&mdash;I saw him show a paper to
+the Halt Commandant at Berlin, and the <i>Herr</i> Colonel
+himself spoke to him and told him he might travel as
+far as Bingen by this train.  And I happen to know
+that four London newspaper correspondents have been
+accredited by the King upon the instance of Count Bismarck;
+one being appointed to accompany the Crown Prince,
+another being permitted to accompany the Second Army,
+while two are attached to the Great Headquarter Staff."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Sergeant said, glancing at the unconscious slumberer:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Gut, gut!</i> but is this fellow one of them?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If he be not, <i>Herr</i> Sergeant, he will get no farther
+than Bingen, for doubtless the Commandant there will be
+on the lookout for persons whose credentials are not of
+the best."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Sergeant shook his head vigorously, wrinkling up
+his full-bearded countenance suspiciously:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And suppose the Commandant is not on the lookout,
+Private von Valverden?  See you, I have had my
+suspicions since yesterday, and I tell you..."
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap32"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XXXII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Every waking ear in the neighborhood, and there were
+now a good many, pricked with curiosity as the Sergeant
+half-rose, and, inclining his inflamed countenance and
+bearded lips toward the ear of his selected confidant,
+continued in a hoarse rumbling undertone:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Two of those <i>verdammte</i> English newspaper-scribblers
+that have got on the blind side of Their Excellencies and
+His Majesty the Commander-in-Chief were at the station
+at Berlin picking up information the very day we
+entrained.  Well do I know that paunchy little one with the
+big beard, who has, they say, as many Orders as a
+Field-Marshal, and who will venture to thrust himself upon
+Our Moltke in his study, and accost His Excellency Count
+Bismarck upon the very doorsteps of the Reichstag itself.
+They got off three trains ahead of us, paying for men and
+horses and trucks, to Cologne; and if this fellow were not
+a knave, would he not have gone with them?  <i>Ach, ja</i>!
+It would have been so!  But they did not even know him,
+though he pretended to touch his cap to them....  I tell
+you he turned as red as beetroot when they passed him
+without a glance.  <i>Nu, nu!</i> he is an unlicensed meddler,
+if not a French spy, speaking English.  Do they not teach
+it at their Lycées?  And he has got on the blind side of
+the Commandant at Berlin and the <i>Herr</i> Colonel.  But I,
+Sergeant Schmidt, have my weather-eye open, and it
+sticks in my gizzard that our so-glorious Moltke, let
+alone His Majesty, should with so much civility these
+quill-driving vagabonds encourage; when they say the French
+Emperor has given orders that, should the like of them
+about the heels of his Army Corps be caught sniffing, they
+are to be shot."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Possibly the Napoleon has more deficiencies to be
+ashamed of than we have, <i>Herr</i> Sergeant!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Taking a deep breath, the Sergeant blew himself out to
+the utmost of his capacity and bellowed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Himmeldonnerwetter!</i> are you going to insinuate in
+my presence that the Prussian Army has anything at all
+to be ashamed of?  Now you've waked this rascal with
+your racket, maybe you'll sit on his head while I go
+through his pockets.  Here, Braun and Kleiss, catch hold
+of his arms and legs!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Waking in the chiaroscuro of the smoke-filled, lamplit
+troop-carriage to find himself in the brawny grip of the
+aforesaid Braun and Kleiss, P. C. Breagh fought for freedom,
+yelling as one possessed, and lashing out with all his
+might.  In the heat of the scrimmage that followed, as a
+muscular arm in a coarse blue sleeve came round his neck
+from behind and choked him into silence, somebody said
+in his ear:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Keep still ... not hurt you!  Only going ... search!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And before he had rallied his wits sufficiently to realize
+that the warning was in English, a pair of extra-sized
+hands had deftly emptied the pockets of the old brown
+Norfolk jacket, relieved him of the cherished binoculars,
+a brand-new revolver, and a purse and letter-case that
+had been hidden in his bosom next the skin.  Then, a
+soiled newspaper having been spread upon the carriage-bench
+and the pieces of conviction arranged upon it,
+Sergeant Schmidt, surrounded by an audience of admiring
+inferiors, commenced to interrogate their owner:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What is this?"  He held up the well-used briar-root.
+"A pipe, and yet it might be used to conceal dispatches or
+tracings.  A pistol also.  On the principle of the French
+mitraille, with many barrels.  Prisoner, answer!  Where
+did you get this?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Returned P. C. Breagh, scarlet and breathing shortly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I bought it in Berlin from a pawnbroker in the
+Landsberger-strasse.  By what right..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Someone behind hacked him on the ankle, driving home
+the axiom that silence was wisdom, and he subsided,
+boiling within, as the Colt, a nearly brand-new six-barreled
+weapon, seen and purchased, together with its box of three
+hundred cartridges, for seven of P. C. Breagh's cherished
+sovereigns, was laid by, while the Sergeant, breathing
+stertorously, examined the contents of the purse.  He
+snorted, letting the bright coins run through his greedy
+fingers like yellow water:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Nine pieces of gold.  French coins, too, or call me a
+sheepshead!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"At your service, Herr Sergeant," put in the smooth,
+well-bred voice of Valverden, following on the ominous
+murmur that had greeted the Sergeant's announcement;
+"the money is as English as this revolver is American.
+Prove the first for yourself.  When has the French
+Emperor figured in a woman's hair and <i>corsage</i>?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A guffaw went up.  P. C. Breagh, recognizing the voice
+which had spoken from behind him, realized that here was
+a friend in need.  But an attempt at speech on his part
+was frustrated by an ominous tightening of the muscular
+arm that had previously half-strangled him.  The Sergeant,
+his fiery pot-zeal rather damped by frequent set-backs,
+snapped-to the purse and said, keeping it tucked in one
+capacious palm, as he shook out the contents of the
+letter-case:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>So</i>!  He is cunning, like many another of his kidney.
+Yet it may be here is proof sufficient to show him a
+rogue!  Who here reads French?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I do, <i>Herr</i> Sergeant."  Once again the well-bred voice
+of Valverden.  The Sergeant grunted surlily:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There is another here ... Private Kunz!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The spectacled soldier who read Homer in the original,
+and who had been violently displaced when the muscular
+Braun and the athletic Kleiss had obeyed the order to
+pinion the suspected one, shot bolt upright in his distant
+corner, saluted and said in a meek voice:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"At your service, <i>Herr</i> Sergeant!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Private Kunz, canst thou read French?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Zu befehl, Herr</i> Sergeant!"  The spectacled private
+added as the Sergeant passed him over the contents of the
+letter-case: "But these letters are not in French.  Two
+are in English, and one is in German."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Sergeant scowled and thundered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Thou art an ass!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"At your service, Herr Sergeant," mildly agreed the
+spectacled soldier, "but Private Count von Schön-Valverden,
+who understands the French and English languages,
+will corroborate my statement if you will kindly
+refer to him."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'Kindly refer.' ... 'Corroborate my statement.'
+..."  The Sergeant, purple in the gills, and with bolting
+eyes, loosened his collar-hook before he launched into
+profanity: "<i>Potzblitz</i>!  Never did I meet with language
+to equal thine.  What wert thou as a civilian before thou
+didst enter the Army?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Graduate of the University of Würzburg, <i>Herr</i> Sergeant,"
+faltered the spectacled Guardsman, "and <i>Privat-docent</i>
+in Chemistry and Philosophy.  Occupying the post
+of assistant to Herr Weber, Dispensing Chemist, of
+Strahlsund, near Stettin."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Sehrgut</i>, Private Kunz," said the Sergeant, conscious
+of the grins lurking behind the respectful faces about him.
+"Tell us plainly, and without lying or skipping, what
+are these papers the fellow has got on him?  Put him
+back on the seat, Braun and Kleiss, and sit on either
+side, each taking a wing.  Now, Kunz, do thou begin!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the little sheaf that had been transferred from the
+horny clutches of the Sergeant, to the yellow-stained
+sensitive-looking fingers of the chemist's assistant, was
+subjected to the scrutiny of the weak eyes behind his large
+round spectacles, as sleepy-looking Westphalian villages of
+cottages with tall tiled roofs, grouped about squat,
+low-spired churches; and leagues of rye and barley, almost
+ready for the sickle, streamed by the half-glazed windows,
+all black in shadow and white in the clear, pure radiance of
+August's crescent moon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Item</i>, a worn letter in English handwriting of the legal
+kind, dated in the January previous, and directed to
+P. C. Breagh, Esq., Care of Frau Busch, Jaeger-strasse,
+Schwärz-Brettingen.  <i>Item</i>, a passport issued some ten
+days previously, to the same person on application at the
+London Foreign Office, on disbursement of the sum of Two
+Shillings, and authorizing him, on payment of the proper
+dues and at his own risk, to proceed <i>via</i> Ostend to Berlin.
+<i>Item</i>, another passport, procured as a last resource&mdash;granting
+the said P. C. Breagh permission on the part of the
+Berlin Foreign Office, and as a strictly non-combatant
+British subject, to transfer himself, <i>via</i> Belgium and
+Luxembourg, to French territory.  Lastly, a half-sheet of
+tough Chancellory note-paper, covered with the large,
+closely-set, vigorous handwriting of the man who was
+meant when newspaper-editors and politicians, diplomats
+and monarchs, guttersnipes and generals, talked of Prussia.
+What would happen when that came under the spectacles
+of the ex-chemist's assistant?  P. C. Breagh thirsted to
+know.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What happened was, that the Sergeant, rendered
+impatient by delay on the part of the spectacled one, grabbed
+at the documents and dropped them on the unclean floor.
+The half-sheet of Chancellory note was picked up by
+Valverden.  He gave it one glance and said, smoothly and
+with an indefinable change in the tone of the voice that
+P. C. Breagh had thought so friendly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I would put this paper back with the rest and return
+them to their owner, Herr Sergeant, and prosecute no
+further inquiries, if I were you."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Nu</i>? ... <i>Was</i>?  I cannot read the crabbed stuff that
+is written and printed on the other papers," grunted the
+Sergeant.  "But this seems wholesome German....
+What says it, then?  Tell us, you, since that <i>gimpel</i> in
+glasses can make nothing of it, for all his brag."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Valverden obeyed and read:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>The bearer of this is an Englishman, named Patrick
+Carolan Breagh, speaking German with a slight accent.
+Height five feet nine inches, age 23.  Hair reddish and
+curling, complexion fresh, much freckled.  Short, straight
+nose, gray eyes with dots of yellow, chin square, slightly
+cleft.  Further his desire to proceed with our troops, if
+possible.  I can personally vouch for his honesty and good
+faith.</i>
+</p>
+
+<img class="imgleft" src="images/img-295.jpg" alt="signature of Otto von Bismarck">
+
+<p class="noindent">
+  "BERLIN,<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"<i>July</i>, 1870."<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap33"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XXXIII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh never heard the order given, but next
+moment his aching wrists were released from the huge, hard
+grip of Privates Braun and Kleiss, and the muscular legs
+that had affectionately twined about his own, were
+withdrawn.  Subsequently, singly, and in silence, the Sergeant
+handed back the watch, pipe, tobacco-pouch, purse, and
+note-case.  Last of all, Valverden, making a long arm,
+returned the half-sheet of Chancellory note, bearing the
+signature that had worked the miracle, without words, and
+looking coldly in its owner's face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Thanks tremendously! ... I've no doubt I'm to
+blame for not producing my credentials earlier," said
+Carolan.  "But I'd no notion of the rather serious turn
+things were going to take.  However, all's well that
+ends&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His smile froze upon his lips, and died out of his eyes as
+he encountered the stare the other turned upon him,
+answering haughtily:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I regret that you have suffered some rough handling
+from my comrades, under the wrong impression that you
+were an agent of the French Secret Service.  Admitting
+that our own side act advisedly in employing persons like
+you, I must say that to me, personally, a spy is&mdash;a spy!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But, hang it! you don't suppose&mdash;&mdash;" Carolan choked
+out after a moment of angry bewilderment.  And with the
+Sergeant's piggish little eyes curiously fixed on him,
+Valverden answered curtly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I suppose nothing.  Excuse me from further conversation."
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+The revolver with its cartridges had not been returned
+with the other articles.  Its owner asked the Sergeant for
+it, getting in reply only a glare.  Thenceforward the long
+night's journey for one traveler was performed in unbroken
+silence.  P. C. Breagh had been dispatched to Coventry by
+one and all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Men who conversed spoke in barely-audible whispers,
+their covert glances, like the frigid indifference of
+Valverden's regard, and the extra six inches of seat-space
+accorded to the holder of the States Chancellor's written
+guarantee, testified to the aroma of suspicion that
+personage's document exhaled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So at breathless, baking midnight the troop-train clanked
+into Cologne, no longer throbbing with the beat of drums,
+roaring with iron-shod wheels, swarming with men in
+brass-spiked helmets, choked with continuously shouting
+patriots, as it had been a few hours earlier when the
+Headquarter Staff trains had passed through,&mdash;and in the
+close, gray dawn of a thundery day, jolted into Bingen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here miles of rolling-stock and numberless engines
+blocked up the metal roads.  Shuttered windows and
+barricaded doors testified that house-owners had temporarily
+abandoned their property.  Strings of barges, laden with
+Commissariat stores and live-stock, were being towed up
+the Rhine by the gaily painted, white-awninged, paddle-wheel
+steamers familiar to the British tourist, while others
+were conveying voluntarily exiled residents and fugitive
+visitors down the classic stream out of harm's way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Conveyance by railway&mdash;of a kind&mdash;was to be had upon
+terms prohibitory to all but the opulent.  And disheveled
+ladies, pale or red with panic, besieged the station-master
+and his master, the Halt Commandant&mdash;with prayers,
+commands and entreaties, for places, but for places on some
+Northward-going train....
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Something was in the air besides the short, staccato
+bugle-calls, the scream of signal-whistles and the ceaseless
+beating of the Prussian side-drums.  P. C. Breagh knew
+it, even as a tall, lean, red-faced Inspector caught his eye
+and beckoned him imperiously to quit his cage, asking:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You have a <i>Legitimation</i> to proceed with the troops to
+Kreuznach?  No?  Then be good enough to stand aside
+until I have an opportunity of ascertaining why you were
+originally permitted.  Here is the Commandant."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Standing on the whitewashed platform, hot, dusty,
+unbrushed and unwashed, burdened with his unstrapped
+knapsack, a stout walking-stick, a leather-covered, screw
+topped sling water-bottle, some crumpled newspapers and
+a package of solid sandwiches&mdash;thrust upon him at one of
+the previous stopping-places, P. C. Breagh was conscious
+of cutting a sorry figure.  Conscious, too, of Valverden's
+supercilious eye-glass, glittering a few yards off, as he
+stretched his long legs on the platform and talked eagerly
+with some comrades of his own standing, straight-backed,
+long-legged youngsters, with arrogant manners, clear
+eyes, budding mustaches, newly fledged whiskers, broad
+shoulders and regulation waists.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No new pupil at a young ladies' boarding school, smarting
+under the double stigma of plainness and poverty, no
+cheaply arrayed debutante at a suburban subscription-ball,
+ever blushed more hotly or winced more painfully under
+the scrutiny of prettier and richer girls, than did
+P. C. Breagh under the glances of these young men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not the memory of the Army Service examinations he
+had failed in galled him, or that missed shot for the I.C.S.,
+or the University career foregone.  It was the word "spy"
+that rankled in his memory and took the starch out of his
+self-conceit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before the discovery of the Minister's written guarantee,
+Valverden had gossiped with him as an equal&mdash;the other
+Guardsmen had been friendly in their rougher way.  The
+fateful half-sheet of Chancellory note had changed
+everything.  "As though one had blossomed out in plague
+or smallpox," P. C. Breagh had said to himself bitterly.
+"And I feel like a kind of Ali Baba or somebody, whose
+talisman would only work upside down!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even his parting salute had met with grudging
+acknowledgment.  The Sergeant had grunted.  Braun and Kleiss
+had spat, and looked the other way.  Valverden's finger
+had barely brushed the narrow peak of his forage-cap.
+Only Kunz, the spectacled ex-chemist's assistant, had
+civilly bidden the parting guest good-day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was horribly sore at the treatment received from
+Valverden.  Susceptible of hero-worship, warm and sincere
+in feeling, he had taken a liking to the brilliant youngster,
+three years his junior, his superior in social status and in
+cynical knowledge of the world.  Was it disgraceful to
+belong to the Prussian Diplomatic Secret Intelligence
+Department, that ramifying spider-web of invisible wires,
+reaching to the uttermost Kingdoms of the civilized globe,
+and emanating from the Chancellory in the Friedrichstrasse,
+Berlin?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Army had its secret agents, an army of them, by
+Jingo!  Had not scraps of conversation reached the ears
+of P. C. Breagh no later than the previous day, relative
+to a certain dandy Colonel of Prussian Field Artillery,
+who for the past two years had filled the well-paid post of
+lace and ribbon Department Manager at the Paris Bon
+Marche.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then why on earth....  But at this juncture the Halt
+Inspector returned with the Commandant, a white-whiskered,
+potty officer, in blue infantry uniform with distinctive
+white shoulder-straps, beside whom stalked a tall,
+middle-aged Colonel of Uhlans, whose pale eyes, unshaded
+by the tufted schlapka, glittered through steel-rimmed
+glasses, whose teeth were clenched on a familiar
+meerschaum&mdash;and whose gaunt, broad-shouldered figure looked
+better in the dark blue cavalry uniform with its yellow
+plastron and white cross-belt, than in Herr von Rosius's
+Berlin-made private clothes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For it was undoubtedly Miss Ling's quiet-mannered first-floor
+lodger, who had resigned his post of teacher at the
+Berners Street Institute of Languages when the wire had
+come from Headquarters, bidding him come back and
+be a cog-wheel in Moltke's big war-machine.  What
+Mr. Knewbit would have called "the blank expression"
+appeared behind his spectacles when they showed him his
+young fellow-lodger from Coram Street.  But he paused
+when the Commandant halted and began to ask questions&mdash;which
+Carolan answered in the German so frequently tested
+on Herr von Rosius.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"How came you to travel from Berlin in a train set
+apart for the use of the Guard Infantry?  Show me your
+<i>Legitimations-Kart</i> and military ticket, if you have
+one!&mdash;You have neither? ... Then how did you, against the
+regulations, obtain permission of the authorities to enter
+a <i>militär-zug</i>?  It is inconceivable that you should have
+managed to conceal yourself without connivance of some
+kind!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Things were getting close to the Chancellory half-sheet,
+but it would never be displayed with the consent of
+P. C. Breagh.  He had wild ideas of feigning idiocy, of
+appealing to Von Rosius, but the first resource savored of the
+theater too strongly for adoption, and the second&mdash;one
+glance at the hard, ignoring eyes behind the steel-rimmed
+glasses disposed of that for good.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+At his wits' end, a loud, genial voice hailed him in the
+English language, flavored with the County Dublin
+brogue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"By the powers! and there's the face I'm looking for.
+Longer by a yard than it was when you capped me at
+Berlin.  Faith! and I stared at you with all my eyes,
+wondering where in the world I'd last beheld ye?  Till Chris
+Brotherton quizzed me and I bet him five shillings the
+place was Fleet Street.  Now, on your honor, was it?
+Speak, or forever after hold your tongue!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not quite Fleet Street, sir, but hardly a stone's throw
+from it!"  A great wave of unreasonable hope lifted the
+sinking heart of P. C. Breagh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The big, warm voice and the kind, bright glance that had
+wrought the miracle, belonged to a stout little bearded
+gentleman of fifty, topped with a hard gray Derby, and
+attired in a pepper-and-salt cutaway coat, brown holland
+vest and neat white hunting-stock, gray Bedford cords and
+shiny black spurred Blucher boots.  Had you met him
+cantering on some plump and well-fed cob along a green
+lane in the Mother Country, you would have taken him&mdash;but
+for the revolver-pouch that depended from a neat
+black leather belt, and the wallet that, with its companioning
+field-glass, was slung across his shoulders&mdash;for a hard-riding
+country surgeon or solicitor, of the good old English
+kind.  But P. C. Breagh knew better, and his drab world
+changed to rose-color, as the big voice rolled from the
+capacious chest:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Hardly a minute's ... Hold on!  For the life of
+you, don't refresh my memory!  What would it be to
+find one's mental legs getting shaky at the start of a new
+campaign!  Not a stone's throw from Fleet Street, did you
+say? ... By the Beadle of Old Trinity! if you don't
+mean the Maze at Hampton Court or the Nevski Prospect
+at Petersburg, or the garden of the Dilkusha at Lucknow,
+you're talking of Printing House Square!  Am I right
+now?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You've hit the nail, sir!  You were walking arm-in-arm
+with Mr. Sala&mdash;and I'd been introduced to him before,
+luckily! and he remembered my name and presented me
+to you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And I'm five shillings the richer by the meeting.  For
+if Chris Brotherton dares to say the <i>Thunderbolt</i> office
+and Fleet Street are anything but synonymous, he's a
+bolder man than I take him to be.  But I'm interrupting a
+conversation...."  He broke off, saluting the official.
+"Pray accept my apologies, <i>Herr</i> Commandant, I'll wait
+while you finish with my young friend."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Commandant stiffly returned the genial salute before
+he wheeled and walked off with the Inspector and Von
+Rosius, who, while the king of British War Correspondents
+chatted with his glowing vassal, had exchanged a few
+sentences with these personages apart.  Then said the kindly
+little gentleman, with a humorous twirl of the eye at the
+three:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I claimed your acquaintance because I saw you nearing
+the jaws of a German guardroom.  Though I fancy you'd
+a friend at Court in that Uhlan Colonel there! ... I
+heard him tell the Commandant that he'd no earthly idea
+how you got here, but you were simply an English schoolboy
+who was crazy to see a war.  And the Commandant
+said something about turning tail at the first whistle of a
+<i>Bombensplitter</i>&mdash;that's a shell-splinter.  Though I'm
+pretty certain by the cut of your jib you'd do nothing of
+the kind!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He added, as a familiar shout of "Entrain!" and a
+bugle-call brought the platform leg-stretchers scampering
+to their places and the long train of gray-painted wagons,
+officers' horse-boxes and baggage trucks, clanked into
+motion again:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your friends of the Guard have gone without you.
+Kreuznach will be their detraining-point&mdash;that's all I can
+tell you.  For the reason&mdash;and it's an uncommonly sound
+one!&mdash;that the newly mobilized men of the infantry
+battalions want a march to limber their joints and stretch
+their new boots a bit.  Begad! my own brogues would be
+the better of a day or two on the trees.  But rheumatism
+and corns are the price one pays for experience&mdash;and the
+privilege of talking like a daddy to harum-scarum gossoons
+like yourself.  You've no business to be here, boyo! but
+since you are&mdash;use your eyes and brains to observe
+with&mdash;never be ashamed of running away when you can get out
+of danger by doing it! and for your mother's sake, if she's
+living&mdash;don't be dragged into fighting on a side.  Forget
+that you have a revolver, if that bulge under your jacket
+means that you carry one,&mdash;and keep your temper cool and
+your opinions strictly neutral, if a fellow with a drop of
+Irish blood in him can!  Twit me with Bull Run, now, and
+you'll get the historic answer: 'Do as I advise you to do,
+not what I do!'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He pulled out the battered gold hunting-watch at the
+end of its short, strong leather guard, and glanced at it,
+saying with a sigh of relief:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Seven o'clock.  Breakfast ought to be ready at the
+Victoria&mdash;barrack of a hostelry, packed with cocky Prussian
+officers.  Suppose you come back there with me and have
+a bite and sup?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dazzling prospect! to a young man given to hero-worship,
+which the historian of "Cromwell" had positively
+asserted to be good for youthful bodies and souls.
+P. C. Breagh would have given a great deal if Valverden could
+have heard the invitation....  However, it was more likely
+than not that he had beheld the object of his scorn in
+familiar conversation with the most famous of British War
+Correspondents, as the gray-painted troop-train carried him
+away.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap34"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XXXIV
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+That was an enchanted walk for P. C. Breagh, back to
+the big, bare, barrack-like Victoria.  It was the Doctor's
+generous amends for an unintentional slight.  Two days
+previously, at the Potsdam Railway Station, Berlin, when a
+companion had said to him: "Who's the enthusiastic young
+admirer who kowtowed to you?  English, I should say, and
+you cut him unmercifully,"&mdash;he had answered, out of the
+whirl of great affairs:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I've no notion; but I'll make amends if ever he crosses
+my path again.  It's not my way to hurt a boy."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Bet you five bob he hails from Fleet Street," the friend
+had cried; and the Doctor had answered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If so, he has a claim on me I'm not going to deny."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dust underfoot made the tread fall as on velvet.  Dust
+in the air parched the throat and got in the eyes.  And the
+incessant rolling of the Prussian side-drums, lanced
+through with signal whistles and sharp bugle-calls, made
+the hot baked atmosphere quiver, and the play of early
+sunshine on myriads of brass helmet-spikes made the eyes
+water and blink, as the battalions of blue infantry that
+had marched into Bingen on the previous day mustered
+from their billets, were entrained and conjured away; and
+other battalions that had marched fifteen miles since
+cock-crow tramped in with the thick white dust turned to mud
+upon them by the heavy Rhineland dews that had soaked
+their boots and damped their uniforms, halted but to
+breakfast&mdash;and were off, almost on the heels of the first.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Division after Division of Cavalry&mdash;Uhlans in light or
+dark blue piped with red, and shiny black Lancer <i>schapkas</i>,
+Cuirassiers in white uniforms, with steel breast and
+back plates, and steel helmets simple in design as those of
+Cromwell's Ironsides; light blue Dragoons, Hussars with
+tufted shakos of miniver, and braided jackets of red, black,
+green, brown and pale blue, with their flying batteries of
+Horse Artillery, their proviant columns and ammunition-trains,
+had been rushed to the frontier with astounding
+speed.  Now the blue deluge of marching men with
+needle-guns came rolling after.  With thunder of heavy
+siege-trains, with patches of green upon the monotonous blue,
+that stood for picked battalions of sharpshooters; sons of
+gamekeepers and forest-rangers; bred from childhood to
+woodcraft and hunter's lore; experts in the use of the rifle,
+scouts and trackers of daring and skill.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the seventeenth of July the Warlock had said to his
+King, "Give me to the third of August and we are safe."  This
+was the third of August.  And the air was thick with
+something besides dust.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Conscious of this, they talked, the neophyte and the
+adept discussing things that had happened during the
+pregnant interval.  How Forbes of the <i>Daily News</i>, who
+tramped it up to Saarbrück by the Nahe Valley Road from
+Kreuznach, had seen the first blood flow, when a couple of
+infantrymen of the garrison were brought in in a chipped
+condition, having been sniped at by red-breeched French
+marksmen across the frontier-line.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a single battalion of the Hohenzollerns, the 7th
+Regiment of Rhineland Uhlans had hitherto constituted
+Saarbrück's garrison.  And the French being reported in
+force at Forbach, some fifteen or sixteen thousand men
+being said to be strung out along the frontier, a
+detachment of Uhlans with spare troop-horses had ridden into
+Neunkirchen on the morning of the twenty-fourth of July,
+and borrowed from the collieries a dozen stout miners,
+armed with picks, and supplied with blasting cartridges,
+fuses, and so on.  These grimy stalwarts they tied on
+troop-horses; crossed the frontier, and blew up the viaduct
+on the railway-line branching from the Forbach-Metz
+railway near Cocheren and connecting Metz with
+Saarguemines, Bitche, Hagenau and Strasbourg.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thenceafter, nothing of note happened until the twenty-eighth
+of July, when the Emperor Napoleon III. entered
+Metz with his Staff and the heir to the Throne Imperial,
+and formally took command of the seven <i>corps d'armée</i>
+known as the "Army of the Rhine."  Upon the same day,
+a party of the Hohenzollerns, commanded by an N.C.O.,
+reconnoitering on the right front, flushed a French <i>vidette</i>,
+in a wood covering a knoll of rising ground, over the top
+of which went the imaginary frontier-line.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Being shot at, the Hohenzollerns retired to garrison.
+But about regimental soup-time, twelve or thereabouts, a
+battery of six French field-pieces came over the slope of
+the Spicherenberg heights, getting into position on a
+plateau half-way down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And while the Prussian drummers beat to arms; while
+the Hohenzollerns hastily posted their four companies, one
+on each of the town's three bridges, and sent one forward
+on the heels of a squadron of Uhlans, up the Forbach Road,
+which runs through Saarbrück, rising as it trends to the
+west;&mdash;while the rest of the Uhlans stood to their horses in
+the Markt-platz, and the civilian population stopped to
+look on, or scuttled for cover, six shells were fired, three of
+them hitting a little beerhouse on the hill-brow, just off
+the Forbach Road&mdash;and the Imperial cannonade was over,
+the artillerists retired, and nothing more had happened,&mdash;though
+the <i>videttes</i> and patrols, Gallic and Teuton, had
+cracked away at each other from high noon till batlight.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Discussing these things, the adept and the neophyte came
+to the Victoria, every window of which was crowded with
+Prussian officers, eating, drinking and smoking, or shouting
+for breakfast, coffee, beer, wine and tobacco in every key
+of the human register.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Distracted waiters ran about like ants, and before the
+packed and roaring caravanserai&mdash;keeping guard over one
+of the little decrepit iron tables that stood under the dusty
+acacias&mdash;a little table that had a fly-spotted cloth upon it,
+and a great glass basin filled with sugar cubes, and was
+further adorned with brown rings made by the bottoms of
+coffee-cups and beer-glasses, were the two friends referred
+to by P. C. Breagh's Good Samaritan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One was a handsome, fair-haired, smiling man in the
+scarlet, yellow-faced, gold-adorned uniform of a crack
+regiment of British Light Dragoons, "a swell of the
+haw-haw type" Mr. Ticking would have termed him.  With this
+splendid personage, who was generally referred to as
+"Major Brotherton," was a shorter, plainer individual
+with fluffy whiskers, attired as for the sports of the field,
+in a white, low-crowned felt, large checked tweeds, in which
+orange and pink predominated, drab leggings and heavily
+nailed highlows.  A Dolland field-glass was slung from his
+shoulders, and over a neighboring chair lay a huge box-coat,
+the multitudinous pockets of which appeared to contain
+his luggage, for a bath-sponge in a rubber bag rolled
+out of one as he rose up to welcome the leader of the
+party, and a box of areca-nut tooth-paste, and a hairbrush
+with a patent collapsible handle had to be shifted before
+the sponge could be replaced; just as though Mr. Toole
+had thought out the costume and the comic business for
+some traveling Briton in a new farce.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You may suppose P. C. Breagh blushing from consciousness
+of the contrast of his own travel-stained griminess
+with the Major's dazzling brilliancy, when that personage
+shook hands with him and said it was going to be
+a hot day.  Introduced by his kindly patron to the
+sportsman in pink and orange tweeds with:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Tower, this is a young countryman of mine&mdash;picked up
+at the station&mdash;just tumbled out of a troop-wagon full of
+Guards Infantry&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fluffy whiskered sportsman civilly nodded and
+observed: "And dashed good luck for him!"  He added:
+"Doctor, if you recognized your baggage-van by that
+confounded goat you've had painted on it, I'll admit it's
+served some purpose besides frightening German crows!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Begad! it frightened me when I saw it on the siding
+this morning!" avowed the genial Doctor.  "But how was
+I to know that the Berlin painter who undertook to copy
+the crest from my family coat-of-arms had got a
+magnifying eye?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the man in cavalry uniform, smoothing his drooping
+mustache, and speaking with the drawl of Robertsonian
+comedy:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"At any rate, the size of the animal testifies to the
+antiquity of your race, and so on.  For in prehistoric days,
+I take it, goats were as big as cows are now!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My thanks to you, Brotherton, for supplying so plausible
+an explanation.  I'll salve my pride of pedigree with
+it next time I'm taken for a traveling quack, and
+Prussian soldiers suffering with indigestion apply to me for
+pills and black-dose."  He added, with his pleasant laugh,
+catching P. C. Breagh's glance of incredulity: "Actual
+fact, and no embroidery, I assure you!  You understand
+that to emphasize the strictly pacific nature of my calling,
+I'm exploiting my honorary degree for all it's worth!"  He
+added, rather pointedly addressing the handsome
+cavalryman, "I've no special ambition to be shot as a
+combatant!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Nor have I," said the man in sporting checks, warmly.
+"And, Brotherton, my dear fellow, if this 'ere 'umble
+individual may add his advice to the counsel you've
+already had from the man, by Jove! who of all men knows
+best what he's talkin' about, you'll stow that 'ere
+lady-killing uniform, and the silver helmet with the flowin'
+plume away in some spare portmanteau, and leave 'em with
+your saber and the dazzlin' horse-furniture you showed
+me this morning in charge of the landlord here, until you
+come back from the war-path safe and sound.  Am I
+talking 'oss sense, Doctor?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Indeed you are, Tower!" agreed the Doctor.  "And,
+Chris, if you'll listen to him, I'll be eternally grateful to
+you, for your own sake.  You've too much of what Tower
+and the Yankees call 'horse sense' not to know you're
+handicapped as a war correspondent by your glorious
+panoply!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Major smiled, and said, smoothing the drooping
+mustache with a fine white hand that wore a diamond-set
+signet:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You can't blame me for thirsting to carry the harness
+I've worn in sham fights for nearly half my lifetime, where
+bullets are flying in real earnest?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not a bit, dear fellow," said the Doctor, with a twinkle,
+"so long as you thirst to do it and don't!  That letter 'R'
+on your shoulder-cord is hardly big enough to serve as
+cover where those bullets are plentiful.  And with your
+influence, prospects in life, and position, you'd be an
+ingrate to Fate if you were anxious to die at thirty-four."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Brotherton, knitting his fair eyebrows over the
+restless fire in his handsome eyes:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Influence has been my bane, and the two other things
+have stood in my light ever since I was an urchin in
+knickerbockers.  I've been Queen's page, and Prince's Equerry,
+and <i>aide-de-camp</i> on the Duke's Staff, and I've never seen
+an army in the field, or smelt powder, except at Aldershot,
+or Shorncliffe, or the Curragh of Kildare, or at
+carbine-practice.  What luck do you call that?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Dashed hard!" said Tower.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brotherton went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I was a callow cadet at Sandhurst when the Regiment
+covered itself with glory at Balaclava, and as it has seen
+no active service since&mdash;I've had no chance to find out
+whether I'm a real soldier, or a kid-glove one."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why not have exchanged&mdash;&mdash;" began Tower.  The
+Major shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It wasn't to be done, for a very solid reason.  My
+father, who served with Redlett's Brigade in the Crimea,
+was killed on Balaclava Day; and I was an only son.  And
+my mother was a confidential Lady-in-Waiting, and knew
+where to apply, by Jove! when my youthful ambition was
+to be cold-watered....  And now that the dear soul has
+gone, and I'm on the Retired list&mdash;after fifteen years of
+Windsor, Buckingham Palace, Whitehall, Pall Mall and
+Hyde Park&mdash;out breaks the war that I've been sighing for.
+And, after hovering about the <i>Thunderbolt</i> office till
+every printer's devil knows me by name, and cooling my
+heels on the doorstep of your chambers in the Albion so
+persistently that your housekeeper believed me a bailiff with a
+writ&mdash;I managed to knock over Opportunity on the wing&mdash;and
+secured, thanks to you, Doctor! the chance of my
+life!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stood up, a handsome, martial figure in his scarlet
+and golden uniform, his eyes ablaze under the silver,
+gold-starred, white-plumed helmet, his fine face flushed with the
+battle-lust.  And as he stretched out his hand across the
+spotty tablecloth, the feasting flies rose in a buzzing
+cloud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And glad am I if word of mine helped to get that
+chance for you, and you know it, Chris, and that it's a
+pleasure to have you with me," said the genial voice, as the
+Doctor took the offered hand.  "But the military array, my
+dear fellow!  The wampum and war-paint&mdash;that's what I
+kick at, with my gouty toe of fifty-two."  He added: "But
+here comes the waiter with the coffee and eggs, and bread
+and butter, and something like the cold sliced ham I'm
+dying for&mdash;if only it doesn't happen to be raw!  So sit
+down and we'll fortify ourselves against possible
+short-commons at Mayence.  For that's where the King is, with
+Moltke and the Great Headquarters.  And that's the
+destination we take rail for at twelve noon."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He added, as Brotherton and Tower started in their
+chairs, and P. C. Breagh quivered like a fox-terrier shown
+a rat: "As for the other chiefs, the Red Prince is&mdash;no
+one seems able to tell where&mdash;and the Crown Prince is on
+the frontier.  Maybe we'll hear of him at Wissembourg
+by-and-by!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"We should be there ourselves, in the thick of it,"
+asserted Brotherton, savagely slashing at a pallid pat of
+butter, as Tower poured boiling milk and coffee into cups
+half-an-inch thick.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"We would be, Chris, me dear man!" said the Doctor,
+liberally piling slices of cold veal and ham-sausage on his
+guests' plates, cutting bread and passing the pickles, "if
+the authorities panted to have English correspondents at
+their elbows while they're posting their pawns and pieces
+for the opening game!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brotherton retorted with a touch of pomposity:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You take it lightly, sir.  But for the honor of our
+profession, we should extort recognition at the hands of
+these foreigners.  We should, as representatives of a great
+Power, submit to no belittling.  Wielding as we do&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Keep all that toffee for the speechmaking end of a
+Newspaper Press dinner, Chris, my boy," drolled the Doctor.
+"Sure, 'tis we ourselves are the foreigners here&mdash;hard
+as it is of conception to a true-born Briton.  And&mdash;since
+we're permitted on sufferance to accompany the forces
+of United Germany&mdash;the least we can do is to extract the
+necessary information painlessly!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But, my God! when I think of what may be doing at
+this moment!" broke out Brotherton, hitting the table,
+"I feel as if I should go stark, staring crazy!  Have I
+sacrificed what I have sacrificed&mdash;and&mdash;and borne what I
+have borne, to trot like a stray tyke at the tail of a moving
+Army&mdash;picking up such scraps as may be thrown me from
+day to day?  I tell you, sir, the mere idea is horrible to
+me!  I cannot put it more mildly.  My blood is not yet
+chilled by age, or my susceptibilities blunted...."  He
+pushed away his plate and rose, pulling his gloves from his
+belt, and taking up the cloak that had been thrown over a
+neighboring chair.  "I will ask you to excuse me!  I have
+not yet received my papers back from the Halt Commandant.
+I will call upon him now!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Come with you, if you've no objection to walking in
+civilian company?" said Tower, swallowing a mouthful,
+emptying his coffee-cup, and reaching for the white felt
+hat and the box-coat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Come back about ten&mdash;I may have a scrap or two of
+news worth hearing," said the Doctor, with imperturbable
+good temper; and with a horsey touch of the hat on Tower's
+part, and a sulkily dignified salute from the Major, the tall
+soldierly figure in its scarlet and blue and gold, and the less
+dignified personality in the clothes that might have been
+worn by Toole in the part of a horsey squire, went away
+together, over the yellow-burnt grass and the dusty sun-baked
+gravel, dotted with little breakfasting groups of
+officers, who had been crowded out of the Hotel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I'm glad Tower's gone with him.  He's in a frame of
+mind that won't make for pleasant relations with Prussian
+transport-officers," quoth the Doctor, looking after the
+retreating couple with something like a twinkle and
+something like a sigh.  "But he's a grand fellow!&mdash;a splendid
+fellow is Brotherton!&mdash;even if he sometimes reminds me of
+the Quaker wife who said to her husband: 'Friend Timothy,
+all the world is wrong except thee and me, and thou
+is a little wrong sometimes, Friend Timothy!'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And having got rid of his vexation in one gentle gibe at
+the idiosyncrasy of the petulant Brotherton, he fell to his
+breakfast again, urging his guest to a renewed attack on
+the strong ham-sausage and weak coffee, with the words:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Bad policy&mdash;neglecting rations.  Must stoke when fuel
+for the human engine is to be had, if you're going to
+chronicle the deeds of an army that fights as it marches.  And
+when you've cleaned your plate, and drunk another cup of
+coffee, you shall tell me why you came here and what you
+want to do."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He commented, when P. C. Breagh, duly replete, had
+stated the nature of his aims and ambitions; touching upon
+his discouragements as briefly as might be:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"War Correspondence! ... Well, I'll admit I guessed
+that you'd set your heart on something of the kind, when
+I saw you tumble out of that troop-wagon with a note
+book sticking out of your jacket-pocket.  And so old Knewbit
+financed?  Sporting of him!&mdash;and he deserves that his
+letters should be worth reading.  Call 'em 'Experiences of
+a Tyke at the Tail of an Army.'"  He added, his bright
+brown eyes twinkling through their gold-rimmed glasses.
+"For that's where you've got to be!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He lighted a huge cigar, twisted round his green-painted
+iron chair and sat astride upon it, resting on its rickety
+back his folded arms, short and strong, with small muscular
+hands, sunburned like his bearded face and thick bull-neck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am not joking, my young acquaintance.  Can't you
+understand that to keep abreast with even a secondary
+Staff in the war-field you have to sweat out money at
+every pore?  And&mdash;without gold for transport or thalers
+for <i>trinkgelt</i>&mdash;or seasoned knowledge to help you even if
+your pockets were full, what can you accomplish?  I tell
+you frankly&mdash;nothing at all!  But if you'll follow on the
+fringe of a Division, marching with the hangers-on and
+officers' servants&mdash;you'll get many a scrap of useful news
+and many a meaty bone of valuable information tossed
+to you day by day.  And even with the rear of the Army
+Corps you elect to stick to, you'll sup your fill of raw-head
+and bloody bones&mdash;take the assurance from me.  Will
+you&mdash;with the advice?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The great man was so unassuming in his kindness that
+the little one hardly grasped the full extent of it, even as
+he said, blinking as though a cinder of the Lower Rhineland
+Railroad had got into his eye:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Yes, sir, and thank you!  I shall never forget how
+good you've been to me!" and got reply:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You've no business to be here, boyo, but since you
+are, more by luck than grace, use your eyes and stuff your
+memory with things worth keeping.  Now as my time is
+precious,&mdash;is there anything more you want to know?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Only one thing....  I have been puzzled by an&mdash;an
+incident that happened to a&mdash;fellow in my own
+position."  P. C. Breagh boggled horribly: "Was regularly
+set on getting to the Front&mdash;hadn't a notion how to set
+about it&mdash;when he&mdash;accidentally&mdash;managed to get hold of
+a&mdash;kind of official authorization.  An informal pass,
+certifying the bearer as trustworthy&mdash;written and signed by
+Count Bismarck himself...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And that wasn't half bad," the Doctor said, knocking
+the ash off the huge cigar, "for a beginner pretty well, it
+seems to me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said P. C. Breagh:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He was tremendously elated at having got the paper.
+It seemed to smooth away every difficulty.  But later,
+when he found himself in touch with Prussian Army
+men&mdash;they,&mdash;not only the gentlemen privates qualifying for
+commissions, but the common rankers,&mdash;dropped him like a
+hot potato once they knew!  And&mdash;I'd like to know the
+reason why they cut me&mdash;I mean him?&mdash;because they
+supposed him to belong to the Secret Intelligence
+Department?  '<i>A spy is&mdash;a spy!  Excuse me from further
+conversation!</i>'  His mouth twisted wryly, repeating the
+hateful words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I&mdash;understand."  The Doctor stroked his beard.  "And
+previously this young Englishman and the rank-and-file
+of the Guard Infantry"&mdash;P. C. Breagh kept as straight an
+upper-lip as was possible&mdash;"had chatted together upon
+friendly terms?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That was it.  He had got on splendidly with them&mdash;one
+fellow especially.  And&mdash;it hurt, being suddenly sent
+to Coventry!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And does it strike you"&mdash;there was infinite sagacity
+in the clear brown eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses,
+"that if you had been chatting freely with a supposed
+equal, about your own position, prospects, and opinions,
+you would have 'dropped him like a hot potato' if you
+had suspected him of being commissioned to sound you for
+French sympathies, predilections, and so forth&mdash;on the
+eve of hostilities with France?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A light broke in upon the darkness in which Carolan had
+groped.  His eyes became circular, and his mouth shaped
+for a whistle.  He exploded:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Oh, hang it!  I never thought of anything so&mdash;so
+beastly....  I wondered why Valverden shied, supposing
+me a Secret Information agent, when the Army has shoals
+of 'em....  But that Government should set such fellows
+sniffing at the heels of the Army&mdash;of course I never thought
+of that.  It's not&mdash;cricket, is it, sir?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Doctor's hearty laugh pulled round the heads of a
+breakfasting party of officers not far off.  He said,
+lowering his voice:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You remember the nigger's definitions of verse and
+prose, don't you?  '<i>Go up mill-dam, fall down slam! dat
+verse.  Go up mill-dam, fall down whoppo, dat blank
+verse.</i>'  Prussian military authority may hold, that between
+spying on the enemy before the Army and spying on the
+Army before the enemy, there is as little distinction.
+Though they'd think differently at the Horse Guards, thank
+the Lord!  By the way, with regard to that gaunt, long-legged
+Lieutenant-Colonel of Uhlans of the Landwehr who
+claimed to know something of you, rather luckily for your
+ambitions!&mdash;where did you come across him?  '<i>An English
+schoolboy,' he called you, 'crazy to see War!</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh explained:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He did know something of me, sir!&mdash;though it was the
+merest chance&mdash;our meeting.  Until a week ago he was
+a teacher of English at the Berners Street Institute of
+Languages, and lodged at my landlady's.  And they
+recalled him to Berlin a few hours before the Declaration
+of War."
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap35"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XXXV
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+It was the Doctor's turn to whistle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Phew!  So that's how they spy out and trap deserters
+from their Reserve and <i>Landwehr</i>.  Clever&mdash;uncommonly!
+Possibly it's not business to tell you, but you've given away
+a genuine bit of information.  And as a lesson in caution
+for the future, I shall annex your nugget&mdash;do you hear?
+In return&mdash;I've a pass for an extra groom who has shot
+the moon with three weeks' double pay in advance, the
+cowardly beggar!  And&mdash;supposing you're not too
+proud&mdash;I'll take you with me as far as Mayence."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I don't know how to thank you, sir!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Leave thanking for the present."  He pulled out the
+gold chronometer, secured by its twisted thong.  "Ten
+o'clock, and here come Towers and Brotherton, like
+Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, '<i>with a kind of confession in
+their looks which their modesties have not craft enough to
+color</i>.'  No news to be had?  No starting for Mayence
+before twelve sharp, in spite of honied entreaties lavished
+on the authorities?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Deuce a scrap!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Devil a minute!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They threw themselves upon chairs, hot, dusty and panting.
+They had got their papers back, countersigned, from
+a kind of understrapper, after, to do him justice, very
+little delay.  But of intelligence, not a modicum was
+obtainable, except that the Emperor was said to be close to the
+frontier near Saarbrück at the head of the Imperial
+Guards.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Though they've been saying that for forty-eight hours,"
+grumbled Tower, "and I'm dam' if I call it anything but
+Ancient History."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At which candid confession the Doctor's mouth twitched
+under the thick, curling mustache of rusty iron-gray.  He
+said, his quick eye noting an excited stir and bustle about
+the thronged entrance of the hotel, and the crowding of
+officers about another, who had a paper in his hand:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Those officers have heard&mdash;something that is not
+Ancient History.  And look at the fellows who were eating
+at the tables in the windows; they've something tastier to
+discuss now than the landlord's indifferent grub!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was true.  In the long dining-room, in the restaurant,
+and in the reading-room, which had been converted into a
+temporary coffee-room, men were swarming like bees and
+buzzing like them, while detached, staccato sentences
+shaped out of the buzz.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Saarbrück ... Spicheren ... Frossard ... Colonel
+von Pestel...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Something up...."  Towers adjusted his eyeglass.
+Brotherton, catching a sentence shouted by an officer of a
+<i>jäger</i> battalion to another green-coat leaning from a
+window on the second-floor, jumped as though he had been
+prodded with a bayonet, and turned a flaming face upon
+his friend:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A telegram has come in...  There has been serious
+fighting at Saarbrück.  Did they lie to us at the station,
+then?  Officers and gentlemen&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Softly, Chris!"  The Doctor's hand upon his arm
+checked him on the verge of a fiery outburst.  "I fancy
+they've a right to hold back intelligence dispatched from
+Headquarters when the senders mark the wire '<i>Delay</i>.'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No doubt, but I had better interview the Commandant.
+Details would be worth having!" said Brotherton, adding
+with a peculiar smile, "Or at least I, in my inexperience, am
+inclined to think so."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Came the quick answer:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You can have details now&mdash;without troubling the
+Commandant!  Full&mdash;well, as fully as I got them&mdash;under a
+strict undertaking of secrecy for four hours&mdash;at six o'clock
+this morning!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brotherton turned as ashen-pale as he had hitherto been
+crimson.  Towers called out gleefully, as active little thrills
+of excitement coursed down P. C. Breagh's spine:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Bravo, Doctor!  And you had it up youi sleeve all
+the time.  'Unfold, thou man of 'orrid mystery!' as Miss
+Le Grange says at Astley's in the <i>Specter's Bride</i>."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There's not so much to unfold.  But from, eight
+thousand to ten thousand French troops made an attack on
+Saarbrück yesterday.  Some battalions of the 8th Prussian
+Army Corps had augmented the original garrison, and their
+nearest support was at Lebach, five miles to the rear.  A
+mitrailleuse-battery and some field-guns posted on the
+Keppertsberg drove the Blue Uniforms out of the town!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Towers said: "Then why the deuce..." and broke off.
+Brotherton gloomed heavily.  The Doctor went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Emperor and the Prince Imperial were on the
+heights, with the Imperial Staff, to see the show&mdash;an astonishing
+spectacle it must have been.  Frossard, in the center
+with supports drawn from the Second Corps&mdash;Marshal
+Bazaine on the right, with troops picked from the Third.
+And in command of the Fifth Corps, De Failly, who
+crossed the river at Saarguemines."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Queried Tower:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And when the big bow-wow had made the little one
+drop the bone, he didn't stick to it?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Doctor returned:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No&mdash;and that's the puzzle of the whole affair.  The
+whole glorious display resolved itself into a cannonade,
+with occupation of the heights on the left bank, and nothing
+further.  Though the French foreposts actually occupied
+the three bridges and held the town."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tower said, his pale eyes sharp with intelligence:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Bet you a tenner it was done for the boy.  Got up to
+blood the young'un&mdash;cockerel of the Walk Imperial.
+Geewhillikins!&mdash;What telegrams Nap must have fired off to
+St. Cloud!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They'll have read them in Berlin and London long
+before they get to us," said the Doctor, shrugging.  "Where
+are you off to, Brotherton?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brotherton returned&mdash;and the tone was offensive, if the
+words were not:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To do what my senior Special does not appear to think
+necessary&mdash;wire the news to Printing House Square."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The elder answered with a good-humored twinkle:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why, that was done hours back, by grace of the
+authorities.  They bridled my tongue, but left my pen
+unhampered.  Knowing, of course, that the British Public
+must wait for its news until breakfast-time to-morrow.
+Were you speaking to me, Brotherton?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Major was saying in a voice as little like his own as
+the livid mask of rage he turned on the Doctor resembled
+his ordinarily calm and placid visage:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I was addressing you, though it pleased you not to hear
+me.  I was asking you what you meant, by G&mdash;&mdash;! in
+stealing a march on the man you've called your friend?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Doctor's eyes blazed behind their gold-rimmed
+glasses.  Anger darkened his handsome sunburnt face.  He
+drew himself up and said, speaking simply and with dignity:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"How do you infer that I have 'stolen a march on you'?
+By taking the apology they give one here for a cold tub at
+cockcrow and going over to the Hauptmann's office with
+our papers while you and Tower were sleeping like&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Like dormice, by Gad!" put in Tower.  "And so we
+were.  And it's a case of the early bird&mdash;and not the first
+time, I'll swear&mdash;by thousands!  And, Brotherton&mdash;you
+ought to apologize.  You were simply infernally rude just
+now!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Major loftily:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I gave it as my opinion that I had been dealt with
+unfairly.  I do not withdraw the words I used.  But I
+comprehend that my senior in the service of the paper is not
+anxious to share the credit of the earliest intelligence with
+regard to what is taking place on the frontier just now."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For God's sake, Chris, don't say what you'll be sorry
+for!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I'll say what I think, to you, sir, or to the King of
+Prussia!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gray-bearded, strongly-featured face, with the look
+of generous sorrow on it, and the younger, fairer,
+handsomer face, with the stamp of arrogance and vanity and
+pride marring its manly beauty, confronted each other in
+silence, until, with an impatient snarl, Brotherton swung
+round upon his heel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Look here!&mdash;look here!&mdash;where the merry hell are you
+off to?" Tower spluttered, grabbing at the sleeve of the
+splendid scarlet tunic.  "Not going to part company for
+a misunderstanding&mdash;hey?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am going to part company," Brotherton returned
+bitterly, freeing himself from the detaining hand, "since
+the jealousy that hampered me in my military career
+threatens to mar my prospects now.  Where I am going to
+I cannot tell you&mdash;probably you will hear from me, but I
+cannot promise it.  Good-bye!  Or&mdash;if you prefer it&mdash;<i>Auf
+wiedersehen</i>!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook hands with Tower, nodded coldly to the astonished
+P. C. Breagh, formally saluted the Doctor, who returned
+with a slight bow, picked up his cap and cloak
+and strode away over the sun-dried grass and the hot yellow
+gravel, making for the gaudily painted iron gates that
+ended the drive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Oh, Chris, man-alive, and am I jealous of ye?" said
+the Doctor, his spectacles dewy with irrepressible laughter,
+as the gallant figure in its gorgeous scarlet and golden
+trappings was swallowed in a crowd of blue uniforms: "If
+you'd waited another minute, I'd have told you of something
+else your senior in the service of the paper by seventeen
+years, some odd days, and a minute or two isn't
+anxious to share with you, and that is a reputation for not
+being a hot-headed, unreasonable young ass!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He's making a bee-line for the Railway Station," said
+Tower, wiping his heated forehead with a gaudily-hued
+silk handkerchief, "and if he comes across any of those
+Transport swells there'll be the deuce to pay.  He's got the
+bit in his teeth and his tail tight down over the ribbons, by
+George!&mdash;and he'll kick the trap to pieces and lame himself
+to a dead certainty.  Shall I go after him and try to <i>soother</i>
+him down a bit?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Doctor shrugged assent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If you think 'twill be any good! ... Meanwhile I
+have to write a letter or two, and pack, or rout my man
+out of the servants' quarters to do it.  As for you, my
+boyo!"&mdash;he turned on P. C. Breagh a keen, humorous
+glance that summoned up blushes to mantle under the
+railway grime&mdash;"a wash and brush-up will do you no harm,
+and besides&mdash;my absconding Berliner isn't described on
+his passport as a mulatto!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Tower came back in half an hour, reporting failure in
+the attempt to pacify Brotherton, who nevertheless joined
+the Doctor's little party at the station, having apparently
+recovered his serenity of temper, and abandoned his
+determination to forswear his senior's company.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beer, coffee, bread and meat were still being lavishly
+distributed among the troops continually parading for
+departure, and the train-loads of soldiers passing through.
+And the exodus of panic-stricken visitors, flying from the
+little up-Rhine watering places, in apprehension of the
+arrival of the Emperor with his mitrailleuses, continued;
+until, in another hour, the shrunken finger of the Warlock
+wagged, and thenceforth the Rhine Valley Railways were
+totally blocked for civilian passengers, and given over to
+the transport of men and munitions of war.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Presently, when a train of coal-trucks from Kreuznach
+came jolting into Bingen, bearing on their sable flanks the
+chalk hieroglyphics that signified their official emptiness,
+P. C. Breagh was destined to behold personages of the
+loftiest rank and the utmost exclusiveness, German Serene
+Highnesses, Austrian Duchesses, and English peeresses,
+with their children and lap-dogs, their maids, <i>chefs</i>,
+coachmen, lackeys, and grooms, packed into these grimy vehicles
+without precedence or selection, or any seating-accommodation
+other than that afforded by an empty sack or an
+armful of straw.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The troop-train conveying the mounted gendarmerie of
+the Third Army Corps&mdash;huge men equipped as dragoons&mdash;to
+Mayence, afforded accommodation to the men, horses
+and vans of the Doctor's party.  Long before the fortifications
+came in sight the roads were blotted out by marching
+columns, and the fields were dotted with moving
+transport-trains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At Mayence, whose stone-paved streets were roaring with
+the passage of iron-shod wheels, the trampling of
+iron-shod hoofs, and the measured tramping of infantry
+battalions, the Doctor, stepping from the train, was seized
+upon by friends.  Yet after the first eager interchange of
+interrogations and answers, he found time to bestow a
+parting hand-grip on Carolan and a final word of advice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And&mdash;put this in your pocket&mdash;it'll be a help to you
+if it doesn't hang you.  They're lithographed by the
+Prussian War Department, and every German officer has one.
+And here's something else, a lot more use than the revolver
+those chaps stole from you.  You'll know better than to use
+it unless in case of need!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was a folding pocket-map of the Eastern Departments
+of France, with certain military routes very nicely
+marked in red upon it.  While the something else proved
+to be a wicker-covered metal pocket-flask, containing about
+half-a-pint of the whisky of Kinahan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The donor added:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Remember, train your memory to pigeon-hole things
+for later description, and never be caught taking notes, or
+fighting on a side!  And&mdash;be on your guard with women,
+pretty ones especially.  And&mdash;there's a scrap of paper in
+the pocket of the map-cover, may come in handy, at a pinch.
+No, no thanks!  General von Reigen, that's the light blue
+Würtemburg Hussar officer talking to Tower&mdash;tells me
+Moltke and his staff are quartered at the Hotel de Holland.
+If so, the King won't be far off.  He thinks Bismarck has
+gone to a house outside the town, but he can't swear to it.
+There goes a carriage with the Red Prince's big
+buck-nigger on the box.  Shows his Highness must be
+somewhere hereabouts.  As for the Crown Prince, nobody will
+say anything.  He's marching&mdash;with an end in view.  And
+they say the French are shooting uncommonly badly&mdash;and
+that half of the Reserve men don't know how to use their
+chassepots.  Well, they'll have practice enough before long.
+Good luck, and good-bye!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The "scrap of paper," upon later examination, proved
+to be a five-pound note, placed there by the hand that
+later penned those wonderful war-letters&mdash;under a wayside
+hedge, at a corner of a plank bivouac-table, on the zinc
+counter of a wine-shop filled with carousing soldiers&mdash;at the
+ebony and tortoiseshell <i>éscritoire</i> of Madame la Marquise,
+in the boudoir of the château that had been so sorely
+battered by those big potatoes of Moltke's.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kind little, great man; a whole chestful of Orders had
+no power to chill the big warm heart that prompted your
+many deeds of generosity.  It molders in a coffin now,
+and the decorations are dimming with dust in a glass-topped
+box.  But beyond the Veil that parts the seen from
+the unseen world, I like to think that there were waiting
+for you rewards and honors, in comparison with which the
+most coveted earthly insignia were vilest dirt and dross.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap36"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XXXVI
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Said the sutler-woman, whose coarse black hair was
+powdered white as any lady's of the early eighteenth
+century, smearing the dust from the peonies of her
+cheeks with a brawny arm that was dusty as any
+miller's:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Young man, if thou stick to thy word, and take good
+care of the jackass, remembering the sharp nail-spike in
+the end of the whip-butt if he tries to kick or bite&mdash;I'll
+creep in under the tilt and take a forty-winks.  Lord be
+thanked! my legs are sound, but they ache a bit!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The jackass, who boasted the not inglorious name of
+"Rumschottel," laid back his ears viciously at his mistress's
+reference to the persuasive spike in the whip-butt,
+and the young man addressed by his temporary employer
+nodded in assent without opening his lips.  For the dust
+in which the little tilt-cart moved was almost solid, being
+kicked up by the Seventh Corps of the Second Army of
+Germany, in line of march through the Haardt Wald by
+Kaiserslautern.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sutler-woman's young man had marched with the
+Fifth Corps from Mayence by Oppenheim and Alzey, and
+had picked up an American tourist who knew of a short cut
+to Kaiserslautern, and had mislaid the Army Corps in
+trying to find it.  Staffs, squadrons, batteries, battalions,
+transport and baggage had vanished like smoke among
+these vineyard-and-forest-clad hills, these pine-jacketed
+gorges, these roads that ran between natural ramparts of
+granite, or passed through quaint villages tucked under
+hillsides crimson and gold with laden appletrees, and
+dominated by ancient castles perched on towering
+platforms of rock.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scenery palls when the thigh-bones seem wearing through
+their sockets; when the stomach complains for very emptiness,
+and there are bloody blisters inside the ragged socks.
+The American who had been so cocksure about the road to
+Kaiserslautern was lying up under a peasant's penthouse-thatch,
+at a twenty-mile distant village, drinking Kirsch,
+nursing his own skinless heels, and reading up "Murray."  His
+late companion had refused to give in, and perseverance
+had won its reward.  Sixty miles or so above
+Kreuznach, where the main road forks right and left,
+climbing the shoulders of the Nahe Valley, he had met the Ninth
+Corps of the Second Army marching up from Bingen, and
+hobbled at the heels of one of the dusty battalions until
+he could hobble no more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sutler-woman had come upon him sitting
+pumped-out by the wayside, had sold him bread, coffee and sausage,
+doctored his blisters, supplied him with tallowed strips of
+linen to replace his wornout socks, earned his gratitude,
+and displayed no reluctance to profit by her philanthropy,
+when he had volunteered to help lead the jackass as far as
+Kaiserslautern.  True, he spoke a most vile jargon, but
+you cannot have everything.  And the weather was so
+beautifully dusty, thought the sutler-woman, that an
+assistant would certainly be of use.  Without the dust that
+clogs the human throat, the trade in liquid lubricants would
+be less roaring.  And the tilt-cart contained, beside other
+marching-requisites, a twenty-gallon barrel of rather
+luke-warm beer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young man nodded again as the cart-shafts tilted in
+the hame-straps, and a command to throw his weight on the
+front-board was issued from behind.  There was a good
+deal of creaking as he obeyed.  A heavy weight suddenly
+added to the jackass's load made Rumschottel look
+malevolently round his near-side blinker, and display an upper
+row of long orange-colored teeth in testimony of his desire
+to bite.  Then his driver slid off the board, took the rope
+reins, and continued to trudge beside him, keeping well
+to the low hedgerow so as to leave a clear space between
+the sutler's cart and the seemingly endless column of
+dusty infantrymen, striding steadily forward through a
+blazing August noon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ahead, where black-and-white and white-and-black lance-pennons
+flickered at the turn of the road below a steep hill-shoulder
+covered with bronzing vineyards heavy with purpling
+grapes, the light-blue of a Prussian Dragoon regiment
+and the facings of a squadron of Red Uhlans showed
+through the thick coating of dust that clung to horse and
+man.  But the dark uniforms of a succeeding battery of
+Horse Artillery and the indigo or rifle-green of the
+battalions that marched with the needle-gun, had long ago
+given place to a pervasive whitey-brown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Schmidt, Klaus, and Klein were pressing on in spite of
+dust and an eighty-five-in-the-shade thermometer, you must
+understand, so as not to get left out of the fighting that
+must be going on ahead.  For the First and Second Corps
+of the Second Army, with the Headquarters Staff, were
+known to have reached Homburg, and on the previous
+night the Army of the Crown Prince had bivouacked
+behind the Klingbach, south of Landau....  Five or six in
+the morning, supposing him to have marched at dawn,
+would see him well across the frontier.  And scouts on the
+hills had heliographed and flag-signaled the arrival of
+Imperial battalions and artillery at Wissembourg, and blue
+Baden Dragoons reported a cavalry camp at Selz.  For all
+they knew, "Unser Fritz" and the Napoleon were even then
+at grips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So they marched&mdash;as they had marched since they detrained
+at Bingen, swinging starkly on under the weight of
+the knapsack, eighty rounds of ammunition, rolled great-coat,
+camp-kettle, sword, spade, water-bottle, haversack
+and bread-roll, or half-a-dozen flint-hard brown biscuits
+threaded together on a bit of string.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Men sweated and blistered under the relentless sun, but
+not many fell out, and there were very few severe cases of
+sunstroke, these for the most part falling to the lot of
+Reservists.  And in the hottest part of the day a plump of
+thunder broke among the hills eastward, and a deluge that
+followed turned the dust on them to paste.  Then the sun
+came out again and baked the paste hard; and the sutler-woman
+stuck her head out between the front flaps of the
+cart-tilt, and told her young man to pull up for a bit of a
+rest and a snack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So P. C. Breagh unharnessed Rumschottel, and the jackass
+rolled in a sandy hollow in asinine fashion, and rose
+up braying and refreshed.  Then, quite mildly submitting
+to be hobbled by his mistress, he fell-to upon a patch of
+thistles that the battery-wheels had spared.  And the
+sutler-woman, who answered to the name of Krumpf, produced
+black bread and cheese, with peppery sausage of Brunswick,
+and a mighty tin bottle of cold milk-coffee, from the
+depths of her vehicle, and liberally dispensed of these
+refreshments to her servitor.  She partook of them herself,
+largely, lacing her own mug of coffee out of a private bottle
+of <i>schnaps</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Herr Je!</i>" she grumbled presently, "what is he gaping
+at?"  For her young man had finished eating, and was
+absorbed in watching marching legs....  She added,
+snorting scornfully: "We might sit here and sleep for
+three hours, and they would still be going by when we woke
+up....  Horses' legs and men's legs, just as though they
+had got clockwork inside them....  It was so in
+Schleswig-Holstein, and it will be so in France.  And what the Danes
+got the French will get, and that will be a thumping!"  She
+nodded directly afterward and dozed heavily, leaning
+her broad back against the wheel of her cart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps she slept a quarter-of-an-hour while the dusty
+men marched by, four abreast, without slackening pace or
+changing step.  They had hard-featured, serious, intelligent
+faces for the most part, thought P. C. Breagh, though
+here and there was a visage that bore the stamp of vice
+upon it, or was pimply with drink, or brutal, or merely sly.
+They had ceased to sing, though their bivouac of the night
+before had been patriotically vocal; the dusty instruments
+of the bandsmen came less frequently out of their dustier
+bags.  They marched for the most part in silence, though
+the trampling of their feet made the solid ground reverberate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sometimes a battalion would quit the road, and hedges
+would go down before it as by magic; and through the
+middle of a field of browning corn or whitening barley
+a broad white highway would be beaten hard as any
+threshing-floor, bare of anything save the most insignificant
+tokens of their passage, such as a covey of late-hatched
+partridge chicks trampled into rags, a broken strap, a
+fragment of biscuit, a scattering of potato-peels, an empty
+match-box, the paper that had held an ounce of tobacco,
+and many empty bottles that had held beer.  Rarely, a
+great scurry in the dust where some obstreperous charger
+had reared and fallen with his rider, the extent of whose
+injuries might be guessed by a clotted puddle of drying
+blood and a broken stirrup-iron.  Thus, under the
+rhythmical tread of the dusty boots, as under the iron-shod
+wheels and iron-shod hoofs that had preceded and would
+follow them&mdash;green things were beaten from the face of
+earth, and fur and feather fled, as they were flying before
+the Third Army, marching toward Wissembourg; as they
+were flying before Steinmetz, bringing the First Army from
+the North.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Where they halted they left their taint by the scorched
+hedgerows, and the black circles of their great fires
+remained to tell of them, like the soil-pits that scarred the
+fields where they had bivouacked.  Last night, by some
+delusion of the wearied senses of sight and hearing, they had
+seemed to the boy who had slept on the outskirts of their
+camp to be marching even as they slept.  The lusty snoring
+of the countless swathes of sleepers between the long,
+orderly rows of stacked needle-guns topped with gilt-spiked
+helmets, suggested the rushing of a host in onward motion.
+When the boy who had lain through the night under the
+sutler-woman's cart to guard it from light-fingered
+marauders had fallen into a troubled slumber, his blistered
+feet had carried him on in dreams behind them still.  Then
+in the blue dusk before dawn cavalry trumpets far ahead
+and shrill bugles near at hand had shrilled reveillé&mdash;and
+when the tremendous war-machine rushed on again once
+more, the dusty boy had been caught up once more by the
+wind of its going, and drawn along with it, as a chip is
+whirled in the under-draught of a rushing express-train,
+or a wisp of hay is caught up by a traveling tornado, and
+borne upon its dreadful way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He grinned now, reminiscent of the Doctor's analogy, as
+a blunt-nosed, shaggy dog of no distinguishable breed
+trotted past, sneezing, between the files at the rear of a
+half-company-column.  "Whose is the beast?" he heard a
+soldier ask his neighbor on the right-hand, and:
+"Nobody's&mdash;joined the battalion at Bingen!" was the reply.  Upon
+which the inquirer tossed the canine waif a scrap of biscuit,
+with "Here, Bang!" and Bang, thus adopted and christened,
+neatly caught the morsel, bolted it, and trotted on,&mdash;no
+more an ownerless mongrel, but a regimental dog.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Now the sutler-woman was waking, rubbing the sleep out
+of a pair of eyes which were less bright than they had been
+before their owner became addicted to the use of beer with
+<i>schnaps</i> as a lacing.  She had an incipient beard, and the
+voice of a heavy dragoon, yet there was a tinge of womanly
+coquetry in her way of straightening her big, battered
+bonnet, and adjusting the checked blue-and-yellow shawl
+tied crosswise over her voluminous bust.  She yawned,
+struggled to the perpendicular position, with some difficulty,
+owing to her corpulence; and cried, pointing a stout
+red finger at her henchman, yet squatting in the shade of
+a clump of dusty whins:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Lord! if he isn't mooning still, with his chin on his two
+fists!  Such a <i>gimpel</i> I never yet did see!  But they say all
+the <i>Englisch</i> are mad, their climate makes them so.  Otherwise
+would they not live in their country?&mdash;but no! they
+can't.  <i>Hier</i>!  Catch Rumschottel, and let's be moving!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh obliged, undisturbed by the appellation of
+idiot, or the contumely heaped on the United Kingdom.
+It was better to be on the black books of the sutler-woman
+than distinguished by her too-favorable regard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For though the stout proprietress of the tilt-cart had
+undoubtedly played the part of a Samaritaness toward
+the wandering Englander, she was, it had to be owned,
+more charitable than chaste; trading not only in beer,
+bread, sausages, matches, cheap packs of cards, dominoes,
+pipe-tobacco, sweets and pickled cucumbers, but following,
+between marches, the oldest profession in the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Being invited on the previous evening to convey a verbal
+billet of the amorous kind to a young Pioneer of Würtemberg
+Artillery, P. C. Breagh had flatly declined.  Conceiving
+the refusal to be prompted by jealousy, Frau or Fraulein
+Krumpf had not taken it in ill part.  Until, being
+undeceived upon this point, she uncorked the vials of her
+anger and exerted a gift for vituperation justly celebrated
+among her clients of the rank and file.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You threadling, you whipper-snapper!  You pickled
+herring in a jacket and breeches!  There is a man buried
+in the Domkirche at Mainz, where I belong, that has been
+dead over a hundred years, and has more of good red life
+in him to-day than thou!  '<i>Frauenlob</i>,' they called him,
+because he couldn't live without women, and women! and
+when he died, eight of the town-girls carried him on his
+bier.  And they poured wine over his grave so that you
+stepped up to your knees in it&mdash;all because he had liked
+the women as a tom-cat likes cream!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first spate of her resentment over, she had accepted
+the situation.  But the wound remained; and as the better-half
+of Potiphar may have railed at her husband's young
+Hebrew steward, the sutler-woman nagged at the young
+man who limped beside her jackass, through the deep
+welcome shade of ancient oak-forests or over long blistering
+stretches of naked mountain roads, as those tireless, dusty
+men marched by.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no keeping up with them; they passed, and
+others swarmed after them.  Batteries succeeded battalions,
+ammunition and baggage, ambulance and commissariat-trains
+were followed by yet other battalions, while the
+sweat dripped into the eyes of P. C. Breagh and the skin
+wore off his heels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At midday, when his chest hurt with the very act of
+breathing and his straining muscles seemed about to crack,
+a man died.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was an infantryman of Hessians, and it happened
+quite suddenly.  P. C. Breagh, who had long ago abandoned
+all unnecessary integuments, marching without coat,
+vest, collar, or braces, had noticed him a moment previously
+swinging along with unbuttoned uniform&mdash;it was marvelous
+how small a minority of the soldiers had sought this
+method of relief....  His open shirt showed the lighter
+skin of his bare chest, his <i>pickelhaube</i> was perched upon the
+cooking-pan crowning his knapsack-top, and he had draped
+a wetted red handkerchief over his steaming head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Save that his face was purple with congested blood, so
+that his pale, staring eyes seemed colorless by comparison,
+and he walked with open mouth, the Adam's apple in his
+lean throat jerking as he gulped down the hot air, he
+conveyed no dire impression of breakdown.  But suddenly he
+stumbled and spun round, as if seized by sudden giddiness,
+clutching at his shirt-breast, dropping his gun.  Men were
+thrown out of step as he fell, with an absurd clatter of metal
+and tin-ware.  Yet they marched on without a pause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Others came, stepping over the fallen figure lying
+huddled in the way.  Its fingers moved, paddling in the
+dust; and P. C. Breagh, yielding to a sudden impulse,
+dropped the bridle of the jackass, ran in, grabbed hold
+and hauled the heavy body out of the way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What are you doing, born stupid that you are?" the
+sutler-woman cried viciously, for Rumschottel had swerved
+aside to the hedge and was ravenously devouring weeds.
+She added, becoming aware of the prone infantryman, who
+was lying on his back staring at the sun unwinkingly: "It
+it all up with that one, his eyes are turning white already.
+Such as he have never six pfennigs to pay for other folks'
+time and trouble.  Better leave him for the <i>Feld-lazarett</i>
+to pick up."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But P. C. Breagh only grunted dourly, hunkering by the
+prostrate Hessian, and with a parting sarcasm the
+proprietress of Rumschottel seized her beast's head and
+trudged on.  If she had looked back, she would have seen
+good Irish whisky wasted.  For despite the shade of the
+tree under which he was hauled, the rolled-up coat thrust
+under his head and the laving of his face and breast with
+spirit, it was all up with the man, as she had prophesied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He grabbled with his sunburnt fingers in the dust a
+little, and tried to lift a hand to his perspiring chest.  By
+the tin crucifix dependent from a leather bootlace round his
+neck, you could tell that he tried to make the sacred Sign.
+Then his eyes rolled up, and an expression of great surprise
+overspread his discolored countenance.  His knees jerked
+and a sound like a rotten stick of wood, breaking, came
+from his open mouth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>A-a-ach!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap37"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XXXVII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+He would breathe for possibly an hour longer, but
+practically the man was dead.  Still listening for the faint,
+intermittent heart-beats, a splash of gravel stung P. C. Breagh
+smartly in the neck and cheek, and the dull thunder
+of horse-hoofs came unpleasantly close and stopped.  He
+lifted his ear from the rattling chest, and looked up into
+the face of an infantry officer, who was reining up his
+beast and bending from the saddle as he looked at the
+casualty on the ground.  The officer asked in staccato
+sentences:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is a case of heat-stroke?  You are a doctor?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh answered shortly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Enough of one to know that there is no hope."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The horse, a fine, spirited animal, hoofed the ground
+impatiently.  The captain said, patting the glossy,
+sweating neck:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Very good.  Will you kindly show me his name-tag?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh found the zinc label, bearing the moribund
+Hessian's name, regimental, battalion and company-number,
+and turned it face-upward on the discolored breast.
+The captain, leaning from the saddle, read, and mentally
+registered.  His keen eyes, hedged with dusty fair lashes,
+narrowed against the blinding white sunshine and,
+somewhat bloodshot with heat and fatigue, had something like
+a smile in them; and for some reason, to the dusty young
+man who squatted on the ground by the dying, the smile
+was an offense.  He scowled, and the officer, noting this,
+asked curiously:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Were you acquainted with that one, then?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He indicated the body by an overhand thumb-gesture.
+Resenting the gesture for the same inexplicable reason,
+P. C. Breagh responded with a head-shake.  The captain
+pursued, pulling the damp and blackened reins between his
+gloved fingers, stained with his own sweat and the horse's
+within the palms....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I asked, because you seemed&mdash;how shall one put
+it?&mdash;sorry for him, you know!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dust-smeared, freckled face turned on the interlocutor
+angrily.  The smouldering fire in the eyes leaped
+into sudden flame:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am, damned sorry for him!  To come by his end like
+this&mdash;without firing a single shot!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was something unusual about this little dialogue,
+carried on between the smart mounted officer and the
+footsore, untidy pedestrian, over the body stretched out by
+the roadside.  As the broad stream of marching men flowed
+by, curious eyes rolled their way, the whites showing
+startlingly in their owners' sunburned faces.  Men
+wondered what he had died of, and what they were discussing
+there.  And P. C. Breagh went on, his mouth pulled awry
+with wrathful bitterness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He was as good a patriot, I'd bet my hat!&mdash;as any
+fellow in his battalion.  He set as much store as others by
+King and Fatherland!  I daresay he dreamed of getting
+the Distinguished Service medal for some tremendous act
+of gallantry, and astonishing his wife&mdash;he wears a wedding
+ring, so I suppose he had one!&mdash;with it when he got home.
+And now it's all over.  It makes me feel sick.  All over,
+and nothing to show for it!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The blank, rolled-up eyes, staring unwinkingly in the
+face of the coppery, westering sun, and the discolored face,
+with the look of agonized surprise now fixed upon it,
+seemed to echo dumbly: "Nothing but this!"  The officer
+returned:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So! but there will be a war-pension for the widow, as
+he died upon Active Service, and that will not be so bad,
+after all.  And presently the <i>Feld-lazarett</i> will come up and
+put him in a wagon.  He will be buried at sundown, when
+we halt....  They will give him a firing party and a
+bugler&mdash;everything will be done decently.  After a battle
+there is not always&mdash;you understand?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shrugged, and the Danish and Austrian war-medals
+on his dark blue tunic glinted, in witness of his ripe
+knowledge and experience.  Hating him still more vigorously,
+P. C. Breagh ended his sentence:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not always time to stow away lost pawns!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'Pawns!'  My worthy sir, <i>our</i> pawns are battalions!"  The
+captain laughed, showing even, but tobacco-stained
+teeth under his thick brown mustache.  "This was&mdash;a
+unit among myriads of myriads....  You will find plenty
+of work waiting for you among his comrades, if, as I guess,
+you are a graduate in surgery out for practice....  Let
+me advise you to join a Red Cross ambulance&mdash;the
+arm-badge is a protection&mdash;of a definite kind."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He saluted, gave rein, and the tired, yet impatient horse
+snorted relief, and cantered on with him, sending another
+shower of dust-grains and gravel-grit over the extinct
+"unit among myriads of myriads" and the unkempt
+Samaritan hunkering by its side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A scalding wave of bitterness and resentment had swept
+over him a moment previously.  Behind and through the
+officer's brown-eyed, good-looking face he had seen the
+fierce, challenging blue stare and great domed skull and
+bulldog jaw of the great Minister who made wars at will.
+And the limp, dead body of the "unit among myriads of
+myriads," lying by the beaten track where twenty
+thousand men thus clad and armed had passed already, had
+awakened in him a rage of pity and a fury of disgust.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This War that had seemed such a huge and splendid
+world-event, shaking sovereigns upon their thrones and
+stirring nations to wildest enthusiasm, meant catastrophes
+innumerable as minute; infinitesimal tragedies never to be
+heard of, related or known,&mdash;involving the humbler and
+the weaker among the people of both sides.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile&mdash;here was a letter, pinned inside the dead
+man's shirt, an ill-spelt, loving scrawl, containing a wilted
+sprig of some kind of garden-herb, smelling evilly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Glory is glory," said the poor soul who wrote, "but so
+thou bring thyself safe back to me and the Kinder, that will
+be enough."  Meanwhile, entreating her lambkin to
+remember that "old man" kept off the fleas, she enclosed
+"a bit picked from the clump in the garden border by the
+old red gooseberry bush," and with a tender inquiry after
+his poor corns, and a row of blotty kisses, signed herself
+his faithful wife Lottchen.  One could only be sorry for
+poor Lottchen and note down her address, together with
+her deceased lambkin's name and regiment, and send her
+presently a line from a stranger who had been near him
+when he died.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the unit among myriads of myriads, nothing
+could be done beyond pulling his yet pliant limbs into
+decent straightness and folding the already stiffening hands
+upon the unheaving breast.  Then P. C. Breagh covered
+his face with the red handkerchief, and&mdash;a tin crucifix
+being suspended from the neck by a leather bootlace&mdash;touched
+the violet-mottled lips with it, and whispered a
+prayer for the departed soul, before, resuming possession
+of his discarded jacket and shouldering his knapsack, he
+trudged upon his way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Our Moltke" was testing his material at the outset,
+by heavy marching.  Since breakfast-time there had been
+no halt; the columns of human flesh and horsemeat had
+pegged along, tirelessly as though the sinews that bore
+them had been forged of elastic steel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The blazing sun set in a great whirlpool of molten rubies
+and gold beyond the Birkenfeld, while the sky to the north
+and east was green, with a vivid, springlike hue.  The
+clear, thin dusk of August fell, yet the tireless columns
+marched on&mdash;and in company of other, even queerer
+wayfarers, the dusty young man with the knapsack doggedly
+continued to trudge beside them.  When at length the halt
+was sounded, he staggered through a hedge-gap into a field
+of flax, and threw himself heavily face downward amid
+the yellowing stems that had long ago flowered, and
+seeded, and ripened for pulling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stupid with weariness, he might have lain there ten
+minutes, when a bugle shrilled close by, and the brown, hairy
+heads and forelegs of the leaders of a team of gun-horses
+crashed through the hedgerow, the scarlet face, open
+shouting mouth, and uplifted whip-arm of the forerider showing
+above.  As luck would have it, orders had been given that
+a half-battery of mounted artillery should bivouac in this
+flax-field.  And death under the iron-shod hoofs of the
+horses, and the iron-shod wheels that followed them, shaved
+very close to P. C. Breagh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet he was not grateful as he picked himself out of the
+hollow into which his frog-like, instinctive leap for life had
+landed him.  The heavy riding-whip of the forerider had
+cut him bitterly across the loins while yet in mid-air.
+Adding insult to injury, the artilleryman had cursed his
+victim for getting in the way of the battery, and the other
+riders and the gunners on the limber were grinning from
+ear to ear.  Smarting, P. C. Breagh cursed back, in a
+cautious but vigorous whisper, as he hobbled back to the
+road....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon the farther side two half-battalions of infantry,
+divided by a little bushy knoll, were already encamped
+upon a strip of gorsey grass.  The thing had been done as
+if by magic, the officers grouped in the foreground round
+their little camp tables were drinking Rhine wine and beer
+as peacefully as though they had not stirred for hours.
+Behind them the battalion-color and the halberd of the
+drum-major had been planted upright in the center of an
+orderly array of drums and band-instruments, the straight
+rows of knapsacks within rolled greatcoats, stretching
+away in the rear, were divided by the customary ten-pace
+interval, and the mathematically balanced stacks of
+needle-guns.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fires of brush and dry cones from the pine-groves fringing
+the road crackled in the small oblong trenches dug by
+the fatigue-men.  Squad-cooks were cutting up pea-sausages,
+raw potatoes, and onions into camp-kettles of water,
+destined to simmer, slung on sticks reaching from bank to
+bank.  And the regimental butchers had already slaughtered
+a couple of young bullocks, whose skins lay smoking
+by the chopping-block.  Presently, when the officers'
+mess-cooks had chosen such joints as seemed good to them, the
+rest of the meat would go to enrich the stew of the
+rank-and-file.  Meanwhile the men, scattered to the utmost
+limits of the cordon of sentries, blunted the edge of hunger
+with black bread and the flinty brown biscuit, crowded
+thirstily round the beer and wine-carts, squatted in groups
+playing cards, chatting, or singing part-songs; wrestled
+and ran races, or dozed lying face downward on the sunburnt
+grass, their foreheads resting on their folded arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A charming scene, now that the all-pervading dust had
+begun to settle&mdash;the bivouac roofed in by the clear green
+twilight, through which diamond star-points began to
+thrust.  If only one had been less sharp-set, and the
+proprietors of the wine and beer-carts had had bread and
+sausage to sell as well as warm, flat beer and musty-smelling
+vintage, the beauty would have appealed to one a good
+deal more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Squatted by a lichened boulder in a clump of sun-scorched
+bracken, P. C. Breagh searched his pockets, and
+then the recesses of his knapsack, for something to eat.
+An ancient crust of black bread rewarded his investigations,
+just as the savory-smelling camp-kettles were taken
+off the fires.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He fell to work upon his crust as the stew was apportioned,
+and the big cans of beer distributed to each mess;
+and as he gnawed dog-like at the stone-hard lump of baked
+rye-dough, he caught the eye of one of the Barmecides, a
+merry-faced, red-haired young private, who was evidently
+the jester of his squad.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Our soup smells good, what?  Well, the smell may be
+had for nothing.  He may fill his belly with as much of
+that as he can!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A roar of laughter greeted the sally of the humorist.  To
+whom P. C. Breagh nodded assent, and, gravely extending
+his diminished crust in the quarter from whence the whiff
+of oniony pea-soup came most powerfully, fell to with
+apparently renewed appetite, provoking the approving
+comment:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He can take a joke!  Well, then, let him take this!  and
+this!  Catch it, <i>junge</i>!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A lump of very fresh beef, boiled in the oniony pea-soup,
+was dumped into a bit of newspaper, screwed up, and
+pitched across to the supperless.  P. C. Breagh gratefully
+caught the oleaginous parcel and the two hard Army biscuits
+that came after, and, pulling out some small change,
+signified his desire to pitch back the coins in return.  But
+a big hand waved them vigorously away, with the gruff
+exclamation: "<i>Der Teufel!</i> let him keep his pfennigs.  One
+gives a share of one's supper&mdash;one doesn't sell!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so genuine was the one that, despite the smarting
+weal that had been the gift of another less kindly,
+P. C. Breagh's faith in humanity lifted up its head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He disposed of the grub, and drank some hill-water
+tinctured with Kinahan, a permissible indulgence in view of
+his fatigue, and stuffed the well-used briar-root with bird's
+eye, and, propping his back comfortably against the
+boulder, kindled the pipe of peace.  By nature clubbable,
+and athirst for news, he would have liked to mingle with
+the replete, unbuttoned soldiers, who, supper over, gathered
+round the fires to smoke and chat and sing.  But the snub
+dealt by Valverden had not left off smarting; the fear of
+incurring another rebuff, even from a social inferior, kept
+him aloof and solitary.  He realized with dismay that his
+stock of self-confidence was beginning to run low.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I'd a lot of faith in myself when I accepted that
+commission from Knewbit," he ruminated, chewing hard on
+the stem of the venerable briar-root.  "More than half
+his money's spent&mdash;what did I want with that revolver?&mdash;and
+I haven't written him a line.  Instead, I've swotted up
+a thundering long descriptive article, telling people all
+about what they know already&mdash;and sent it to that shaved
+sea-elephant in a Gladstone collar, who told me I might
+forward letters from the seat of hostilities if ever I got
+there!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He frowned, mentally reviewing the points of the
+first-born launched upon the tide of speculation.  However
+ancient its matter might be, the vigor and mastery of
+that descriptive article&mdash;completed in the train between
+Bingen and Mayence, and dropped with paternal solicitude
+into the sack of a corporal of the Field Post&mdash;would
+surely&mdash;could not fail to&mdash;insure its appearance in print.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Why did a horrible conviction of its utter stodginess
+come home to him at this eleventh hour?  Its labored
+periods revolted, its stately mawkishness sickened his
+memory.  He knocked out the pipe-bowl against the boulder
+and got out his note-book and began to jot down a letter
+to Mr. Knewbit by the light of the now risen moon, who,
+with Venus blazing emerald at her opulent side, hung high
+in the south-east, looking down upon forest and field,
+mountain, valley and river, and the armed men and beasts,
+guns and wagon-trains, strung out over leagues of distance,
+calmly as befitting an aged Queen familiar with the
+portents of War.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She stared down so haughtily at the travel-soiled and
+dusty scallawag lying upon the fringe of the bivouac
+among the remnants of a meal cadged from a soldier's
+camp-kettle, that he caught her eye and broke his pencil-lead.
+No! he couldn't write, even well enough to "please
+plain, homely people." ... Why, hang it all!&mdash;Old
+Knewbit must have known from the beginning, to do that
+was the highest and most difficult art of all.  Men came
+into the world equipped, as had come Shakespeare, and
+Scott, and Dickens, each with a single feather, such as
+might belong to the wing of a Phcenix or an Archangel,
+sprouting from his own flesh.  Urged by the inborn crave
+to set down Life, each had plucked forth his birth-gift with
+a pang of unutterable anguish, and there, at the quill-end,
+hung a single drop of red, red blood.  And that drop
+tinctured every page they penned, and thus what they wrote
+lived.  To be a distinguished War Correspondent one had
+to be born with the magic pen-feather.  The Doctor had it.
+That was why his written sentences dug home to the quick.
+Without it, Success would never come to one, no matter
+how hard one tried for it.  One would be nothing better all
+one's life than a plodding paragraphist.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Pity an unlucky youth, fagged, footsore, and smarting,
+not only from disillusion and chagrin, but from the very
+recent application of an Artillery horsewhip.  In addition,
+the infantry band had now begun to play with soul-melting
+sweetness.  First "The Lorelei," and then "Red Dawn
+That Lights Me to My Early Grave," and then the song of
+Siebel from "Faust"&mdash;with all its yearning passion and
+tender anguish.  And possibly other eyes were wet besides
+P. C. Breagh's, who fairly put down his head and sobbed,
+under cover of the twilight and the protecting boulder, as
+he had not done since his knickerbocker days....  Not
+now from a vague, wistful aching for the voice and the
+touch of the young, unknown, long-dead mother.  Pain
+and longing were there, but of how different a kind....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The reign of Brünhilde-Britomart-Isolde was over.  That
+night saw the smallest and slenderest of heroines
+established on the vacant throne of the Ideal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He who wept was not the type of a young girl's hero,
+choking and gulping, and burrowing his hot, wet face into
+the dry, rustling fern.  But he suffered as only youth can
+suffer, the pangs were very real that wrung from him such
+stifled cries as these:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Oh, God!  I love her&mdash;Juliette de Bayard! ... I
+have loved her since the moment our eyes met.  My
+infernal ingratitude that she forgave like an angel!&mdash;the
+brutal things I thought and said of her&mdash;were because I
+could not forgive myself for loving her so.  My discontent,
+my restlessness, my ambition to do something and be
+somebody&mdash;weren't they prompted by the longing to cut a
+figure in her eyes! ... Lovely eyes;&mdash;and at this minute
+her husband may be kissing them!&mdash;'the noble gentleman,
+brave as a lion,' who fought like the deuce and all!  Stop,
+though!  If he's an Army man, he has had to leave her.
+Could I have borne to do that if I had had the luck to be
+in his shoes?  Yet how she would despise a lover who
+hesitated between her and his duty!  Even if '<i>her heart-strings
+about his heels were tied</i>,' as the Suabian ballad says, '<i>she
+would bid him march to war!</i>'  For a girl like that could
+love, mind you! like Juliet and Desdemona and Viola
+rolled into one, and yet never be blinded by love into
+forgetfulness of God, or honor, or loyalty.  It is written in her
+face.  Are these things first with me?  I'm afraid
+not!... I think not!... I know they're not!... And
+yet I dare to love her&mdash;to whom they mean everything!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His conscience stung and smarted like the weal from
+the Artillery whip-lash.  And the dread of Death and the
+Hereafter wakened in him, shuddering and quaking in the
+creeping dusk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now he comprehended his own insignificance and weakness
+and loneliness....  He had seen a man die that
+day, suddenly, without time for preparation, as thousands
+of others would die before the ending of this war.  What if
+to-morrow at the hottest hour the trenchant blade of the
+sun should bite through P. C. Breagh's brain-pan?  He
+heard the other self within him saying "Suppose...?"  And
+he asked himself, with a cold sweat breaking out upon
+his flesh, and a curious stirring among the roots of his
+hair, what would have happened only an hour or two
+back, if the flying squirrel-leap that had made the white
+teeth flash against the brown faces of the gunners on the
+limber, had failed to land the dusty scallawag who had
+been sleeping in the flax-field beyond reach of the
+pounding of the hoofs of the battery-team! ...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Father, I cry to Thee!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The soldiers were singing the Battle Prayer of Körner,
+the lusty Teutonic basses and baritones and tenors mingling
+in melodious unison with the night-breeze that had risen
+with the moon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Previously P. C. Breagh might have smiled at the simultaneous
+production of hymn-books, the rising at the word
+of command to sing&mdash;the short, business-like prayer recited
+by an officer, that was followed by a crashing Amen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, it seemed to him, there was something wholesome
+and good in the military regulation that united men of
+every Christian creed and denomination, with those who
+habitually omitted religion from the daily routine, in the
+brief act of worship described....  Recalled by it to the
+teachings of the Mother Church, he made the sacred sign
+upon brow and breast, and whispered his nightly prayers.
+The name of Juliette mingled in the entreaty that Our
+Lord and His Mother would bless and guard those dear to
+the petitioner from danger and harm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And not let me come to grief for <i>her</i> sake&mdash;of course I
+mean Monica's!  For she never would have loved me even
+if there hadn't been another man.  But O! take care of
+her, and shield her from evil, sickness, grief, and danger.
+And let me see her again one day!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He grew drowsy, lying against the yet sun-warm boulder,
+listening to the distant cry of the mousing owl, and the long
+rattling <i>chur'r'r!</i> of the nightjar, mingled with the
+occasional snorting of the tethered horses, the measured tramp
+of the sentries,&mdash;the small explosions made by pine-cones
+thrown upon the blazing guard-fires, and the other sounds
+of the bivouac.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap38"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XXXVIII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+The watch was set at nine o'clock.  Then the "Lie Down"
+sounded far and near, and the moon stared down on rows
+of prone men wrapped in their greatcoats and pillowed on
+their knapsacks, stretching away under the pansy-dark
+canopy of heaven for miles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The officers sat for some time longer, drinking their
+Rhine wine and playing cards by moonshine and lantern-light,
+or strolling, cigar in mouth, upon the outskirts of
+the bivouac.  Several Artillery-officers, who had supped
+with them, went back to their own bivouac after voluble
+leave-takings.  Infantry-officers, who had shared the
+hospitality of the gunners, returned, enlivening the night with,
+scraps of gossip, and more or less melodious song.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A couple of these late-comers halted on the outskirts of
+the cordon of sentries to finish a confidential conversation.
+The moon was obscured by clouds, the bivouac was swathed
+in shadow.  Of the lumpy boulder by which the Adjutant
+stood, only its shape could be discerned against the
+dusty-pale grass by the dust-white road.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Adjutant to the senior Captain, and the
+excellent cigar he was smoking smelt pleasantly in the dark:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"One can't call yesterday's a big battle, but at the same
+time it was a tolerably serious engagement."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The senior Captain snorted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Donnerwetter!</i> one would think so.  Nearly fifteen
+hundred prisoners, and Douay's Division obliged to
+abandon its camp and baggage.  The Crown Prince has begun
+well&mdash;one expected no less!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Adjutant:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I shall advise the Herr Colonel to announce the news
+to the regiment at roll-call to-morrow.  It will make a good
+moral impression upon those who are new to Active
+Service, when they realize that the French have been
+trounced."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then they were silent a moment, but one felt that both
+were crowing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We know what had happened.  Before midday the Crown
+Prince had pounded Douay's Division into brickbats, the
+brave General himself was dead, the town of Wissembourg
+had fallen; by two o'clock the mitrailleuse-batteries on
+the Geisburg had been silenced, and the Chateau stormed
+and won.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The men of the Imperial Army in Alsace had fought
+magnificently.  Red-capped, swarthy Turcos in baggy
+white breeches, Zouaves and French infantrymen, light
+blue Bavarian and dark blue Prussian uniforms, with what
+had been brave men inside them, lay scattered among the
+hop-gardens and vineyards on the mountain-side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of these no doubt the Adjutant was thinking when he
+threw away his cigar-butt and said, with a sigh and an oath
+together:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Kreuzdonnerwetter!</i> one does not win victories for
+nothing.  It must have been a bloody fight, and especially
+in the streets; you understand me?  The French fired from
+the windows, and from the roofs of the houses....  There
+was a terrible struggle at the point of the bayonet, and both
+sides used the butt&mdash;liberally!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The butt may be brutal," commented the senior Captain,
+clearing his throat and expectorating copiously; "but
+all the same it is a hellishly useful thing!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why leave your enemy brains when he may live to
+plan your defeat by the use of them?" agreed the Adjutant.
+The scabbard of his sword clinked, as he moved, against
+the boulder, and the sound made an eavesdropper go
+goose-fleshy all over, as he lay prone among dry bents and
+bracken in the blackness on the farther side.  Then he
+heard the Captain ask:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Did the Crown Prince continue the advance to-day?"
+and strained his ears for the Staff officer's reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Undoubtedly!  Moltke's telegram from the King's
+Headquarters at Mainz ran: '<i>Seek out and fight the enemy
+wherever you may find him,</i>' and Marshal MacMahon is
+said to be concentrating all his force on a high plateau
+between Froeschwiller and Eberbach, west of the Sauer and
+the Sulz.  The bridges have been broken&mdash;his position is
+an exceptionally strong one....  Of course you know the
+kind of ground!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Open ground," snorted the Captain, "over which an
+assailant must pass to get at him.  <i>Sapperlot!</i> don't I wish
+I'd had the chance to-day!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You are too greedy, Scheren," joked the Adjutant.
+"Ts't!  What was that?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Both men were silent, intently listening.  For the
+eavesdropper, titillated to madness by a spear of seed-grass that
+had thrust up a nostril, had given a smothered sneeze.
+Now on the point of discovery, he found presence of mind
+sufficient to repeat the sneeze, panting doggishly, whining
+and scratching among the fern....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The ruse was successful.  The Adjutant said, laughingly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It's a dog, nosing at a rat or rabbit-hole.
+Under-Lieutenant Brand's terrier 'Nagler,' perhaps."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Hie, then, boy!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Here, Nagler!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Captain whistled, the other man advised indifferently:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Let the brute alone&mdash;perhaps the rabbit's a French
+one!"  He added, "It would be amusing to read a dog's
+Impressions of the campaign.  What time is it?  'Ten!'  Very
+well, I shall go and turn in.  You'll do the same
+thing if you'll take my advice."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Captain grunted assent, and the two officers clanked
+away together, while P. C. Breagh noiselessly collected his
+venerable waterproof, his water-bottle, and knapsack, and
+departed in search of a more distant sleeping-place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when he found it in a dry ditch a quarter-of-a-mile
+below the Mounted Artillery bivouac, and stretched
+himself out to sleep, he could not....  His head rang with
+the news that would presently thrill the civilized world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+First blood to Germany....  Did the Doctor know? ...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That genial little gentleman had prophesied accurately.
+The "meaty bone" of early and accurate information had
+fallen to the "tyke at the tail of the Army Corps."  While
+the prophet, delayed by pumped-out horses and recalcitrant
+grooms, at the Lion Inn of Neustadt, knew no more than
+that the heir to the Prussian Crown was over the frontier,
+and was reported to have taken Wissembourg from the
+French.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+That dry ditch accommodated a complacent lodger.  His
+misgivings banished by one stroke of fortune, P. C. Breagh
+brooded sleeplessly over the Koh-i-noor that had fallen
+to him....  Though, to hold such a jewel and know oneself
+impotent to use it, that was the verjuice mingled in
+the cup of bliss.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without funds for telegraphing&mdash;an Editor to print
+one's letters&mdash;and a public ready to read, what was the use
+of information?  Stop!  What was that the more authoritative
+of the two officers had said?&mdash;the one who had given
+the news to the other man?  "<i>It would be amusing to read
+a dog's impressions of the campaign! ...</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Would it?  Such a dog, perhaps, as the mongrel that
+had joined the green-jacketed Saxon infantry regiment at
+Bingen.  The cur the compassionate soldier had christened
+"Bang."  Lying on his back, pillowed on his knapsack,
+staring at the waning moon, the boy pondered.  Suppose
+one wrote one's letters to Knewbit in the assumed character
+of Bang?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The idea grew, and he sat up to review its possibilities.
+Something soft and feathery brushed past his ear as he
+stirred.  An owlet, most likely, yet I prefer to believe that
+it may have been the wing of Inspiration, touching the
+head destined to be crowned by Fame.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+"Pages from the Diary of 'Bang,' the Battalion Dog."  That
+should be the title, or simply, "The Story of 'Bang.'"  "Short
+and to the point," he heard Mr. Knewbit saying.
+And Knewbit ...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here was day! ...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Reveille after reveille sounded, shattering his train of
+thought, waking the hilly echoes.  Under how strange a
+sky the bugles clamored, the bivouac stopped snoring;
+men sat up on dew-wet cloaks and rubbed their eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cup of heaven was red as though brimmed with blood
+new-drained from the veins of heroes.  In the leftward
+hemisphere looking East, Ursa Major swam in blood,
+blazing with white-hot fierceness.  On the ensanguined
+South the Dog cowered as though in terror.  And like a
+skeleton arm, the Milky Way pointed over the blood-dabbled
+hill-crests and the blood-tipped pine-groves from the
+south-east, West....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Men's faces and hands were crimsoned by reflections cast
+from that portentous sunrise, the dew-wet grasses were
+dyed the same hue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They broke their fast on their black bread washed down
+with bitter black coffee.  In the pause that followed the
+roll-call, a voice spoke.  And amid deafening cheers the
+news sprang from bearded lip to lip.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Lucky is the standard that flies over the first-fought
+field!" says the proverb.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How those Teutons marched, that day of rain-pelts and
+thunderstorms, upheld by their first draft of the strong
+wine of Success!
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+At Mayence, Moltke had commented to his Sovereign,
+with his keen old eyes twinkling with joy:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Douay's troops were preparing their evening coffee
+when the Prince with his four Divisions appeared on the
+heights above Schweigen.  The Red Breeches thought it
+was a <i>promenade militaire</i> in the Second Empire style,
+until the shells began to plop into their cooking-pots!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Thanks be to Heaven!" returned King William piously,
+"our artillery-fire has improved since the Bohemian campaign."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"All the same," returned the Warlock, shaking the wise
+old head cased in the auburn scratch-wig, "their musketry
+should do much for the French.  For the chassepot is
+quicker in loading than our needle-gun, and spits less,
+which is better for the aim....  Then our needle-gun has
+A poor trajectory at 500 yards, and wounds rather than
+kills outright.  While the chassepot bullet,&mdash;driven by its
+huge charge of powder&mdash;has a splendidly flat trajectory,
+And flattening out,&mdash;makes a magnificent wound!  In at
+the chest&mdash;out at the shoulder-blades! ... The man has
+a hole in him you can see the landscape through!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he nibbed his withered hands, the old specialist in
+slaughter.  While Bismarck said, laughing, to his cousin
+and military <i>attaché</i>:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The enthusiast forgets that the perforated examples
+will be German....  Look at him!  Already he begins
+to resemble a bird of prey.  Have you read these French
+newspapers?  The King has laughed heartily over them,
+but they must horribly irritate the Emperor.  Listen to
+this, from the <i>Constitutionnel: 'Prussia continues to insult
+us with impunity, when the Armies of the Empire, at a
+word from their Chief, might descend like three crashing
+avalanches upon the hosts of Germany.  Why is the word
+not uttered?  Why is the massacre&mdash;with the rout that
+must inevitably follow, delayed for a single hour?</i>'" ...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Emperor had perused the leaders, in his headquarters
+at the Prefecture at Metz.  His eyes seemed opaque as
+clouded glass, his face was a puffy mask, devoid of expression,
+as he replied to the hinted condolences of a sycophant
+upon his staff.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The opinions of these gentlemen of the Press were not
+solicited.  They are free to criticize me, let them do so.
+I am not bound to divulge to them my plans."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alas! vacillation, hesitation, and delay on the part of the
+Imperial Commander-in-Chief fatally clogged the movements
+of his magnificent Army.  He did not put in an
+appearance with his staff at headquarters until a fortnight
+subsequent to the Declaration of War.  A week later&mdash;and
+no Plan of Campaign had been issued to his generals.
+True, he had demolished, with field-fire, a beer-shop at
+Saarbrück.  He had paraded on the hills with Frossard's Army
+Corps.  He had witnessed the evacuation of the town by
+its tiny garrison&mdash;had withdrawn his advanced posts and
+gone home to Metz to dine and telegraph to Paris of the
+"capture of the heights" and the "short resistance of the
+Prussians";&mdash;to tell of the cannon-balls and bullets which
+fell at his own feet, and those of the Prince Imperial, "who
+showed admirable coolness."  "Some of the soldiers wept,"
+he adds, "beholding him so calm...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And indeed, though one takes the soldiers' tears with a
+grain of salt, the spirited bearing of the boy must have
+cheered the sick heart of his father, and yet thrust another
+dagger in it, too.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Had the Imperial Commander-in-Chief any plan, one
+wonders....  Long after he had ceased to be Emperor,
+a pamphlet was published at Brussels, which is generally
+accepted as the work of the pen that signed the Capitulation
+of Sedan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>To Marshals MacMahon and Lebœuf alone, the Emperor
+had entrusted his scheme of warfare.  His purpose was&mdash;to
+mass 150,000 troops at Metz, 100,000 at Strasbourg, and
+50,000 at the Camp of Châlons.  The concentration of the
+first two armies&mdash;one on the Sarre, and the other on the
+Rhine&mdash;did not reveal the purpose of the Imperial
+Commander-in-Chief, for the enemy would be left in
+uncertainty as to whether the attack would be made against the
+Rhenish Provinces or the Duchy of Baden.</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Would the Warlock have long remained in uncertainty?
+But hear the pamphleteer:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>As soon as the troops should have been concentrated at
+the points indicated, it was the Emperor's purpose to
+instantly unite the armies of Metz and Strasbourg; and at the
+head of 250,000 men, to cross the Rhine at Maxau, compel
+the Southern States of Germany to observe neutrality, and
+hasten to encounter the Army of Prussia.</i>"  Later on
+occurs the pathetic complaint: "<i>If one could only know
+beforehand exactly where the enemy was, one's plans would
+be easy to carry out!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Indeed, the dispositions of Moltke were made with
+baffling secrecy.  Even as the Heathen Chinee accommodated
+card-packs innumerable in his ample sleeves, so the
+Warlock hid the twelve Army Corps of the North German
+Confederation, with the Prussian Guard Corps, the
+Bavarian Field Army and the Württemberg and Baden
+Divisions, in the skirts of his military cloak....  When the
+moment came, the aged conjuror twitched open the garment
+and showed them: Steinmetz with the First Army at
+Treves, Prince Frederick Charles with the Second at
+Mayence, the Crown Prince with the Third at Landau.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the Three Armies rolled on, the art of the strategist
+covered their movements with a baffling veil of cavalry.
+That immense, well-organized and highly mobilized arm
+was thrown well forward before the Germans crossed the
+frontier: at their first entry into France they came in
+contact with French troops.  A day's march ahead of the
+Army Corps' advanced-guards, Divisions of Uhlans,
+Dragoons and Hussars&mdash;(in a little all were "Uhlans" to
+the terrified French peasants)&mdash;provided for the security of
+the huge infantry bivouacs behind them; made requisitions
+for provisions, fuel, and forage; rendered railways and
+telegraphs useless&mdash;scouted for the enemy's positions&mdash;took
+prisoner or shot dispatch-bearers and patrol-riders&mdash;harassed
+marches, and boldly fired into camps.  Many fell
+in forays, or skirmishes, many were those accounted for by
+the long-range hitting chassepot, which was heartily
+detested by Prussia's mounted men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If I had not been called to Metz to attend an Imperial
+War-Council," Marshal MacMahon is reported to have said
+bitterly, when the news of the defeat of Wissembourg
+reached him, "this blow upon the south would not have
+fallen.  My Second Division would still be left to guard
+the opening between the Vosges and the Rhine."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The thunder of the guns of Worth add their comment
+upon that utterance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Over the head of the town, lying at the bottom of a
+fertile valley patched with hop-gardens and vineyards, and
+threaded by a river, was waged between the Marshal with
+50,000 troops, the pick and flower of the French Army,
+and "Unser Fritz" with twice the number of men, a
+desperate and bloody fight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The French on the bluffy wooded cliffs that are the foothills
+of the Vosges, occupied, as strategists have declared,
+an almost unassailable position.  But the fire of the
+mitrailleuses was hampered by the artillery of the 2d Bavarians
+under Hartmann, that seasoned veteran, who had fought
+at Waterloo in 1815 and now led an Army Corps against
+France in his seventy-sixth year.  Thus the Prussian
+infantry crossed the Sauerbach on bridges improvised of
+planks and hop poles; and though the chassepot proved an
+infinitely deadlier weapon than the needle-gun, the
+generalship of Von Kirchbach and Von der Tann,&mdash;in command
+of the Prussian 4th Division and 5th Corps, backed by a
+division of the 11th Corps,&mdash;forced MacMahon's hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Outnumbered, outflanked and disorganized, with the
+loss of 9,000 men killed, 5,000 taken prisoners, twenty
+pieces of artillery, six mitrailleuses, and two eagles, the
+Marshal fled by the way of Zabern, under cover of night,
+trailing after him the beaten remnant of the Army of
+Strasbourg.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Third Army of Germany had lost 489 officers and
+10,153 rank and file.  Before night of the 7th the dead
+were buried in great trenches, the columns of the Society
+of the Red Cross, the Sisters of Mercy and Lutheran
+Deaconesses, with surgeons, volunteers, and Army
+ambulance-bearers, had cleared the wounded from the field.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah! if we had only had this sort of thing at the Alma
+and at Inkerman!" a grizzled Zouave sapper growled to
+one of the ladies of the Red Cross.  "I was wounded
+there&mdash;sacred name of a pipe!  My belt-buckle was carried by
+a shell-splinter through my ceinture into my stomach.
+This very buckle, look you, that I wear to-day!"  He
+added, rubbing the locality of the previous casualty:
+"There is nothing inside there now, because of late they
+have not fed us, or our chassepots.  How the devil can
+men kill Prussians without soup in their bellies or cartridges
+in their guns?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Zouave spoke truth.  It was a half-equipped and
+under-rationed army that had made such a splendid show
+at Froeschwiller.  It was a starving, demoralized remnant
+that surged and weltered through the passes of the Vosges
+at MacMahon's flying heels.  Cavalry on foot, Zouaves
+riding Artillery-horses, mitrailleuse corps without
+mitrailleuses, baggage-wagons crowded with men of a dozen
+different regiments, went clanking and jolting over the roads
+that were littered with discarded chassepots, bearing
+witness to the pitiable, ghastly disorder of the retreat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hour of their defeat had seen Frossard's Army Corps
+holding with Forton's Cavalry Brigade the heights over
+Saarbrück, simultaneously attacked by the 7th and 8th
+Corps of Unser Fritz's terrible army, and driven back in
+confusion and with slaughter, toward Metz.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap39"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XXXIX
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+The huge peacock-bubble of the Third Empire was
+pricked and leaking in good earnest.  Thenceforward it
+was to shrink, and pale, and dwindle to its inglorious end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Emperor must have known its days were numbered,
+when those wires of the 6th reached him.  On the 7th the
+news of Wörth electrified Paris.  Can you hear Jules
+Ferry joyfully exclaiming to the father of Paul Déroulède,
+"The armies of the Third Napoleon are annihilated!  At
+last there dawns a day of hope for France!"  But fierce,
+triumphant voices like these were drowned in the muffled
+sobs of mothers, the moans of wives made widows, and the
+wailing of children now fatherless.  Later, and as though
+to enhance the bitterness of defeat, lying telegrams were
+published in Paris, announcing that the Duke of Magenta
+had retaken Wissembourg, captured sixty guns, and made
+25,000 prisoners.  Chief among these unlucky ones figured
+the Prussian Crown Prince, who in an access of despair
+had shot himself....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For some hours the streets and boulevards were packed
+with rejoicing multitudes.  Cries of "<i>Vive l'Empereur</i>,"
+scarce at this era as snowflakes in summer, were suddenly
+heard again.  Flags and Chinese lanterns were displayed
+from every window, the people stopped the hansom-cab in
+which the famous Opera tenor Capoul was being driven
+along the Place de la Bourse, and, hoisting their idol to the
+top of a stationary omnibus, compelled him to chant the
+"<i>Marseillaise</i>."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the Emperor's sorrowful dispatches of the 7th
+revealed the cruel truth, and proclamations signed by the
+Empress and the Ministers made it public, rapture gave
+place to frenzy of the wildest.  Troops of cuirassiers and
+mounted Gardes de Paris,&mdash;bands of National Guards,&mdash;companies
+of the Line, and Marines were employed to clear
+the Rue de la Paix, and the Places de l'Opéra and
+Vendôme, of rioters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chambers assembled amid tumult indescribable.
+Ministers were insulted on their way to attend the
+deliberations.  "<i>À la Frontière!</i>" cried the huge crowd, thronging
+the quay before the Palace of the Corps Législatif.  "<i>Vive
+Rochefort!</i>"  "<i>À bas les Ministres!</i>"  "<i>Chassepôts!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Their reiterated demands for arms could be heard within
+the Chamber.  Where, when M. Schneider mounted the
+tribune to read the Imperial Decree of Convocation, the
+opening formula: "Napoleon, by the Grace of God and the
+national will, Emperor of the French," was vigorously
+howled down.  Ollivier, the unpopular Head of the Imperial
+Cabinet, who had egged on the war, fared no better.  Later,
+the fall of his Ministry was greeted with salvo upon salvo
+of enthusiastic applause, and when the news was published
+all Paris went mad once more with joy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While the moment of supreme collapse of the great
+peacock bubble was coming nearer, the Crown Prince of
+Prussia was hunting MacMahon through the defiles of the
+Vosges, his flying cavalry snapping up scores of wounded
+or footsore stragglers, his advance batteries of light
+artillery harassing the bleeding flanks of the fugitive.  The
+Second and First Armies were moving Metzward, the Warlock
+having knowledge that the Emperor's main Army, the
+Imperial Guard, and Bazaine's, Ladmirault's and Frossard's
+Corps, with part of Canrobert's, were concentrating
+there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Great Bubble was sagging pitifully.  The weather
+was wet and chilly, the Imperial troops not yet in action
+were disheartened by the news of battles lost.  Their
+equipment was incomplete, their new boots had proved to be of
+no better material than brown paper and American cloth.
+Worst of all, the Commissariat, always inadequate, showed
+signs of caving in.  And the blame for all was heaped upon
+the shoulders of the Emperor, whose faith in his fortunate
+star had quite deserted him; a man tormented by telegrams
+of wifely censure and wifely advice from Paris;
+disgruntled, if ever man was; haunted and oppressed by
+premonitions of impending disaster; sleepless, shaky, sick,
+and prematurely old.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The taking of the fortresses of Bitche and Phalsbourg&mdash;memorable
+by reason of its brave Governor's resolute
+defense&mdash;the seizure of the undefended City of Nancy, the
+Zorn Valley railway line, Forbach with its immense military
+stores, Sarreguemines, and other garrison towns were
+lesser shocks, falling on a mind already paralyzed.  Hasty
+decisions, contradictory orders, had emanated, one after
+another, from the Headquarters.  He was confused and
+flurried, finding his good brother of Prussia so near.  For the
+Warlock, scenting a movement of French troops to the
+rear, had crowned the uplands eastward of Metz with the
+1st and 7th Corps of the First Army of Germany under the
+veteran General Steinmetz, cavalry well to the fore and
+outposts skillfully posted, so as to look into the French
+position from all points of view, while the Red Prince felt
+for a solid footing for his Second Army on the left or
+French bank of the Moselle.  Meanwhile, the Crown Prince,
+whose clutches Marshal MacMahon had evaded by taking
+a vast circuit to Châlons, had swept round and was
+marching northward from Vigneulles toward Metz.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah! in what a hornet's nest the Imperial Commander-in-Chief
+found himself.  Almost incapable of mental effort, he
+recognized, like Mr. Wilkins Micawber,&mdash;whose epistolary
+style is occasionally suggested by his Proclamations and
+harangues,&mdash;that something had to be done at once.  To
+shake off the intolerable burden of authority was the most
+urgent necessity.  He transferred it to the youngest of his
+Marshals, Bazaine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You will get us out of this, won't you, Marshal?"
+cried an officer of the Imperial Staff, as the new
+Commander-in-Chief came out of the Prefecture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Marshal had left his Imperial master in bed, expecting
+answers to letters he had penned to the Emperor of
+Austria and the King of Italy, soliciting aid and alliance,
+which these potentates did not bestow.  True to himself,
+he could not quit Metz without a proclamation, penned in
+the old flourishing, ambiguous style:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Inhabitants of Metz.  In leaving you to oppose the
+invading enemy, I rely upon your patriotism to defend this
+great city.  You will not allow the foreigner to seize this
+bulwark of France, and you will emulate the Army in
+courage and devotion....  I hope to return in happier
+times to thank you for your noble conduct."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he quitted the place with his son, his cousin and
+his personal following and escort.  As his <i>cortège</i> clattered
+through the streets choked with soldiers, guns,
+provision-carts and baggage-wagons, and faces of contempt, or
+derision, or hatred turned to see, did he hide his sick,
+humiliated face behind the green silk screen of the carriage
+window?  How did he answer the inevitable questions of
+his son?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A prey to hideous uncertainties, for the new Commander-in-Chief
+had suddenly applied to be superseded, the luckless
+Emperor spent the night at the camp at Longeville,
+waking upon a foggy morning&mdash;if he could be said to sleep,
+who never slept&mdash;to a brisk salute of Prussian guns.  For
+a patrol of Uhlans with a half battery had made, during
+the night, a bold attempt to seize upon the Imperial person,
+and being foiled within an ace of success, had retreated,
+plumping a shell or so into the lines from the German side
+of the river.  And while these hornets were being repulsed
+with heavy metal, the muddy, travel-stained Army of the
+Red Prince crossed the river lower down; the little episode
+described having diverted attention from their transit;
+effected, even as in a jam of batteries, battalions,
+squadrons, baggage and ammunition-trains, the French retreat
+was being made.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So choked were the roads that the Emperor and his suite
+with the Imperial Guard Escort only managed to struggle
+as far as Gravelotte, a village some eight miles from Metz,
+where Bazaine had his headquarters:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Gentlemen, we will remain here, but keep the baggage
+packed!" had been the Emperor's instructions to his
+following upon alighting at the inn, where two miserable
+bedrooms were with difficulty obtained for himself and his
+son.  Prince Napoleon and the other personages of the
+suite found harborage at various cottages; the lackeys slept
+in the baggage-fourgons, it may be hazarded.  For in the
+morning these vehicles and their attendants were found
+to have disappeared.  They had departed for Verdun,
+whither their master was now to follow them.  Bazaine,
+who could not shuffle off his now detested responsibilities,
+was summoned, to find the Imperial carriage standing in
+readiness before the tavern door.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap40"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XL
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+One can see the splendid bays, clamping their bits of
+solid silver, their sleek skins and their costly harness
+glittering in the sunshine that had driven the early morning
+fogs away, the postilions and outriders in their green and
+gold liveries sitting in the saddle, the landaus of the suite
+drawn up at the distance prescribed by etiquette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everybody was breakfastless, save the Emperor, his son,
+and cousin, and their immediate following.  The regiment
+of Chasseurs d'Afrique, the gorgeous Cent Gardes in
+gold-crested, crimson-tufted, silver helmets with flowing white
+horsetails and caped cloaks of azure, were empty of all but
+air, like their own famous kettledrums.  Their horses had
+cropped a little grass in the fields during the night's
+bivouac, and were better off than their riders, by one
+meal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young Prince Imperial looked sulky and discontented,
+but neat and soldierlike in his new uniform of a
+subaltern of infantry.  Prince Jerome Napoleon, the portly
+M. Plon-Plon of the Crimean War caricatures, wore a
+cocked hat pulled down hard over his eyes, and was
+buttoned up in a military cloak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Emperor had suffered in the night, for a traveler
+who had slept in an attic above his bedroom had heard him
+pacing to and fro and groaning.  He wore a black-caped,
+red-lined waterproof cloak over the uniform of a General
+of Division; a glimpse of the Star of the Legion of Honor
+fastened on his breast showed as he raised his hand to throw
+away the butt of the inseparable cigarette, and set his neat
+little polished gold-spurred boot on the carriage-step, and
+beckoned with a small white-kid-gloved hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Obeying this signal, a green-and-gold equerry and a
+demure elderly valet hoisted him respectfully on one side,
+while a keen-eyed, lean-jawed young man, accurately
+attired in deep black, propped him scientifically upon the
+other.  We know this deft and silent personage to have
+been a brilliant young Paris surgeon, retained about the
+person of the Emperor; a specialist whose ministrations, in
+dulling unbearable pain with subcutaneous injections of
+morphia, and combating the progress of disease by skilled
+surgical treatment, became more necessary every day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They got him in.  The sweat was starting through the
+rouge upon his livid face as he sank heavily upon the seat
+of the carriage.  His son and cousin followed.  Bazaine,&mdash;who
+was accompanied by Canrobert and Bourbaki, and did
+not dismount, rode up to receive his master's farewells.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not entreat again to be relieved of the supreme
+responsibility.  Perhaps the Emperor imagined that he
+might.  For he put out his hand in haste and shook the
+Marshal's, reiterating:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"All will go well!  Excellently, I have no doubt of it!
+You understand, you have broken the spell."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of ill-luck, did he mean, clinging to the fatalist whose
+Star was on the point of setting.  He added:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I go to Verdun and Châlons.  Put yourself upon the
+road for Châlons as soon as possible....  May you be
+fortunate!  <i>Au revoir!  En avant!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The brigadier-general in charge of the escort gave the
+word.  The Advance was sounded, the Chasseurs on their
+gray Arabs dashed onward, riding in fours, keeping a sharp
+lookout for Uhlans.  A half-troop of Cent Gardes preceded
+the Emperor's carriage, his equerries and aides and those
+of the Prince's household followed on their empty, chafing
+beasts.  Another <i>peloton</i> of Cent Gardes were succeeded
+by three Imperial carriages containing the surgeon,
+secretaries and valets; grooms followed with led horses; and the
+Empress's regiment of Dragoons, brass-helmeted, black-plumed
+warriors, in green with white plastrons, brought up
+the rear.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+It was four o'clock in the morning when they started.
+Deep defiles rather than roads, with wooded, precipitous
+banks, stretch between Metz and Gravelotte.  By the time
+the Imperial <i>cortège</i> had extricated itself from the stray
+columns and batteries choking these, and the cliffy banks
+had lowered to hedgerows, it was six o'clock and a gloriously
+sunny morning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One may imagine, as the landscape broadened and
+smoothed like a human face relieved from carking anxiety,
+the young Prince Imperial turning in his seat, and looking
+back upon the scene he was unwillingly quitting, with a
+scowl of resentment and dissatisfaction that changed and
+aged his boyish face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He saw the white tents of the huge camps of the Imperial
+Divisions snowing over a vast area of country on the French
+side of the river, and the clotting of cavalry and infantry in
+swarms upon the roads, where vast aggregations of baggage
+and provisions and ambulance wagons impeded their passage.
+He saw the Imperial Standard break out above the
+Tricolor on the flagstaff of the Fort of Plappeville,
+signifying that Bazaine had entered.  He could see the
+artillery-batteries on the high ground at Rezerieulles, and he knew
+that others were posted behind the woods of Genivaux,
+and yet others near the quarries of Amanvilliers.  The
+glitter of steel and the flutter of red and white
+lance-pennons told of the Light Cavalry outposts at St. Ruffine.
+And sinister moving specks upon the hill-crests beyond the
+river above St. Barbe&mdash;and others moving in the villages,
+with darker, bigger patches toward Sarrebourg, testified,
+like the gray-white drifts of powder-smoke that came down
+upon the northeast breeze, with the reduplicated rattle of
+musketry, the detonation of field-guns and the yapping of
+mitrailleuses&mdash;to the near, active presence of the ancient,
+racial foe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>He</i> was drawing nearer, always nearer, to the coveted
+key-city of the Two Rivers, seated within her ancient
+fortifications, guarding the northeast frontiers of France.
+<i>He</i> wanted Metz, with her vast modern arsenal, her huge
+hospitals and military colleges, her fifteen bridges&mdash;(the
+railway-bridge had been blown up by Bazaine's engineers
+on the night before last, when the squadron of Uhlans,
+greatly daring, had made their way into the French lines,
+with the project of seizing upon the person of papa)&mdash;and
+her glorious Cathedral, whose vast gray bulk was now
+bathed in the misty golden sunshine of a perfect autumn
+day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Soon, soon, those indomitable dark blue soldiers would be
+at grips with Frenchmen for the possession of Metz.  Oh! not
+to be able to fire a shot, or strike a blow with her
+defenders, because of one's pitiable weakness and youth!
+Oh! to be perpetually guarded and protected and plucked
+from the very possibility of danger, because one happened
+to be Heir to the Imperial Throne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Why had the Emperor resigned the supreme command
+of the Army?  There had been reverses&mdash;does a
+Commander-in-Chief give up for that?  True, he was not well,
+but the First Napoleon had fought battles and won them,
+in spite of cramps and colic.  <i>He</i> would never have driven
+away under the noses of King Wilhelm and Count Bismarck
+and the Prince Commanders.  He would have called
+the nephew who could commit such an <i>impair</i> as that a
+<i>godichon</i>.  He would have said: "To the devil with you,
+who boast yourself of my blood!  A Napoleon&mdash;and not a
+general!  You might have proved yourself a fighter, at
+least!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The soldiers regarded the Emperor's resignation as the
+Great Napoleon would have done.  They had not cried
+"<i>Vive l'Empereur!</i>" when papa had driven out of Metz.
+Upon the contrary, they had maintained silence, scowling
+or sneering covertly.  To-day, the meanest piou-piou had
+presumed to wink or grin.  More, voices from the depths of
+company-columns had called out horrible insults; things
+that had made the son's teeth set and his fists clench with
+the passionate desire to thrash the offenders, yet had not
+twitched one muscle in the father's impassive face....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why do you look back so often, Louis?  What are you
+thinking about?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Emperor's question brought the young head round.
+He muttered, twisting the gold knot of his little sword:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am looking at the Army, and at Metz&mdash;and at those
+Uhlan outposts.  And I want to know why we are going
+away&mdash;just because the Prussians are coming?  Why
+cannot we stay&mdash;and fight?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The diplomatic, evasive answer came:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Because for the present it is more prudent that we
+should withdraw ourselves."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boy shrugged, almost imperceptibly, and his young
+face took on an expression of heavy obstinacy, bringing
+out, quite startlingly, a resemblance to the sire.  He
+muttered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"All very well....  But it isn't nice to&mdash;absquatulate!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The slang term <i>filer</i> might be rendered as above.  The
+Emperor's gray face with the patches of rouge on the flaccid
+cheeks moved not a muscle.  Turning his hunched shoulders
+upon the scene of his horrible humiliations, he stared with
+fixed eyes along the road to Verdun, stretching away to the
+west between its bordering poplars, whose long blue
+shadows&mdash;the day being yet young&mdash;barred the white dust
+rather suggestively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At Etain, where the <i>cortège</i> halted for breakfast, the
+Prince had a much nearer view of those ubiquitous
+horsemen in the dark blue uniforms.  Indeed, the Emperor and
+his suite barely escaped a surprise, and the escort of Cent
+Gardes, who were here replaced by some of MacMahon's
+Chasseurs d'Afrique, were hotly chased and sniped at on
+the way back to camp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Through the journey of that night, performed in the
+cushionless plank seats of a third-class carriage, his suite
+being accommodated in a string of cattle-trucks, of what
+did the sleepless Emperor think?  What questions occupied
+that sick and sluggish brain?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The question of returning to Paris, the refuge he longed
+for and yet dreaded inexpressibly.  The question as to
+whether the Empress Regent would welcome the Emperor
+who could no longer rule the State, and what kind of
+ovation the people would extend to the General who had
+deserted the Army of Metz before the advancing hordes of
+United Germany.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Would not Rebellion, Anarchy and Revolution rear up
+their hydra-heads to greet the Third Napoleon, reëntering
+his capital?  Would his reign end in the explosion of a
+bomb, and a shower of torn flesh and scattered blood upon
+the paving-stones?  Would his son ever wear the Imperial
+crown, won by bribery, bloodshed, fraud and trickery?
+Would the Church forgive the rape of temporal power?
+Would Heaven succor one who had defrauded Her?  Was
+this the beginning of the end?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lugubrious doubts like these and many others haunted
+his sleepless pillow in the Imperial pavilion of the camp on
+the dusty plains of Champagne.  Dismantled at the close
+of the October maneuvers, and now hastily prepared for
+the Emperor's reception, the place was damp, dismal, and
+cheerless, as such places usually are.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The newly levied troops were showing signs of
+insubordination; the Gardes Mobiles from Paris were in open
+mutiny against their generals.  The great camp was a
+wasp's nest, which the presence of the Emperor stirred to
+frenzy; the lewd songs in which he figured, the yells of
+savage laughter greeting obscene jests leveled at him and
+his, reached him, pacing the mildewed carpets underneath
+the damp-stained draperies festooned from the claws of
+Imperial eagles, whose gilding was tarnished and
+discolored, like the Imperial central crown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All night he paced, on thorns.  With the dawn of day he
+had the answer to his questions.  From the Empress, who
+wished him to abdicate that she might reign for her son;
+from the new War Minister, a creature of his own
+aggrandizing, who by influencing the Empress, who detested him,
+dreamed of becoming another Richelieu; from the Prefect
+of Police&mdash;who indeed brought the warning in person&mdash;came
+a triple sentence of exile for the sick, dejected man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Spewed forth again upon the road toward the northern
+frontier, he was a clog upon the feet of the army that
+might, by a movement in which boldness combined with
+rapidity, have relieved Bazaine at the critical moment and
+changed the fate of France.  Thenceforth he was to be a
+passive witness, rather than a participator, in scene after
+scene of horrible disaster; disgraces, disillusions, defeats,
+crowding one upon the other, to be crowned by the
+unspeakable catastrophe of Sedan.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap41"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XLI
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Three hours after the Emperor had driven out of Gravelotte
+the Red Prince had blocked the direct road to Verdun.
+The First Army had crossed the Moselle.  Moltke and the
+Royal Headquarter Staff were already at Pont à Mousson,
+the Crown Prince was marching toward Châlons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this stage of the game, the Warlock gave the signal.
+Von Redern's guns opened suddenly on the French cavalry
+camp near Vionville.  You remember the squadrons were
+watering: Murat's Dragoons stampeded with their baggage-trains,
+De Gramont's troopers sent in a volley of carbine-fire,
+mounted and retired in less haste.  This was the opening
+figure of the three days of bloody conflict waged in the
+rural tract between the northern edges of the Bois de Vaux
+and the Forest of Jaumont.  The French call it the "Battle
+of St. Privat," the Germans the battle of
+Gravelotte-St. Privat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Great Headquarters of the Prussian Commander-in-Chief
+were at the riverside town of Pont à Mousson, some
+ten miles distant from the war-theater&mdash;whose stage
+occupied some six square miles of undulating, wooded,
+ravine-gashed country-side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And here, his possessing genius, or demon, prompting
+him, the tactics of Moltke abruptly changed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have fancied the Warlock getting up at cockcrow on
+the day of Vionville,&mdash;he had a little folding camp-bed he
+always slept upon.  Undressed to shirt and drawers, he
+would roll himself in a gray-striped blanket which did not
+reveal the fact when it needed washing, and cover himself
+on chilly nights with a big, shabby, military cloak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beside the bed, with the extinguished candle-lantern,
+standing on a corner of it, was the little portable
+campaign-table, covered with faded green baize.  His maps were
+spread on this, and an Army revolver of large caliber lay
+atop of them, well within reach of its owner's practiced
+hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sponged his old face and sinewy neck economically in
+a basin of cold water, carefully washed his hands, rinsed his
+mouth and put on a clean white shirt.  A white drill waistcoat
+went on under the old red-faced uniform frock, with
+the distinctive shoulder-cords of Chieftaincy of the Great
+General Staff and the Order of Merit dangling from the
+silver-gilt swivel at the collar.  Then he polished his bald
+head with his silk handkerchief, reached his wig from the
+chest of drawers and assumed it, read a text in his Lutheran
+Bible, prayed a twenty-second prayer standing: lighted a
+thin, dry, ginger-colored cigar, such as his soul loved, and
+sat down to work at his maps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bismarck might well have likened him to some bird of
+the predatory species.  With the rising furrows of his bald
+brow hitching up his wig, and his clear eyes, lashless with
+old age, crimson-rimmed by dint of fatigue and overstrain,
+his fierce hooked beak following the journey of his withered
+claw over the tough cartridge-paper&mdash;one can imagine him,
+very like an eagle, or a member of the vulture-tribe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It grew lighter as he worked with his old chronometer
+and well-used compasses and stumpy pencils; and the little
+thumbed table of distance-measures to which he sometimes
+referred.  He finished and rang his handbell for his
+orderly-servant; chatted with his Adjutant and secretary as he
+broke his fast on bread and black coffee.  Then at a great
+jingling of cavalry bridles and stamping of iron hoofs upon
+the cobblestones below, he went down, carrying his rolled
+map-case, mounted, and rode away with his following.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sun rising had found him, lean, inscrutable and
+silent, on the ridge above Flavigny, where he had told
+Prince Charles and Steinmetz, Moltke would be found that
+day....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had met and primed them with the result of his
+calculations, had seen a fierce engagement from his coign
+of observation.  By three noon, he was back at Pont à
+Mousson, had interviewed the King, dined frugally, and
+now stood chatting with the Iron Chancellor upon the
+steps of the Mairie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Guns were muttering in the distance as they had done all
+day at intervals.  There had been fighting, he answered
+mildly when questioned.  Quite a considerable battle one
+might call it.  The villages of Flavigny and Vionville were
+burning as he spoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The potato-gardens of Flauville were thick-strewn with
+corpses of French and German foot-soldiers.  In a little,
+layer upon layer of dead and dying men and horses had
+been piled upon these.  Necessity knows no law; and it had
+been found necessary to interpose Prussian cavalry between
+the French Artillery and exhausted masses of German
+infantry.  Which accounted for a considerable thinning in
+the ranks of Rauch's Hussars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sacrifice had been necessary.  He told himself so as
+he stood there smoking.  His high forehead was quite
+unclouded as he returned in answer to some reference to
+MacMahon's losses at Wörth:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is one of the traditions handed down from the days of
+Murat and Kellerman and Lassalle&mdash;the French belief in
+the virtue of the massed cavalry charge...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister to whom he spoke replied:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The English exploded the theory at Balaklava sixteen
+years ago, by their magnificent but useless sacrifice of
+Cardigan's Light Brigade.  They learned then, and we have
+profited by the lesson that MacMahon has just been spanked
+for forgetting&mdash;and that Your Excellency will presently
+teach Bazaine...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The great strategist cupped his long chin in his lean hand,
+and said in his dry, thoughtful way:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Yes, yes.  We will drub this precept into his brain at
+cost of his breeches.  <i>Regiments of mounted men serve
+admirably for the protection of marching Army Corps&mdash;are
+priceless for reconnaissance, outpost and patrol-work, but
+when they are thrown against vast bodies of troops armed
+with the modern breech-loader, their use is unjustifiable,
+being nil.</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And when in addition, the unlucky horsemen are
+charged as at Wörth, over hop-poles and tree-stumps, open
+field-drains and shattered garden walls," said the Minister,
+"then they are worse than useless, I should add."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Warlock's thin-lipped mouth opened in a silent laugh
+that creased his lean cheeks and displayed the gums that
+were all but toothless.  He rubbed his hairless chin and
+said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ay, unless from the point of view of that farmer of
+Schleswig-Holstein who said as our troops marched by his
+barn-yard: 'Let us look on them as manure for next year's
+wheat!'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Iron Chancellor's blue eyes hardened with sudden
+anger.  Imagine him in his great muddy jack-boots, with
+cord breeches not innocent of clay and soil, the black
+double-breasted frock with pewter buttons and yellow collar
+and cuff-facings, the white cap with the yellow band and
+the long, heavy, steel-hilted cavalry sword, puffing at a
+giant cigar as he stood on the doorsteps of the Mairie, over
+whose door drooped the Prussian flag, and the white
+Hohenzollern pennon with the Black Eagle and the gold blazoning,
+showing, like the bodyguard of Red Dragoons and White
+Cuirassiers, the numerous orderlies, and the double cordon
+of sentries placed about the building, that there lodged the
+King.  While the Red Prince's headquarters were distinguished
+in similar fashion at the National Bank of France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I have not forgotten!"  The response came in Bismarck's
+grimmest vein of humor.  "Nor has the rascal
+either, if he happens to be alive still.  Our infantry taught
+him very thoroughly that there are more uses than one for
+a bundle of straw."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Some of our German Princes have mastered that lesson
+quite recently, Excellency," said Count Paul Hatzfeldt,
+First Secretary of the ambulatory Foreign Office, turning
+a handsome, humorous face upon his Chief.  "The Grand
+Duke of Mecklenburg slept in a barn at the last halting-place,
+and Prince Leopold of Bavaria in a loft over a stable
+yard, where, as he explained afterward, there were not only
+mice, but rats!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I understand His Excellency to refer," said Moltke,
+taking a pinch of stuff, "to the Polish method of flogging,
+which is to tie a man face-downward on a truss and thrash
+him to a jelly with green birch-rods."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Precisely.  Only not having birch rods 'convenient' as
+Lever's Irishmen would say," returned the Chancellor,
+"our fellows used their belts&mdash;buckle-end preferably.  Then
+they pitched the farmer on his own dunghill, and left him
+to rot there for the land in spring."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Severe, but severe lessons are best remembered," said
+the Warlock, placidly.  "Thus MacMahon will perhaps
+throw no more regiments of cavalry away!  As for
+ourselves, we have hardly brought that arm of the Service to
+its present condition of usefulness to handle it wastefully.
+Military science&mdash;true military science&mdash;does not allow of
+undue extravagance in the sentient material of war.  Nay,&mdash;it
+will never be said of me that I wasted blood prodigally!"  He
+curved his long thin hand about his large and beautifully
+shaped ear, and added, as the distant detonations of
+heavy artillery made the windows rattle in their sashes and
+the pavement quake underfoot.  "They are still fighting
+south and west of Metz.  In half an hour, if the firing has
+not abated, I am going to ride in that direction with the
+King."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He glanced at his chronometer, then went down the side
+steps, and strolled, contentedly smoking, to where his own
+charger and his master's were waiting in charge of some
+orderlies near the Royal carriages and fourgons that
+occupied the center of the Market Place.  While Count
+Hatzfeldt, glancing after the thin figure, shrugged and said to
+his Chief in an undertone:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Heaven send that by this time to-morrow we may not
+be deploring some tremendous holocaust of Prussian
+cavalry!  Do not ask me how the idea suggested itself...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Possibly,"&mdash;the Minister slightly moved his hand
+toward a string of country grain-wagons, crowded with
+wounded, and drawn by farmers' horses, converging from
+the westward boulevard toward the Market Place&mdash;"possibly
+because so many of those fellows have been brought
+in here since twelve noon.  And in Moltke's very disclaimer
+of blood-waste, you find cause of suspicion.  In that case,
+our greatest strategist would be like the spider, who agitates
+her web to conceal herself before she has even been seen.
+Moreover, they&mdash;I refer to our wounded&mdash;have been
+infantry of the Third Corps chiefly, nearly all Prussians from
+the Mark of Brandenburg.  The French prisoners were
+mostly horsemen; Light Blue Lancers and Cuirassiers of
+the Guard Imperial.  What fellows are these?"  Under his
+heavy brows he scrutinized the approaching train of
+sufferers, adding: "H'm!  Marshal Frossard's chassepotiers
+have taken toll of Rauch's Hussars with a vengeance!
+Where are you going, Count, in such haste?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Halfway down the steps Hatzfeldt halted, dropping his
+eyeglass and turning round an astonished face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Going, Excellency?  Why, naturally, to speak to these
+wounded cavalry men.  My wife has a cousin, a captain in
+the Hussars of Rauch."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor said, bending his powerful gaze on the
+handsome face of the diplomatic dandy:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Let me counsel you to quench your desire for
+information.  The King's windows are overhead.  And the
+inquiries natural for you to make in your own character will
+be suspected, should His Majesty observe them&mdash;to have
+been prompted by me."  He showed a corner of the sealed
+dispatch he had thrust into his pocket.  "You recognize
+the Queen's handwriting upon this envelope?  Augusta
+will have written another such Jeremiad to her spouse.
+Mercy and moderation, piety and philanthropy will be the
+headings of the sermon penned on my own sheets of letter-paper.
+The test of the King's will be, '<i>Bismarck is alone
+to blame!</i>'  Fortunately my back is broad, and I have his
+entire confidence....  But if he once suspected me of
+getting what the Yankees call 'cold feet!'..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hand that held the cigar indicated a stoppage of the
+foremost wagon.  "See!  Moltke is speaking to the officer
+in charge of the convoy.  I will wager you a case of
+champagne that his mouth is being corked up.  A wise
+proceeding too!  For, remember, the story of a wounded man is
+painted from his own wounds&mdash;always a red tale of disaster.
+How can it be otherwise?  In the heat of battle, or
+perhaps without having fired one shot, or ridden one charge&mdash;he
+has been struck down, poor wretch! and carried, bleeding,
+from the field....  Has it occurred to Your Excellency
+that those guns are drawing nearer?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The query was addressed to Moltke, who had returned,
+leaving the wagon-train to jolt with its doleful load in the
+direction where the Flag of the Geneva Cross, hanging from
+doors and windows, announced the location of temporary
+hospitals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The expert listened as distant crashes of volley-firing
+were answered by the hyena-yapping of mitrailleuses, and
+answered, pointing to the weather-vane on the tower of the
+Market Hall:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your Excellency is wrong.  The breeze has altered its
+direction.  It was northerly, and is now blowing directly
+from the west.  Yet if the action should assume grave
+proportions, it may prove necessary to shift Headquarters
+to some village further afield."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Heaven forbid!" murmured Count Hatzfeldt, expressively
+raising his fine eyebrows, "when one is able to get a
+decent dinner, and a daily bath at one's hotel!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Heaven generally ordains, through the mouth of Your
+Excellency, an exodus," said the Chancellor, laughing,
+"when a comfortable bed falls to my lot.  At Herny my
+couch had to be lengthened with chairs and carriage-cushions,
+and these kept parting company all the night
+long.  My feet were on the floor when I awakened in the
+morning,&mdash;literally at cockcrow&mdash;for my window opened
+upon the dunghill where the lord of the poultry-yard
+sounded his reveillé.  Now here I am accommodated in
+quite respectable fashion; in a little red creeper-covered
+house at the corner of the Rue Raugraf, and three of the
+Councillors are stowed under the same roof with me."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"While I," said the Warlock, "have my quarters at a
+cleanly bakery, where there is quite an excellent piano, by
+the way.  So that, to-night, unless Fate order otherwise, I
+shall hear my nephew Henry von Burt sing some of my
+favorite songs.  He is in voice for the first time since his
+attack of sore throat.  The King has been much pleased
+with his rendering of Herder's '<i>Volkslieder</i>' and '<i>Die
+Blumen</i> of Heine, which doubtless Your Excellency
+knows."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am acquainted with the song you mention.  Or I
+was," returned the Chancellor, "in my salad days.  They
+are over for me, unluckily! ... Only Your Excellency
+possesses the secret of perpetual youth."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he turned aside to receive a bulky sealed packet of
+dispatches from a green-jacketed Royal Courier, who
+had just driven into the Market Place in a farmer's gig,
+and now got down, tossing a fee to the scowling driver of
+the muddy, panting roadster.  While Moltke stood smiling
+and humming with characteristic untunefulness a stave of
+the tender, sentimental ballad:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+  "<i>If they knew it, the little flowers,<br>
+  How she wounded this bleeding heart,<br>
+  They would weep with me in bright dew-showers,<br>
+  Healing, healing its anguished smart!</i>"<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Minister in an undertone to Hatzfeldt, as he
+transferred to his keeping the bulky sealed envelope
+received from the courier:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Let his Excellency sing only loud enough, and neither
+Steinmetz nor the Red Prince will be able to prevent the
+music-loving Frenchmen from retiring upon Verdun."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had not meant the pungent jest to reach the ear of
+the great strategist.  But Moltke glanced round and
+answered mildly, if with a narrowing of his wrinkled eyelids,
+and a sardonic twist of his thin, dry lips:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Then all the more surely should we surround and
+annihilate them.  My second plan is usually stronger than
+my first.  And I have already issued instructions to Prince
+Frederick Charles and General Steinmetz, indicating the
+course they are to follow should Bazaine pierce our left
+wing.  Meanwhile let us listen to this fellow's singing.  It
+may please Your Excellency better than mine!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The arrival, a Captain of Dragoons of the Prussian
+Guard, acting as <i>aide-de-camp</i> upon the staff of Steinmetz,
+had just galloped into Pont à Mousson, accompanied by an
+escort of half a dozen troopers on blown horses, and had
+little breath left even for speech.  But when he threw
+himself from his reeking beast, the dispatch he took from his
+belt-pouch and handed to the Chief of the Great Staff told
+of a huge expenditure of "the sentient material of war."
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+At noon of the day, looking from his point of observation
+on the high ground between the Bois des Ognons and Gravelotte,
+short-legged, fiery-tempered Steinmetz had seen what
+seemed a weak spot in the French position.  Under cannon,
+mitrailleuse and chassepot-fire he had ordered several
+batteries of the 7th Corps and Von Hartmann's Division of
+Cavalry to cross the Gravelotte defile and plant themselves
+on the slopes south of the road.  Death had harvested redly
+from the extravagant movement.  The slaughter that
+ensued had shaken even the men who carried the needle-gun,
+their huge columns were giving ground.  General Steinmetz
+and his staff were under heavy fire.  Only the Prussian
+field-batteries, served and trained by gunner-sharpshooters,
+kept the German right wing from caving in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Heavy news, one would suppose, yet the Warlock read
+the dispatch to his master with as placid an expression as
+though he were at that moment seated beside the baker's
+excellent piano, listening to the tender warblings of the
+melodious Henry von Burt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Steinmetz is over ardent, it may be, yet it is what I
+should have done, had I been in his place," he said in
+answer to some perturbed exclamation of King Wilhelm.
+"Only, perhaps," he fingered his long chin thoughtfully,
+"I should have done it in a different way.  He is supported
+by now.  Stülpnagel will have thrown his Division forward
+and gripped the woods and heights upon the French left.
+Your Majesty will see a change in our favor by the time
+we have reached the ground!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your Excellency should be there now and I with you.
+Pray order the horses!" urged the agitated King.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They are waiting, sire!" said the Warlock, cool, calm,
+and inscrutable as ever.  In fact, he hummed another bar
+or two of the plaintive ballad about the weeping flowers as
+he followed his Royal master downstairs to the door, and
+the War Minister, Von Roon, who had been hastily sent for,
+rode up with his staff as the King mounted his steadiest
+charger, a powerful black horse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Federal Chancellor, Count von Bismarck Schönhausen,
+begs permission to accompany your Majesty!" said
+Hatzfeldt, gracefully approaching as the orderly of the
+Body-guard resigned the bridle-rein.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said to himself as he returned with the graciously
+accorded permission to where the Minister waited by the big
+brown mare that was held by an orderly of Cuirassiers:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"How perfect is his discretion!  How completely he
+hides the iron grip of power under the velvet glove of
+diplomacy!  Roon is the King's quartermaster-sergeant,
+Moltke is his calculating machine, Bismarck is his ruler&mdash;but
+he will always seem his slave!  Wherever the King
+goes&mdash;on journeys, shooting excursions, visits to
+watering-places&mdash;he is always at his elbow; he rides with him to
+maneuvers, and reviews and parades.  Since the War began&mdash;and
+at cost of what exertion, mental and bodily, no one
+understands better than I do!&mdash;he has never left his master
+alone for long enough to further the intrigues and
+influence of other men....  Every battle-field the King looks
+on will be seen through the Chancellor's eyes.  For this
+War is <i>his</i> War&mdash;and he knows it! ... Here come galloping
+the Royalties and Serene Highnesses, rabid to see some
+real fighting....  Bismarck calls them the Tinsel
+Rabble,&mdash;if only they knew!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Count Paul, smiling in his gently satirical fashion,
+strode back to his quarters to pen to his young, pretty, and
+exceedingly coquettish Countess, a marital letter full of
+tender expressions and requests for lots more cigarettes.
+While their Highnesses and Mightinesses of the Royal Suite
+pranced away in the wake of the King and his three great
+servants, without the slightest idea that the Chancellor
+who rode on William's left hand held them in such contempt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wounded men sitting or lying on hay in the grain-carts
+at the hospital door looked up as the Great Headquarter
+Staff rode by and gave a shaky Hoch! of greeting.
+Heads of dressers, nurses, Knights of St. John, and surgeons
+appeared at windows from which projected the Flag with
+the Red Cross.  While a long train of haggard French
+prisoners, halted before the porch of the church that had
+been converted into a temporary prison, stared with
+lackluster eyes over the bowls of cabbage-soup and the huge
+hunches of bread that had been distributed among them
+by pitying ladies; and a battalion of little black-a-vised,
+green-coated Saxon soldiers who had marched in dead-beat
+and were dozing on straw under the Market Hall, lifted
+their heads from their knapsacks, saying: "There goes
+Moltke with his King, and the Big Pomeranian.  Something
+is up out yonder!" and rolled over to sleep again....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The inhabitants and tradespeople of Pont à Mousson were
+too crushed to make any audible comments.  Within a
+fortnight they had had twice to feed and quarter a French
+Division.  Now here, as it seemed, was the whole Prussian
+Army poured out upon them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were dumb and stupefied in the Babel of foreign
+dialects.  They could make no headway against the flood.
+Everywhere were loud-voiced Intendants making requisitions
+and giving orders; officers and quartermaster-sergeants
+shouting for rooms, provender and stabling; the
+men, like the officers, insatiable in demands for meat, bread,
+forage, tobacco, flour and wine, liberal in oaths and blows
+to those who could not satisfy their needs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tradesmen in gutted shops swore in whispers over
+basketsful of dirty little nickel coins with (to them)
+indecipherable inscriptions&mdash;all they had to show in return for
+one or two thousand francs' worth of stock.  To grumble
+brought retribution, swift, sharp and merciless, on the
+head of the grumbler.  To resist meant death.  Therefore
+they would be silent until the invader should have passed
+on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when the wearers of the muddy blue uniforms and
+the riders of the muddy, well-fed horses did pass, fresh
+hosts came swarming after them.  There seemed no end to
+the brown-faced men in the loathed blue uniform....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Are there more to come?" those of them who understood
+French&mdash;and many did&mdash;were asked timidly, and
+they answered: "Naturally.  We are only the Advance.
+To keep the roads by which we have passed open, and to
+guard the telegraph-wires we have left behind us there will
+be very many more required!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Germany was being emptied into France's lap, it seemed
+to the bewildered peasants leaning against the walls of
+their cottages or peering from the doorways, as had done
+the peasants of Alsace-Lorraine.  They, like them, were
+ruined, their crops devastated by cataclysms of armed
+humanity, their cellars emptied, their frugal stores devoured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But where are we to find food for all these, we who had
+fared badly enough before they came?  And who will pay
+us for what they have not paid for, or give cash for this
+stuff called money that they have left behind?  Will it be
+the King or the Emperor?" some haggard man or woman,
+reckless with despair and misery, would demand with
+frantic gestures.  "And how shall we feed our children when
+they leave us nothing?  How live at all when they live
+upon us?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They asked this less often when the Flag with the Geneva
+Cross appeared above roofs and thrust out of windows of
+buildings appropriated as hospitals, and when long trains
+of German ambulance-wagons and hay-carts full of
+wounded men in blue uniforms began to pass by, as well
+as piteous processions of French wounded and French
+prisoners....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You see, they die!" they presently began to tell each
+other.  "Frenchmen are being killed like flies out yonder
+where you hear the cannon, but not Frenchmen only.
+These too, die....  MacMahon has failed us and the cursed
+Emperor has run away for fear of Bismarck, and Bazaine
+may prove a rotten staff for France to lean on.  But if our
+generals have forgotten how to lead, the Army of France
+has not forgotten how to fight, and thousands upon thousands
+of Prussians have been killed since the beginning of
+the War.  They dig their great trenches so quickly and
+bury the slain in such haste that the greatness of their
+losses will never be really known.  When they would hide
+them more completely, they heap up corpses in farmers'
+barns, and pile the farmers' straw and hay and faggots
+about them, and pour on petroleum and tar and set fire to
+it&mdash;and thus their dead are consumed to ashes&mdash;and
+sometimes the yet living with the dead!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+As at Paris, spy-fever raged in cities, towns and villages,
+while the armies of the invader plowed bleeding furrows
+in the flank of prostrate France.  For the Prussian Secret
+Intelligence Department had its emissaries everywhere.
+Hotels, public bureaus, railway stations, shops, offices, even
+clubs, had harbored them unknowingly.  Now they cropped
+up on all sides, speaking French with the Gallic accent,
+their German brains full of neatly pigeon-holed and docketed
+information, ready to place themselves at the disposal
+of their friends.  Hence, patriotic Frenchmen, favored by
+chance or heredity with blue eyes, fair hair, ruddy
+complexions and the advantage as to inches over their
+neighbors, found themselves cold-shouldered by their intimates
+and subjected to unpleasantly suspicious scrutiny when
+consuming refreshment in <i>cafés</i> and restaurants, or
+strolling with their acquaintances on public boulevards.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+English artists attached to illustrated newspapers, special
+correspondents, handicapped by blonde whiskers and an
+imperfect acquaintance with the French language, found
+themselves in many a tight place.  "<i>Mort aux espions!</i>"
+is not a cheering cry when some thousands of red-hot
+throats are uttering it, and half a dozen soldiers or
+gendarmes form the only barrier between the unlucky suspects
+and the furious mob.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap42"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XLII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+A mud-bedaubed nondescript who toiled at the heels of the
+Great Headquarter Staff upon a huge velocipede of the
+big-wheeled, bone-shaker type prevalent at that remote period,
+met plenty of scowling glances from groups of peasants
+gathered at the corners of villages and listening by the
+wayside.  Even on territory occupied by German troops,
+it was not safe for lagging soldiers to drop behind upon
+the march.  To enter roadside taverns or farmhouses with
+a comrade was imprudent, to venture in alone was perilous,
+the sight of the German uniform, the sound of the Teutonic
+gutturals, were so fiercely abhorred.  Of the reason
+for this loathing the Englishman was not ignorant.  Marching
+with the infantry of the German army, he had followed
+where the Uhlans had passed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had slept, the night before the Army of the Red
+Prince had crossed the river, in a little deserted country
+château,&mdash;an ideal honeymoon nest for lovers, standing in a
+high-walled garden full of fruit-trees and tangled roses
+in the middle of a sloping meadow on the banks of the
+Moselle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The butt of some Prussian soldier's rifle had served for
+key to the locked door in the high garden-wall.  Those who
+had gone before had stripped the bushes and espaliers.
+The house had been entered, and the dainty silk-upholstered
+drawing-room chairs and sofas had been dragged out into
+the garden.  The piano&mdash;a tiny rosewood <i>bijou</i>&mdash;probably
+a wedding present&mdash;and the absurd little billiard-table with
+which Monsieur had disported himself, stood crookedly upon
+the gravel; a long tear in the green cloth of the one; prints
+of tumblers, marks of greasy fingers marring the shiny
+veneer of the other.  Bottles that had contained Champagne
+and Moselle&mdash;butts of cigars, empty tobacco-papers
+and match-boxes were scattered everywhere&mdash;over gravel,
+and grass-plot and the once trim garden-beds.  An
+impromptu <i>café</i>-concert had evidently formed a feature of the
+bivouac.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh had slept in a charming bedroom, under
+rosebud-chintz curtains looped with silken ropes, having
+carved wooden Cupids, painted pink, instead of tassels.
+The bed was not as luxurious as it might have been, because
+the blankets and sheets had been carried off.  Opening his
+eyes in the gray of morning he had seen himself as he lay
+reflected in a long cheval-glass, and failed, for the moment,
+to recognize in the bronzed, shaggy, unclean tatterdemalion
+therein reflected the young Englishman of respectable
+appearance who had interviewed the German States'
+Chancellor in the Wilhelm-strasse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was not alone in the room, that was the next discovery.
+A woman, young and swarthy, dressed in the quaint costume
+of the country, stood upon the other side of the bed,
+with a kitchen chopper in her lifted right hand.  He took
+in the chopper at a glance, and promptly rolled off the bed
+upon the side facing the friendly cheval-glass, and stood
+glowering at the black-eyed girl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I have startled Monsieur?  A thousand apologies!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She forced a smile with her curtsey and backed toward
+the door.  P. C. Breagh explained in his French that he
+was no robber but a harmless traveler, and that she need
+not be alarmed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur is very kind!"  Her chopper-hand hidden
+under her apron, she explained that she had served as
+cook in the establishment.  Upon the news that M. de
+Bismarck was coming, <i>tout à coup</i>, Monsieur and Madame
+had gone away together to Paris.  They were noble and
+very amiable, but old, old, and feeble....  They had left
+the little château in her care....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mademoiselle is not easily frightened?" P. C. Breagh
+hinted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the black-eyed, modestly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am Angéle&mdash;nothing of Mademoiselle.  A peasant&mdash;like
+my father, who was gardener for Monsieur and
+Madame....  I was alone here when the Prussian horsemen
+came, breaking the doors and shutters....  Everything
+was spoiled, or taken, wine, linen, the fowls in the
+poultry-run.  Destitution, ruin everywhere!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She accentuated her tale of loss by heavings of the bosom,
+shrugs of the fine shoulders, dramatic gestures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Then my father returned and found ...  No matter!
+Both he and I should have been silent and endured
+everything....  It was not wise, Monsieur, that the old man
+should have struck a Prussian, even for my sake.  For then
+he was beaten.  Whenever I shut my eyes, I see it....
+Therefore I have vowed not to sleep again until...."  She
+opened her eyes wide, and smiled, rather grimly, then
+changed the subject with a wave of the unchoppered and
+visible hand.  Was Monsieur hungry?  By searching, a
+crust of bread might be found in some cupboard, an egg or
+two&mdash;laid by one of the abducted hens in some private
+corner&mdash;a pinch of coffee and sugar sufficient for Monsieur!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I should be glad of it.  But&mdash;when you are in such
+trouble it seems unfair," protested Monsieur.  He added,
+reverting to the language of the country, that he would be
+happy to pay for the <i>déjeuner</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But no!  A meal for a bird!&mdash;Monsieur and Madame
+will never miss it!" and Angéle curtseyed herself away,
+with forced smiles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Left alone, P. C. Breagh bolted the door and finding
+water in the bedroom jugs, and scented soap upon the
+washstand, enjoyed the luxury of a comprehensive wash,
+drying himself, in the absence of towels, upon a pillow-case.
+A pot of cold-cream, tinted a delicate pink and bearing the
+label of Piesse and Lubin, he found, and anointed his blistered
+feet therewith, and not without pangs of conscience&mdash;tore
+up the pillow-case and bandaged them.  He would pay
+the girl for the damage done to her master's property, he
+told himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He combed his shock of dusty hair with a tortoise-shell
+comb he picked up from the carpet, and went downstairs,
+knapsack in hand.  It was four o'clock.  The dusty,
+foot-print and wheel-marked highway beyond the broken door
+in the garden-wall was strangely bare and lonely.  The
+battalion he had marched with had bivouacked on the other
+side of the village.  The troops that would presently follow
+were not yet upon the road.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl cried out that Monsieur's breakfast was ready.
+It had been laid, looking quite tempting, on one of the little
+inlaid tables that stood upon the tiny lawn.  A truncheon
+of bread, fairly new, a pat of butter, two eggs, and a bowl
+of fragrant, steaming milk and coffee&mdash;such a meal as
+P. C. Breagh had not enjoyed for many a day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He begged Angéle to share.  She replied with a graceful
+wave of abnegation that she had already eaten.  P. C. Breagh
+expressed regret, muttered his old Rockhampton
+grace and savagely fell to.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur is Catholic?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The movement of his hand, making the sacred Sign, had
+not escaped her.  He nodded, with his mouth full, and
+Angéle turned pale under her swarthy skin.  Her guest
+vigorously beheaded an egg and reached for the coffee-bowl.
+The expression of the girl's eyes, as he lifted it to
+his mouth, brought something back to him.  He sipped
+cautiously&mdash;recognized the French equivalent for English
+rat-poison&mdash;spat forth what he had taken, with a hideous
+grimace, and poured the deadly stuff out upon the ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he got up and looked for Angéle, whose white-frilled
+cap, crimson bodice, and striped stuff petticoat had
+vanished round the corner of the little hen-house.  He could
+hear the <i>klop-klop</i> of her varnished cow-leather clogs
+receding along paths unknown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said P. C. Breagh, speaking with mouth awry, for the
+intense bitterness of the alkaloid had dried up tongue and
+palate:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I'd like to follow that girl and shake her.  But more
+than likely her sweetheart and male relatives are lurking
+in the neighborhood with pitchforks, to speed the
+unwelcome guest."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He went back to the breakfast-table, but the glamour
+had faded from the banquet, and the leathery dryness of
+mouth and throat foiled him in the effort to finish the egg
+he had begun.  He pocketed the other, abandoned the bread
+and butter as unreliable, strapped on his dusty knapsack,
+and was hobbling away upon the sticks that had lately
+served him as crutches, when he caught sight of an obviously
+new coffin of thin tarred planking, on the gravel near
+the conservatory door.  It bore a cross and an inscription
+roughly scrawled in letters of white paint:
+</p>
+
+<pre style="text-align: center">
+&nbsp;&nbsp;|&nbsp;&nbsp;
+--+--
+&nbsp;&nbsp;|&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&nbsp;&nbsp;|&nbsp;&nbsp;
+</pre>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  JOSEPH MARIE MEUNIER,<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  AGED 80.<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  KILLED BY THE PRUSSIANS,<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  AUGUST, 1870.<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  R.I.P.<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+And then, with a stiffening of every muscle and a cold
+and deadly sinking at the heart, the English boy realized
+that Angéle's father had been murdered, and knew what
+had been the unendurable injury that had provoked the
+man of eighty to strike in his daughter's defense.  Next
+instant a gun banged, but the charge of slugs that had
+been meant to lodge in P. C. Breagh's cerebellum merely
+smashed the conservatory glass and peppered the walls and
+trees.  The intended recipient of these favors had
+previously been lame.  Now, regardless of blisters and skin
+cracks, he cast away his improvised crutches, darted down
+the garden-path, nipped through the shattered door that
+hung upon one twisted hinge, and ran for dear life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thenceafter our young friend did not stray too far from
+the column he temporarily marched with.  The secret of
+those haggard eyes and scowling looks was clear to him
+now.  And the discovery of a giant velocipede with the
+solid rubber tires of the period and a front wheel of four
+feet in diameter abandoned in a ditch, presently enabled
+him&mdash;previously schooled by Mr. Tickling in the management
+of a machine of similar construction to outpace the
+Red Prince's marching battalions; and&mdash;upon highways,
+keep abreast of his flying cavalry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, hugely daring, he pounded along in the wake of the
+Great Headquarter Staff, guided by the whipping flicker
+of the black and white lance-pennons of the Red Uhlans
+bringing up the rear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were troops upon the road....  One or two stray
+batteries of artillery, and part of an Engineer Corps going
+the same way, halted to give a cheer for the King.  But
+the galloping dispatch-bearers with their guards of troopers,
+bound for Pont à Mousson, meeting the Great Staff on
+the way, turned back with it, adding to the clouds of dust
+in its wake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Doctor had promised P. C. Breagh plenty of raw-head
+and bloody-bones whether he marched with the Advance
+or remained at the rear.  The prophecy had been
+verified.  He had not yet seen a battle or even a
+battlefield.  But thousands of wounded men, displaying every
+sickening mutilation that shot and shell and steel can
+inflict upon the human body; thousands upon thousands of
+prisoners, gaunt with fatigue, hunger and misery, had
+passed in an almost unending panorama before his sickened,
+pitying eyes.  Ruined châteaux, farms and churches, crops
+destroyed or rotting in the ground ungarnered, villages
+razed or burned, towns battered out of shape, and fortifications
+breached by heavy gunnery, were to become sights of
+common occurrence as he traveled the long red road that
+was to lead him home at last.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Now he rode and odd lines of songs, comic or tender,
+fragments of Fleet Street talk, brain-pictures of things seen
+or persons remembered passed through his mind as he
+pedaled between long lines of roadside poplars, whitening
+in the hot breeze that carried the scorching dust along in
+clouds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The face of the peasant girl who had tried to poison him.
+By George! if Mrs. Rousby or Miss Marriott or Mrs. Vezin
+could have seen her fierce, gleaming eyes, and her
+heavy black eyebrows lifted at the outer corners, and the
+way a white canine tooth had nipped her red underlip....
+The voice of Mr. Knewbit barking, "Avoid Sham Technicality
+and Sentimental Slumgullion," the well-bred voice
+of Valverden dealing the unforgotten snub.  The fortune
+told him by the gipsy woman on Waterloo Bridge after
+that unforgettable January night's vigil: "Yer'll travel a
+long road and a bloody road; and yer'll tramp it with the
+one yer love, and never know it, until the end, when tute
+is jasing...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"When tute is jasing" meant "When thou art going"
+he had been told so by a man who knew a bit of Romany.
+His imagination made a grasshopper-leap of years to the
+death-bed of a celebrated War Correspondent.&mdash;a grim,
+bronzed man who had followed his arduous calling in many
+quarters of the world, and had earned much kudos and a
+whole chestful of decorations, but had never married, and
+was understood to look with coldness upon the loveliest
+women, his heart having been irrevocably given in earlier
+days.  Juliette&mdash;still young, and ah! how exquisite in
+maturity&mdash;Juliette in widow's weeds, would hasten to the
+moribund's side and place her little hand in his, gaunt and
+damp with approaching death.  She would hear his story
+of faithful, hopeless passion, and close his eyelids for the
+last long sleep.  And standing by his pillow, looking
+pityingly at the dead face, she would realize that she
+loved&mdash;too late....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sniffed and gulped as the tears stung his smarting
+eyelids, so moving was the picture of that death-bed scene.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A picture of the King of Prussia as he had seen him
+sitting at the open window of his lodgings at the Mairie
+of Pont à Mousson next came up, with faces of market-people
+and street-boys gaping round-eyed at <i>Le Roi de la
+Prusse</i>, who nursed his clean-shaven chin and stared
+unwinkingly before him.  Again, the old man, pale,
+square-shouldered, capped and tightly-buttoned, riding through
+the market-place with his Iron Chancellor by his side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wiry, hawk-eyed Moltke and saturnine, shaggy-browed
+Roon clattered upon the heels of them, but P. C. Breagh
+had had eyes only for the great soldierly figure that
+bestrode the big brown mare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Did he not owe his life to the well-shaped hand that
+had rested on the thigh of the brown mare's rider, as the
+Minister bent to speak to the King?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No common bond of confidence and friendship seemed to
+unite the master of seventy-three and the man of fifty-five.
+The hard, somewhat vulpine face of the Hohenzollern, with
+its drooping, aquiline nose, narrow light hazel eyes, curled
+white mustache, precise, tight-lipped mouth and rounded
+chin projecting between the brushed back white whiskers,
+had been all alight with interest, and warm with kindliness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is what the Man of Iron had said with his small
+square teeth showing laughingly under the heavy hair-brake,
+and his fierce, prominent blue eyes sparkling with
+humor and fun:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The final scenes of melodrama are always the most
+strenuous.  Your Majesty must regard the ridge over
+Flavigny as your Royal box on the Grand Tier, the occasion
+as a farewell performance of the French Empire&mdash;played
+for the benefit of United Germany, before the whole
+world!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Flavigny was a village....  But the flickering
+black-and-white pennons that tipped the dust-cloud ahead were
+slowing....  Three battalions of infantry, each with its
+band playing gaily at its head, the bronzed, healthy-looking,
+white-powdered men marching eight abreast, had halted
+and front-faced as the word of command followed the
+sound of the Great Staff trumpeter:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Clear the way!  Clear the way!  Here comes the King!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now the scorching air vibrated with their vigorous
+cheering as the King cantered by and was gone with a
+shout and a wave of the hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Our old one takes dust and sun, saddle-blisters and
+short commons like any old trooper!" P. C. Breagh heard
+a Lieutenant say to a subaltern as the dusty ranks
+half-wheeled and fell into step once more.  "He's a precisian
+too....  <i>Zum Beispiel</i>, he called to a man in Vidler's
+company that he had got his 'needler' on the wrong
+shoulder.  Now that's another thing I like in the old
+man!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Field Marshal is taking the Great Headquarters to
+where it will be hellishly risky," a Captain with Staff
+shoulder-cords was saying to another, as a new outbreak
+of cannon and mitrailleuse-fire caused his horse to start
+and rear.  He added: "They were hard at it at Mars la
+Tour, Vionville and Rezonville all day yesterday: the
+5th Division were in action all round Moltke as he stood
+on the high ridge above Flavigny....  To-day our 7th
+and 10th are fighting between Gravelotte and St. Hubert,
+where the French have the devil's own array of
+battery-emplacements and rifle-pits&mdash;our guards are at Doncourt,
+our 9th and 8th corps are at Verneville and Amanvilliers.
+Now the fighting seems to have rolled down nearer the
+river.  I have certainly heard cavalry trumpets sounding
+the charge, and volleys of musketry&mdash;French, I judge!&mdash;coming
+from that direction.  I should judge that...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Bazaine must have turned the handle in too much of
+a hurry!" retorted the junior, who enjoyed a regimental
+reputation for humor, and a volley of laughter rattled
+along the marching files, now breasting a steep and gravelly
+hill, half-way up which the rider of the giant-wheeled
+velocipede had been compelled to dismount.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh had seen, reproduced from the <i>Charivari</i> in
+all the German illustrated papers, the famous caricature of
+Cham, over which King Wilhelm's brown-faced infantrymen
+were grinning as they climbed the hill.  Who does not
+remember the Count de Noë's memorable presentment of
+the field of war dotted with defunct Prussians, and the
+French mitrailleuse-gunner in the foreground who exclaims
+in astonishment: "<i>Sapristi!</i> the battle is over.  I
+must have turned the handle too fast!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But more than the sardonic jest of Cham, the Captain's
+reference to the nearness of a possible action interested the
+would-be spectator of a battlefield.  The wiry, sun-bronzed
+young man in the broken boots and the dusty brown Norfolk
+jacket, now pushing the solid-tired giant-wheel up a
+steep and lung-testing hill which the bearers of the needle-gun
+took in a canter, had seen war-casualties in appalling
+numbers, but he had not yet beheld War.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now sharp bugles and piercing trumpets were
+clamoring of War all round one.  The musketry that one
+could hear at Pont à Mousson clattered in volleys among
+the neighboring hills.  The deep booming of heavy
+field-batteries persistently answered.  Every now and then the
+ear was violently assaulted by the hideous hyena-yapping
+of the mitrailleuse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These breasting hills, these deep-cupped valleys walled
+and ramparted with wood-crested hill-ranges, cut up the
+honest battle into a dozen skirmishes.  Oh! for an open,
+campaign and a vantage on some breezy hill-top whence
+one might see, as the King was seeing with Moltke and his
+Chancellor from the ridge above Flavigny!
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap43"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XLIII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+The ridge above Flavigny seemed farther off and more
+inaccessible than the Great Atlas.  One must get off the
+highroad to some elevated bit of ground, consult the
+Doctor's map, and use the Chancellor's binoculars.  Here was
+a broad track, green with grass grown over ancient wheel-ruts,
+leading off upon the left near the crest of the hill.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The grass-road led to a stone quarry evidently long
+abandoned.  Skirting the quarry, P. C. Breagh began to climb
+the grassy scarp of the hill.  It grew steeper, and presently
+he awakened to the difficulties of mountaineering with a
+velocipede, and hid away, with the intention of retrieving it
+later, his stolen giant-wheel in a clump of whins.  Alas! its
+bones, like those of many a sentient charger, were to
+rust in rains and blister in suns upon that hillside of the
+Meurthe Department for many and many a year.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But not knowing this, P. C. Breagh continued climbing.
+The ridgy backbone of turf-jacketed rock proved a natural
+buttress rising to a towering platform sparsely grassed,
+tufted with thorn and furze-bushes, stunted pines and
+dwarfy oak-trees, all mossy of stem and bending to the
+southwest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The afternoon sunshine was mellow rather than hot.
+The pure dustless air was fragrant with hill-thyme and the
+meadow-sweet.  The autumn-tinted woods were golden, the
+hills hathed in clear blue air.  The short herbage clothing
+the steep was warm, smelling like the clean hide of some
+great grass-feeding animal.  But for the restless bickering
+of trumpets and bugles, and the hellish noise that men with
+guns were making, it would have been sweet to be upon the
+hillside alone with God.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a great view from the summit of the colossal
+limestone....  You could see that bone of contention, the
+road leading to Verdun, stretching away southwestward, a
+dusty-white ribbon between its lines of whitening poplars,
+over the tops of three thick patches of rusty-golden
+woodland, and the bushy uplands above Gravelotte and the
+church spire of Vernéville.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dark blue Prussian columns showed on the grassy slopes
+traversed by the road that ran from Ars to Bagneux.
+Near the Quarries of Rezerieulles was a huge French
+battery served by red-legged artillerymen, who ran about like
+ants.  But one could only guess at the fact that Germany
+and the Bad Neighbor were locked in the death-grips over
+six miles square of battle-ground, the breasting plumps
+of trees and towering bush-clad ridges hid so much away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah! but the din was hellish!  The woods vomited fire.
+White balloons that meant shrapnel-shells described arcs
+against the hot blue sky, crossing and recrossing between
+Rezonville and Gravelotte.  When they fell upon the slippery
+grass slopes they exploded with fearful crashes, or
+became black balls that rolled merrily a while and then lay
+quiet.  In the grass near them were shapeless lumps and
+masses, red and blue, and dark blue; and things with stiff
+legs sticking up grotesquely,&mdash;the human and equine <i>débris</i>
+of the morning's fighting and the battle of the previous day.
+The soft westerly breeze brought an ugly taint upon it&mdash;less
+loathsome, but more horrible than the stench coming
+from the huge crowded camps of French about St. Quentin
+and Plappeville and Les Carrières and St. Eloy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two great nations at each other's throats and God's
+image being shattered everywhere....  Blizzards of Lead
+and Iron, Steel and Fire raging over six miles square of
+ground.  Rivers of blood being poured out, and yet, in
+spite of the terrific din of War, the insects and birds
+and beasts went about their usual business.  The shrill
+laugh of the green woodpecker sounded in the copses,
+the jackdaws were gossiping as they darted in and out of
+the clefts of the gray rock.  Two magpies were feeding a
+late-hatched fledgling among the dwarfy oak-scrub.  Rabbits
+were showing their white scuts on the edges of the
+oak-plantations; and the black and gray humble-bees were
+buzzing as they rifled the lavender scabious and the blue
+corn-bottles and the late white clover-blooms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Looking northeast toward the richly wooded hill where
+perches Fort Queleu, you could see the French flag flying
+from there, and from St. Privat, and the great cathedral of
+Metz sitting in the lap of the Moselle.  The railway bridge
+crossing the green, slowly rolling river above Ars was
+guarded by Uhlans and Engineers.  A stray outpost with
+half a field-battery held the island below the bridge, and
+the rear squadrons of a brigade of cavalry,&mdash;Blue Dragoons,
+White Cuirassiers, Uhlans, and Red Hussars, with
+two batteries of Horse Artillery, were traversing the iron
+roadway, the troopers walking beside the horses as they
+delicately picked their way along.  The Advance was
+almost out of sight, the midpost squadrons, remounted, were
+under the bluff that runs beside the river road from Ars
+to below Aney, and with the Staff of the Cuirassier
+brigade-commander&mdash;the dazzling scarlet-and-gold of his British
+Dragoon's uniform contrasting forcibly with the steel
+cuirasses and white coats, his red-plumed silver helmet
+shining like a miniature sun&mdash;rode Brotherton, on a powerful
+dappled-gray horse, his handsome face animated and eager
+as he replied to some remark addressed to him by the
+Brigadier.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Certainly, General, but I should think the sword could
+never be superseded.  It is, with the bow and spear, the
+traditional weapon of war."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You omit the sling, Colonel!" called out an officer
+who rode behind him.  And then the scrap of English talk
+was swamped in the clink of steel on steel, and the
+rhythmical trampling of the squadrons that followed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh sat astride of a hot boulder, got out the
+Doctor's map and adjusted his cherished binoculars.  They
+showed him the battalion he had marched with halted by
+the side of the river road.  The bridge at Pagny showed
+black with solid columns of infantry, marching eight
+abreast; their sun-touched bayonets rippling lines of
+molten silver, each helmet-spike a flame of ruddy gold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The First and Second Armies of United Germany, hitherto
+compelled to a strenuous inactivity, were having their
+innings with a vengeance now....  Looking Metzwards,
+one could see that three new lines of pontoons were
+thrown across the river below Yaux.  A division of the
+dark-blue soldiers, with eight squadrons of cavalry and
+half a dozen batteries of mounted artillery, were crossing
+almost within range of the guns of Mount St. Quentin
+and Plappeville.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How thickly the white tents were clustered on the green
+slopes about both fortresses, Red Breeches swarming in
+thousands without and within the walls.  Were the
+gunners of the huge bronze Creusots one had read of asleep,
+or lazy or indifferent?  The answer came in a spirt of
+white vapor from an embrasure of the middle salient of
+St. Quentin's long, eight-pointed star.  A white-hot flame
+leaped, a towering cloud of smoke soared, the roar of a
+heavy piece of artillery followed; and a shell of big caliber
+soared above Moulins and burst with a shattering explosion
+and an uprush of flame.  Some Artillery-horses on the
+nearest pontoon reared, causing a momentary confusion.
+Their dismounted drivers quieted them, and the orderly
+crossing went on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Boom-Boom!</i>  Crack!  A clatter like old iron and a
+heavy splashing and pounding of hoofs.  St. Quentin had
+got the range.&mdash;No! the shrapnel shell had been fired from
+a French field-battery placed behind earthworks above
+St. Ruffine.  Another shell hit the upper pontoon and
+must have smashed it adrift on the landing side.  For
+dark-blue men and struggling horses were drifting away in
+the direction of Metz, and the green river was tinged with
+red.  The wheelers of a gun-team, dragged downward by
+the weight attached to them, had gone to the bottom almost
+without a struggle.  The leaders, submerged all but their
+wild heads and splashing fore-hoofs, battled a while with
+the current before one of them vanished.  The other, whose
+rope-and-chain traces had somehow broken, swam gallantly
+down-stream, and finally landed on the farther bank.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Further successful practice on the part of France's
+artillerists may have followed.  At this juncture the
+attention of P. C. Breagh became diverted by a curious fact.
+One of the stone-pines seemed to be lobbing cones at him.
+<i>Whiff-phutt!</i> they were dropping on all sides.  Or could
+it? ... A shrill whistling sound close by his ear, and a
+simultaneous bristling of the hairs upon his scalp and body,
+told him that it could.  The missiles were bullets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They came, sometimes with a sharp whistle that told of
+unexpended energy, at others with the pleasant humming
+that had at first attracted him, from the woods that clothed
+the rising ground northwest and west of the platform he
+occupied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Were they Prussian bullets or French?  At the moment,
+the question did not interest him.  He had pocketed his
+map and crawling on his belly towards the southern edge
+of his platform, looked cautiously over, meditating descent.
+Beyond was a sandwich-shaped stretch of woodland climbing
+to a ridge; and beyond the ridge a considerable expanse
+of bush-dotted common bordered by a stream and speckled
+with a few farm-buildings.  Quite a decent-sized town
+lifted its Norman church-tower nearly a mile away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The town must be Gorze.  Withdrawing his eyes from it,
+they dropped into a deep ravine or combe running parallel
+with the western and southern sides of the giant limestone
+rock he sprawled on.  Ferns clothed the deep, hollow sides,
+and oaks and birches, springing from the bottom, lifted
+their bushy heads to the level of his face.  Spying between
+the branches, he saw that the ravine was full of garishly
+colored lights and shadows, and that a steady current of
+glittering white metal snaked in and out between the
+tree-trunks, setting from west to east.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bayonets, carried on the shoulders of red-breeched
+French soldiers, moving with startling rapidity over the
+dry leaves at the bottom of the ravine.  A battalion, at
+least, of wiry, active-looking Voltigeurs, a mitrailleuse-battery,
+each weapon hauled by a team of three gunners....
+Green-coated Chasseurs <i>à pied</i>, with cocks' plumes
+shading the peaks of their <i>képis</i> followed.  Would a surprise
+be intended for the cavalry-brigades that had crossed
+the railway-bridge and ridden eastward down the river-road
+a few minutes previously?  In that case, what ought
+one to do?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even as he asked, the advanced company of Voltigeurs
+discovered the Prussian squadrons.  He saw a ripple of
+excitement pass down the ranks, and the Voltigeurs hurry
+forward at the double.  He saw the mitrailleuse-batteries
+string out in line, push up the sloping sides of the
+ravine, and scatter among the trees of the plantation that
+climbed the ridge.  The Chasseurs followed.  Their intention
+was obvious.  They were going to enfilade the passing
+brigades from the cover of the wood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even as the hounds of hell seemed to break loose, and a
+sheet of pure yellow-white flame ran from end to end of the
+ridge where the trees ended, the foremost brigade of three
+Hussar regiments came in view, trotting over a track that
+traversed the common, became a road, and plunged
+between deep woodlands trending west.  His map had told
+him that the road led to Rezonville and Gravelotte.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He heard the Prussian trumpets sound through the ear-splitting
+racket of the French rifle-fire.  He saw through
+the thin haze of powder-smoke that hung above the wood,
+the massed columns split into squadrons, the squadrons
+divide into troops, the troops become units&mdash;scattered over
+the common, galloping to re-form again upon the road that
+led through the woods to Rezonville.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were two of the brigades forming Rheinbaben's
+Fifth Division, under Von Barby and Von Bredow, pushing
+forward to join General von Redern in the neighborhood
+of Mac La Tour.  Their mobility saved them from
+decimation on a grand scale, but they left dead horses and
+men and officers dead and wounded.  Their retreat was
+covered by one of their batteries of Horse Artillery, and
+two squadrons of a Uhlan regiment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the distance a riderless gray charger galloped wildly
+over the common, and a prone figure in a brilliant scarlet
+coat lay motionless beside the track.  More could not be
+observed just then, for the battery of Horse Artillery got
+into position, while the Uhlans dismounted and coolly
+returned with carbine-fire the enfilade from the chassepots
+in the wood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They knelt, and aimed and shot without hurry, and that
+their shooting was effective was demonstrated to the
+noncombatant onlooker, by half a dozen French Artillerymen
+and Chasseurs <i>à pied</i> who came staggering or limping back
+through the trees, and got down into the ravine.  One
+toppled over in the act of negotiating the descent, and lay
+sprawling and head downward.  Another, who kept putting
+a hand to his streaming cheek, and taking it away to
+stare at the blood upon it, was shot again in a vital part,
+spun around, and collapsed in a heap.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Lee-ee eer!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wailing, stinging screech of a bullet that had shaved
+unpleasantly near was accompanied by the whisking of
+the sun-scorched straw hat from the head of P. C. Breagh,
+and an acute pang of deadly fear.  In the same instant the
+Prussian field-battery opened fire.  Beyond the trees four
+puffs of white smoke went up, and four tongues of bright
+yellow flame preceded the quadruple crash of the
+driving-charges.  Lanes opened through the smoke-filled wood,
+as trees split into kindling and match-sticks.  And heaps
+of green and scarlet rags mixed with bloody flesh and
+shattered bones mingled with the <i>débris</i>.  And something
+that screamed like a devil unchained hurtled through
+intervening space, and plumped upon the limestone platform
+within a dozen feet of P. C. Breagh.  And he shrieked like
+a shot rabbit as it exploded with a splitting crash, and a
+spurt of evil yellow fire licked the skin off his ear and
+cheek.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dazed and stupefied, he removed himself to the farther
+and more sheltered side of the platform.  But the skirmish
+was over, the Voltigeurs and the Chasseurs <i>à pied</i>, with
+what remained of the mitrailleuse-battery, had not waited
+for the Uhlans to charge, but were in pell-mell retreat along
+the ravine.  He heard a French voice cry savagely:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"We are cut off!  These woods are full of Prussians!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And in the same instant, through the lanes that had been
+hacked through the trees, P. C. Breagh saw the Prussian
+artillery limber up and ride off with what remained of the
+Uhlan squadrons.  They were wanted badly at the front,
+and the infantry-battalions with which P. C. Breagh had
+marched from Pont à Mousson, and the Division coming
+up from Pagny, striking into the Ars road, had crossed the
+upper end of the ravine.  The woods were indeed full of
+them.  And they also were wanted at the front and had
+no time to spare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As blue uniforms and crimson faces topped by gilt-spiked
+helmets came crowding through the trees, the
+human river, flowing along the bottom of the defile, rose
+in a wave and splashed back upon itself.  A red-haired
+young officer of Voltigeurs, drawing his sword, used his
+voice and the flat of the weapon to restore order; and
+succeeded so far that his company formed in straggling lines
+and began to send in volleys with the courage of despair.
+The gunners of the mitrailleuse that was not smashed by
+the German shell-fire could not use the piece effectively at
+the bottom of the death-trap.  They were shot down in the
+attempt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was cool, scientific slaughter&mdash;merciless carnage.
+Before it began, a bugle cautioned attention.  A flat-capped
+field-officer pushed his horse to the front and cried
+in stentorian tones:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Aimed fire!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The men of the chassepot made a gallant stand, but the
+odds were heavy, and the men of the needle-gun did not
+waste a cartridge.  They loaded and aimed, fired and
+reloaded with machine-like precision.  When the ravine was
+piled with bloody corpses the bugles sounded "Cease fire!"  Then
+the Prussian field-officer spurred to the edge of the
+red ditch and shouted, looking down:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Does anyone here ask quarter?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a laugh.  But something raised itself from a
+heap of bullet-pierced bodies.  A rattling voice cried:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No, dog of a Prussian!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A revolver cracked, and the speaker, a Voltigeur, was
+silent.  His voice had sounded like that of an old man, but
+he wore the epaulettes of a lieutenant and had carroty-red
+hair.  At this juncture, being overtaken by grievous
+retching and vomiting, P. C. Breagh's observations
+ceased.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sat up presently and wiped his dripping neck and
+mopped his forehead.  It seemed to him that he had seen
+the whole French Army exterminated, and yet he had
+witnessed but a skirmish ending in a battue.  He shook his
+wits into some order, and controlled the shuddering that
+took him in the pit of the stomach, when he remembered
+that in common decency he must go to Brotherton.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The descent from the rock-platform was nothing more
+than a risky scramble.  There were plenty of pine and
+furze roots and jutting stones for holding to and clefts into
+which to thrust one's toes.  But the crossing of that ravine
+cumbered with bloody corpses was not effected without
+revolt of body and soul.  He slipped once and fell, and
+struggled up all horribly besmeared and sick and shaking.
+For the teeth of a head from which the face had been
+shot away had snapped close by his ear.  Then came the
+negotiation of the bit of woodland.  Here were more
+Voltigeurs and Chasseurs <i>à pied</i> dead and horribly mutilated,
+and the wreck of a mitrailleuse, with two of its gunners.
+Some of these poor wounded creatures were living, and
+moaned for water.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My God!&mdash;my God! how I suffer!" one feeble voice
+kept crying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Help was coming, for from the direction of the town
+some carts were being driven, one by a stout priest in
+cassock and broad-brimmed hat, others by men with Red Cross
+armlets.  Black-habited, white-capped Sisters of Mercy
+were in these vehicles, with baskets, and pitchers, and
+pails.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seven dead Hussars showing hideously the effect of
+mitrailleuse-fire,&mdash;a troop-horse or two, and a White
+Cuirassier shot through the body and swearing horribly in
+Low German, were the fruits of the French enfilade.  The
+fine gray charger had ceased careering; it grazed peaceably
+on the short herbage by the track that led over the
+common.  But Chris Brotherton would never sit in saddle
+again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh turned him gently over and opened the
+gold-laced scarlet tunic.  There was no blood upon it, only
+clean dust, nor was the dead man bruised or cut, having
+fallen where it was grassy.  Upon the broad breast, under
+the white cambric shirt, was an oval miniature, pearl-set,
+of a pretty woman.  The handsome mouth of the wearer
+smiled under the drooping fair mustache, and his blue
+eyes stared glassily.  A bluish hole in the right temple and
+a bloody clot amid the hair upon the left side showed
+where the chassepot bullet had traversed the brain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had been high-handed, arrogant, and domineering,
+yet the Doctor and the horsey Towers had seemed to love
+him.  No doubt that woman in the miniature had held
+Chris Brotherton dear....  P. C. Breagh would have
+left her fair face lying on the yet warm breast of her lover,
+but something he saw going on among the casualties upon
+the edge of the wood caused him to change his mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That gaunt-eyed, greedy-fingered creature in the
+peasant's blouse and Red Cross brassard, who glided from
+body to body, rifling pockets, should not plunder the
+Doctor's friend.  With this determination, Carolan took away
+the portrait, a packet of letters, and Brotherton's watch
+and purse and pocketbook, then went forward to meet the
+Sisters, just descending from the foremost of the string of
+peasants' carts; and began:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My Sister..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The nun addressed turned a pleasant face upon him, and
+cried, with a sympathetic clasping of her small,
+work-roughened hands:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There is blood on Monsieur! ... He has been wounded."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh explained with economy of words how and
+where he had been watching the fighting, and whence came
+the ugly stains upon his clothes.  The nun glanced toward
+the wood, paled and shuddered, and said, making the sign
+of the Cross upon her starched, cape-like <i>guimpe</i>:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But all cannot be dead who lie bleeding in that <i>ravin</i>&mdash;the
+hollow where our poor school-children gather primroses
+in Spring?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I think they must be.  The massacre was carried out
+deliberately.  Aimed fire&mdash;and there is not a movement,
+not a groan...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh shuddered, remembering the crossing of
+the red ditch.  The nun said with energy, as other black
+habits and white guimpes came crowding round her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"We must make sure....  Each of those bodies must
+be lifted and examined.  Life often lingers, sir, when it
+seems to have fled.  We learned that in the Crimea, when
+we worked in the base-hospitals of Kamiesch.  What of
+these things?"  P. C. Breagh was holding out the portrait,
+purse, pocketbook, and letters.  "You wish our Reverend
+Mother to take charge of them?  They belonged to that
+dead officer yonder, in the scarlet uniform?  He was
+English, you tell me&mdash;and you, too, are of England?  Very
+well!  It shall be as you wish, Monsieur&mdash;I am free to
+decide, as I am the Superior of our community.  But I
+will not receive the valuables at your hands until you have
+helped us to clear that terrible ravine.  We have only our
+good priest with a few peasants and one surgeon, and some
+charitable ladies and gentlemen of the Association of the
+Red Cross.  Everyone else is panic-stricken&mdash;they have
+barricaded themselves within their shops and houses, and
+taken refuge in the cellars....  The explosions of
+cannon have been so terrible&mdash;they are becoming yet more
+alarming, and when the fighting came quite close....  Our
+people are not brave, you think!&mdash;Still, everyone cannot
+be courageous....  But, Monsieur, who watches men
+being killed by guns to gain experience&mdash;we may look to
+Monsieur for help?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The clear woman-eyes went to the sun-browned, freckled
+face of the young man in the travel-worn, dusty, blood-stained
+clothing, and realized that a struggle was going on
+within him.  She said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If Monsieur is of necessity compelled to go and leave
+us, I will take charge of the dead English officer's property
+for Monsieur.  But a great blessing is for those who succor
+the wounded.  Our Lord has always promised this!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No one listened to the little colloquy; some of the Sisters
+were already stooping beside the prone bodies, two of them
+were helping the vocal Cuirassier into a cart....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a great longing P. C. Breagh had longed to make
+the ridge south of Flavigny, and see with his own eyes
+how the Man of Iron comported himself in the clash of war.
+And to stay behind and forego the possibility cost him
+poignant anguish, but one could not leave the Superior and
+the Sisters to dabble unaided in that ghastly ravine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I will stay, Reverend Mother," he said, with a bow that
+might have been more clumsy.  Next moment Brotherton's
+property had vanished into a huge pocket hidden
+somewhere in the black habit.  The nun clapped her hands,
+crying to the peasants:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Thanks! thanks!  Come, Antoine, Pichegru, Eloi,
+Bénoit!  Dubois!  To the wood, my friends! and the
+hollow, where are many sufferers!  I place you under the
+orders of this English Monsieur."
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap44"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XLIV
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Upon that battlefield of Gravelotte, France, driven to bay,
+fought like a royal tigress.  How many times the dark blue
+Divisions were thrown back in their assault upon positions
+zoned with death-bellowing cannon and death-barking
+mitrailleuses, History relates.  So murderous was the fire of
+her chassepotiers from their densely manned rifle-pits that
+you could trace Moltke's plans of assault in mounds of
+dead Uhlan cavalry and long regular swathes of motionless
+blue objects that had been Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet if the Warlock had said within himself, "<i>This shall
+be above all a battle of cavalry</i>," it would seem as though
+the determination had been formed upon the other side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For this day that saw the death-charge of Von Bredow's
+brigade upon the Gorze Road&mdash;Uhlans, White Cuirassiers,
+and Dragoons of the Guard hurled in a solid column of
+shining steel against French field-batteries and battalions
+of riflemen&mdash;also saw the cavalry of Frossard, of
+Ladmirault, and Canrobert ride down whole squares of
+German infantry, who rose again and poured in volleys from
+their needle-guns, to be beaten down by the storms of
+leaden hail ground out by the mitrailleuse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A glowing, coppery sun looked down on those six square
+miles of fiercely contested ground.  Over its whole expanse
+there was not one patch as big as a National School playground
+without its <i>débris</i> of arms and accouterments, its
+ghastly or ludicrous tokens of war.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In an intermittent lull of the racket you could hear the
+dry earth, that had been pounded bare of verdure, sucking
+moisture as though after heavy rain.  Only the rain was
+red.  The faint, sour smell of it came to the nostrils
+mingled with the smell of burnt gunpowder, human and
+equine exhalations, and the acrid stifle of burning wood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For Flavigny was yet smouldering, the farm-buildings at
+Gorze were burning, Malmaison was a furnace; houses and
+barns at Verneville were wrapped in clouds of black smoke
+shot with lurid flame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Exhausted battalions, sick and stupefied with slaughter,
+were lying down among the dead and the wounded to snatch
+a wink of sleep.  Others opened their haversacks to snatch
+a hasty mouthful, or drained their canteens of the last
+drop.  Surgeons were going up and down among them,
+patching up flesh-cuts with lint and diachylon, temporarily
+plugging bullet-wounds of the minor order.  "There!"
+they would say to the Schmidt, Kunz, or Schultz so treated;
+"now you are fit for fighting again!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps you can see the Man of Iron in his white Cuirassier
+cap, black undress frock with the pewter buttons, and
+great steel-spurred jack-boots, standing, grim-jawed and
+inscrutable, behind his King's camp-chair.  Through the
+stress and storm of two long days of hot fighting, that
+patch of high ground south of Flavigny had been the point
+to which orderlies and aides-de-camp furiously galloped
+from every point of the compass, and from which they
+galloped back in even more desperate haste.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the rear of the camp-chair, not so close to it as to
+draw fire, were the King's personal military staff, a bevy
+of Princes, and the representative of the British War Office,
+Colonel &mdash;&mdash;.  Several Councillors and Secretaries of
+the Chancellor's traveling Foreign Office stood about, stout,
+gray-haired, important-looking persons in semi-military
+uniform.  The carriages that had conveyed them waited at
+Tronville.  The King's charger and those of the other
+great personages were in the care of orderlies.  The Escort
+waited by their horses in the background.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moltke stood apart, taciturn and inscrutable, nursing
+his thin elbow and cupping his long chin.  Roon, who
+contrary to his custom was not wearing his helmet, gloomily
+champed his cap-strap, unable to disguise his anguish of
+anxiety.  He would have given a year of life to say:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Old man, so cool in the midst of this hellish slaughter,
+can it be that you do not know how things really are going?
+Since two of the clock the French have had the best of it!
+The chassepot you termed a 'magnificent weapon' has
+justified your eulogism.  The mitrailleuse we despised, not
+comprehending its terrible capabilities, has revealed them
+to our undoing.  The Army of United Germany bleeds at
+every pore!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He tore his mustache, the dye upon which had not been
+renewed recently.  His heart swelled with the flood of
+pent-up speech.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Commander-in-Chief's dispatches to the Queen
+have been cheered in Berlin.  Throughout Germany they
+are hailed with joy....  '<i>France now fights with her back
+to the Rhine</i>,' the people say.  '<i>Our Army stands arrayed
+between Bazaine and Paris!</i>'  Is it possible they do not
+realize that the situation is critical?  Have they no
+suspicion that the tables might be turned?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He wrung his knotted hands together in torment, and
+the sweat started in gouts upon his livid skin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Before us the Army of Bazaine&mdash;behind us at Châlons
+the Army of MacMahon.  Were the Duke of Magenta
+with his recuperated Divisions to advance energetically and
+swiftly to the relief of his brother Marshal&mdash;could the
+Crown Prince hold him back?  And if he could not, what
+were our chance worth?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sentence had escaped Roon without his knowledge.
+Moltke's wrinkled visage turned his way.  The scarlet-rimmed
+eyes glittered on him a moment.  Roon leaped as
+the dry voice said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not so much as a pinch of snuff!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The War Minister stammered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Pardon, Your Excellency!  You spoke to me?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moltke answered quietly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I asked if you could spare me a pinch of snuff.  My
+box is empty."  He opened the little silver receptacle and
+turned it upside down, tapping it on his finger nail:
+"Neither have I a single cigar!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Roon had forgotten his cigar-case in quarters.  He
+fumbled for his snuff-box, thought it must be in his cloak.
+A resonant voice said from behind the King's camp-chair:
+"Will Your Excellency take one of these?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why not? why not?  If they are not too strong for
+me...."  The Warlock smiled, showing his toothless gums.
+The Chancellor said, opening and offering the plain green
+leather case with the coroneted B stamped in gilding on it:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It may be they are stronger than you are accustomed
+to smoke?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moltke's keen, swift glance met the heavy blue stare of
+the Chancellor.  He returned:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I will answer Your Excellency when I have tested them."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The case held three Havanas of varying merit.  Two
+were good, one super-excellent.  The withered hand
+hovered, paused above them, made selection, while the sharp,
+glittering glance seemed to say: "So! ... You are trying
+again the test you put me to at Königgratz!  See!  I am
+cool enough to choose the better creed!"  While Bismarck
+returned the case to his breeches-pocket, mentally
+commenting:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Excellent.  He has chosen the best one.  He is not
+flustered&mdash;he has yet a trump to play!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Believed, he returned to his post behind the King's
+camp-chair, a rugged, powerful figure, with the face of a
+thoroughbred mastiff, unwearyingly keeping guard lest
+meaner influences should undermine his power and topple
+his unfinished life-work down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Watching the battle through these noonday hours, he
+had, being a practical soldier as well as a consummate
+statesman, known some moments of horrible foreboding.
+Now his courage revived.  The work would be completed.
+The well-shaped, sun-browned hand lightly resting on the
+chair-back would hold all Germany within its iron grip.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The thrill of conscious power transmitted itself to the
+King, it may be, for he moved impatiently in his seat.
+Sometimes he must have chafed, the white-haired Hohenzollern
+chieftain, knowing himself a puppet in the hands
+of his powerful Minister.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"How they fight!  How they fight!  <i>Ach Gott!</i>" he
+muttered.  "Wouldst thou have credited, Otto, that such
+fire was left in France?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the helmeted head of the old chieftain shook with
+an uncontrollable nervous spasm.  Over it came the
+scoffing retort:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is the fire of fever, the fire of phosphorescence.  It
+will leave them weak and debilitated&mdash;it will glimmer out
+and go black.  And yet Bazaine, contemptible as a strategist,
+has his moments of inspiration.  The thrust of the
+skilled fencer will sometimes puzzle the master of
+swordsmanship....  Frossard and Canrobert are devout
+Catholics, and no doubt believe in guardian-spirits.  They have
+had a hint, it may be, from some celestial Field Marshal;
+St. Louis, possibly, or the Chevalier de Bayard."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The King murmured, unheeding the jest, his eyes glued
+to the field-glasses that jerked in his shaking hands:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Even a victory could not bring my soldiers of the
+Guard to life again.  And there!  Dost thou see?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister turned his own binoculars in the indicated
+quarter.  What remained of a Division of the Prussian
+10th Corps, with a brigade of cavalry, Uhlans and
+Dragoons, was locked in the death-grip with a Cavalry
+Division of Bazaine's own corps, the Third, on the plain
+between the Bois de Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont.
+And even the Chancellor's iron hand trembled as with
+ague, and his breathing harshened perceptibly as he
+carefully focused the glasses on the fight.  He said after a
+moment:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Those three regiments of cavalry on brown horses with
+green, silver-laced dolmans and red-bagged talpacks are
+Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard.  Fine fellows!  They
+have a man to lead them, it would seem, in that little
+Colonel with the big paunch."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Brigadier of the Chasseurs had been killed by a
+shell, and upon Paunchy had devolved the leadership.
+Twice he had led the green dolmans in shattering charges,
+under the stress of which the dark blue islands of infantry
+had hollowed and caved in.  Twice he had fought his way
+out at the head of his shrunken and mutilated squadrons.
+Now, sweeping round, the Dragoons and Uhlans had
+attacked the Chasseurs furiously in the rear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All that could be seen, even through the binoculars, was
+a shifting kaleidoscopic jumble of gay uniforms.  Men's
+heads and arms rising and falling, flashing swords,
+flickering lance-pennons, and the crests and hindquarters of
+plunging beasts....  Hence Kraus, Klaus, and Klein of
+the blue infantry could not fire into the <i>mêlée</i> for fear of
+shooting their countrymen.  Red Breeches hesitated to use
+his chassepot on the same count.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About a bushy knoll to the left of the struggle, the
+German cavalry circled like swallows, greedily assailing a
+swarm of green and red dragon-flies.  The chasseurs'
+cartridge-boxes being empty, they used their long sabers as
+they had used their carbines, coolly and effectively; and
+Paunchy, lifted above the press by the little knoll referred
+to, encouraged them with looks and gestures and words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Courage, my children! ... Follow me! ... Bravo! ... One
+moment's breathing-space, and at them again!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was only a green and scarlet speck in the midst of an
+aggregation of other specks on the vast battlefield, yet the
+King and the Minister watched him with fixed regard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Grosser Gott</i>!  How that man fights!" the King muttered
+at one point in the conflict, and the rejoinder came
+from overhead:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He is gallant, certainly, but a bit of an actor.  Would
+not one say that flourish was meant for the ladies in the
+orchestra-stalls?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Because he has kissed a medal or a relic?" the King
+muttered, tugging at his white whisker.  "Doubtless he is
+Catholic....  We ourselves have many brave soldiers of
+the Roman faith!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+For as his squadrons ever thinned and dwindled, every
+instant paying toll to the great swords of the Prussian
+Dragoons and the blood-thirsty Uhlan lances, they had
+seen the little Brigadier take from the breast of his green
+dolman something white and press his bearded lips to it,
+and thrust it back again, and sign himself with the Cross.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Hurrah Preussen!  Immer vorwärts!</i>" yelled the
+Uhlans, as their dripping lance-points flickered in and out
+between the red-stained sword-blades, and the bodies of
+dead Chasseurs and dead horses rose in a mound about the
+knoll where stood the little Brigadier.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Paunchy possessed a great voice.  His "<i>Chargez!</i>" had
+reached the ears of the King and his Chancellor through
+all the pandemonium of battle.  When his Staff
+trumpeter's instrument, bullet-pierced, gave forth no sound
+but a strangled screeching, the little Colonel's thundering
+"<i>Feu!</i>" needed no trumpet to make the order plain.  Now,
+his "<i>Vive la France!  Vive l'Empereur!</i>" boomed out like
+the roar of a dying lion.  His melting squadrons gave back
+the rallying-cry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But they were lost.  Prisoned within the ring of piercing
+steel that tirelessly revolved about them, they could kill,
+but they could not break through the barrier.  Fresh
+squadrons rushed with hoarse shouts to the aid of the German
+cavalry.  The Chasseurs were hopelessly outnumbered, and
+must inevitably be crushed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The subaltern who bore the Imperial standard got a
+lance-thrust in the shoulder.  At the same moment, his
+horse was shot dead.  As the beast reared in the death-throe
+and went down under the plunging hoofs of the
+maddened horses round him, the Colonel leaned from his
+saddle, seized the hand that gripped the staff of the
+standard, drew the fainting officer upward, and laid him across
+his own saddle-bow.  Then, as his gallant horse braced
+itself to bear the double burden, the rider lifted high the
+glistening folds of the tricolor topped by the golden
+Imperial eagle, and as the Uhlans charged the knoll he shouted
+again in terrible tones the slogan of the dying Empire:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Vive la France!  Vive l'Empereur!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+War has many of these sublime moments mingled with
+her squalid hideousness.  Upon this day many a soldier,
+French and German, died as finely as the father of Juliette.
+You are to see him&mdash;bareheaded, for the fur talpack with
+the plume of green and scarlet had been sheared from his
+head by a glancing sword-cut&mdash;lifting a war-flushed forehead
+to the sky all sunset-red.  Then a mortal lance-thrust
+reached him over the body that lay across his horse's
+withers, and he reeled upon his saddle, and fell backward,
+partly swathed in the Flag for which so many heroes have
+died.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Through the tricolored folds yet other Uhlan lance-points
+reached him.  Did any thought of his daughter pass
+through the brain of the dying soldier between the sharp
+pangs of the probing steel?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>My child ... safe ... neutral territory....  Charles
+... honest man ... protect my girl from Adelaide!
+Now ... death!  Ah!&mdash;agony!  Save, Jesu! ... Mary,
+help!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A few of his gallant Chasseurs surrendered.  But these
+were only a handful.  Nearly the whole strength of his
+brigade of three regiments lay dead upon that patch of
+common that was cumbered with their corpses and those of
+their enemies.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap45"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XLV
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Bismarck said, lowering his binoculars:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Lucky that war is so confoundedly expensive.  Otherwise,
+one might get too fond of it!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The King groaned:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My Dragoons of the Guard!&mdash;my Uhlans, slaughtered
+in regiments!  My infantry shattered&mdash;decimated&mdash;annihilated
+in Divisions.  The bravest blood of France&mdash;poured
+out upon French soil like water....  Great God!&mdash;how
+shall I defend this carnage to the Queen?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The voice behind him said, ironically:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My wife writes me ten pages every three days, urging
+upon me in Biblical language the necessity for complete
+extermination of everything French!  Believe me, Sire,
+he who is guided by the advice of a woman follows, not a
+Jack, but a Jinny o' Lantern, that will inevitably lead
+him into a bog!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The King winced under the gibe, yet he said, striking
+his clenched hand passionately upon his knee:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And this shadow that we follow southward, this vision,
+of a Crown Imperial!  What is it but an <i>ignis fatuus</i> that
+has plunged us to the neck in the morass of War?  If the
+whole Army of United Germany sink down in the death-sleep,
+for what have we offered up the sacrifice?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The answer came, prompt and authoritative:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your Majesty may leave that question to be answered
+by the sons of these men who lie dead about us, and the
+sons they shall in their time beget.  If your Majesty's
+whole army must be sacrificed to insure German Unity, let
+it be so, in the name of Heaven!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The King tugged again at his white side-whisker and
+muttered something about "sinful ambition."  The hand
+that had wrenched the curb now offered sugar.  The
+voice said, mellowed and softened to persuasive tenderness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I have served a great King.  I aim to serve a great
+Emperor.  If my ambition be sinful, it is at least not base!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah, Otto!"  The King rose, and his hard, yellowish-hazel
+eyes were full of tears as they met the Minister's.
+"You have no argument so strong as your disinterestedness.
+For even your bitterest enemies have never questioned that!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Something took place in the brain behind the great domed
+forehead hidden by the Cuirassier cap, the fierce, almost
+challenging stare sank beneath the old man's tearful look
+of love.  The Man of Iron was asking himself: "Am I,
+then, so disinterested? ... If I am, why is it that these
+words have power to gall me so?  Can it be that I have
+my price as well as others?  I think myself repaid in Power
+for what other Ministers will only sell for gold."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The momentary embarrassment passed.  He said, pointing
+to one of those long blue mounds of dead infantry:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And who could see our soldiers advance under the fire
+of these French chassepots and the terrible mitrailleuses,
+and doubt that they have understood the greatness of the
+issue at stake.  Excuse me a moment, Sire! ... What
+is it, Götzow?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>aide-de-camp</i>, in the full uniform of the Chancellor's
+own regiment of Cuirassiers, was white as his own coat.
+He gulped out:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Excellency, I am charged by His Highness, Prince
+Augustus of Württemberg, Commander-in-Chief of the
+Prussian Guard Corps..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor's prominent blue eyes lightened so fiercely
+upon the speaker that he began to stammer and boggle in
+his speech:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Terrible intelligence ... only just received by His
+Highness....  Yesterday Your Excellency's sons, Count
+Herbert and Count William, were in the general cavalry
+charge which took place at Mars la Tour..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The great soldierly figure standing with the huge spurred
+boots apart, the hands leaning on the long steel-hilted
+sword, might have been cast in iron or carved in granite
+for all the emotion conveyed by look or gesture.  The voice
+said stridently and harshly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The First Dragoons of the Guard were not involved in
+the struggle.  Only the brigades of Von Barby, the 4th
+Westphalian Cuirassiers, the 10th Hussars, and the 16th
+Dragoons."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The ghastly aide faltered, perspiring freely:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"At the moment of General von Barby's charge, it has
+been unfortunately ascertained, a squadron of Prussian
+Guard Dragoons of the First Regiment&mdash;returning from a
+patrol, dashed into the <i>mêlée</i>..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor drew a sharp breath, but stirred not a
+finger.  His fierce eyes, staring from dark pits that had
+suddenly been dug round them, paralyzed the wretched
+bearer of the tragic intelligence.  He asked in a tone that
+appalled by its tranquillity:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Have both my sons been killed?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>aide-de-camp</i> got out that it was feared so.  He was
+thanked and charged with a polite message to the Prince.
+As he saluted and retired, lightened of his tidings of
+anguish, the Minister focused his binoculars with a steady
+hand upon that point toward the northward where the dark
+bulk of the fortress of St. Privat loomed on a hill-top
+covered with masses of troops and traversed by a straight
+white, poplar-bordered road, regularly trenched for
+musketry.  He said in the same tone of composure, though his
+set face and the hand that held the glasses were wet as
+though with rain:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"St. Privat still resists.  General Pape, with the
+Guard's cavalry and the Saxons, will find their work cut
+out for them in driving those French battalions out of the
+village below the hill."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He lowered and wiped the glasses with his handkerchief.
+The King said entreatingly, laying a hand upon his arm:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Go, go!  Find out the truth about your sons,
+Bismarck....  Leave not a stone unturned, in God's name!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even as the King spoke, German drums and trumpets
+sounded the charge; and there was a sudden shifting of
+masses of troops in the direction of St. Hubert.  Then as
+a wave of dark blue men began to roll out from the deep
+woods that flanked the village of Gravelotte, so fierce a
+storm of cannon and mitrailleuse and chassepot began to
+beat about their heads that the unseasoned horses of the
+Princes of the suite kicked and plunged and the Minister
+said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It would be wise did your Majesty remove out of this
+neighborhood.  These bon-bons thrown by Frossard's
+artillery are coming much too near."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I will ride back&mdash;I will move out of the way," said the
+old man in great agitation.  "But you, Bismarck!&mdash;you
+must go and see about your sons!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He answered, and his great bloodshot eyes and sagging
+jowl were more than ever those of a mastiff:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"When I have seen your Majesty in a place of safety
+I will ask your permission to do so."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An orderly from Steinmetz, who now had his field
+headquarters at St. Hubert, arrived with an urgent entreaty
+that the King would at once retire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The horses were brought.  King William and Von Roon
+mounted.  The Chancellor's mare had been sent to water;
+his orderly appeared with her as the King's party rode on.
+With a hasty word of reproof the Minister swung his great
+figure into the saddle, but the brawn and bone of his beast
+had not carried him clear of the threatened spot before a
+retreating wave of German foot and horsemen swept over
+it, followed by the thundering gallop of a retreating
+battery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a <i>sauve-qui peut</i>, caused by the smashing fire
+from the French shrapnel and mitrailleuse batteries, and
+the practice of the French riflemen entrenched at the
+Moscow Farm.  A general officer rode through the rout,
+laying about him with the flat of his drawn sword and
+swearing horribly, to judge by his bloodshot eyes, and
+purple countenance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Hares!  <i>Gottverdammt!</i> hares!" he gasped breathlessly,
+finding himself face to face with a gigantic officer of
+Cuirassiers.  "A thousand pardons, Excellency.  I did
+not at once recognize you.  Surely you will follow his
+Majesty to the rear?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Willingly," said the Chancellor, as a brace of French
+shells exploded, digging pits in the sandy ground over
+which the Headquarter Staff had passed.  "Only, as shell
+does not fall twice in the same place, I am waiting to make
+sure."  And, with a knee-touch, he put the brown mare
+into her stride.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a backward surge of disorganized infantry as
+the huge beast lifted herself over the yawning craters.
+But she passed through the press by the bore and thrust of
+her great shoulders, and the beast and the big man she
+carried were swallowed up in the roaring dusk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moltke, the bald-headed war-eagle, remained brooding
+his coign of observation upon the verge of the ridge
+south of Flavigny, his feathers drooping, his shoulders
+hunched, his sharp, hooked beak inclined toward his breast;
+his red eyes, burning with the battle-lust, staring fixedly
+from under the wide, hairless brows.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+The sun sank in clouds of smoky gold and crimson over
+that country of copses, ravines, ruddy brown farmhouses,
+and white villages.  Evening came down and dipped her
+wings in billows of salt-tasting gunpowder smoke,
+rose-tinged above and beneath by the reflection from the red
+sky and the red earth.  The green Moselle was tinged with
+blood.  Little rivers ran blood, streams and springs became
+blood.  Wells were filled with blood, as in old time under
+the rod of the Lawgiver of Israel, and still the battle
+raged over hill and valley, common and highroad.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Flavigny village still smouldered, Malmaison was burning,
+houses and barns at Verneville were wrapped in roaring
+flames.  Yet the gunners of the French batteries at
+Moscow, Point du Jour, La Folie, and the Quarries of
+Amanvilliers and Rezerieulles, continued to make practice
+of the deadliest; and still French cavalry charged the
+Teuton's dwindling infantry-squares.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Had not a comparatively fresh and vigorous Prussian
+Army Corps dropped in at the crucial moment success had
+hardly crowned the arms of United Germany.  They had
+been marching every day since they quitted the Saar,
+those solid-thewed Pomeranians of the 2d Corps, but at
+Puxieux they had cooked and eaten, and now appeared
+like giants refreshed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not only Steinmetz rode at their head, with their
+commander Von Fransecky, but the Warlock in person directed
+their attack.  Battalions that had retired in disorder
+reformed and rushed back to meet afresh the brunt of battle.
+Wherever the red eye glittered and the withered finger
+pointed, fresh swarms of fierce assailants were hurled
+against the dwindling hosts of France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Down came the dark, and now St. Privat was burning;
+the village under the lee of the fort was burning&mdash;sending
+up great columns of livid smoke shot with licking tongues
+of flame.  The day was over.  But crackling lines of fire
+outlined the position of the rifle-trenches; the mitrailleuse
+batteries still spat death unwearyingly, as what remained
+of Bazaine's Army retired in comparative safety to the
+Fortress of St. Quentin under cover of that fiery screen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There the shattered brigades and mutilated divisions
+clung like swarming wasps "with plenty of sting in them
+yet," said Moltke, "and the hive"&mdash;meaning the huge
+Fortress of Metz&mdash;"handy in their rear.  But, on the
+whole," he added, "I am excellently well satisfied.  My
+calculations have worked out correctly.  Those Pomeranians
+of the Second Corps arrived just in time!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the veteran galloped joyously as a young trooper
+of twenty-five to cheer his King with the good news.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+And can you see that other man, to whom Emperors and
+Kings and Ministers referred when they mentioned Prussia,
+who outwitted nations in policy and made wars at will,
+spurring the great brown mare wildly through the weltering
+darkness, with salt drops of mortal anguish coursing
+down his granite cheeks?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Bazaine's right has been turned by the Saxons, the
+Guards have smashed his center, and the Pomeranians of
+the Second Corps have taken St. Privat and forced him to
+retreat, leaving Germany master of the field.  Success has
+crowned beyond hope the arms of the Fatherland, but
+where are the sons who called me father? ... Is this Thy
+judgment upon one through whom so many fathers are
+sonless, O my offended God?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps he groaned forth such words as these, as he
+bucketed the great brown mare through the perilous
+darkness, over roads bestrewn with helmets, swords, and
+cuirasses, knapsacks, talpacks, forage-caps, and schakos,
+needle-guns, and chassepots, and camp kettles, as well as
+the human <i>débris</i> of War.  The flare of a lantern tied to
+and swinging from one of the great steel stirrups threw a
+treacherous and fitful light upon his road.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Follow him as he ranged from camp to camp, questioning,
+investigating....  It was black night and raining
+heavily when a gleam of hope dawned upon the man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cavalry piquet-officer who had given the clue beheld
+the great brute and her huge rider vanish in a cloud of
+their own steam.  A furious clatter of hoofs came back out
+of the welter ing darkness, as the flaring lantern, gyrating
+like some captive fiend at the end of its tether, dwindled
+to a dancing will-o'-the-wisp and vanished, the officer
+exclaimed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Kreuzdonnerwetter!</i> he must have a neck like other
+men.  Yet he rides as though it were forged of tempered
+steel!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Who rides? ... What was that?" asked a brother
+officer, waking from a doze of exhaustion beside the hissing
+logs of the rain-beaten watch-fire.  He got reply:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Only the Pomeranian bear ranging in search of his lost
+cubs."  He added: "I was able to tell him that he would
+find the eldest of them at the field-hospital of Mariaville,
+upon which he galloped away like mad."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The field-hospital of Mariaville" proved to be a
+farmhouse on a hill-top near the battlefield of Mars la Tour.
+Candles stuck in the necks of empty wine-bottles revealed,
+through the open, unblinded windows, the figure of the
+surgeon in charge and those of his orderly-assistants
+passing to and fro.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Have you a Bismarck here?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The stentorian shout from the yard made wounded men
+turn upon their improvised pillows, and brought the head
+and shoulders of the bibbed and shirt-sleeved surgeon
+thrusting out of a window on the first floor.  A colloquy
+ensued between the unseen and the medical officer.
+Presently the arbitrary voice interrupted:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What do you call not seriously wounded, man?  Describe
+the casualty clearly, without professional Latin, or
+too many crackjaw words."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dressers winked to each other behind the back of
+the surgeon.  He said, supporting himself with one hand
+against the crazy window-frame as he thrust his head and
+shoulders forth into the dripping darkness and gesticulated
+with a hand that held a probe:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Excellency, your elder son has received three bullets.
+One lodged in the breast of his tunic, another hit his
+watch, and the third is at present in the upper part of his
+thigh.  I was about to place the patient under chloroform
+when Your Excellency's call summoned me from his side."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The voice said, with a clang of anger in it:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You should not have left him had it been the King
+who called.  Go back to him instantly.  I am coming up."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he came striding in his great boots up the crazy
+one-flight stair.  Ghastly faces of wounded soldiers turned
+upon their pillows of straw as that gigantic figure filled up
+the doorway.  His shadow, thrown by the flaring tallow-candle
+flames, loomed portentously on the whitewashed
+walls.  He wore no cloak or overcoat and dripped as though
+he had swum, not ridden, through water to his finding; the
+peak of his field-cap discharged quite a little deluge upon
+his son's white face as he stooped over the stretcher where
+the young man lay and touched his hand, and kissed him
+on the cheek.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Never mind.  Clean water does no hurt," he said, for
+he had drawn out his handkerchief to wipe the splash away,
+and finding it soiled with dust and powder-grime had
+returned it to his pocket.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The surgeon returned:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I wish we had clean water&mdash;it would be above price.
+But all the springs are fouled with blood, and there are
+dead French in the courtyard-well."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They must be got out and the well cleansed, if possible,"
+said the Chancellor.  "Meanwhile, a temporary supply
+must be found....  What nourishment have you, fit
+for wounded men?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The surgeon responded, busy with a cotton-wool chloroform pad:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Nothing, Excellency, except wine and a little Extract
+of Liebig."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor said harshly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Yet this appears to be a farm-house, and I heard the
+clucking of fowls down below!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The surgeon, who was a bullet-headed, obstinate East
+Prussian, and did not relish this sort of hectoring, returned,
+thrusting out a stubbly under-jaw:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Excellency, there are certainly fowls in the farmyard.
+But they are not mine, nor have I money to buy.  They
+belong to the unhappy wretch who owns this place, and
+has lost everything else."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he gave back the stare of the fierce eyes that raked
+him.  The Minister began to lisp, an ominous sign:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah, indeed! ... May I&mdash;may I ask where you&mdash;where
+you gained your notions of the code of ethics that should
+prevail in warfare?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the surgeon, fronting him fairly and squarely:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Excellency, from my father, who was an honest man!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Straw rustled under heads that slewed to look at the
+blunt speaker.  There was a long instant's pause.  Then
+the Chancellor thrust his hand into his breeches-pocket,
+pulled out a gold coin, and said, tendering it to the medical
+officer:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Kindly pay this to the object of your pity for twenty
+fowls at a mark apiece.  Now I will keep you no longer
+from your patient.  Good night to everyone here."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Good night, Excellency!" came in chorus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He gave his brusque salute and had already reached the
+threshold, when his son, a colossal, black-haired,
+brown-skinned young trooper, who lay back upon his stretcher,
+staring sulkily at the smoke-blackened rafters, or
+contemplating the twitching bare toes of the leg that bore a
+tourniquet above the plugged and bandaged wound, started
+slightly, looked round, and called:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Father!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What is it, my dear fellow?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His great stride took him back to the prone young giant
+on the stretcher.  Count Herbert said, barely removing his
+eyes from the ceiling, and speaking in a studiously
+indifferent tone:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If you are upset about Bill, sir, there's no need to
+worry.  His horse was shot under him, but he got hold of
+another.  I saw him ride off all right with a wounded
+comrade behind him.  That's all.  Goodnight!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The son nodded surlily and resumed his inspection of
+the ceiling.  The sire, who had received the news in silence,
+went out at the door, stooping under the lintel, his great
+shoulders rasping the posts on either side.  They heard his
+heavy footsteps pass down the crazy staircase.  A curt
+sentence or two reached them, spoken as he went through the
+kitchen on his way to the door.  Then he was in the yard,
+loudly calling for an orderly to bring a lantern.  An
+instant, and three revolver-shots cracked in rapid succession,
+each followed by a significant cackling and squawking.
+The surgeon, now fitting the cotton-wool pad upon the wire
+mouthpiece and signing to his assistant to hand him the
+chloroform, clapped the pad upon the mouth and nostrils
+of young Bismarck, and said, with a dry chuckle as he
+poured the pungent anaesthetic upon the wool:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"His Excellency is having a little sport.  All the same,
+without water, one cannot cleanse wounds or boil
+hen-broth."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Water arrived an hour later, two barrelsful upon a
+hand-cart drawn by terrified peasants, behind whom rode a
+trooper of Uhlans, accelerating their movements with prods
+of the lance.  A general officer had sent the barrels for
+the use of the wounded at Mariaville.  This service
+rendered to his son, he rode in search of his King.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap46"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XLVI
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+He found him, with his Staff, not far distant from
+Rezonville, having returned there when the French cavalry of
+the Left withdrew after their tremendous charge.  The
+King was reading dispatches, seated on a saddle thrown
+across a wet faggot, beside a smoky watch-fire.  The
+farmstead of Malmaison, now sending up showers of sparks
+like a set-piece at the end of a display of fireworks, gave
+light enough by which to read.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Persuaded to take shelter, the old man found it in a
+deserted hamlet, of which the very name was uncertain,
+so sorely had it been mauled about.  A crust of stale bread
+and a mutton-chop grilled on some wood embers furnished
+his supper.  Water fit for drinking being unattainable, he
+tossed off a nip of sutler's rum out of a broken tulip-glass,
+and lay down in his clothes to rest upon the royal ambulance,
+within four walls and under a roof holed and gapped
+by shot and shell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Princes of the Suite, much to their Highnesses'
+chagrin, were compelled to subsist on fragments of stale
+sandwiches from their holster-cases.  The escort bivouacked
+about the Royal lodging.  Troops, wearied to exhaustion
+by the two days' continuous fighting, lay down to sleep in
+the pouring rain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Warlock supped with his personal Staff on ration-biscuit
+and raw bacon, and spent the night by a bivouac-fire,
+among the living and the dead.  Can you see him
+sitting on the empty ammunition-box, buttoned in his
+dripping waterproof, his scanty meal eaten and his cigar well
+alight? ... How contentedly he listens while the bulbul
+Henry sings, without notes of accompaniment, his moving
+ballads.  How piously he rises, bares his old head, and joins
+in the robust hymn sung by his battered but victorious
+legions, "Now thank we all our God..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or, with the mind's eye, one can follow the Man of Iron
+as, having bidden his master good night and left the young
+Hereditary Grand Duke of Mecklenburg to keep guard over
+the royal carriage, he set out, in company of his cousin
+Bismarck-Böhlen, a lieutenant of Dragoon Guards and one
+of the minor Councillors of the Embassy, in search of a
+lodging until break of day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sheridan, the famous American General, representing
+the United States with the Prussian Headquarters Staff, a
+short, alert gentleman of forty-five, with a dark mustache
+and chin-tuft, and a pronounced Yankee twang, followed,
+begging leave to accompany the expedition.  The first
+cottage approached as likely to afford a night's shelter was
+found to be on fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Too hot, though I like warm quarters!" the Chancellor
+commented.  The next house was found crammed with
+wounded soldiers, all suffering from the excellent
+shell-practice made by the gunners of General Frossard.  The
+next house and the next had also been converted into
+field-hospitals.  The fourth yielded to the Minister's personal
+investigations a vacant attic, with three truckle-beds,
+provided with straw palliasses, tolerably clean.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sheridan and Bismarck-Böhlen threw themselves upon
+their rude beds and very soon were soundly sleeping.  For
+a little while the Man of Iron stood beside the narrow
+unglazed window in the attic gable, his great arms folded on
+his broad breast, his eyes, bloodshot and strained with
+gazing through the fire and smoke of bombardments, looking
+out into the wild black welter of the rainy night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Those torn-up pastures and plow-acres, those devastated
+cornfields and woodlands, those burning farms and
+villages of Lorraine lay in comparative quiet now....
+The hellish roar and crash and tumult of War had ceased
+for the time being.  Its ghastly sights were veiled, for the
+most part, by merciful darkness, though the innumerable
+little sputtering fires kindled by the soldiers threw fitful
+illuminations upon grotesque, or strange, or terrible, or
+indescribably hideous things....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hungry, thirsty, weary, and saddle-sore as any trooper of
+his own White Cuirassiers was the Man of Iron, having
+broken his fast at dawn upon a hunch of bread and
+bacon-fat, and supped upon a couple of raw hen's eggs, broken
+on the pommel of his big steel-hilted sword.  But as his
+bloodshot eyes looked upon his handiwork, he was
+contented.  This huge, vehement, and bloody conflict had
+established the mastery of Germany: France was
+outnumbered, out-generaled, and out-fought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With frightful loss Moltke had attained his premier
+object.  The Army of MacMahon had been driven in rout to
+Châlons, the retreat of Bazaine's Army westward had been
+effectually checked.  The South road from Metz to Verdun,
+hitherto lightly held by the advance-patrols of the
+Prussian Crown Prince, was now blocked by the whole effective
+strength of two out of the three armies of Germany;
+weakened, wounded, and bleeding after the two days of
+desperate fighting, but still powerful, menacing, and grim.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One desperate effort made at this juncture might have
+broken through the barrier of living flesh and steel.  Would
+it be made, or would the French Army of the Rhine fall
+into the snare so cunningly left open, and retire within
+the fortified area of Metz?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gable-attic looked toward the great fortress.  In vain
+his glasses swept the formless blackness.  The sparkle of a
+moonbeam on a bayonet-point&mdash;the green or crimson ray cast
+by a Staff lantern moving over the ground, yet screened by
+the French batteries, might have cleared the point in doubt.
+Save for the sputter of German watch-fires over the recent
+field of battle, and the yellow candle-flare in the windows of
+half-ruined cottages and outbuildings, where wounded men
+lay on straw or the bare earth, no light showed, no life
+seemed to be....  He swung the shattered casement wide,
+and thrust his head out, gripping the window-sill, intently
+listening....  No distant roll of iron-shod wheels, no
+reverberating tread of countless footsteps; no other sounds,
+such as might betray the retreating movement of an armed
+host, broke the silence of that tragic night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Only the sob of the wind and the dripping of the chill
+rain from the overflowing roof-gutters, came to him, with
+the deep ruckling snores of exhausted Divisions, and the
+strangling coughs and hollow groans of mangled and dying
+men and beasts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All would be well, he told himself, as he shut up the
+glasses, unbuckled his sword-belt, and unhooking his collar
+stretched himself in his great boots upon the groaning
+truckle-bed, his heavy revolver ready to his hand.  Moltke's
+great plan would be successful....  The King would once
+more prove his Chancellor a true prophet....  The hand
+that could build up Prussia from a fourth-rate State into
+a world-power, would yet hold the German Empire in its
+grip of iron, and through that Empire rule the world!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If He Who created the World had been displeased by
+Bismarck's ambitions, things would have gone less smoothly
+from the outset....  If He Who wrought Man in His
+Image had been moved to wrath by all this bloodshed, He
+would have shown it by letting something happen to the
+boys....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Bill was safe, while Herbert was only slightly
+wounded.  To-morrow he should be brought back to the
+hospital at Pont à Mousson and thence invalided home.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Reverting to Bill, secretly the father's idol, in whose
+person he saw his own lost youth renewed, the Chancellor
+smiled now, painting in imagination on the darkness a
+picture of that charge of the French square at Mars la Tour.
+According to Herbert, who had put the thing badly, Bill
+had had his horse shot, and jumped on another, taking a
+comrade behind him as he rode off the field.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A fine story to write home to the boy's mother....  How
+her deep eyes would glow and kindle as she read....  An
+exploit with which to dazzle fat Borck, hated keeper of
+the King's Privy Purse....  Nor must one omit to embody
+the incident in the next official communication penned
+to Count Bernstorff, Prussian Ambassador in London, who
+would be sure to retail it to some Lady-in-Waiting possessing
+the ear of the Queen.  Lastly, what a magnificent anecdote
+for the convivial stage of a Foreign Office Staff dinner,
+or an official banquet, related with spirit garnished
+with exaggerations of the pardonable harmless kind.
+Indeed, with such embellishments he subsequently related the
+slight episode, proving himself capable of the very folly of
+paternal tenderness.  The picture cropped up constantly
+among his dreams on this wild night of Gravelotte.  And
+when the wan-faced Dawn peeped shuddering between her
+blood-stained curtains, and the reveillé sounded, waking the
+living from their sleep among the dead, so that their
+haggard uprising seemed as though in answer to the trump of
+the Archangel of the Resurrection&mdash;he heaved his giant's
+frame from the squalid bed to learn, with a savage thrill
+of exultation, that Bazaine had fallen into the trap.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the dead of night, behind the screen of the unsilenced
+French batteries yet emplaced behind the high-walled
+farms of Montigny la Grange, La Folie, and from thence to
+Point du Jour, the bleeding Army of the Rhine had
+retreated to the treacherous shelter offered beneath the guns
+of Metz.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Warlock, smiling in his sunniest manner as he
+made his hasty morning toilet in the shelter of a
+baggage-wagon tilt:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Three French Marshals are twittering in this birdcage
+on the Moselle&mdash;one Army has been shut up with them.
+Another yet remains at large, with Paris and the huge
+resources of France in rear of it."  He paused to absorb a
+pinch of snuff and extract a clean white shirt from a small
+and shabby japanned tin field-case, then added: "A
+France on the point of Revolution&mdash;an Army commanded
+by MacMahon, who has been badly beaten, and has that Old
+Man of the Sea, the Third Napoleon, sitting on his back
+wherever he goes!"  He put on the shirt and emerged from
+temporary obscurity to finish.  "If the spirits of the just
+be permitted knowledge of earthly matters, my beloved
+wife Mary is pleased with her old man!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he equipped himself in his old war-harness, and
+crowned his old wig with his battered war-helm, and got on
+his fine charger and rode off to meet and confer with his
+King, the Chancellor, and the War Minister, and issue
+instructions to his Chiefs of the various Staffs, trolling even
+less tunefully than usual, another verse of his favorite
+song:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+  "And knew they, the shining stars above me,<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Of the bitterness of my woe,<br>
+  They would come down and bid her love me,<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Pleading: 'Ah! do not scorn him so!'"<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap47"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XLVII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Rumor had it that the King, the Chancellor, Roon, the
+Royal Staff, and the Tinsel Rabble, with the escort of red,
+blue, and green Hussars, Guard-Dragoons and Uhlans, had
+ridden toward Flavigny.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Warlock placidly followed, traversing the battlefield
+near Rezonville.  Here bearer-parties of the German Ambulance
+Service, with Red Cross helpers, Knights of St. John,
+volunteers and French and German surgeons wearing the
+Geneva badge, were now arriving; and some progress had
+already been made in the gigantic task of separating the
+wounded from the dead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Iron Chancellor was found here, attended by his
+shadow, Bismarck-Böhlen, sometimes dubbed "The Little
+Cousin," other whiles "The Twopenny Roué," according
+to the humor of his powerful relative.  The Minister was
+glancing through the morning's letters, his cousin was
+reading him extracts from the <i>Daily Telegraph</i>, a parcel of
+English papers having arrived.  Hard by, squads of
+fatigue-men, aided by bloused peasants, were working to
+finish the second of two parallel trenches, in length some three
+hundred feet, near which had been collected a huge mass
+of French and German corpses, many half-naked, the majority
+of them still in uniform.  Carts lumbering up with
+fresh loads to discharge continually, augmented the terrible
+mound of bodies, a huge percentage hideously displaying
+the effects of shell-fire, many in the initial stages of
+decomposition, hastened by the sweltering and oppressive
+heat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Soldiers went about with huge canvas sacks, filling these
+with zinc identification-tags taken from the necks of their
+dead comrades, gathering a harvest of watches and purses,
+the former sometimes of such value, and the latter
+occasionally so well-filled with French money as to suggest
+that they had previously been taken from the dead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Ach Gott!</i>" the perplexed officer of Pioneers in superintendence
+of the trenching-party kept saying: "More, more,
+and still more....  What is one to do with so many dead
+men?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some utterance of this kind reaching the ears of the
+Chancellor, he turned in his saddle and called to the officer:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your trench is too deep, sir, and not half wide enough.
+Three feet is sufficient.  Lay them in as cooks dispose
+herrings in oil-pickle, across in layers and not singly and
+lengthways&mdash;labor and space will be economized thus."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Alas, Excellency!" protested the officer, "will not such
+a method be very unwholesome?  The churchyard at Flauville
+is already raised four feet above the pavement of the
+church."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Let them lay on fresh dead," said the Chancellor, smiling
+grimly, "and stop when they reach to the level of the
+window-sills.  Thus our good fellows will be able to listen to
+the Curé's Sunday address.  Meanwhile, bury thick."  He
+added, as Moltke rode up, pointing to the ground now
+trodden into mud and littered with French schakos and <i>képis</i>,
+Prussian helmets and schapkas, knapsacks, arms, under-clothing,
+accouterments, brushes, razors, and shoes: "Would
+not one call this 'Death's Rag Fair'?"  He added as the
+wind, blowing over a battery of dead horses, brought with
+it an odor that made the senses reel: "Or 'Death's
+Perfumery Shop' would be as appropriate a title....  I must
+advise the King not to breathe this atmosphere longer,
+fasting.  It might result in dysentery."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moltke agreed, expanding his thin nostrils: "Truly, the
+effluvium is exceedingly bad!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Hypocrite!" said the Chancellor, openly laughing.
+"Do we not all know that the bouquet of a battle-field
+covered with slain enemies is sweeter to you than November
+violet-blooms."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Both may be agreeable," said the old war-eagle, "in
+different fashion; as the partition of a conquered province,
+and the dismemberment of a truffled capon might afford
+pleasure of two kinds to Your Excellency."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Bismarck, as his cousin reined back and joined the
+modest personal staff of Moltke, following at some distance
+in the rear of the Commander-in-Chief:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I prefer the first, if the second appeals to my empty
+stomach.  Though we must not sell the bear's skin before
+we have killed the bear!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He went on, patting the sweating neck of the brown
+mare, who had winced and started as yet another dead-cart
+shot out its dreadful load to windward....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The King has been in favor of keeping the country up
+to the Marne.  I have yet another idea, which may be too
+Utopian to realize.  A kind of German colony&mdash;a neutral
+State of eight or ten million inhabitants, free from the
+conscription, and whose taxes should flow to Berlin.  France
+would thus lose a district from whence she draws her best
+soldiers&mdash;one would cut her claws thus!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Moltke, his clear eyes narrowing in merry wrinkles:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And draw her teeth as well!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That the annexation of the piece of territory will give
+jaundice to the French is a matter of no consequence.
+Revenge should be made impossible.  Even without annexation
+we must render them permanently harmless before we risk
+their bite.  The surrender of the eastern fortresses of
+France can alone serve our purpose.  We have bought
+them with the best of our German blood!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Agreed the Warlock: "Many noble Prussian families
+will be plunged in mourning.  Wesdehlen and Reuss,
+Wedell and Finkenstein have been killed&mdash;Rahden is most
+grievously wounded, and a whole crowd of officers
+commanding regiments or battalions are either badly hurt or
+dead.  I can but thank Divine Providence that I have
+suffered no personal bereavement."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I echo your thanksgiving," responded the Minister,
+"though some pints of my own blood have vicariously been
+shed."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I had heard&mdash;I had heard somewhat, but feared to
+touch upon the matter," said the Warlock.  "With the
+younger olive-branch they tell me all is well!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor answered, stammering slightly and
+looking straight in the other's eyes:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Bill rode off the field in safety, carrying two unhorsed
+comrades out of the leaden hailstorm, one in each stirrup,
+Cossack-fashion, and accommodating a th&mdash;a third on the
+crupper of his horse!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Ei&mdash;ei</i>!  I had not heard these interesting particulars,"
+exclaimed Moltke, raising his hairless brows in apparent
+astonishment.  "I did not know the brave young man had
+distinguished himself so much!  The Countess will
+overflow with pride and gratitude....  She writes regularly,
+I think Your Excellency told me?  Naturally she would be
+solicitous for your health."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I had a letter from her yesterday," returned Bismarck,
+"in which she mingles, in equal doses, stern admonition and
+affectionate advice.  Thus, I am to avoid the French wines,
+which are known to be gout-provoking, and be sure to
+return in time for the celebration of our wedding-day....
+While, remembering, however strongly Paris may be fortified,
+that the walls of Jericho fell down when the trumpets
+of Joshua were sounded&mdash;I am to give Your Excellency no
+peace, 'until the modern Babylon is utterly destroyed.'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ha, ha, ha!"  The Warlock laughed with boyish merriment,
+until the water stood in his clear, keen eyes.  "Her
+Excellency, as I have often told thee, Otto, possesses a
+personality of the antique order.  She is of the breed of Judith
+and Zenobia....  I would also say Boadicea, but for the
+Countess's known antipathy to the British race.  So we
+are to destroy Paris, and what of the Bonapartes and
+Bourbons and Orleans?...  Have we, then, no cut-and-dried
+instructions as to what is to be done with these?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor returned, with immovable gravity of
+tone and feature, belied by the amusement dancing in his
+eyes:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"We are to purge France of the whole lot of them.
+Though&mdash;supposing the Prince Imperial were to complete
+his education at a German University, and thus attain to
+manhood surrounded by German influences&mdash;Monseigneur
+Lulu might one day become a subaltern in our Prussian
+Army&mdash;subsequently to completion of the customary period
+of service in the ranks!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Capital.  Her Excellency is indeed a woman in a
+thousand."  And Moltke fairly rocked in his saddle with
+laughter, finally having recourse to the frayed cuff of his old
+uniform field-frock for the mopping of his overflowing eyes.
+"Thou must paint for the King," he gasped, "that picture
+of Lulu as a Prussian private soldier.  Do not fail to tell
+him&mdash;it will be sure to make him laugh."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Chancellor, shrugging his great shoulders:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He has ridden with Von Roon and the Tinsel Rabble
+in the direction of Flavigny, where the French bombardment
+so greatly endangered him yesterday.  Von Roon will
+be pouring into the royal ear dismal details of our losses,
+which are to be estimated for the Berlin newspapers at
+something under twenty thousand, including officers."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Seventy thousand would be nearer the mark," said the
+Warlock placidly.  "Nor do I regard it as a heavy price
+for such a victory as we have won.  Roon, however, is not
+to be envied an unpleasant duty, which, for my own part,
+I prefer, when possible, to leave to other mouths than
+mine."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And leaving the battle-field they struck into a road in a
+cutting leading east toward Flavigny, and bordered with
+cottages shattered and scorched by shell-fire, most of them
+standing in gardens gay with dahlias, sunflowers, snapdragons,
+marigolds, lavender, and phlox.  Every house that
+boasted a roof was full of wounded French and German
+soldiers, most of them lying on bare boards or earthen
+floors.  Oaths and cries of anguish came from kitchens that
+in virtue of their solid tables had been converted into
+operating theaters; ambulance-assistants emptied buckets of
+ensanguined water over the gaily-colored flower-beds, while
+bare-armed surgeons, in blood-stained aprons, came to the
+doors every other moment to cool themselves, or fill their
+lungs with draughts of cleaner air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is sad to see all this suffering," remarked the
+Chancellor, "or would be, did one not know it unavoidable!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Warlock, smiling cheerfully:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Blood and wounds, dying men and dead men, are the
+inseparable concomitants of War.  One takes them then as
+natural, and pays no heed to them.  Did armies fight with
+truncheons of sausages, and dumplings stuffed with plums
+instead of iron shells full of shrapnel, there would still be
+deaths in plenty."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor said, laughing heartily:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And the Field equipment of our Army surgeons would
+consist of calomel and rhubarb-pills.  Here now are a
+collection of soaked macaws and paroquets.  The fine feathers
+of the Napoleon's Guard Imperial have suffered badly from
+last night's rain."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In two fields right and left of the road they followed were
+crowded nearly four thousand French prisoners, under
+a heavy guard of Mecklenburg infantry.  The Mecklenburgers
+were drinking their morning coffee and munching
+Army bread and raw ham rations.  The emerald, pale blue,
+and scarlet Imperial Dragoons and Cuirassiers, the
+white-mantled, red-fezzed Chasseurs d'Afrique, the green-coated
+Chasseurs à cheval, the gorgeous Guides and Lancers, the
+Voltigeurs, and the red-breeched, blue-coated grenadiers
+belonging to individual regiments, standing as if in the ranks,
+or lying down in groups upon the muddy ground where
+they had spent the last night, looked with hollow eyes of
+famine, upon their munching jailers, but disdained to ask
+for food.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They are wet," said Moltke, "for few of them have got
+their greatcoats.  It is the love of display that leads the
+French soldier to throw away what extra weight of covering
+he carries when he is in the thick of a <i>mêlée</i>, or
+suddenly called upon to charge.  While our stout fellows will
+come out of an assault with what they carried into it."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Or perhaps a little more!" hinted the Chancellor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It may be&mdash;it may be!" admitted the Field Marshal.
+"The French love for gold-carrying is the cause of that
+enrichment.  Hence most of their Guard Cavalry officers
+carry beneath their tunics or in the pockets of their tight
+pantaloons netted purses given them by their women, that
+stick out in a tempting style.  A prod of our German lance,
+or a rip from the bayonet, and out pops the purse into the
+soldier's fist.  You would not call him a thief for taking
+what he finds in this manner?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I cannot answer for myself," said the Chancellor,
+turning a laughing look upon the speaker, "but I can safely
+predict that my wife would exonerate him upon Scriptural
+authority.  By the way, I see that your brigadiers have not
+thought it worth while to place the French wounded under
+surveillance."  He pointed to a halting procession of
+roughly bandaged casualties in torn and muddy uniforms.  "I
+have already passed at least a thousand of these limping
+fellows in red breeches, and of course there must be
+thousands more."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"How could they escape?" asked the Warlock, turning
+his ascetic, hairless face upon the speaker.  "And did they
+succeed in doing so, of what use would they be as combatants?
+All these you see, have they not been wounded by
+shell-splinters in the head or arms, or hit in the legs and
+feet by our rifle bullets?  Why should we burden ourselves
+with the maintenance of men who cannot fight against us? and
+must be helpless burdens upon their country even were
+they within the French lines?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I admit the clearness of your Excellency's judgment,"
+said the Minister, "even while I doubt whether, if some of
+these red-breeched rascals happen to be in possession of
+concealed weapons&mdash;there would not be an excellent
+opportunity, at this moment, for ridding France of Bismarck or
+Moltke."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Or both," the Warlock amended, "with the aid of a
+double-barreled pistol.  Look here!  Was ever a more
+startling likeness between a dead man and a living, than is
+presented at this moment before Your Excellency and myself?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And returning the salute of a young soldier in the
+white-faced blue uniform of the Guards Infantry, who in the act
+of galloping past upon a powerful if wearied beast, had
+checked his stride so as not to splash mud upon the
+Chancellor and the great Field-Marshal, Moltke signed to him to
+halt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That he is a relative of Max Valverden's," said
+Bismarck, "I would have wagered you a dozen of Moselle, of
+Comet vintage, if Your Excellency were not already
+inclined to bet on the relationship."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I never bet," chirped Moltke, "except in boxes of chocolate
+and gloves with my nieces, and then it is a matter of
+certainty beforehand that the little girls are going to
+win!"  And he turned his narrow, glittering gaze upon the object
+of his curiosity, who was now fixed in the front attitude of
+attention, immovable as an equestrian statue of painted
+stone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I will not detain you upon what is no doubt a pressing
+errand," said the Chief of the Great Staff, smiling amiably
+in the Guardsman's rigid countenance.  "I merely wished
+to ask your name, and why it is that a private soldier of
+Guard Infantry happens to be riding an officer's horse?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Pardon, General Field-Marshal!"  The statue blushed
+becomingly.  "My name is Carl Bernhard von Schön
+Valverden, at the service of Your Excellency.  Of my rank in
+the Army I am hardly at this moment certain, as I was
+promoted Corporal and Sergeant yesterday, during the
+action of the Guard at St. Privat and Amanvilliers, and am
+now acting temporarily as junior Captain of my company,
+nearly all our officers having been killed."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I congratulate you, Sergeant!" rejoined the Field-Marshal
+cordially, "and am glad that you, as successor to
+the family honors of an officer who served the Prussian
+Army with distinction, seem likely to follow in the steps of
+your relative.  Prut!&mdash;that was a close thing!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Hellishly so!" agreed Bismarck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the flushed and laughing face of Valverden had
+suddenly hardened and sharpened.  With lightning quickness
+he had drawn a revolver from a pouch strapped to his belt
+and fired across the withers of the big brown mare bestridden
+by the Iron Chancellor.  As the single shot rang out,
+another followed almost instantly, and the midmost of a
+knot of three dismounted Lancers, their heads, legs, and
+arms swathed in clumsy, blood-stained bandages, who had
+halted to rest by the side of the muddy road, yelled shrilly
+and pitched heavily backward, dropping, with the broken
+pair of clothes-props that had served him as crutches, a
+cavalry holster-pistol that had exploded as it fell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Valverden, stiffening his features in the endeavor to
+disguise his almost passionate elation: "Your Excellencies
+will pardon me, but I saw the fellow was dangerous...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He might with reason," the Chancellor answered, "have
+entertained a similar idea of you!"  He turned to Moltke,
+saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Will not Your Excellency give orders that the companions
+of these would-be assassins&mdash;all upon the road who
+have witnessed the attempted outrage&mdash;shall be shot without
+delay?  It strikes me also that more stringent precautions
+must be taken with regard to disarming wounded
+prisoners.  The man had a pistol&mdash;that goes for much!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Certainly&mdash;certainly!" agreed Moltke, beckoning to an
+aide of his small Staff, who followed at some distance.  He
+issued some brief directions, speaking in an undertone, then
+said, smiling and turning to Valverden:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The late Count Max was an excellent marksman with
+the pistol.  You seem to have inherited this talent of his!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor added, looking at the still smoking
+revolver: "You have there a pretty little weapon, apparently
+of American make!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is one of Colt's six-shooters," said Valverden,
+smiling.  "I bought it from a non-commissioned officer quite
+recently, and have practised with it in the trenches at the
+animate mark.  But of the ammunition I got with it all has
+been expended save six cartridges, one of which I have had
+the honor to dedicate to the service of Your Excellencies."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Both the Excellencies laughed, Moltke saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It would be a pity to spoil your shooting, Sergeant
+Count von Schön Valverden, for want of a few cartridges.
+Give me the caliber of your weapon and I will engage to
+supply you with a few hundred.  And, as to your promptitude
+may be owed the priceless life of Count Bismarck, the
+silver-sword-knot must be the reward."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Thanks, thanks!  Your Excellency!" stammered Valverden,
+grasping the offered hand of the old warrior.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And the King shall hear how important a service his
+newly promoted officer has rendered him," appended the
+Chancellor, "in preserving to the Throne and nation of
+Prussia the greatest of living strategists!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Under Divine Providence," said Moltke, devoutly
+raising his forage-cap.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Under Divine Providence," repeated the Chancellor,
+touching the peak of his own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He added, as Valverden, dismissed by a wave of the
+Chief's finger, his blue eyes blazing, his blond face aglow
+with triumph, set his borrowed spurs to the flanks of his
+late Captain's charger, and with a showy bound and
+demi-volte, galloped furiously away:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He is as vain as Count Max, but seems to possess more
+character.  I prophesy he will go far!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moltke agreed, slightly glancing after the flying horseman:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Far&mdash;if Heaven preserve him from the clutches of such
+women as Adelaide de Bayard.  Wouldst thou believe, Otto,
+the she-fiend spread her nets to catch that youngster, who
+out of dare-devilry prevailed on an officer of her
+acquaintance to take him to her house?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So!"  Bismarck turned his large eyes on the withered
+eagle-face.  "Did the meeting ripen into intimacy?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moltke replied:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Sufficiently so to cause Valverden's family acute
+apprehension.  One would suppose that she first revolted, then
+attracted, then charmed....  The Countess in the anguish
+of maternal solicitude wrote a letter to the Colonel of
+Valverden's regiment....  Fortunately the call to Active
+Service diverted the young man's thoughts elsewhere."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bismarck said, smiling and smoothing his heavy gray
+mustache with his ungloved right hand:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And, happily for her intended victim, an accident befell
+the sorceress, which blunted some of the arrows in her
+quiver of irresistible charms!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap48"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XLVIII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+"Sad, sad!  I had not heard.  How did it happen?" asked
+Moltke, elevating his hairless brows inquiringly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Briefly, the affair, as its details have reached me, sums
+up in this way: Straz, the Roumanian agent of the Emperor
+Napoleon, having performed his mission to Prince
+Antony of Hohenzollern, met Madame de Bayard at a
+Sigmaringen hotel....  She is as clever and light-fingered as
+she is, or was, beautiful&mdash;&mdash;'
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I know, I know!" said Moltke.  "She sucked Straz dry
+of his store of Imperial secrets, but how, I did not hear
+from Your Excellency."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Returned the Chancellor:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"By drugging him&mdash;or so he vows!&mdash;she obtained those
+copies of his instructions from the Emperor (with copies
+of his copies of the telegrams sent by Prince Antony)&mdash;which
+I was privileged to show you later on.  Subsequently,
+and in floods of artificial tears, she awakened her victim,
+declaring she must return that instant to Berlin.  Which
+she did&mdash;a special engine having been kept under steam at
+the Sigmaringen railway station&mdash;in time to place the
+papers in the hands for which they were destined.  The
+exquisite point of the jest is that Straz accompanied
+her&mdash;subsequently discovering how roundly he had been
+befooled!  But upon this point I am not certain....  I only
+argue from the premises that when Delilah was subsequently
+found gagged, half-strangled, and robbed in her bedroom
+at the hotel where she and her Roumanian had put
+up&mdash;Straz&mdash;who had vanished&mdash;was the perpetrator of what
+Madame has since termed 'a mysterious outrage.'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He took the money?" Moltke queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Undoubtedly he took the money, which Bucher had
+paid her a few hours previously.  Twenty thousand marks
+in honest Prussian bank-notes.  Some of them Straz changed
+before he left Berlin.  He is now here in France, and that
+is all I care to know of him at present.  But in the eyes of
+every man she now encounters, Madame will read something
+that will keep her animosity alive."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So changed, is she?" asked Moltke, with interest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So changed is she, in spite of the aid of cosmetics, that
+as I looked at her I was minded to exclaim with the Prophet
+Ezekiel: <i>Devourer of men ... thou shalt devour men
+no more!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The speaker added:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Unless vicariously, for the De Bayard has a daughter&mdash;not
+destitute of charms, if there be truth in the description
+given me by her mother, when the woman offered, for a
+consideration, to sell the girl to me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Prut!" said Moltke, reddening angrily and frowning.
+"Decency demands that such vileness be kept hid!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Chancellor, shrugging indifferently:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Decency and such women as Max Valverden's ex-mistress
+have long ceased to be on nodding terms.  To do
+Madame justice, she flew at higher game than a mere Prussian
+Minister.  Her idea was to influence a future Emperor,
+in the person of Badinguet's heir."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moltke wrinkled up his transparent, arched nostrils, as
+though an unpleasant odor had afflicted them:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Pfui!</i>&mdash;what beastliness! what abomination!  And the
+boy but fifteen, and childish for his age!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And cleanly of habit and thought," added Bismarck,
+"considering his paternity, and the sort of people who
+habitually surround him."  He turned slightly in his saddle
+as carbine-shots rang out, followed by oaths, shouts, and in
+the distance behind them muscular blows: "The gendarmery
+of the Württembergers are carrying out your orders in
+a general <i>battue</i>.  It should be enforced as an iron rule
+never to be infringed or departed from, that not only those
+soldiers, reduced to the level of non-combatants&mdash;who
+attempt to revenge the misfortunes of their Army by acts of
+violence&mdash;but those who witness such acts are to be
+instantly shot.  More, the rule should extend to private
+persons: I would without mercy shoot or hang all those who
+do not treat as sacredly inviolate the persons of their
+conquerors!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His deep-cut nostrils expanded, his blood-tinged blue eyes
+blazed under the heavy eyebrows, the corners of his mouth
+clamped downward, giving to the thick mustache a certain
+appearance of solidity, typical of the man, and suggesting
+a human mask carved in granite, or cast in bronze and
+colored with the hues of life.  His resonant voice had the
+clang and timbre of a war-gong, forged of metal tempered
+by Pagan priests in blood of human victims.  And he went
+on, his clenched right hand beating the measure of his
+words upon his solid thigh:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I speak from the inner depths, at the promptings of a
+profound conviction.  Strictness&mdash;unmerciful strictness&mdash;should
+be wielded, to bring home to the innocent and the
+guilty, the feeble as well as the powerful, the horror and
+hideousness of War.  And yet"&mdash;his voice assumed a milder
+tone, the somber frown relaxed, and the tense corners of
+the deep-cut mouth twitched a little: "And yet wilt thou
+credit that during the frightful carnage of the last two
+days&mdash;there have been moments when my bowels melted to
+water&mdash;when Pity and Compunction have gripped me by
+the throat?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Ach-ach!</i>" ejaculated Moltke, turning his clear
+red-rimmed eyes wonderingly upon the heavy features whose
+ruddy color had faded to grayish: "Thou wast unfed, or
+hadst made some rough soldier's meal that disagreed with
+thee.  Man's stomach will upon such occasions chide with
+the very voice of conscience.  Unavoidable horrors need not
+cause twinges.  Besides, pity and compunction are felt by
+my niece Gusta when she has trodden upon her lapdog's
+tail....  I am myself agitated by these sentiments when
+Gusta exhibits to me her chilblains....  In War&mdash;especially
+a recklessly provoked war of attack, such as this&mdash;neither
+pity nor compunction can be tolerated.  Grief of
+heart, I have been hitherto spared by Heaven's gracious
+preservation of those dear to me.  Thou art nearly as
+favored, for the wound of Herbert is comparatively slight,
+and Bill&mdash;the hero of the astonishing episode thou hast
+related&mdash;has come off the field not only with four&mdash;I think
+Your Excellency mentioned four&mdash;rescued comrades, but
+without a scratch upon his skin?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The simple, serious, almost childish tone of his harangue
+brought back the thunderclouds to the forehead of the Man
+of Iron.  His grim mouth set, his bulldog jaw thrust
+forward, a dull cloud of red swept upward to his temples,
+chasing the sickly grayish hue.  He said, stammering in his
+characteristic manner:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your Ex&mdash;Your Excellency and myself have, as you
+say, been spared the bereavement which will presently
+plunge the noblest Prussian families into mourning.  But
+Heaven&mdash;looking down upon the Gorze Road, now white
+with the bodies of Von Bredow's Cuirassiers&mdash;or contemplating
+the field of Mars la Tour, heaped with the corpses
+of our Guard-Dragoons and Uhlans&mdash;might be inclined to
+disclaim arch-responsibility for the orders that in one
+instance hurled suss&mdash;six Prussian squadrons upon a French
+Infantry Division and the combined strength of Frossard's
+batteries, and in the other, pitted against eight regiments
+of French Imperial Guard Cavalry Von Barby's Heavy
+Brigade."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Ei!</i>" said Moltke, placidly ignoring the irony, but with
+a rosy heightening of the color in his wrinkled cheeks:
+"And Heaven would be in the right of it.  Von Alvensleben
+in the first case, General Voights-Rhetz in the second,
+had been told in such and such an emergency to do
+thus&mdash;and thus.  In the Wars of Joshua and David, as
+recorded in Holy Scripture, Heaven assumed the chief
+generalship.  In the War of Germany with France, in this
+year of 1870, Heaven is pleased to let Moltke have his own
+way."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Verbal thrusts and riposte had the grind of edged steel
+on steel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor returned with elaborate suavity:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And yet&mdash;I quote Your Excellency's own utterance,
+such use of cavalry as I have quoted has been condemned
+by Moltke as unjustifiable."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And Moltke was right," trumpeted the indomitable
+veteran, "only you have not quoted me right.  Such use of
+cavalry by a general is unjustifiable.
+Unjustifiable&mdash;absolutely&mdash;unless he wins!"  He
+added, rather nettled by the Chancellor's criticism:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Here we part, as I ride toward Gorze to visit the scene
+of Von Bredow's brilliant exploit, in the course of which,
+though Your Excellency has omitted to mention it, the
+French battery was cut to pieces, and an infantry column
+ridden down.  Thus the loss of life in a military sense
+weighs nothing against the advantage!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And stiffly returning the Minister's salute, the Warlock
+galloped away.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+"I have trodden on Moltke's corns," said Bismarck,
+laughing, as his cousin Bismarck-Böhlen rode up to join
+him.  "He grew testy on being twitted with our losses in
+cavalry."  He added, as the low hedges bounding the road
+vanished, and the arena of the previous afternoon's conflict
+opened before them: "There is the King, whose face Roon
+has lengthened with tremendous lists of losses on our side.
+It will now be my business to shorten the royal countenance
+again.  Roon and I resemble Ixel and Axel in the child's
+story-book, only that we manage better on the whole!"  He
+explained as his cousin professed ignorance of the legend:
+"Ixel and Axel were possessed of a magical birth-gift,
+which worked in the same way, but differently....  Thus,
+Axel had a little finger that stirred sweet, while Ixel's
+stirred sour, only neither could remember to use his gift
+properly.  Thus, Ixel would sour the coffee in the pot, spoil
+the beer, and turn the jelly in the house-mother's pipkins,
+while Axel would stir the sauer-kraut sweet and make sweet
+calf's head with cabbages!"  He added, laughing: "If a
+dish thus flavored were now set before me, I should
+certainly make short work of it.  Save for a bowl of the
+soldier's pea-soup given me by General von Goeben this
+morning&mdash;my stomach would now be as empty as the inside of
+Louis Napoleon's head!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+The scene of the Homeric battle of the previous
+afternoon, watched by the King, Bismarck, Roon, and Moltke
+from the ridge south of Flavigny, was indescribable.  Blue
+Prussian infantry, mingled with Uhlan lancers, Dragoons,
+and mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard, covered the
+wide stretch of level common-ground between the Bois de
+Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont.  So high were piled
+the bodies of dead men and dead horses, mingled with that
+sorrowful <i>débris</i> of shattered arms, scattered accouterments
+and ownerless headgear, that live men walked through
+narrow lanes and crevasses opening here and there among
+them, and failed to reach the surface at the full stretch of
+the arm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bearer-sections of the German Ambulance were looking
+for survivors, burial-parties were collecting the German
+dead.  Here and there the narrow lanes that ended nowhere
+had become crooked thoroughfares, owing to these efforts
+and the labor of bands of volunteers and peasants working
+under the Red Cross.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh was one of these toilers.  On the previous
+day he had helped the peasants clear the Red Ravine under
+the direction of the Gorze Sisters of Mercy, and darkness
+falling before the gruesome task was ended, he had kept on
+by torch and lantern-light until brain and muscles gave in.
+Then, staggering with weariness, he had gone back with
+the Sisters to their convent&mdash;had been dried and warmed,
+fed with soup and bread, stewed fruit and coffee, and had
+slept dreamlessly in the clean spare bed at their gardener's
+cottage&mdash;to wake, refreshed, in the light of a new day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Morning had found every house in Gorze crammed with
+French and German wounded, and every able-bodied resident,
+willingly or otherwise, impressed into the service of
+the Red Cross.  One single lady of the Sister's acquaintance,
+whose villa had been forcibly turned into a hospital,
+had retired to sleep off a nervous headache, setting her maid
+to guard her bedroom door.  Which door, after an interval
+of trampling and violent argument, had been kicked open,
+revealing the kicker in the person of a Prussian General,
+muddy to the whiskers, hoarse from exposure and shouting,
+and red-eyed from the lack of sleep, who there and
+then forcibly ejected the hapless spinster from her bed, and
+telling her go and nurse the wounded, pulled off his spurred
+boots, and promptly installed himself in her place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was mild treatment, even tender, to the usage
+received by many other harmless non-combatants.  P. C. Breagh
+had seen an elderly priest savagely hit in the face
+by a dismounted Uhlan, whom he had unintentionally
+jostled in helping to lift a disabled French soldier into a
+cart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he had been witness of other outrages.  He had seen
+a wayside cabaret gutted, and the casks hauled up from
+the cellar, set up on end, unheaded, and emptied by a party
+of blue infantry-men.  When they had dipped in and filled
+their water-bottles, they had drunk out of their helmets,
+and when they could drink no more, they had emptied out
+the wine upon the ground before the bush-decorated doorway,
+and with brutal jests and laughter watched the red
+stuff trickle away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To this senseless waste the host had offered no objection.
+A blow from a gun-butt had previously knocked him senseless,
+and his wife, with her black hair hanging wildly over
+her shoulders, and her face blurred with tears and pale
+with terror, was trying to bring him round again.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap49"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+XLIX
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+The sight of the battle-field blotted out that brutal
+picture&mdash;made him clench his hands until the nails dug deep into
+the palms, shut his eyes and set his teeth, fighting down
+the deadly qualm....  It was worse than the Red Ravine a
+hundred times magnified.  It was awful&mdash;inconceivably
+awful....  He found himself muttering:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I wonder how God can bear to look down on it all!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With difficulty he controlled his ardent desire to remove
+himself as far as possible from this attained vision of his
+great desire, by using the legs that had brought him to this
+hideous scene:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If some of the fellows who gas about wanting to see
+War&mdash;as I gassed&mdash;not twenty-four hours ago&mdash;could be
+set down where I stand now, they'd find out, as I have
+found&mdash;that they didn't know what they were talking about....
+Oh, God! ... suppose one of them saw that German
+Hussar without a head, sitting upright on a dead horse,
+curiously caparisoned with its own intestines, would he go
+sheer crazy or tumble down in a swoon?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He who saw the thing kept on his legs and did not lose
+his mental equilibrium.  We are so weak to our own knowledge
+that it is always a marvel when we find ourselves
+strong.  He found the nausea going and the dimness clearing
+from his vision.  He could even breathe the dreadful
+air, and, standing on the limber of a broken gun-carriage,
+stare out over the rigid billows of that silent sea of death
+and tell himself that a not inapt comparison would have
+been Deal Beach, with ridges of dead men and beasts
+instead of ridges of pebbles, and flocks of carrion crows
+instead of gulls&mdash;flapping heavily from one place to settle
+down in another and renew their dreadful banquet, between
+hoarse croakings that sounded like "More, more, more!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Starlings in myriads were there, reveling in blood and
+fat like the titmice and robins, who manifested predilections
+calculated to divest P. C. Breagh of the last remnant of
+belief in the tender fable of the Babes in the Wood.
+Butterflies, Royal Peacock, and Purple Emperor greedily
+sipped blood in preference to honey-dew.  Hares, rendered
+tame by bewilderment and terror, couched among the
+corpses of men, their natural enemies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Toward the northeast rose a knoll, about which the
+battle seemed to have raged desperately.  For it was
+high-heaped with bodies of the green-jacketed Chasseurs on the
+bony brown horses, and ringed about with Red Uhlans and
+Dragoons in blue coats.  The black and white lance-pennons
+were whipping and flickering in the morning breeze that
+brought with it the appalling savor of death....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One had come to work, not to make notes.  P. C. Breagh
+got down from the limber into the trough between two
+towering wave-crests and looked about him helplessly, not
+knowing where to begin.  A bearer-party of the Prussian
+Ambulance Service pushed by him.  They were hard-bitten,
+brown-faced men, who joked and laughed freely.  A scared
+band of peasants followed, carrying auxiliary stretchers
+made of hurdles and sacks and poles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon the heels of these tottered a single figure.  Was it
+a young girl, or an old woman, so slight and frail, so bowed
+and blackly clad?  A black silk veil covered the bent face,
+the small white hands were knitted across the narrow
+bosom.  A white linen armlet with the badge of the Red
+Cross showed vividly against the sleeve of her plain black
+merino dress.  The little, daintily shod feet that showed
+under the dabbled hem of the skirt had red mire upon
+them.  Through the veil her great eyes gleamed, haggardly
+moving from side to side, restlessly seeking....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh was becoming familiar with that look of
+strained apprehension and bleak anxiety, stamped upon the
+sharpened faces of those crowds of black-clad men and
+women who hastened from all quarters to seek amid the
+brute and human waste and wreckage of battle, their own
+wounded or dead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She moved with the irregular gait of one walking in a
+fog, looking from side to side, questing amid blue and livid
+or waxen faces for the face, it was quite plain.  Her look
+passed over bodies that did not wear the dark-green,
+silver-laced dolman, and silver-striped red pantaloons of the
+mounted Chasseurs of the Guard Imperial.  She ignored
+faces that were young, and unadorned with the crisp
+mustache and the Imperial tuft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For whom did she seek?  A husband, uncle, father? ... What
+lay in her path?  Something that, did the little foot
+strike it unwarily, might bring to an end that anguished
+search....  The impact seemed so imminent that his voice
+died in his throat when he strove to call to her.  He got out
+in a gasping croak:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Stop! ... Look! ... Right in your path there! ... For
+God's sake, don't touch it&mdash;it's a live shell!" ...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She swerved blindly aside in obedience to the warning,
+though he who uttered it had spoken in his own tongue.
+The edge of her skirt brushed the unexploded shrapnel, a
+potentiality fraught with hideous death.  But she struck
+her knee against the wheel of the broken limber&mdash;would
+have fallen but for P. C. Breagh.  Even as the slight figure
+stumbled against him, he knew the veil screened the face of
+Juliette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mademoiselle de Bayard....  Madame..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah, it is you&mdash;it is you!" she said gaspingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she would have dropped at his feet had he not thrust
+out strong hands and caught hers that were still knitted
+over her breast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were so cold, so cold and tiny.  They stirred in his
+grasp like little half-frozen birds.  She freed one, and put
+aside the heavy veil, and showed him what havoc Grief can
+make in loveliness....  She said&mdash;in the toneless wraith of
+the crystal voice he remembered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"When you spoke to me in English, I knew Our Lord
+had not forgotten me.  Ah, Monsieur Breagh, for the love
+you bear your sister!&mdash;for the love of charity&mdash;do not
+desert me!  Me, I am in the greatest extremity, or I would
+not venture to appeal to you now.  In the midst of these
+appalling cruelties and terrors I seek the body of one who
+is all the world to me....  For that I may find him living
+I do not dare to hope..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh choked out, crimsoning and stammering:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not your husband? ... You don't mean your husband...?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said, with a wonderful, pure dignity:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not my husband.  My father, sir.  It is since a week
+that I returned from Belgium upon receiving news of his
+captivity in the hands of the Prussians.  The intelligence
+was false&mdash;I afterward learned.  How&mdash;I cannot now tell
+you.  At this moment, and in the presence of all these poor
+corpses, of odor so terrible, of appearance so frightful, I
+can remember nothing very well.  But this&mdash;that I have
+come from Rethel since yesterday, and that I have come
+altogether alone."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Alone! ... without a guide, or protector of any kind? ... Without
+papers?..."  His face expressed the blankest surprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A passport was obtained for me," she told him, "by
+whom I will not say now, so that from the Belgian frontier
+I might reach Rethel.  When I quitted Rethel, I was given
+a military permit by the aid of which I returned to Verdun.
+From Verdun, in a train full of French wounded&mdash;in
+a <i>fiacre</i> part of the way&mdash;in a peasant's cart the remaining
+distance&mdash;I traveled: hoping to reach the Camp of the
+Imperial Guard Cavalry at Châtel St. Germain.  But at
+Plappeville they detained me.  A great battle was raging....
+What thunder of guns, what fire and smoke, what terrible
+confusion, devastation, wounds, and death did I not
+behold!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She unknitted one of the little rigid hands that he had
+let go, felt for her handkerchief, and wiped away the cold
+drops of anguish that stood upon her blue-veined temples
+and about her colorless lips.  And P. C. Breagh could only
+look at her in an agony of pity, and wonder at the courage
+that bore the frail creature up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Last night the frightful explosions of cannon ceased
+A poor peasant woman had afforded me shelter in her cottage,
+and shared with me the milk of her goat and her last
+loaf of bread.  News came before day, brought by a wounded
+soldier, whose comrades had been killed, that the battle
+had been won by the Army of France, but that M. de Bazaine
+had withdrawn our forces for rest and shelter to the
+Citadel of Metz.  I asked this poor soldier for intelligence
+of my father's regiment, the 777th Mounted Chasseurs of
+the Guard.  The reply was: 'Three regiments of Mounted
+Chasseurs lie dead on the field of honor.  You will find
+them south of Flavigny, between the Bois de Vionville and
+the Bois de Gaumont.'  I cried out then, for the words had
+pierced me like sharp iron.  I would have run out of the
+house to find my father, like a creature distracted, but that
+an ambulance of the Red Cross, accompanied by two English
+Protestant Sisters, passed through the village on the
+way to this terrible place.  They brought me with them&mdash;'You
+cannot seek among the dead,' they told me, 'without
+the brassard of the Rouge Croix.'  This they put upon me,
+and then they bring me with them.  Now I know not where
+they are, but I have found you.  Help me, monsieur&mdash;and I
+will pray for you until I die!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She gave him one wild, supplicating look, put her little
+frozen hands together&mdash;would have knelt down on the
+bloody grass to plead with him the better, if he had seemed
+to delay.  But he caught fire at her flaming eagerness, and
+snatched at the wallet of Red Cross necessaries he had
+unslung when he had climbed upon the broken limber to gaze
+over that sea of Death that spread to the horizon, crying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Of course I'll help you look for your father! ... But
+how to search for him&mdash;and where? ... Tell me ...  the
+regiment and the color of the uniform?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Shuddering, she pointed to the green, silver-braided
+dolman clothing of one of the rigid figures near them.  He
+noted the red and green plume of the sealskin talpack, cut
+through, perhaps, by a stroke of the heavy saber yet
+gripped in the stiff right hand of a Prussian Dragoon.  He
+muttered, even while mentally registering other details of
+the Chasseur's uniform&mdash;noting the crest embroidered on
+the green schabraque of the brown charger whose inert
+weight rested on its dead rider's thigh:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"777th Chasseurs ... I've heard German officers telling
+each other that they fought like devils yesterday....  Half
+a dozen regiments might have been cut up here!  And we
+have to find one man somewhere in a square mile of
+piled-up bodies....  If one only had a bloodhound and one of
+De Bayard's gloves!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Love has a scent as keen as the great dun hound of the
+hanging dewlap.  The issue of the search was to prove this.
+For an hour, as it seemed, they traversed narrow lanes that
+wound between walls of dead men.  Then the ground rose
+to a knoll, topped with three scorched oak-trees that had
+been stripped of their leaves and lopped of their branches
+by the blizzard of metal and fire, still burning, the air
+expanding in their sap-channels, exploded with the detonation
+of musketry.  Charred cinders dropped from them; they
+gave forth clouds of acrid-smelling whitish smoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About and upon this knoll of the three oak-trees the
+battle of the previous day had raged&mdash;the billows of the sea
+of Death had beaten fiercely.  The lane became a crevasse,
+the floor of which sloped sharply&mdash;from the sides of which
+projected rigid limbs, human and equine.  But the slender
+figure in black moved between them&mdash;stooped to pass under
+them, seldom faltering.  When the young man who followed
+begged her to turn back, she shook her head without
+answering, and kept on.  The silent gesture meant:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not yet!  A little farther still!...  Be patient with
+me, I beg of you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For it seemed to Juliette's tense nerves and overstrained
+brain as though those white or blue, or darkly-discolored
+faces, hideously distorted or wearing an unnatural expression
+of calm, were all staring with their glassy eyes in one
+direction, pointed out by myriads of stiffened arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said, tottering with sheer weakness, and turning
+upon her companion colorless, black-ringed eyes set in a
+face most strangely peaked and shrunken:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Here where these trees are I will turn, because my
+strength is failing....  See, see!  O Mother of God!...  O
+Jesu!... HE IS THERE!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The scream that tore through her slender throat turned
+P. C. Breagh's blood to snow-water.  He could only gasp,
+clutching at the folds of her black school-dress with a vague
+idea of holding her back from some sight of intolerable
+horror:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Wait!  For God's sake!  Wait!...  Let me!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook off his unconsciously violent grasp as though it
+had been a baby's.  She was gone, wading through a languid
+runnel of fast-congealing blood, stepping over a broken
+lance-shaft and a horse's rigid hind-limb.  When P. C. Breagh
+reached her, she was crouching on a patch of hoof-torn
+earth through which the limestone core of the knoll
+showed in places, hugging to her bosom a stiff blue hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It wore a familiar ring, that brave right hand, from
+whose grip the long cavalry sword had dropped when the
+Uhlan gave the death-thrust.  But I think, even without
+the crested sard, his daughter would have known....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madness was near enough in that fell hour to brush the
+bowed veiled head of Juliette with her tattered mantle of
+imaginary enemies.  She saw nothing and knew nothing
+but that her father was there.  She kissed the stiff blue
+hand, and sang to it and cuddled it.  Ophelia was not more
+tragic than this Convent school-girl, squatting in the chilly
+shadow of a heap of dead horsemen, lavishing futile, foolish
+tendernesses on that piece of insensible clay:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My father, now that I have found thee, we must never
+be parted again&mdash;never!  Indeed, I have tried to obey
+thee&mdash;but I could not help coming back because I love thee
+so!...  Thou hast been wounded, but I will nurse thee and
+cure thee.  When thou art well again we will find a quiet
+home together, where my mother shall never come.  For
+she is not good as my grandmother was, and as thou art, my
+own father!...  I have fear of her, now that I have seen
+and known!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She broke off and listened, as though an answer had come
+from under the blood-stained Imperial eagle and the corpses
+that hid De Bayard from her view.  One of them was the
+body of the young subaltern who had borne the standard.
+Over him sprawled the colossal form of a German officer of
+Dragoons.  He was not dead, for he moved, and blood was
+yet trickling from a sword-cut that had bitten deep into his
+shoulder through the cuirass, and a deep gash in the
+close-cropped scalp of his unhelmeted head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Help!  Some drink!  <i>Donner!</i> how my head hurts!" he
+groaned faintly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh, judging it a case for practical Samaritanism,
+got to him by skirting the heap of dead and scaling it
+from the opposite side.  Reaching the summit, he dosed the
+Dragoon with cognac, and was about to apply a first-aid
+bandage to the damaged shoulder, when the red-banded
+forage-caps and bearded faces of a burial-party of
+Prussian Guard infantry strung through the narrow alley below
+the level of his operations, and an unforgotten voice said
+in rough Teutonic gutturals:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Hereabouts or near.  Begin this&mdash;widening the way
+until carts can get through to be loaded....
+<i>Kreuzdonnerwetter!</i> is that a dog up there?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another voice answered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No, <i>Herr</i> Sergeant.  It is either a nun or a woman!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Sergeant thundered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You silly sheepshead!  Aren't nuns women?  But you
+<i>verdammte</i> Catholics think such wenches are angels out of
+the sky.  Turn her out of that&mdash;nun or woman!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a savage rush of scalding blood to his sun-bronzed
+cheeks and temples, P. C. Breagh realized that they meant
+Juliette.  He thrust his head forward, peering down from
+his eyrie.  The crouching little shape in black looked no
+bigger than a big dog.  Near her stood a soldier in the
+white-faced dark blue uniform of the Guard Infantry.  It
+was the spectacled ex-chemist Kunz, who had nodded him
+civil farewell.  Staring up from below was the copper-colored
+countenance of the too-zealous Sergeant Schmidt,
+not rendered more amiable by mud-splashes and powder
+grime, in combination with a stitched-up scar across the
+bridge of the nose, and a flamboyant overgrowth of beard.
+He bellowed to the ex-chemist:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Speak to her!  Ask what is her business."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The spectacled Kunz stooped over the little bowed head,
+and seemed to put a question.  She lifted her drained white
+face, shuddered, then resumed her previous attitude.
+Interrogated from below, Private Kunz responded:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She is deaf, or mad.  She only shakes and stares at one!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Sergeant bellowed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Shout in her ear, fool!  You are not courting your
+sweetheart!  Tell her to get up and move out of this!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus urged, the ex-chemist approached his lips to the
+little ear shaded by the black silken tresses, and bawled
+the order of his superior.  She gave no sign of having
+heard.  Copper-red with indignation, the Sergeant commanded:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Turn her out, then!  Promptly up with the baggage!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kunz, thus adjured, gripped the slight arm, not brutally.
+At the touch, Juliette gave a faint cry, and crouched lower,
+hiding her face upon the rigid hand she held.  And
+P. C. Breagh saw red, abandoned his groaning cavalryman and
+leaped for it, slithering down from the summit of his
+dreadful eyrie with a roll of four-inch bandaging trailing in
+his wake.  Casting caution to the winds, he shouted
+savagely to the ex-chemist:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Let the lady go!  Take your hand off!  Damn you!&mdash;do
+you hear?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The words, being English, were not comprehended by the
+Sergeant.  For an instant he stared open-mouthed at the
+unexpected apparition.  The next he had bawled out an
+order to his men, and P. C. Breagh found himself looking
+down the long brown barrels of a couple of Prussian
+"needlers," accurately covering the exact area of waistcoat
+behind which his heart hammered and bumped.  There
+was a creaking of leather then&mdash;and with the jingle of
+steel on steel, the snort of a horse reluctant to be ridden
+into an alley without turning-space.  Over the heads of
+the Sergeant and his party rose the pricked ears, sagacious
+eyes, and broad frontlet of a great, gaunt brown mare, ridden
+by a gigantic field officer, wearing the flat white,
+yellow-banded forage cap, black pewter-buttoned frock, white
+cords, and immense spurred jack-boots of the Coburg
+regiment of White Cuirassiers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Whom have we English here?  Who called out 'Take
+your hands off!'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From under the peak of the white forage-cap the rider's
+heavy domineering stare took in the huddled feminine
+figure, the disheveled young man menaced by the Service
+rifles, and the truculent attitude of Sergeant Schmidt.  He
+lifted a finger, and the "needlers" became vertical.  He
+beckoned with the authoritative digit, and P. C. Breagh
+drew near.  And the sickening horrors of the battlefield
+faded suddenly from about the Englishman....  He was
+back in the tobacco-scented study of a house in the
+Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin.  And the resonant tones of the man
+who stood for Prussia in the mind's eye of the world were
+saying, in Bismarck's well-phrased English:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Even though you belong to a neutral nation, you should
+not presume upon the fact too rashly.  Had I not been
+within earshot just now, you would have paid with your
+life for your interference.  German military authority is
+supreme, and in the execution of its duty not to be turned
+aside."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh retorted, tingling to the very finger-tips:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your Excellency, I interfered to save this lady from
+ill-usage."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She is a Frenchwoman? ... Explain to her," said the
+resonant voice coldly and brutally, "that even to reach the
+side of a fallen lover, too much may be risked and lost!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh said, meeting the imperious stare with
+yellow-gray eyes that blazed tigerishly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Excellency, the dead man is her father, Colonel de
+Bayard, 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Stand back," said the domineering voice, "and I will
+speak to her!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At a touch of the spur the great brown mare moved forward,
+breasting a lance-shaft that barred the narrow alley,
+terribly squeezing the Sergeant and his men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mademoiselle de Bayard!" said the authoritative voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Excellency, she does not hear you!  The shock has been
+too terrible," Carolan was beginning.  He was brusquely
+interrupted with:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"People usually listen when I speak to them."  And the
+curt command was issued&mdash;in French, suave and polished:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Be good enough, Mademoiselle de Bayard, to stand up
+and listen to me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The big brown mare snorted angrily and fidgeted.  He
+turned her head with an iron hand on the curb-bit, looking
+steadily at the other female thing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mademoiselle de Bayard, do you hear?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This time she lifted her sunken head, and turned her
+small pinched face his way.  In the haggard young mask
+of frozen anguish two wild eyes glittered, tearless and
+stony-hard.  Then slowly, as though his powerful will
+impelled her, she rose to her knees, and stood upon her feet
+before him.  He said, in cool, incisive accents:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Young lady, your father was a gallant soldier.  I myself
+had the privilege of seeing how he died.  I wish such a
+man had served a better master!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She answered, her white lips barely moving as they
+framed the sentence:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He served the Master of Kings and Emperors, before
+Whom he stands now!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His somber eyes lightened suddenly as though in irritation.
+He said in tones that had the clang of overbearing
+authority:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I cannot enter now into a theological discussion.  The
+battle-field is no place for debate, or for unprotected women
+and young girls....  In your own best interests I counsel
+you to return home."  He added&mdash;and there was no flicker
+of recognition in the passing glance vouchsafed to
+P. C. Breagh: "Alone, if you prefer&mdash;or under the escort of
+this young Englishman....  I will promise you that your
+father's body shall be treated with respect!"  His heavy
+eyes fell on the stiffened face of the Sergeant, standing
+rigidly in the attitude of salute.  "Where is the officer in
+charge of this burial-party?" he added, grimly enough.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Here, Excellency!" came from behind him.  He glanced
+over his shoulder and said to the flurried under-lieutenant
+who had hurried up and was standing in the alleyway:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A separate grave, distinguished by some mark that is
+recognizable by the daughter."  He looked back at the
+daughter, saying curtly: "Your veil!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She removed it in silence, and handed it to the ex-chemist,
+who received the frail fluttering cobweb between
+his finger and thumb.  Then the brown mare, in obedience
+to the iron hand upon the bridle, backed out of the alley
+of silent witnesses, baring her long, vicious-looking yellow
+teeth and showing the whites of her savage eyes resentfully.
+From the florid bull-dog face of her rider, barred with the
+heavy mustache of iron gray, all memory of the little
+drama just enacted had been effaced, as the outlines of a
+sketch in charcoal are wiped from wood or stone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But as the alley widened and his great beast surged
+round, switching her tail, putting back her ears and lashing
+out with her heels so as to nearly brain the officer,
+P. C. Breagh thought he caught the words:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Separate grave ... marked to find easily.  All respect
+... answer to me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+More he might have heard, but for Juliette's sobbing.
+For God had remembered her, and sent her tears at last.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had suddenly seen, lying at her feet, a frayed and
+crumpled envelope bearing the Belgian postmark, and
+addressed in her own handwriting to M. le Colonel
+H. A. A. de Bayard, Headquarters of the 777th Mounted Chasseurs
+of the Guard Imperial with the Army of France, at Metz.
+And the intuition of love told her that the dead man must
+have carried this, the last message received from his
+daughter, hidden in his bosom; and have drawn it forth and
+kissed it&mdash;as in very truth we know he had&mdash;shortly
+before he died.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"See, see, my friend!  Behold my own letter.  His
+sacred blood has stained it....  His lips perhaps have
+pressed it!&mdash;it well may be that tears of his have fallen
+here also! ... Never shall it leave me until my hand is
+cold as this is!  Adieu, dear hand!"  She knelt down to
+fondle it, had to be raised almost by force&mdash;would have
+returned for a last caress&mdash;a final prayer, but that
+P. C. Breagh, rendered desperate by the evident impatience of
+the officer and the scowling looks of the Sergeant and his
+merry men, lifted her bodily in his arms and carried her
+away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I pray you put me down! ... Me, I am not an
+infant!" she protested.  "See you well, Monsieur Breagh, I
+do not think it <i>convenable</i> that a gentleman should carry a
+lady so!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then her strength ebbed from her and she became in
+truth, an infant.  As her frail body yielded to his clasp, as
+her head sank down upon his shoulder, she sighed, a long,
+quivering sigh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What of the youth who waded through the frozen sea of
+Death, bearing in his arms his worshiped lady?  He was
+footsore and aching in every bone and muscle from long
+marches and desperate exertion.  His heart pounded so
+beneath her cheek that it seemed to him she must hear it and
+be frightened, or that he must suffocate and die outright.
+Terror and rapture, exquisite pain and exquisite pleasure,
+mingled in the draught now held to his lips by Fate, Life's
+cup-bearer.  And as he drank, with what strange birth-pangs,
+his budding manhood burgeoned into flower.  He
+might look back upon his boyhood with regret, contempt, or
+tenderness....  He would never be a boy again.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap50"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+L
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+The smallest and slenderest of women can be surprisingly
+heavy, when carried in the arms of a lover who long has
+borne her in his heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus to P. C. Breagh, stumbling with his burden over
+roads strewn with weapons, accouterments, mess-tins, and
+water-bottles, boxes of biscuit and halves of sugar-loaves
+discarded by troops retiring in haste, the appearance of a
+very tall peasant leading a little white-faced donkey came
+as an unspeakably welcome relief.  For a franc in good
+French money the owner of the donkey was more than
+willing to hire out his beast.  Thus, seated on this humble
+animal, P. C. Breagh's Infanta returned to the cottage where
+she had passed the previous night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was one of a hamlet boasting the name of Petit Plappeville.
+To reach it they skirted the frightful carnage at St. Hubert,
+threaded the wood of Châtel St. Germain, crossed
+the railroad, unmolested by the Prussian patrols, and,
+following narrow lanes hidden between copses, came at last
+upon its single street.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame Guyot, stout, hospitable, and voluble, received
+Juliette with cries of welcome and open arms.  Mademoiselle
+should have something better than dry bread on this
+occasion, for a neighbor had that morning killed a calf.
+Hence veal cutlet, fried in batter&mdash;for some of the hens,
+scared by yesterday's bombardment, had already begun
+laying&mdash;and an omelette with fine herbs.  No less than
+young demoiselles, wounded soldiers require nourishment,
+and here behold, English Monsieur accompanying
+Mademoiselle, here upon the pallet-bed in the corner of the
+kitchen one of France's brave defenders in the person of
+my Cousin Boisset.  Pardon that he cannot rise to salute
+you, for the Prussians have made it impossible.  During
+the battle of St. Privat yesterday, my Cousin Boisset was
+twice wounded while serving with the Eighteenth Field
+Battery of the Sixth Army Corps....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus introduced, the gunner told his story, and told it
+with vivacity in spite of his evident pain.  His bandaged
+head and the useless leg roughly swathed in a homespun
+towel of Madame Guyot's told their story no less than his
+nimble tongue and vivacious eyes and hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"We were overcome by force of numbers....  The Germans
+know nothing of scientific warfare....  Believe me,
+Mademoiselle and Monsieur, we swept them down in rows
+like ninepins painted black.  At twelve hundred yards, and
+again at fourteen hundred&mdash;and the more we killed the
+more there were to kill.  Name of a pipe!&mdash;pardon,
+Mademoiselle!&mdash;it was inconceivable!  We were compelled at
+length to cease our fire because our ammunition failed us,
+and it was not possible to butcher any more!&mdash;Worst of all,
+our generals lost their heads, and issued contradictory
+orders!&mdash;Commissariat broke down before the ammunition-service&mdash;we
+had had nothing to eat for two days&mdash;then we
+ceased to have shrapnel with which to feed our guns....
+So we stood in front of a wood in which we might have
+taken cover, being peppered by Prussian fire of infantry
+and artillery, for three whole hours!&mdash;Three solid hours,
+Monsieur and Mademoiselle&mdash;until we were remembered,
+and ordered to retire.  When the order came, few officers
+remained, and not a single non-commissioned officer was left
+to us.  Of the three batteries of our brigade Division,
+two-thirds lay dead upon the field.  With my wounded leg
+trailing behind me, I crawled over rank after rank of
+bodies, pausing over many of my old comrades....  Then
+I lay in the wood till dusk, and made crutches of saplings I
+cut down with my penknife.  With the day I reached my
+cousin's house....  You may say 'All this is War'&mdash;but
+what kind of War? is what I ask you....  I&mdash;a soldier when
+has fought and bled for France!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the voice of Juliette that answered from the corner
+of the blackened oaken settle, where she sat huddled
+in the leaden stupor that is born of grief and fatigue:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Soldier of France, I will try to answer your question....
+I am young and ignorant, but I have read and thought
+much.  And now I have experienced what never can be
+forgotten....  I have sat by the corpse of my father on the
+battlefield....  I have looked in the face of the great man
+who is my country's cruel enemy...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame Guyot, who was frying a panful of veal cutlet,
+started and looked round from her sputtering,
+savory-smelling cookery.  The wounded gunner, propped up on
+the pallet-bed that stood in the corner of the low-ceiled,
+stone-built kitchen, turned keen dark eyes and a resolute
+bearded face toward the quarter whence came the silvery
+voice:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is Bismarck's War," she said.  "Stone by stone he
+has built up Prussia until her vast shadow has swallowed
+up all Germany.  He has seen&mdash;this huge man of colossal
+ambitions&mdash;that the road to Power greater still leads
+through the gate of France.  And Diplomacy could not
+steal the key, so War is the lever with which he opens it."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Alas, Mademoiselle," returned the gunner sorrowfully,
+"it would never have opened while a French soldier was
+left alive&mdash;if we had not been betrayed!  Have you seen
+the picture of Cham in last week's <i>Charivari</i>?  It reached
+my battery through one of our officers.  It is true&mdash;<i>mon
+Dieu!</i>&mdash;it is desperately true.  There is the Little Napoleon
+of To-day dressed up in the old cocked hat and the tattered
+rags of the capote that used to be worn by the Great
+Napoleon.  He begs at the street-corner for sous&mdash;and even
+the prostitute turns away from the impostor.  'The End of
+the Legend!' is written underneath.  It is furiously chic
+and terribly clever&mdash;and frightfully true, Mademoiselle.
+For the Napoleonic legend is done with&mdash;finished, for good
+and all!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She did not answer, the momentary flash of interest had
+died out.  With her sad eyes fixed upon the ebony and
+silver crucifix of her rosary, she was murmuring a
+prayer&mdash;doubtless for her father's soul.  Seeing her thus
+absorbed, the soldier glanced at her companion, shrugged
+significantly, and tapped his own forehead, as though he
+would have said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is well that women have faith in Heaven.  See!&mdash;she
+turns to her beads, the poor little one.  She is able to
+pray!&mdash;that is fortunate....  Otherwise, grief would turn
+her brain!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meeting no response from P. C. Breagh, who sat upon a
+backless straw-bottomed chair in the chimney corner,
+raptly contemplating the small, sorrowful face, the gunner
+shrugged again, and exchanged a wink of intelligence with
+Madame Guyot, as she took the bubbling pan from the fire,
+proclaiming the cutlet cooked to a turn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Who has loved and does not remember the first meal
+partaken in the company of the beloved.  To one guest at
+Madame Guyot's board, the fried cutlet and tomatoes eaten
+from her coarse platters of red-flowered crockery, the
+home-baked loaf, the jug of thin red wine, the country
+cheese and the dish of purple plums that served as dessert,
+made a banquet worthy of the gods.  To sit opposite that
+little drawn, white face with the lowered, swollen eyelids,
+and watch her brave pretense of relishing their hostess'
+victuals, would have been torture had it not been bliss.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the homespun cloth had been drawn, the crumbs
+shaken out upon the threshold for the hungry poultry, the
+cat accommodated with a saucer of scraps, and the hearth
+swept, P. C. Breagh, glancing at the cuckoo-clock that had
+hiccuped twelve, and now pointed to the half-hour, got up
+and reluctantly tore himself away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You are going?...  Back to <i>him</i>?...  To make sure
+that those soldiers have obeyed the orders of M. de
+Bismarck?  Ah! that is what I have been praying for!  Our
+Lady has put it into your head."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said it eagerly, with her hand quieting the flutter in
+her bosom.  Of what else should de Bayard's daughter
+have been thinking, P. C. Breagh asked himself.  He
+entreated, his troubled gray eyes wistfully questioning:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You won't leave this place until I come back?  Pray do
+not!...  Promise me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The soldier, chatting in low tones with the good woman
+of the cottage, pricked his hairy ears at the unfamiliar
+accent of the English words.  Juliette answered in the same
+tongue:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur, I give you my <i>parole</i> of honor.  When you
+come back to this house, if I am alive, you will find me
+here, under the <i>manteau</i> of Our Lady.  May she protect
+and guard you.  <i>Au revoir!</i>..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh echoed the final words, and held out his big
+hand.  She considered it a moment, hesitated, then laid her
+own in the broad, blistered palm.  As he shut his strong
+fingers over the fragile captive, it struggled, then lay still,
+throbbing like some small imprisoned bird.  And a dimness
+came before his eyes, and he hurriedly released her,
+stammering:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Take&mdash;take care of yourself, won't you?  I'll&mdash;not be
+very long away!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She called him back.  He knew a shock of joy and hurried
+toward her.  She slipped her Rosary into his hand
+with a gold coin, faltering with eyes brimful, and
+quivering lips:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"This ... to be buried with him!...  This&mdash;for a
+priest to read the Office and offer Mass ... if one can be
+discovered!...  Oh! if I might come with you!... but
+no!&mdash;I will not be unreasonable.  Again, it must not be that
+you carry me, as you did to-day!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He trembled at the poignant recollection.  She went on,
+breathing fast and eagerly, lifting her eyes, poor rain-washed
+scillas, to his&mdash;laying her small hand timidly on his
+shabby sleeve.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Me, I have an idea!...  There is now in Heaven a
+great saint who was priest of a little village that lies not far
+from here....  Since he died, it is eleven years....  I
+speak of M. Jean-Baptiste Vianney, the Blessed Curé of
+Ars...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh nodded recognition of the shining name she
+mentioned.  She went on, her small fingers pinching a fold
+of the rough brown sleeve:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Sacrifice&mdash;mortification&mdash;the Cross&mdash;these things to the
+holy Curé were the Keys of Heaven.  The poorest and
+simplest of his peasants was not poorer or simpler than he.
+Even before his death Our Lord gave him the grace to
+perform miracles, and always did Our Lady regard him
+with tenderness....  See you well, I will pray to the
+Blessed Jean Vianney to intercede for me, that God may
+send a holy priest to read the Office for the dead!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her voice broke, and the bright tears brimmed over her
+pure underlids.  At the sight a wave of tenderness surged
+up in him, pure of all sensuous passion, knowing only the
+overwhelming desire to serve, and comfort, and protect....
+He bent his head, and kissed the little hand, before he
+turned and went from her.  When he glanced back, midway
+clown the wide dusty street of the hamlet of scattered
+cottages, Juliette was standing in the sunshine, looking
+earnestly after him.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap51"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LI
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+She could think clearly and remember again.  The confusion
+in her overwrought brain gradually subsided.  She
+went back to the fatal days when the news of the defeats
+of Wörth and Spicheren rushed shrieking through France
+and Belgium, and the 16th of August brought word of
+Bazaine's intercepted retreat from Metz.  That day a
+young girl, sitting under the grisly wing of Madame Tessier
+at the <i>table d'hôte</i> of the Hôtel de Flandre, in Brussels,
+had risen up as pale as death and hurried from the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The picture was clear-cut, definite as a photograph.  She
+saw the tables in confusion....  French guests uprising,
+the men exclaiming, and the ladies in tears,&mdash;Belgians
+sympathizing&mdash;Teutons exchanging congratulatory eye-glances,
+and smiles not at all concealed.  As the white girl passed
+the chair from which a German cavalry officer had risen, he
+whipped the obstacle out of her way with an ogle and a
+bow.  And Juliette, covering her eyes as though the sight
+of him scorched them, had fled past him....  As she
+quitted the <i>salle à manger</i>, the voice of Madame Tessier had
+reached her, saying grimly to the dandy:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A civility from one of your nation at such a moment is
+an insult, Monsieur."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Madame, with bristling mustaches, had also risen,
+and gone in search of her daughter-in-law elect, to be
+arrested at the foot of the grand staircase by a waiter with
+the intelligence that Mademoiselle had gone to her room to
+lie down, and begged not to be disturbed....  To which
+apartment, it being on the third floor, Madame Tessier&mdash;having
+wound up the twelve-o'clock <i>déjeuner</i> of hot meats
+and vegetables and salad with coffee and pastry,&mdash;did not
+follow her.  Had she braved the ascent, this story would
+have ended in quite a different way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon this day, that saw the battle of Mars la Tour,
+Juliette would not have met the elegant, self-possessed,
+ingratiating lady who had spoken to her so amiably on the
+previous afternoon.  When&mdash;Madame Tessier being
+engaged in changing a French <i>billet de banque</i> into Belgian
+money&mdash;Juliette had inquired for letters at the bureau.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'Mademoiselle de Bayard.' ... Unhappily there is
+not a single letter for Mademoiselle de Bayard..." had
+said the curled and whiskered functionary, taking an
+envelope from compartment "B" of the green baize-covered
+letter-rack, and handing it to this lady, who stood
+immediately behind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette had found it impossible not to see the address
+upon this letter:
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+  "To MADAME DE BATE,<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"HÔTEL DE FLANDRE,<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"BRUSSELS,"<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+written in rather a vulgar scrawl.  It carried extra stamps,
+and looked bulky.  And the elegantly-gloved hand that was
+extended to take it, recoiled from the contact as though the
+envelope had concealed a scorpion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The owner of the hand had regarded Mademoiselle de
+Bayard with a piercing and exhaustive scrutiny, even as
+she slipped the letter into a gold-mounted reticule, and
+snapped the spring tight.  She had observed in soft and
+well-bred accents:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Letters from one we love are enhanced in value, when
+the writer must lay down the sword to use the pen...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Through a black lace veil so thickly flowered as to
+suggest a mask, a pair of brilliant eyes glittered at Juliette.
+What dazzling teeth were revealed by the crimson lips
+that smiled....  The well-bred voice added, with an
+entrancing touch of melancholy:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Under other circumstances, to address Mademoiselle
+would be held a liberty&mdash;the speaker being a stranger.
+Yet as the wife of a French officer of the Imperial
+Guard,&mdash;I may be pardoned for presuming in my young
+country-woman an anxiety similar to my own?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah, Madame," Juliette had said impulsively, "who is
+there would not pardon you?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she had looked with a young girl's honest admiration
+at the sumptuous form in the perfectly-appointed dress.
+When the lady had said, with brilliant eyes fixed on her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Were this letter not from my husband, I could wish it
+had been for you," she continued: "Does Mademoiselle
+know M. de Baye's regiment?  The 777th Mounted
+Chasseurs...?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My father commands it, Madame," Juliette had
+proudly answered.  And an animated conversation would
+have sprung from this answer, but Madame Tessier turned
+round rather sharply, and the lady, with a slight, graceful
+inclination, had glided rather rapidly away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later, Juliette had encountered Madame de Baye upon
+the staircase, and had received another of her brilliant
+glances, and another of her entrancing smiles.  And, being
+lonely in this strange land, and athirst for interest and
+companionship, the young girl had woven a little romance
+out of this passing acquaintanceship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now as she reached her room, trembling and ready to
+sink with excitement and agitation, a woman stopped her
+in the corridor, who looked like a lady's maid of the better
+class.  Well mannered, smart and discreet, she dropped
+Mademoiselle de Bayard an ingratiating curtsey, handing
+her at the same time a little three-cornered note.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the messenger plainly waited for an answer, Juliette
+unfolded the delicately perfumed cocked-hat.  This is what
+she read in a finely-pointed feminine caligraphy, with
+lasso-loops to all the "g's," "y's," and "h's," and "s's" of the
+prolonged, old-fashioned kind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The maid had penned it at the dictation of her mistress,
+who for an unexplained reason preferred another hand to
+bait her hook.  This is what Juliette read between her
+heart-beats, striving to check her flowing tears, and the
+sobs that rose in her throat:
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>To you, Mademoiselle, so spirituelle, gentille and amiable,
+I am fated, alas! to cause the greatest grief.  I have
+received the most terrible news of my husband's regiment.
+The reports of the Emperor's resignation are false from
+the beginning.  The Army of Metz, Mademoiselle, has
+encountered Prussian forces....  Where I know not, but
+with terrible loss!  My Victor has been dangerously
+wounded and conveyed to hospital at Metz.  I fly thither
+on the wings of anxiety and tenderness to receive too
+possibly! his final kiss.  Also I learn that M. le Colonel de
+Bayard has been taken prisoner....  My pen trembles as
+I write the words.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Since I may not tender them personally, receive,
+Mademoiselle, my condolences and farewells.  May Heaven
+protect you!</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+  "<i>Distractedly and devotedly,</i><br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"A. DE BATE."<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Madame was packing, said the maid upon whom Juliette
+turned with a breathless inquiry.  Without doubt Madame
+would receive Mademoiselle....  And, having previously
+been primed with instructions, Mariette, whom not so long
+ago we encountered in Berlin, conducted Mademoiselle to a
+door upon the lower landing, and having knocked discreetly
+ushered the young lady in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a bedroom crowded with trunks and imperials,
+none of which seemed to have been unpacked.  The lovely
+lady of the veil was standing near the toilette-table in a
+thoughtful pose which did justice to her figure and the
+beauty of her profile.  She had removed her veil and held
+it in her hand, as she changed the position of a jeweled
+comb in her hair....  She looked round as the door
+opened.  Her brilliant eyes, ruddy-brown as Persian sard
+or Brazilian tourmaline, encountered the tearful eyes of
+Juliette.  She advanced to meet the girl with effusive
+tenderness, crying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Alas, poor little one!  From my heart I pity you!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was not so beautiful, unveiled, as she had appeared
+behind her mask of black lace flowers.  The handsome
+eyes were bloodshot and too prominent.  There were faint
+dusky-red streaks showing through the purchased roses
+and lilies of her complexion; horizontal marks, resembling
+the congenital disfigurement known as "port-wine stain."  And
+withal she was an attractive woman of fascinating
+manners.  And her sympathy seemed genuine, and yet&mdash;for
+some incomprehensible reason, Juliette trembled at and
+shrank from her touch....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You are too good to receive me&mdash;you who are also
+suffering!..."  She tried to collect herself, and not
+cause distress.  "How I pity you I cannot tell you! but
+at least you have the knowledge that you are returning to
+your husband's bedside.  You will have the sad consolation
+of seeing him, while I..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She broke down and sobbed, and the sympathetic Adelaide
+administered red lavender on sugar, while her maid
+kept guard on the landing to intercept Madame Tessier
+should she appear.  The cock-and-bull story told the girl
+would hardly have borne the test of recital before a third
+person.  But Juliette was young, and innocent and
+unsuspecting, and Adelaide was experienced in the ways of the
+world, and very old in guile....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Courage, my child, and above all, have faith in
+Heaven!"  It did not at all suit her voluptuous type, the
+heroic-pious tone....  "Naturally you will, knowing
+M. le Colonel a prisoner, leave nothing undone to assuage the
+miseries of his situation!...  Have I guessed right?  I
+venture to think I have!"  She patted Juliette's hand and
+smiled in the drowned blue eyes, from which she gently
+drew the little soaked handkerchief.  "Accompanied by
+your venerable protectress, you will instantly return to
+France.  You will leave no stone unturned to obtain an
+interview with the Emperor&mdash;you will implore him on your
+knees to obtain M. le Colonel's exchange....  Presto! the
+Emperor will set the machinery in motion.  He will
+give back three Officers to the King of Prussia&mdash;and
+Mademoiselle will have her father again!  Is it not so, tell me,
+my little one?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She held the girl's small hands in hers, and as she marked
+off each item of her program, she gently clapped the hands
+together, as in approval or consent.  It was a characteristic
+trick with Adelaide when she meant to be playfully
+coaxing, and there was imprudence in employing it now.
+But with the first inchoate stirring of memory in Juliette,
+caution reawakened in Madame de Bayard.  She released
+the hands, and said in a graver tone:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your <i>gouvernante</i> will not object to return?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette responded:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Dear Madame, that lady is not my instructress.  She
+is the excellent Madame Tessier, my grandmother's oldest
+friend."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide's lip wore the expression of one who sniffs at
+physic.  Had she not been deafened with the recounted
+virtues of this very Madame Tessier!  As she racked her
+memory for the date of a possible meeting, Juliette
+continued:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She is very kind to me.  But I fear she will not consent
+to return to France immediately.  She is now upon her
+way to Mons-sur-Trouille to attend the wedding of her only
+son.  All has been arranged.  It is to take place upon the
+22d."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A sigh heaved her breast, and her eyelids sank under the
+burning gaze of Adelaide.  But Adelaide was still engaged
+with Madame Tessier:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>If she has seen me once&mdash;and it may well be once!&mdash;she
+certainly has forgotten me!</i>" she commented mentally.
+Aloud she said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But you, Mademoiselle&mdash;you are free to return to our
+beloved country.  Under my own guardianship if you will.
+Do not refuse!...  Grant me the privilege!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette panted:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Oh, if I might accept!...  But this marriage is the
+obstacle!  Because M. Tessier could not return to France
+for it, my father commanded that I should go.  All the
+more urgently that War had been declared with Prussia,
+and the regiment had been ordered to join the Imperial
+Army at Metz."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame Adelaide repeated scoffingly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"This marriage ... this marriage....  Is your
+presence necessary to legalize the ceremony?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette cried, opening wide her eyes:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Alas! yes, Madame!&mdash;for I am to be the bride!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A shock visibly passed through the nerves of the woman
+who heard her.  She started in her chair and grew livid
+underneath her powder and rouge.  And the dusky marks
+on her fair skin started into sinister prominence.  She was
+suddenly terrible, and haggard and old....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So, that was de Bayard's plot....  To marry her!"
+Adelaide heard an inward voice saying.  "Why did you
+not foresee that, knowing her of age?  Nineteen&mdash;though
+she looks like a child, almost....  Her grandmother
+possessed that physique of an infant, in combination with an
+iron determination, and a regard of truth that robbed Life
+of every alleviation, deprived conversation of grace and
+versatility&mdash;reduced the very language of Love to the level
+of a notary's <i>précis</i>...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this passed through her brain in an instant.  She
+controlled herself, rose, took the girl's hands again, and
+kissed her on the brow, saying with sorrowful melodiousness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My child, I comprehend!  But while I rejoice at the
+happiness that awaits the daughter, I weep&mdash;forgive me
+that I weep!&mdash;for the father in his prison-cell.  He is
+handsome, thy betrothed&mdash;and brave&mdash;and not a soldier?
+In a day like this when our France cries out for men?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette clenched her little hands as the languid irony
+stabbed her.  She cried out, almost beside herself:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Oh, that is what I feel, and for that I cannot pardon
+him!  Why is he not a soldier?  One could esteem him if
+he were!  But oh!  Madame,&mdash;I despise him, and that
+makes it the more terrible....  This marriage with a
+husband whom I have never even seen!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Ah, ha!...</i>" she heard a strange voice scream
+through peals of laughter.  "Ah, <i>la, la!</i>&mdash;what a clumsy
+game to play!...  <i>Fi donc, M. le Colonel!</i>...  So we
+were to be married in the style of the Old Commander....
+'<i>Pas files a droite!</i>...  To the church, quick
+march!'  <i>Mon Dieu!  Mon Dieu!</i> how droll!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief, and said,
+controlling her frantic merriment:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Sweet child, forgive me, I am a little hysterical....
+The shock of Victor's wound ... my sympathy with your
+cruel situation....  How could M. le Colonel subject you
+to a trial so severe?"  Feeling herself upon unsafe ground,
+she dried her eyes again and amended.  "That, I comprehend,
+is a question between yourselves....  When this
+wedding was arranged M. le Colonel had no comprehension
+of what would befall him.  Yet, for his sake, would it not
+be wise to delay?  Engage the interest of the Emperor
+before it is too late to reach the beloved captive.  Should
+he be interned in some fortress of East Prussia, how will
+even a daughter's tenderness reach him amidst those
+desolate plains&mdash;in those caverns of freezing stone!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She used her fine voice like a consummate artist of the
+theater....  Juliette had a vision of her father dying,
+fettered, ghastly and gaunt with famine, as an engraving
+of Count Ugolino in his dungeon she remembered to have
+somewhere seen....  And her secret horror of Charles
+Tessier, wedded with the feverish longing to return to
+France and work for the release of her dear prisoner,
+prompted her to decision now....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I will go with you, since you are good enough to propose
+it.  But Madame Tessier will never give her consent.
+Therefore, we must leave here without consulting her, and
+secretly....  I will write a letter explaining all.  Money
+I have for the railway charges, not much, but I think
+sufficient!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Adelaide, barely able to hide her triumph:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Leave the purchase of the tickets to me, <i>ma mignonne</i>!
+I have a pretty little score to settle with M. le Colonel.  We
+will settle our accounts presently, I promise you!  What
+is the matter now?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette gasped:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Alas!&mdash;I have no passport!  At least, Madame Tessier
+has both ours...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah, bah!" said Adelaide.  "We will borrow Mariette's....
+She can remain here at pasture, and amuse
+herself with the waiters!..."  She burst out laughing at
+Juliette's look of astonishment, and tapped her under the
+chin, telling her to go to her room, pack a small hand-bag
+with necessary articles, change into a dark, plain
+walking-dress, and rejoin her as soon as might be.  She showed
+a small watch, its back thickly crusted with emeralds,
+saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Hurry!...  You have barely a quarter of an hour."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then she opened the door, sped her capture with a beaming
+smile, beckoned Mariette, and this strange colloquy
+took place between Circe and her tirewoman:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Did the old woman come nosing upstairs after the
+little Mademoiselle joined me?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mariette replied:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She did, Madame, but I had locked both Mademoiselle's
+doors&mdash;that leading into the old lady's room, and the one
+that opens on the corridor,&mdash;and put the keys in my pocket.
+Here they are!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She held them up, her sallow features expressive with
+the expectation of a reward earned by intelligence.  Said
+Adelaide, impatiently tapping her handsome foot:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And then?...  And then?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Then I accidentally encountered Madame on the
+threshold of Mademoiselle's apartment.  Seeing her about
+to knock, I told her that I had seen the young lady descend
+the stairs, carrying a letter, which I supposed Mademoiselle
+intended to post at the pillar in the vestibule....
+Hearing this the old lady thanked me, and bundled
+downstairs.  She is asthmatic, judging by her wheezing....
+She will wait a bit before she climbs up all these flights
+again."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide thought a moment, and then gave orders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Run you down, hunt up the old woman&mdash;help her to
+search everywhere for the little thing&mdash;you understand!...
+Half an hour will be sufficient to detain her below
+stairs.  In less time Mademoiselle will be safe with me in
+my apartment....  Then you will give Madame these
+keys and a little note written by Mademoiselle....  Or&mdash;do
+you know of a waiter who would undertake to do this
+and hold his tongue?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mariette's expression became sentimental.  She said,
+with her head tilted on one side:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There is one, a Swiss youth, handsome and with the
+form of an athlete, upon whose fidelity and silence Madame
+can implicitly rely...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For how much?" Adelaide demanded, having no illusions
+as to the permanence of an unpurchased silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mariette answered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I will guarantee Adolphe Madame's for the sum of
+twenty francs!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide gave her a bank-note, and the faithful creature
+tripped away to split it.  Despite youth, beauty and
+muscles, her Adolphe only got ten francs.  But he carried
+out his instructions and handed Madame Tessier the keys,
+with a little envelope, containing a hasty line in the
+handwriting of Juliette:
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Dearest Madame,</i>" it said.  "<i>This moment I have
+received grave news of my father, compelling me to leave
+your side.  This marriage must be deferred.  Entreat
+M. Charles to excuse me!  I embrace and pray you to pardon.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+  "J. M. De B."<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+The little note was penned on the corner of Adelaide's
+toilette-table.  While Madame read it and fainted,&mdash;was
+revived by Mariette and the athletic Adolphe,&mdash;scolded
+herself into hysterics, came out of them and dispatched
+telegrams; tore the telegrams up and wrote letters,&mdash;Juliette
+was safely hidden in Madame Adelaide's room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later on, when Madame Tessier had left the hotel, with
+her luggage and the trunks and bandboxes of the vanished
+bride-elect&mdash;this time containing the marriage robe, crown
+and so on,&mdash;Madame de Baye sent for her bill and paid
+it&mdash;ordered a <i>fiacre</i> and drove to the station, accompanied by
+her maid, and her maid's sister, a demure little person in
+black merino, cut convent-style, whose head was draped,
+after the fashion of some lay novices, with a black silk veil.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+The abduction was effected in the simplest fashion....
+Not a soul turned to look at the dowdy little figure carrying
+the hand-bag, its slight proportions half hidden in the
+sweeping folds of Adelaide's silken train.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The station was crowded with newly-arrived French
+officers, men of MacMahon's defeated army, who wore their
+swords, having given their <i>parole</i> to their captors not to
+serve again in the War.  Belgian officers fraternized with
+them,&mdash;Belgian ladies of the Red Cross were busily
+engaged in making much of those who were wounded....
+Juliette's heart swelled at the sight of the bandages and
+crutches, and when the laden stretchers were carried past,
+the hot tears streamed down her white cheeks behind her
+screening veil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The train carried a great many French passengers, as
+well as an English Red Cross column and a Belgian one.
+When the engine shrieked, Juliette started as guiltily as
+though it had been the voice of Madame Tessier, shrilly
+lamenting an absconding daughter-in-law.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were off&mdash;launched upon the iron road that led
+back to France and freedom.  The excellent Mariette
+remained behind.  She would sleep at some hotel, procure
+a passport, and join her mistress later.  Madame de Baye
+took the trouble to explain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the shrinking little figure in the corner of the
+carriage came a muffled sound in answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Let her mope," Adelaide said to herself.  "Thought is
+necessary to carry out my plan!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are to see her as Juliette saw her, leaning her fair
+round elbow on the padded window-ledge, and thinking, as
+the rolling plains in the vicinity of Brussels gradually gave
+place to valley and hill.  All of fierce and sensual and
+treacherous that mingled in her complex nature with how
+many nobler qualities,&mdash;showed now in the beautiful mask
+of Adelaide, even as she sat brooding there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had knotty problems to decide, it must be admitted....
+How best to play this marvelous trump, her daughter
+thrown in her way by chance, was one of these.  That plot
+of Straz, for bringing the girl into contact with the Heir
+Imperial, might be combined with Adelaide's own original
+notion of employing the girl's influence to bring about a
+reconciliation with M. de Bayard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The indifference of M. de Bismarck had quashed her
+tentative approaches on the one subject.  The silent
+contempt of de Bayard had thrown the other affair out of
+gear.  To score off both would be magnificent....  As
+for Straz ... she lost grip of herself when she thought of
+the Roumanian, murmuring:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For revenge on him, who has robbed me of my beauty,
+how cheerfully I would give my soul!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette, from her corner, saw the change and shuddered.
+Adelaide turned sharply, to read terror in the girl's face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What is it, my chicken?  Has anything frightened you?" ...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The terrifying Medusa turned to a maternally-smiling
+Cybele.  She leaned across the intervening space of cushion,
+to playfully pat the knee of her charge.  But the answering
+smile was as faint as the scent of frozen violets....  The
+spell of her beauty had been broken when her demon had
+looked out of her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My nerves are not as strong as they were before&mdash;what
+happened in July," she told herself.  "And that is another
+debt I owe to Nicolas.  He would be wiser to let me forget
+him&mdash;if oblivion be possible."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her looking-glass bore out each day what the Roumanian
+had said to her.  "<i>Never will you be able to look in your
+mirror without remembering me!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And to keep her smart alive, the Slav had adopted a
+method of his own invention.  Peculiarly ingenious and
+characteristic of Straz.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At intervals Adelaide received anonymous letters,
+containing inclosures, wherever she went and by whatever
+alias she passed.  Envelopes directed in varying hands
+would contain doll's mirrors costing but a sou or two.
+Pinchbeck-framed ovals or circles of tin or glass, always
+reflecting the same thing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A livid face of hate, streaked with those faint brownish
+red marks left by the tightened folds of the silk scarf that
+had so nearly strangled her.  She had tried to laugh at this
+childish form assumed by the malice of the Roumanian.
+But the deadly cleverness of the thing lay in the fact&mdash;that
+it did what it was meant to do.  The medieval torture of
+the falling drops of water was equaled by this Ordeal of
+the Penny Looking-Glass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Look, see, and think of me!</i>" sometimes ran the doggerel
+rhyme scrawled on the paper wrapping of the doll's
+mirror.  At other times:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Charms that are spoiled hold no men entoiled!</i>" would
+be the motto, or something equally stupid, dull and banal.
+The stupidity was becoming unbearable by its very repetition;
+by the certainty and regularity with which the laden
+envelopes arrived.  Sometimes Adelaide felt entangled in a
+cunningly woven network ... surrounded by spies, sleepless
+and unseen....  Yet in the maid Mariette the Slav
+had found an accomplice clever enough to carry out his
+purposes single-handed.  The cream of the thing
+was&mdash;Adelaide never suspected Mariette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Treacherous herself, she believed in the devotion of this
+woman, who watched her anguish grimly, planting fresh
+thorns in her mistress's shuddering flesh.  And every day
+or so brought another doll's looking-glass.  The jeer that
+accompanied the last had been a vilely parodied verse of
+the child's dancing-song:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+  "<i>Ma commère était belle!<br>
+  Helas! dans le temps!<br>
+  Ma commère était belle!<br>
+  Helas! dans le temps!  Hélas!<br>
+  Pousser un soupir!<br>
+  A vue de ma commère:<br>
+  L'Amour n'a qu'à mourir!<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Hélas!</i>"<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+One may imagine the curl of Adelaide's lip on reading
+rubbish like this.  But she read it more than once, and
+when she finally burned it, the accursed jingle, burr-like,
+stuck in her memory: for she it was who had been beautiful
+in the time that had passed for evermore&mdash;the gossip
+at the first sight of whose damaged, unveiled charms Love
+sighed and gave up the ghost.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap52"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile Juliette, nestled in her corner, stared from the
+window as Belgium hurried by.  Bouillon, at whose station
+they left the train, showed a platform crowded with
+swaggering Prussian officers of the Crown Prince's army&mdash;some
+of them wounded, all upon <i>parole</i>.  French ladies, entering
+and leaving the carriages, looked daggers at their enemies.
+Poisoned daggers at Adelaide, who, to her secret annoyance,
+was recognized and familiarly greeted by two of these
+Teutonic warriors, one a tall and red-whiskered Bavarian
+Light Dragoon, the other a brown-coated Hussar of von
+Barnekow's Brigade.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In vain Adelaide ignored the pair and redoubled the
+directions she was giving to a porter.  The Bavarian coolly
+thrust the man aside, opened the carriage-door and jumped
+upon the steps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Meine gnädigste</i> ... loveliest Countess, you won't give
+the go-by to your old comrade Otto?  Here also is von
+Wissman, who claims a greeting from you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no gainsaying the boisterous good-fellowship
+of the officers.  They superintended the removal of the
+luggage from the van, engaged a pair-horsed <i>fiacre</i>, and
+advised as to its loading.  When Adelaide and her charge
+entered they followed uninvited, and deposited themselves
+on the front seat, incommoding the ladies with their long
+spurred boots and filling the vehicle with the odor of
+cigars and wine.  Both talked much; the Hussar chattered
+incessantly; giving details of the various actions he had
+been engaged in, the chance by which he had been taken
+prisoner, the irksomeness of being interned in Belgium
+until the ending of hostilities:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not that it will be long before the War is over.  We
+now hold Alsace Lorraine and the country north and east
+of Metz.  The Crown Prince is making for Châlons; that
+will give the French Emperor an attack of hysterics.  He
+has handed over the supreme command to Bazaine, and
+yesterday left Gravelotte for Verdun.  That means Châlons,
+and after Châlons will be Paris.  Badinguet has had
+enough of campaigning to last him the rest of his reign."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide asked:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And the Prince?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The brown Hussar puffed out his cheeks and squinted
+like a pantomime-mask.  The Bavarian replied:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Lulu went with papa, though we heard they had trouble
+to make him.  He wanted to stop and kill
+Prussians&mdash;they're such horrible beasts, you know!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You droll beggar, Strelitz, shut up with your mummery,"
+said the Hussar, leaning across him to pitch his
+cigar-butt away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madame is fire-proof, why waste the stump of a three-mark
+Havana?" chuckled Strelitz, keeping his own weed
+alight.  He went on, drolling for the benefit of his
+companion:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"This meeting, loveliest Countess, makes me feel a youth
+again&mdash;garlanding the grim temples of Bellona with the
+roses of the goddess of Love.  You remember the classical
+lessons you used to give me only last winter, in your
+charming flat near the Linden Strasse?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He ogled Adelaide with comic sentimentality:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And the jovial supper-party at which I was present,
+when von Kessel, of the Guards Infantry, had the presumption
+to bring an uninvited guest!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why apologize!" laughed the Hussar.  "The pleasantest
+acquaintanceships are made by chance!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah, but this was not chance!" said the Bavarian, with
+mock solemnity.  "It was one of those accidents that only
+happen by design.  Von Schön-Valverden bored von Kessel
+frightfully to take him&mdash;left the fat fellow no peace until
+he gave in.  The Count is reported to have paid the
+penalty."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Aha!  I can imagine what happened to the youngster!"
+giggled the Hussar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Replied the comedian:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He had three losses that evening.  Each one more
+serious than the last!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide shrugged, but she did not look angry; indeed,
+through her veil her disdainful beauty assumed a smiling
+cast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Three losses," the comedian repeated, "exactly as in
+my own case.  For he first lost his money&mdash;so did I!&mdash;we
+were playing baccarat that evening&mdash;then he lost his head,
+and finally his heart!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Otto, thou wert always a tease!" protested Madame,
+but her ill-humor had softened into conscious coquetry,
+and her eyes beamed radiantly through the flowers of her
+masking veil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Or he would have!" continued Otto: "had not his
+mother, the Countess, come flying to the rescue and carried
+him off, nobody knows where!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide's eyes blazed.  She said in a tone of haughty
+nonchalance:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Count Valverden is now with the first Army, advancing
+toward Metz....  He says he hopes to win the silver
+sword-knot before the close of the campaign."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You correspond?" the Hussar asked, grinning, as the
+driver signified impatience by kicking the back of the
+box-seat.  Both officers got out of the carriage as Adelaide
+answered coldly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He often writes to me."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The driver, ignored, opened a little padded trap-hole in
+the front part of the vehicle.  He clapped his mouth to it
+and shouted in the Flemish tongue:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Geef my U address!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide gave the name of the Hôtel des Postes.  The
+officers kissed her hand and said they would call there on
+the morrow.  They waved as the <i>fiacre</i> rumbled out of the
+station.  Adelaide waved back, and issued quite another
+direction through the driver's trap-hole.  And the <i>fiacre</i>
+went jingling through the old-world streets of the castled
+town that sits on the broad flowing river whose bridge was
+crowded with French and Belgian officers, chatting,
+smoking and discussing the news of the War.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Presently they were free of the streets, roaring with the
+tongues of many nations, choked with trains of French
+wounded, Red Cross columns, Sisters, surgeons, bearers,
+carriages full of visitors, and more processions of officers
+on <i>parole</i>.  The <i>fiacre</i> lumbered at a good pace behind its
+pair of heavy-hocked Flemish horses along a wide, straight
+road, with plains on either side.  And presently tall black
+wooden observation-towers marked the frontier where
+Belgian videttes and outposts amicably fraternized with
+French.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kilometer posts of wood instead of stone....  The dear
+French language in the mouths of people.  Breasting hills
+covered with woods, instead of fallow plains, intersected
+with level roads bordered with eternal poplar-trees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the joy and relief of the return, Juliette's heavy
+heart grew lighter.  Her muscles relaxed.  She could
+unclench her hands again.  For the horror she had felt at the
+contiguity of the German officers and the loathing their
+familiar address had inspired in her had been well-nigh
+unbearable, though she understood their language but
+imperfectly.  And this strange woman, her self-chosen
+protectress, who greedily fed on an admiration so coarse,
+Who was she?  What was she?  The poor girl shuddered
+as she wondered.  Of women like Adelaide she had no
+experience, and yet she could not silence the voice of her
+doubt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Madame good-humoredly bade her unlock traveling
+bags, unstrap baskets and serve both with the food
+and drink she had lavishly provided, Juliette, declining all
+offers of refreshment, waited upon her, in silence so frozen
+that the patience of her protectress was severely taxed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Unaided, Madame emptied a pint bottle of champagne,
+a fluid which temporarily elevates the spirits, and
+consumed the greater part of a cold <i>pâté</i>, with pastry and
+fruit, winding up the repast with a Turkish cigarette and
+a thimbleful of cognac from the silver flask in her
+traveling-bag.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"How dull you are&mdash;how cold, you tiny creature!" she
+grumbled.  "Is it blood that runs in your veins, or melted
+snow?  From whom do you inherit this torpid nature&mdash;without
+vivacity, warmth, or gaiety?  Your father was
+not lacking in fire and passion....  Your mother&mdash;&mdash;"  Her
+long eyes laughed wickedly.  "A feminine volcano,
+shall we say?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A shock went through the girl.  She visibly quailed and
+shuddered.  Through the rumbling of the <i>fiacre</i>, she heard
+herself speaking in a voice she hardly recognized:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My mother....  Did you know my mother?  And&mdash;knowing
+her&mdash;dare you speak of her to me?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Dare!..."  Adelaide threw back her handsome head
+in a gale of laughter, curling back her crimson lips, lavishly
+displaying her splendid teeth.  "I dare do many things,"
+she said, still laughing.  "Conventionality ... timidity
+... these are not characteristics distinctive of me!  Nor
+were they ever, to do myself justice....  Why are we
+stopping at this miserable place?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette, rendered dumb by growing fear of her
+companion, did not answer.  The carriage drew up at a
+crossroads where a bridge arched the Givonne.  They were upon
+the fringes of the village, near a country inn and
+posting-house.  The driver had an ancient understanding with the
+proprietor of this hostelry that his beasts should break
+down here.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He now got down from his perch.  Adelaide lowered the
+window.  The man explained by the aid of signs that the
+horses were quite exhausted and they were yet three miles
+from Sedan.  The proprietor of the inn assisted at the
+colloquy, extending the distance by another mile&mdash;hinting
+at possible dangers after nightfall.  He could supply an
+excellent supper, a comfortable double bedroom&mdash;coffee at
+the peep of day, a vehicle and horses to take Madame and
+Mademoiselle to Sedan, or wherever they chose....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finally the driver was paid enough to satisfy even his
+cupidity.  Madame's luggage was taken upstairs, the ladies
+mounted to their room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a low-ceiled, dampish apartment containing two
+bedsteads of uncomfortable aspect, with flock beds and
+dusty chintz draperies.  Candles were lighted, put on the
+chimney-piece....  A fire of damp billets was set smoking
+by the efforts of the chambermaid, who was not disinclined
+to talk.  French troops were encamped near.  Let the ladies
+look from the window.  Those lines of red and yellow lights
+glaring through a rising fog marked the sites of the
+soldiers' watch-fires.  There were officers down below drinking
+wine and playing cards in the <i>salle à manger</i>.  Also soldiers
+were drinking cider in the yard.  It made one feel
+more safe, the presence of so many warriors.  Indeed,
+Sedan was full of them, and all the country round about....
+At Metz also, even more, with guns enough to kill
+all the Prussians in existence.  The chambermaid felt
+confident that they would soon be driven out of France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still talking, she supplied hot water, and laid a little
+supper-table, the ladies preferring not to descend.  A
+smoked omelette with herbs, some stewed pears, and a
+seed-cake furnished the supper, with a decanter of thin red
+wine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide nibbled and sipped discontentedly.  Juliette,
+being famished, made a meal.  The billets refusing warmth
+Madame unrobed her sumptuous person, arrayed herself in
+lace and lawn, enlisting the services of her charge as lady's
+maid, and gracefully betook herself to bed.  There she
+leaned on her white elbow, chatting while Juliette made
+her own preparations for the down-lying....  Her tigerish
+mood was past.  She was amiable&mdash;almost affectionate....
+She even praised the girlish charms reluctantly
+unveiled in the process of undressing; remarking:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"After all, you only want style and more <i>tournure</i> to do
+execution among the men.  Some of them actually prefer
+coldness.  They say it gives the illusion of innocence.  Have
+you locked the door?  Yes!  Then double-lock and drag
+a trunk before it, and shut the window and slide the bolt....
+Pull down the blind and draw the curtain....  One
+cannot be too careful in places like these!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But we shall be suffocated!" Juliette cried in
+consternation, forgetting her deadly fear of Adelaide in her
+craving for fresh air.  And then in the ghastly face the
+other turned upon her, she saw the unmistakable stamp of
+Fear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What have I said?...  What has frightened you?
+Are you ill?  Pray tell me!" she begged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Adelaide waved her off, biting her pale lips to bring
+the blood back to them, saying harshly: "It is nothing!
+A spasm.  I have suffered from them of late....  Do not
+stare at me as though I were hideous.  Give me my reticule....
+There! on the toilette-table.  How clumsy you tiny
+things can be!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Trembling, Juliette handed her the gold-mounted bauble.
+She took a little phial from it and a measuring-glass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Now place one of those candles on the night-stand,
+beside me.  One will not do&mdash;give me both!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was laudanum in the little crystal phial.  When
+Adelaide had measured and swallowed her dose she
+breathed more easily, stared less fixedly, and those
+disfiguring reddish-purple streaks of Straz's handiwork showed
+less vividly against the creamy skin.  Her suffused eyes
+regained clearness.  She lay back among her pillows and
+declared herself better ... laughed at the terror still
+visible in Juliette's face....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Now give me the little pistol and the pearl-handled
+dagger out of the inner compartment in my traveling-bag....
+The large, deep pocket that fastens with a snap.
+What! you would rather not!...  You do not like to
+handle them....  <i>Fi donc</i>, Mademoiselle!  A soldier's
+daughter&mdash;and guilty of such cowardice!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette winced at the thrust.  It was her turn to bite
+her lips.  She steadied them and mastered her voice
+sufficiently to say:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I dislike to touch such weapons, because I have never
+learned to use them.  And I will ask you, Madame, not to
+speak jestingly of my father to me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Give me the pistol and stiletto, then!" stipulated her
+tormentress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In silence Juliette took one of the candles, and set it near
+the traveling-bag upon the table near the supper-tray
+which the chambermaid had neglected to remove.  She
+dived into the deep pocket as directed, and drew out a
+double-barreled pistol, mounted in ebony and silver, and
+the dagger, a costly toy of Indian workmanship.  Something
+else fell upon the floor with a faint tinkle.  It was a
+miniature set with pearls, that had rolled under the table.
+She laid the pistol and dagger there, took the candlestick
+and stooped to pick the miniature up.  The portrait within
+the oval of pearls and gold was that of a girl-child of some
+five years.  In the pictured face that smiled up at her
+with eyes as deeply blue as the spring skies of Italy,
+Juliette with a thrill and shock indescribable, recognized
+herself....
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>It was the August of 1856.  Thou hadst five years, and
+thy curls were as soft and yellow as chicken-down....
+Thy mother used to say: 'Juliette will never be black
+like me!</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+The beloved voice was in her ears, with the very throb of
+his aching heart in it.  De Bayard's daughter knelt so long
+upon the floor, motionless, staring at the horror, that
+Adelaide accused her jestingly of having fallen asleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Get up!  Wake!  Give me my pistol and the dagger.
+I call them my babies&mdash;they sleep under my pillow ever
+since&mdash;never mind!...  Ah!  You have blown out the
+candle....  Light it at this one!&mdash;or perhaps you will
+have light enough without it?...  Ugh! how cold your
+hand is, you chilly little frog!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette had blown out the candle so that she might
+unseen return the portrait to the dressing-bag.  Had
+Straz's Sultana not been heavy with laudanum, she would
+have perceived this.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now she yawned, stretched, smiled, declared herself
+actually sleepy, in spite of a mattress apparently stuffed
+with potatoes and stones....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette was kneeling by the other bedside, a slender,
+rigid little figure in a white night-robe, striving to collect
+her whirling thoughts sufficiently to say her prayers.  When
+she rose up, Adelaide asked her drowsily:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Do you pray always?...  And what do you pray for?
+And for whom, tell me, you secret little thing!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The low answer came:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I pray for the living, Madame, and for the departed....
+For my father and&mdash;others who are dear to me; for
+myself and for my grandmother's soul!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For your mother?" Adelaide queried curiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I pray that my mother may repent and be forgiven!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah-h!"  Adelaide's inflection was sleepily scornful.
+"So you think her a terrible sinner, eh, Mademoiselle?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The white-robed figure palpably shuddered, yet the
+answer came unfalteringly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is not for me to judge&mdash;you, Madame!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The clean riposte pierced the consciousness that had
+been dulled by the opiate.  There was a dreadful silence,
+during which the girl could hear her own heart drumming,
+and through the noise it made, the hiss of her mother's
+sharply intaken and expelled breath.  Then Adelaide
+shrugged, saying in a tone of drowsy irony:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That is the most sensible utterance I have yet heard
+from you, ma mignonne.  Well&mdash;the discovery was inevitable!
+Now, with your leave, I am going to sleep!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she did, while the girl sat huddled among her scanty
+bedclothes, clasping her knees and praying for day.  Torn
+between unconquerable aversion toward this bold,
+audacious, worldly woman, and the old yearning toward the
+beautiful lost mother, enshrined as a demi-goddess in a
+young child's recollection, you may imagine Juliette's
+mental and physical plight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That one should shudder at the touch of her who stood
+in so sacred a relation was inconceivable....  That one
+should welcome it was inconceivable also.  Dim
+conjectures as to her mother's past, as to her present mode of
+life, were evolved from the depths of the daughter's
+Convent-bred ignorance....  Would those German officers
+have looked so boldly, conversed so coarsely and familiarly,
+if they had not had reason to believe such approaches
+welcome, even agreeable?...  The lives of Phryne,
+Thaïs and Aspasia were missing from the pages of
+Juliette's School Dictionary of Classical Biography.  Yet
+when Cora Pearl had flashed past her in the Bois, or upon
+the Champs Élysées, driving four mouse-colored ponies in
+silver harness&mdash;wielding a jeweled parasol driving-whip&mdash;she
+had instinctively averted her gaze from the face of the
+courtesan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Was Juliette's mother a woman like that woman?  And
+why, within a few hours from their chance, accidental
+meeting, had she inveigled her daughter into a snare?...
+For that some sinister purpose had prompted the proceeding
+began to be clear to the poor young girl.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Love....  Oh, Heaven! was the look in those hard eyes
+born of the divine tenderness that a mother feels for her
+child?  Was it not hatred that glittered from them?  Was
+it not revenge that had concocted the plot?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The marriage with M. Charles Tessier, so keenly desired
+by the Colonel, had been quashed by his wife's kite-like
+swoop upon the bride.  Was that story of de Bayard's
+having been made prisoner by Prussians true or invented?
+If false, whither were they now bound?...  "Oh, help,
+Mother of Mercy, Mary most pitiful!  Pray for me that
+light may be given me!&mdash;teach me what I ought to do!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Growing calmer the reflection occurred to Juliette that
+this mother so strangely encountered could not be all
+untender toward her daughter, or the pearl-set miniature
+would not have been kept....  This brought tears to
+her aching eyes, and some relief to her apprehensions.  She
+determined, remembering that token of lingering kindness,
+that she would yield duty and obedience to her mother now.
+Until she found her all untrustworthy, she would trust
+her....  She had invented freely, in setting her
+springes&mdash;and yet not altogether lied....
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Sleep did not come to Mademoiselle de Bayard that
+night, or for many nights after.  She lay staring at the
+curtains that met across the blinded window, until the
+dawn edged them with a line of glimmering gray.  As the
+streak encroached, she rose noiselessly, and silently as the
+dawn itself approached her mother's bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide lay upon her back with her head thrown back
+amid its wealth of rich black tresses, her arms tossed out
+and upward, the hands clenched, one knee a little raised.
+The unfastened robe of lawn disclosed the creamy beauty
+of her throat and the swelling contours of her magnificent
+bosom.  The sight sent an exquisite pang to the heart of
+her sorrowful child.  Oh, God! if beauty so divine had been
+but chaste, what pride, what happiness to call this woman
+mother!  To lay one's head upon that breast and weep all
+griefs out there!...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sleeper stirred beneath the wistful gaze of her
+daughter.  Violet shadows were round her sealed eyelids
+and about her nostrils and mouth.  She moaned a little
+and murmured brokenly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Nicolas ... Monseigneur ... insult ... never
+pardon!...  '<i>Only a woman of fashion would be capable of
+such infamy....</i>'  Ah, <i>mon Dieu!</i>..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She cried out, and her eyes opened, staring about wildly.
+She asked suspiciously as they fell on Juliette:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Have I been talking?...  What was I saying?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette answered simply and literally:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That only a woman of fashion would be capable of
+such infamy."
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap53"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LIII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+They broke their fast on rolls and coffee, dressed and
+demanded, with the bill, the promised carriage.  This was
+not so quickly forthcoming as the landlord of the <i>Coup
+d'Épée</i> had prophesied.  Indeed, the debilitated conveyance
+of the wagonette type, drawn by one promoted cart-horse,
+could only be had by grace of the traveler by whom
+it had been previously engaged.  He proved, when
+Adelaide swept her charge downstairs, to be a <i>Monsieur
+Anglais</i>, traveling for pleasure.  A middle-sized, clean-shaven,
+inconspicuous, elderly man, in an ill-fitting suit of
+drab-color.  He sported a sealskin vest in spite of the
+oppressive heat of the weather, and spoke the French of
+the conversation-manual with the accent it inculcates.  His
+baldish grizzled head was covered with a straw hat bound
+with a preposterous light-blue ribbon.  His luggage
+consisted of a brown calfskin bag, a portable easel,
+sketching-block and color-box, and a violin-case, of which articles
+he took the most excessive care.  Nothing could well be
+more respectable, or appear more harmless.  Juliette
+breathed more freely at the sight of the elderly
+drab-clothed man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He professed himself happy to accommodate the ladies
+with a share in the wagonette as far as Bazeilles, where he
+meant to take train for Verdun.  Interpreting for Adelaide,
+who possessed no English, Juliette learned that their
+own destination was not Metz, but Châlons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That drive to Bazeilles in the freshness of the morning
+would have been delightful under other circumstances.
+The night-mists yet hung white as milk over the valleys,
+while the breasting rises crowned with woodlands were
+golden in the sun.  Tents of French brigades snowed over
+the countryside.  Bugles and trumpets sometimes drowned
+the rushing of the Givonne, beside whose stream their road
+conducted them.  The stubbles were full of grain-devouring
+wood-pigeons, too heavy even to rise and take wing
+when peasant-lads threw stones.  The drab Englishman
+praised the view in the set terms of the manual, until
+discovering that Mademoiselle had command of the tongue of
+Albion, he reverted to that language with evident relief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For I won't deny it comes easier, though I manage to
+get on with the other when necessary.  And since I left
+England&mdash;seven months ago&mdash;my poor health requiring a
+holiday from business&mdash;it has been necessary most of the time."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ask the hideous animal in the ugly clothes whether he
+has seen a newspaper this morning," instructed Madame.
+"And find out if he knows anything of the movements of
+the Emperor.  Those miserables at the inn were absolutely
+ignorant, or else they would not tell!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The drab English traveler had reason to know something
+of his Imperial Majesty, having recently encountered him
+with his suite at the village of Gravelotte, eight miles from
+Metz.  He explained in a rambling manner, and with many
+divagations, that he himself had been surprised by the
+intrusion of War at the outset of a sketching-tour in the
+northwest of France, which was to have realized the
+ambition of his life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Painting from Nature and playing on the violin....
+Those are what I may call my weaknesses," he told the
+ladies by-and-by.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was moist-eyed and red-nosed and shaky-handed,
+which must have interfered with his brush-work and
+bowing.  An odor of strong waters exhaled from his person
+and clothes.  You, had you been there, could have imagined
+him making an inventory, serving a summons, or,
+mounted on a Holborn auctioneer's rostrum&mdash;knocking
+down second-hand works of inferior Art to imaginary
+bidders, and vaunting the qualities of sticky-toned violins.
+Save for his garrulity, he was inoffensive; though his open
+conviction that his fellow-travelers were mother and daughter
+caused Juliette infinite anguish and disquiet of mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"With regard to His Majesty the French Emperor, I
+was brought into contact with him unexpectedly," said the
+drab man.  "You can picture me, young lady, in the
+enjoyment of my well-earned holiday, strolling, as one may
+say, from village to village, enjoying the fresh air and the
+scenery, such a change after five-and-twenty years of
+Camberwell, the Courts of Law, and Furnival's Inn."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide complained:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He bores me horribly, this red-nosed imbecile!  Cannot
+he answer the question?  What is he saying now?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The drab man prattled on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For from the cradle, as one might say, I have been the
+vassal and slave of Business, having been sent by my father
+to a Mercantile and Legal Training College at Bromersham
+when only seven years old.  At fifteen I was office-boy and
+under-clerk in the old gentleman's office.  Believed in
+beginning at the bottom of the ladder, you see!  At eighteen,
+articled&mdash;again to the old gentleman!  He being a solicitor
+and attorney with a good old-fashioned family practice,
+and naturally being desirous to see his son a full-blown
+partner in the Firm!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sighed and shook his head sentimentally.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No use to tell the old gentleman I had been born with
+other ambitions.  That Art had a fascination, and the voice
+of Music called....  I used up reams of office wove-note
+in making pen-and-ink designs for illustrations to the books
+I'd read on the sly, and the plays I'd seen on the quiet....
+I'd render popular airs on the mouth-organ to the
+admiration of all the other clerks.  'Now, Mr. William, let's
+have a Musical Selection!' they'd say whenever the old
+gentleman popped out....  I saved up my money to pay
+for a course of tuition in Drawing from the Round and
+Life Model at a Night School of Art in Soho.  But I never
+got time.  The old gentleman must have been more knowing
+than I suspected, for he always managed to keep my
+nose to the grindstone.  Will you believe that I bought
+this box, and this easel, and the violin twenty years
+ago&mdash;and never got a chance to use 'em, until now?  To such a
+degree was my liberty hectored over, and the talents that
+might have made me the center of a circle of admirers,
+blighted by the Senior Partner and Head of the Firm...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide, growing more restive, interrupted:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Does this fatuous person who talks so greatly afford
+any information, or does he not?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"&mdash;Yet I could show you a sketch of the Roman Aqueduct
+at Ars that would surprise you," went on the drab
+man, addressing Juliette, "regarded as emanating from
+the pencil of a simple amatoor.  Also I could touch off a
+French chansong on the violin in a style equally creditable
+and gratifying&mdash;and justifying my retirement from
+Business in the interests of Music and Art.  But&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took out a plaid silk handkerchief and wiped his
+moist eyes with it, and wagged the grizzled head that wore
+the absurd blue-ribboned straw hat in a maudlin,
+despondent way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But just as I'd settled to the roving life, tramping
+from inn to inn and finding 'em comfortable, the country
+cooking tasty, and the country vintages nice&mdash;War breaks
+out and spoils everything!  Another week, and I should
+have bought a Bit of Ground!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He mopped his eyes and snuffled a little, and put away
+the handkerchief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It was going cheap&mdash;the Chatto and farm and wine-plant
+and vineyards.  I had a good look at the title-deeds&mdash;everything
+was in order there, even to a professional eye....
+All I had to do was to put down the money.  I'd have
+painted and fiddled, made wine and drunk it&mdash;sold what I
+didn't drink, and branded the vintages: 'Château Musty,
+Dry, Sparkling ... Château Musty, Special Still.' ...
+Château Musty, sweet, preferred by ladies....  Stop,
+though!  It wouldn't have been that name!  My name is
+Furnival!  Excuse me, Mam'selle, but I think your
+lady-mother is making some remark to you.  At least she
+impresses me with that idea."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madame is greatly desirous of intelligence with respect
+to the Emperor," Juliette explained.  The talkative
+traveler looked aggrieved:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Pray tell the lady I am coming to him presently.
+After the War broke out&mdash;Lord! what a hurrying and
+scurrying of soldiers....  Bugles blowing your head off
+at four o'clock in the morning&mdash;all the wagons taken to
+carry baggage&mdash;all the farm-horses whipped off to drag
+cannon ... no more sensible business done anywhere!...  And
+when the shooting began, it was a scandal!
+Positively perilous to visitors!  Why, I've been absolutely
+in danger of my life!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide's foot tapped impatiently on the floor of the
+wagonette.  Her fine eyes shot forth indignant sparks.
+She bit her crimson lips.  The drab Englishman regarded
+her mildly, commenting:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If I wasn't accustomed by this time to French ways
+and manners, I should take it that your mamma had a
+temper of her own.  But it's the national method of
+over-working the features....  Not that your Emperor is
+given to too much expression.  Heavy, he struck me as,
+and puffily low-spirited!  And even a worse sleeper than
+myself, if you ask me!  For I spent the night in a room
+over His Majesty's, the night he stopped in the inn at
+Gravelotte, and didn't shut my eyes for an instant with
+his groanings and his moanings and his tramp ings to and
+fro...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He wagged his head, and pursued with solemnity:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"In the morning I peeped out of the window and saw
+him drive off.  All sorts of French Nobs bowing and
+scraping....  Orders and Stars and shiny carriages, and
+silver-mounted harness on prancing bays....  Yet if he
+had asked me, I wouldn't have changed places.  Thinks I,
+'How much better to be Me, plain William Furnival, an
+honest English Commoner, than an Emperor whose
+crime-stained conscience keeps him broad awake o' nights!'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Juliette, her eyes blue fire, two angry roses in her
+usually pale cheeks:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But you, Monsieur&mdash;who also sleep badly&mdash;is that
+because you have crime upon your soul?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What have you said to this creature that has frightened
+him?" Adelaide demanded, as the drab traveler's jaw
+dropped, and his red nose glowed brilliantly in a visage of
+dingy-white.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette translated.  Said Madame, regarding the perturbed
+Mr. Furnival, with a glance of superb indifference:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He is a runaway husband of some Englishwoman who
+keeps a <i>pension</i>.  Or the absconding clerk of a London
+notary."
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Whatever he may or may not have been, he fell silent
+after the little passage here recorded.  At Bazeilles, where
+the driver was paid, and the wagonette dismissed, though
+he entered the same train of vilely dirty third-class
+carriages and goods-trucks, he traveled in a compartment
+remote from that selected by his companions of the drive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At Verdun they learned that the railway bridge below
+Metz had been blown up by M. de Bazaine's Engineers, the
+line beyond being in Prussian hands....  And at this
+point the drab gentleman got out, hugging his violin-case,
+bag, and artist's fit-out.  Juliette saw him swallowed up
+in a roaring crowd of mobilists from the Ardennes, who
+rushed upon and instantly crammed solid every corner of
+the train.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A good-looking officer, entering with the deluge,
+apologized to the ladies in a well-bred, easy way:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is inconvenient, Mesdames, but at the same time
+necessary....  I take these little ones to Châlons to be
+incorporated in the New Army of MacMahon....  They
+are rough, as you perceive, and very few are yet in
+uniform.  But blue cloth and red cloth are less important
+than chassepots, and they have them and can use them&mdash;these
+little ones of mine!  And when they receive orders to
+march north and give a helping hand to M. de Bazaine&mdash;I
+prophesy that, boots or no boots, they will keep up with
+the best!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide smiled witchingly on the speaker, plied the
+archery of her fine eyes, evoking admiring glances from the
+officer and his uncouth, half-clad, half-trained mobilists.
+She said she had no doubt of the courage of these sons of
+Western France.  She had heard, she added, that the
+Emperor was at Châlons, but that H.I.M. intended to
+resort to Paris, having surrendered to another the <i>bâton</i> of
+supreme command.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'To Paris'!"  The officer shrugged.  "Alas! at such a
+crisis in the affairs of the nation, Paris would be the last
+shelter for the French Emperor.  It is no longer a secret
+that the Emperor has already left Châlons with the Grand
+Headquarters Staff and the First Corps of the Army of
+MacMahon....  Rheims is the destination&mdash;that
+intelligence is also public property...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And the Prince?" Adelaide asked eagerly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monseigneur the Prince Imperial left for Rheims with
+the Emperor, but will be sent on from there to Rethel, with
+his carriages, and an escort of Imperial Body Guards
+under Colonel Watrin.  His three <i>aides-de-camp</i>, Colonel
+Lamey, Colonel Comte Clary, and Commandant Duperré
+of the battleship <i>Le Taureau</i>, attend him.  Comte d'Aure
+is equerry now instead of old Bachon!...  Pardon,
+Madame?...  You descend here...?  But I thought you
+were traveling to Châlons!...  Permit me to open the
+carriage door!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the prattling officer, who had promised himself a
+charming <i>vis-à-vis</i> upon the journey, must needs leap out
+upon the platform, arrest the guard's arm in the act of
+signaling the start....  Adelaide was handed down....
+Juliette followed with an avalanche of Madame's
+traveling bags and parcels ... a discontented porter was
+called upon to rescue her trunks and <i>portmanteaux</i> from
+the van....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The signal fell, the train steamed out of the station.
+Juliette, white and fagged, sitting on an up-piled luggage
+truck, was asked by Adelaide:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Where do you think we are going now, Mademoiselle?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Came the weary answer:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I do not know, Madame....  First, it was to Metz,
+and then to Châlons.  Now, it may be to Rheims, as the
+Emperor is there."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide returned tormentingly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But we are not going to Rheims."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A thrill passed through Juliette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My father is not a prisoner, then?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My faith!" said Adelaide, shrugging with ostentatious
+indifference.  "He is as he was yesterday.  But all the
+same, my little one, we do not go to Rheims, but to Rethel....
+Tell me&mdash;you have brought with you a walking-costume
+that is tolerable?  Something more becoming than
+this lugubrious garment you have on!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette replied in the negative.  Adelaide's look was
+coldly scornful as she scrutinized the little figure before
+her.  Could this really be her daughter, this pale, peaked,
+elfish thing?...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What sloping shoulders, what tragic, haunted eyes, what
+a long upper lip, what lack of vivacity and elegance....
+Her grandmother&mdash;that well-loathed woman, lived again
+in de Bayard's child.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Monseigneur the Prince Imperial must have curious taste
+in feminine beauty to have been smitten with this stiff
+little white-faced mannequin.  Whom de Bayard
+worshiped ... whom even Straz had admired....  What
+were his words ... "<i>A little Queen of Diamonds, fresh
+as a rosebud!</i>"  Grand Dieu!... how comical!  "<i>A rare
+jewel....  A chic type....  A pocket edition of Psyche,
+before that little affair with Cupid.</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well, Cupid waited at Rethel....  Her red lips writhed
+with the jeering laughter she stifled.  Two devils of
+mockery looked through the windows of her eyes.  And with
+the swift understanding of this stranger that came of
+their close, intimate relationship, Juliette encountering
+that look, said mentally:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She hates me!  My mother hates me!  For that reason
+she sought me out and told me that false tale....
+Because of that she lured me away with her from Brussels!
+Because of that she has planned to do something....
+Oh, my father, if only you knew!..."
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap54"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LIV
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+The Hope of a tottering and crumbling Empire was
+installed at the Prefecture of Rethel, a picturesque,
+old-world river-town of many bridges, and houses with quaint
+carved gables, slanting floors, and low ceilings crossed by
+heavy beams.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had arrived late on the previous evening.  There had
+been no flags, no bands, no popular ovation, no delirium of
+enthusiasm in greeting the Imperial heir.  Press organs
+were now telling incredulous Parisians that in consideration
+of the Prince's weariness the people had foregone
+their privilege of welcome.  In honest truth, the unlucky
+townsfolk were too sad and sick-hearted to cheer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A great battle was impending in the neighborhood of
+Metz.  The First and Second Armies of United Germany
+had crossed the Moselle, wheeled right-about-face, and were
+closing in on Bazaine, who had failed in his attempt to
+retire upon Châlons by the Verdun Road.  The Prussian
+Crown Prince had come out of the Vosges, and was marching
+North instead of moving upon Châlons.  If his vanguard
+clashed with MacMahon's patched-up Army there
+would be trouble....  Everyone expected trouble, the
+soil of France had been sown so thickly with the bad seed
+from which great national disasters spring, even before
+it had been plowed by German shells....  The coming
+tragedy chilled and numbed as the iceberg chills the senses
+of the passenger in the Atlantic liner's warm deck-cabin,
+long before the keel grates, and the white fog lifts, and
+shows the towering Death on which the doomed vessel is
+being hurled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The deep dejection of the officers around the Heir
+Imperial could not be covered by any well-meant attempts at
+disguise.  The rumors that came through the fog into
+which Bazaine had vanished were horribly disquieting.
+They waited upon thorns, for a telegram from the
+Emperor, conveying intelligence on which they might rely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was something in the situation of the lonely, proud
+young creature they surrounded that made the heart bleed
+as you looked at him.  So helpless and yet so representative
+of unfettered Power, so ignorant in the ways of the
+world, and yet so conversant with its outward forms and
+ceremonies, so palpably the last frail link upon a chain
+that was being hacked through by the Prussian sword.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had grown older and thinner since the days of July,
+and his fresh, fine color had faded to paleness.  There was
+a frown upon the open forehead now, the gay, confident
+regard had changed to sullenness.  The blue eyes were
+less lustrous.  The silky chestnut hair was rumpled and
+duller.  Care had overshadowed the boyish head with her
+heavy sable wing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The arrival of the previous night had been sudden and
+unexpected, the startled authorities had been rarely put
+about to find fitting accommodation for their Emperor's
+son.  This morning Monseigneur had been hurried out of
+his bed at the Prefecture to receive the apologies of the
+Prefect, an Imperialistic vine-grower, who had been absent
+in the interests of his affairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your Imperial Highness will be aware that this is a
+critical month with owners of vineyards.  The vines have
+borne well and the grapes are ripening magnificently.
+Next month the champagne-making ought to be in full
+progress.  But the lack of hands terribly hampers us....
+Women cannot replace the men who are skilled in the
+various processes.  And who knows&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Prefect broke off, for the Sub-Prefect had nudged
+him openly.  Even if the tide of War should turn, and
+France be freed from her invaders, who knew whether any
+of those grape-pickers and sorters and pressers, Reservists
+and volunteers and conscripts who had been called out to
+carry the chassepot against the Prussians, would ever
+return to their countryside again?  Who knew whether they
+would not be thrown as ripe grapes into Death's huge
+wine-press?  Perhaps their red blood was foaming in the vat
+even now.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Who knew whether those rich, prosperous vineyards on
+the Aisne would not be trampled into sticky mashiness
+under the ruthless feet of Prussian Army Corps?  If the
+rumors were correct, an advance upon Paris might take
+place at any moment.  True, MacMahon's Army was said
+to be covering the road to the capital.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But MacMahon had been already beaten terribly....
+Recollecting it, the Prefect shuddered in his well-polished
+shoes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he said his say and shook the young hand graciously
+offered him, and got out of his own wife's drawing-room
+as awkwardly as though he had been one of his own clerks.
+While the Sub-Prefect, a sharp-visaged little man, who
+combined the office of public notary with the trade of
+wool-stapler, trotted after him, very much at his ease.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"How you sweat!  Wipe your head and your neck too,"
+counseled the notary.  "Otherwise your cravat will be a
+perfect wisp and Madame will certainly take you to task!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You have such <i>sangfroid</i>, my good M. Schlitte.  I envy
+you; I do, positively!" stuttered the Prefect, puffing and
+blowing and mopping.  "Royalty invariably dazzles me....
+I tremble ... I blunder....  In a word, I make a
+fool of myself!  At this moment I am tortured by the
+weight of my responsibilities....  True&mdash;His Highness
+is well guarded&mdash;true, the Army of Châlons is somewhere
+or other in the neighborhood!...  But the daring of these
+Prussian horsemen ... the danger of a surprise!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A surprise....  Nonsense, my dear sir.  The thing is
+impossible!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And M. Schlitte, who was said upon the strength of his
+queer French accent to be a native of Strasbourg, soothed
+the Prefect, and grinned like a rat-trap as he betook
+himself home.  Inhabiting a riverside villa in the
+neighborhood, from which residence&mdash;we may suppose for the
+better conduct of his extensive business&mdash;a private
+telegraphic installation connected him with Rheims, Paris,
+Brussels, Luxembourg&mdash;and, when necessary, Berlin&mdash;it
+would have been possible to have made arrangements for
+that very contingency.  His suggestions were not adopted
+at the Prussian Headquarters, but his zeal was approved
+in the right place.  He became Prefect of Rethel a little
+later, when Berlin was settled at Versailles.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+He stopped now, on his way back to his villa, to send
+the town-band round to the Place of the Prefecture and
+to bribe some loafers with small silver to mix with the
+crowd and cheer for the Emperor and the Prince.
+Consequently, a drum, trombone, cornet, and ophicleide shortly
+made their appearance before the Imperial lodgings....
+<i>La Reine Hortense</i> and <i>Partant Pour La Syrie</i> entertained
+Monseigneur while he breakfasted.  Since then he had
+thrice been summoned out upon the balcony to acknowledge
+the acclamations of the loyal populace of Rethel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was pouring rain, and the knots of spies, loafers, and
+genuine enthusiasts were sheltered by umbrellas.  The very
+fowls that pecked between the cobbles had a listless and
+draggled air.  The boy shivered as he turned from the
+dismal outdoor prospect to contemplate the Empire hangings,
+ormolu girandoles, and obsolete, scroll-backed chairs
+and claw-foot tables, gracing the Prefect's wife's reception-room.
+He told himself that it was horrible, even when one
+waited for the news of certain victory, to be shut up in a
+beastly hole like this.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nearly jumped for joy when the name of M. de Straz
+was brought him by his equerry.  He remembered the
+Roumanian agent, who had previously been presented to
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Pray bring him quickly, M. le Comte," he said eagerly
+to M. d'Aure, who had replaced old M. Bachon.  "It is
+possible that he may bring a message from the Emperor."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He colored, and his eyes regained a little of their old
+brightness.  The green-and-gold equerry, who loved him,
+as did every member of his household, was glad to see him,
+interested, for more reasons than one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Straz, known to be a secret agent of the Emperor, and
+hailing from Rheims, where his employer was now&mdash;Straz
+might well amuse the Prince while his protectors waited
+for an Imperial telegram.  Meanwhile, the bodyguard
+about the Prefecture was unostentatiously doubled, the
+carriages and the baggage were secretly held in readiness
+for a move.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You can imagine Straz, with his profile and beard of a
+courtier of old Nineveh, bowing over the boyish hand, and
+rolling his jet-black, glittering eyes.  He had looked better
+in his Astrachan-trimmed traveling jacket than in the
+tight-waisted, closely buttoned, black frock-coat and pearl-gray
+trousers of ceremony, and the inky river of black silk
+cravat that flowed over the expanse of white shirt-front
+now covering his Herculean chest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He wore white spats, which made his short legs appear
+shorter.  A bouquet adorned his buttonhole&mdash;pink carnation
+and tuberose.  Its cloying fragrance hung heavily on
+the damp air of the Prefecture reception-room, as the boy
+pleasantly said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Good-day, M. de Straz; do you come to us from the Emperor?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Yes, my Prince, and no!..."  Straz had long ago
+got rid of his cold, yet a certain thickness characterized his
+consonants.  He shrugged his great shoulders and smiled,
+showing his dazzling double curves of solid human ivory.
+"I come from Rheims, where His Imperial Majesty is
+making history....  I am not charged with any message
+from him!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boy's face fell.  He said, with a brave effort to
+conquer his disappointment: "I am impatient, Monsieur,
+for news of another victory.  It is so long since the
+engagement of Saarbrück, and that was only a little one.  You
+are an officer in the Army of Roumania, you have told me.
+You are aware, even better than I, that military plans take
+time to develop ..  and that Papa has every confidence in
+the generalship of M. de Bazaine....  If I were five or
+six years older, I should be admitted to the Councils of
+the Imperial État Major....  I should understand the
+reasons for these changes which puzzle me....  But one
+thing I should like to ask..."  He flushed and glanced
+round nervously.  "They do not believe in Paris or
+London that we are being ... beaten?...  I beg of you to
+answer me candidly!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Straz drew himself up dramatically, expanding his huge
+chest, and curling his parted mustache.  His fierce black
+eyes, staring from their great curved arches, glittered like
+balls of polished jet....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They do not, my Prince!  They wait for the Star of
+the Bonapartes to rise resplendent from a sea of gore shed
+from Prussian veins....  They wait, as the world waits,
+for the Empire to emerge more glorious than ever from
+this conflict, which will restore to her forever her lost
+Provinces of the Rhine.  It may be that the Coronation of
+Napoleon IV. will be solemnized in the Cathedral of
+Cologne....  Aha, my Prince, have I won a smile at last?"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+He looked, despite the frock-coat, more than ever like
+some ancient warrior of Assyria, marching in a carved and
+painted procession along the walls of some unearthed
+palace of Nineveh or Babylon.  And so admirable an actor
+was he that the sick heart of the boy now warmed at his
+simulated fire, and gladdened at his deceptive words of
+hope.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I had pictured my Imperial Prince," he went on, "in
+brighter and less gloomy surroundings, with sympathetic
+and delightful companions to alleviate his exile from
+home."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had touched the wrong chord.  The slender, well-made
+figure was drawn up proudly.  The delicate brows
+frowned, the lips quivered as the boy said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur, it is not 'exile' when an officer is ordered on
+Active Service....  And I am with the French Army,
+whose uniform I wear.  For the moment the Emperor, my
+commanding officer, has ordered me to remain here....
+I did wrong to grumble&mdash;I shall do so no more!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Straz grinned and bowed to cover his momentary
+confusion.  Why had he used the indigestible word?  He
+touched his buttonhole bouquet and said with a treacly
+inflection:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There are no violets&mdash;it is not the proper season....
+Does Monseigneur remember when the purple blooms
+reached him regularly at intervals, one timid scrap of
+paper hiding among the slender stems? ... And would
+he, did he know how the sender languished for news of
+him&mdash;entrust me with one penciled message of kindness
+that might restore the rose to a fading cheek?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The clear-eyed, fresh face of the boy he harangued
+underwent several changes during this windy apostrophe.
+For one brief instant it flushed and brightened eagerly,
+then it frowned with perplexity, then it twitched with the
+evident desire to laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said, controlling his amusement with his grace of
+good-breeding:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur, if it was a lady who sent me those violets,
+pray tell her that she was very good to do so, and that I
+thank her very much.  And since she asks for a
+message&mdash;perhaps this will do as well?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned to the writing-table, where some sheets, covered
+with clever pen-and-ink caricatures, lay on the blotter,
+and took up a rough little outline drawing of a landscape,
+marked with lines of dots and written over with
+notes.  He said ingenuously, offering this to the
+Roumanian:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"See, Monsieur, this is a mere sketch of the affair at
+Saarbrück.  I did it to send my tutor at Paris, but
+M. Filon shall have another one....  If the lady has sons of
+my age, no doubt they will be able to draw far better.
+Nevertheless, here it is!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Under the date of August 2nd, he had signed it, with a
+touch of boyish vanity:
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+  "<i>Under fire for the first time.<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Your affectionate<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Louis Napoleon.</i>"<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+"What genius!&mdash;what a gift!  How gracious an act of
+kindness on the part of your Imperial Highness!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Straz grabbed the little scrawl eagerly, pressed his moist
+scarlet lips to it with theatrical devotion&mdash;made a tremendous
+flourish of putting it away in a pocketbook, and
+bestowing this receptacle near the region of his heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Though the lady has no sons&mdash;she is not even yet
+married," he hinted.  "Dare I confide a secret to
+Monseigneur?&mdash;she is a young and beautiful girl!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Monseigneur had been promising himself to caricature
+Straz at the next opportunity, not forgetting to make the
+most of his profile, hair, and beard.  Young and beautiful
+girls were no novelties to Louis Napoleon, accustomed to
+do the honors of Versailles and Saint Cloud to the muslin-clad
+daughters of the sparkling coquettes who frequented
+the Imperial Circle.  He began, struggling with the
+boredom that began to oppress him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If the young girl is your <i>fiancée</i>, Monsieur, or your
+daughter&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The speaker broke off at the sound of hoofs and wheels
+on the cobblestones of the Place, the bump of a carriage-step
+let down, hitting the curb before the Prefecture....
+Someone had arrived with a message from the Emperor;
+or perhaps it was only the Prefect's wife returning from
+an airing....  Straz would have been other than himself
+had he failed to seize the opportunity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monseigneur, Mademoiselle de Bayard is not affianced.
+She has hitherto declined all alliances proposed as
+advantageous&mdash;it is said her affections are secretly
+engaged!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His smirk revolted even while it fascinated.  He said,
+rolling his glistening black eyes about the apartment&mdash;shrugging
+his great shoulders, laying a thick white squat-nailed
+finger mysteriously against his carmine lips:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Engaged since a little <i>rencontre</i> that took place in the
+month of January....  There were disturbances in Paris&mdash;which
+the troops had been called out to quell.  Riding
+with M. de Frossard in the Avenues of the Champs Élysées,
+your Highness passed close by a young girl in a cab.  She
+cried out, '<i>Vive le Prince Impérial!</i>' ... She threw a
+knot of violets, which struck your horse on the shoulder....
+You had the flowers in your hand, Monseigneur,
+when you rode away."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah, now I remember!"  The boy's blush became him.
+"Or I should say I have not forgotten.  And where is she
+now, Monsieur?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Where is Mademoiselle de Bayard?  Your Imperial
+Highness would like to know?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Straz, who had thrilled with a sportsman's joy at the
+curtsey of the float betokening a nibble, would have given
+his soul to know himself....  Now, as he delayed, with
+the air of one who momentarily holds back something
+eagerly waited for, the equerry knocked and entered,
+approached and whispered to the Prince.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap55"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LV
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+"But surely, M. le Comte, it would please me to receive
+these two ladies.  M. de Straz has just been speaking of
+Mademoiselle de Bayard."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he dismissed Straz, who for once had been stricken
+speechless; giving his hand to him and saying: "I am
+very much obliged by your visit, Monsieur!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The equerry retired, shepherding the unstrung
+Roumanian.  The Prince waited, looking at the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He heard footsteps descending the stairs, a slight bustle
+in the hall, or so it seemed to him.  Once a raised voice
+cried out something, drowned in the buzzing of the crowd
+that now gorged the Place of the Prefecture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It still rained.  The brass helmets of the Fire-Brigade
+and the black shakos of the local police strung out along
+the edge of the pavement, showed as fringing a solid mass
+of dripping umbrellas; there were clumps of more privileged
+umbrellas in the middle of the Place, where a
+hackney-carriage now stood, doubtless the vehicle that a
+moment previously had stopped before the door.  The Cent
+Gardes had their undress cocked-hats on; their blue-caped
+mantles, pulled out in cavalry fashion over the
+hindquarters of their tall brown horses, shed off the merciless
+downpour like penthouse roofs....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brr!  It was chilly.  Why did not Mademoiselle come?
+Such delay was rather a breach of etiquette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile, there upon the blotter lay a sheet of paper,
+with an unfinished caricature upon it&mdash;masterly, considering
+that a mere boy had drawn it&mdash;representing M. Thiers,
+bald, spectacled, oracularly smiling, in the guise of a
+gobbling turkey-cock.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M. Thiers would keep.  The Prince chose another sheet,
+and began his portrait of the Roumanian, humming a song,
+popular with the African infantry-regiments, in capital
+tune and time.  "<i>Gentle Turco</i>" had been half sung
+through when the door opened.  The crisp grizzled curls,
+tanned soldierly face, waxed mustache, and green-and-silver
+uniform of the equerry reappeared upon the threshold,
+ushering in a small young lady....  D'Aure said, as
+the boy laid down his pen, rose and came toward them:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monseigneur, I bring the young lady of whom I spoke
+to you, daughter of Colonel de Bayard, 777th Chasseurs
+of the Emperor's Guard.  She has convinced me of her
+identity by showing me a portrait, and a letter from her
+father....  She begs me to assure you that she will not
+detain you longer than ten minutes.  For that space of
+time I will return to the lady downstairs."  He added at
+the Prince's glance of inquiry: "The lady is the wife of a
+French officer, and accompanied Mademoiselle de Bayard.
+As I went downstairs just now with M. de Straz, we
+encountered both ladies in the vestibule.  A giddiness seized
+the elder, she cried out, and swooned away."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Prince said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Pray give orders that the sick lady is to have every
+attention!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+D'Aure answered that the wife of the Prefect was with
+Madame even then.  He saluted, and repeated with an
+accent of finality:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For the space of ten minutes, Monseigneur...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he bowed to Mademoiselle de Bayard, and went
+quickly out of the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Prince began, with a touch of boyish pompousness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"We have met before, Mademoiselle.  My thanks for the
+violets!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For he knew this face with cheeks so fairly rose-tinted,
+with eyes that shone brilliant as blue jewels from their
+covert of black lashes, with the softly-smiling mouth.  The
+dull moth shone out a butterfly in the radiance of the joy
+that overbrimmed her.  She was near her Prince Imperial,
+Juliette de Bayard, who was not so much loyal as Loyalty
+incarnate, to whom the tawdry figure of the Emperor was
+invested with godlike splendor, in whose esteem the
+Empire was France&mdash;her France....
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+She was attired as she had been when she left Brussels
+with Adelaide.  Only a fichu of black and white Malines
+lace that she had brought in the handbag containing linen
+and toilet requisites, had been pinned about her narrow,
+sloping shoulders, and a tiny bonnet matching this was
+perched upon her magnificent coils of cloudy-black hair.
+Her deft fingers had fashioned it in a few minutes out of
+the long ends of the over-ample fichu.  A bunch of
+fragrant red roses had been pinned upon her bosom by
+Madame.  She had purchased out of her own slender
+resources a fringed gray silk parasol and a pair of little
+gray kid gloves.  And in this hastily arranged toilette she
+looked elegant, refined, exclusive as any slender aristocrat
+of the Faubourg St. Germain.  You would never have
+suspected the tumult beneath her sedate composure.  Yet she
+thrilled in every fiber as she swept her stateliest curtsey
+before the slender boy in the unassuming uniform of a
+subaltern of infantry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monseigneur is too good to remember so infinitely
+trifling an occurrence ... more than gracious to consent
+to receive me now!  But that my dear father is a prisoner
+in the hands of the Prussians, I would not dare to intrude
+upon the privacy of my Prince.  Oh, Monseigneur! of your
+pity prevail upon the Emperor to obtain the exchange of
+my father for some German officer of equal rank in his
+Army!  Think, oh, pray!&mdash;think how I..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She stopped to control herself ... felt for her handkerchief
+to dry the tears that were blinding her ... dropped
+the scrap of cambric upon the Aubusson carpet gracing the
+drawing-room of the Prefecture.  The Prince picked the
+handkerchief up as Mademoiselle hastily stooped to recover
+it ... their heads encountered in the act.  The bump was
+a hard one&mdash;Juliette could have sunk into the earth with
+confusion....  But the Prince rubbed his forehead,
+grinned, and called out like any other schoolboy:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My word! that was a stunner!  I do hope you're not
+hurt?  Are you, as it happens, Mademoiselle?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No, no, Monseigneur!  But you?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am all right!  Saw lots of stars, though!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He burst out laughing.  And so infectious was the peal
+of merriment that for one blissful moment of forgetfulness
+Juliette joined in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To laugh does the heart good," the boy assured her.
+He went on: "Do not be unhappy, for I will telegraph to
+the Emperor.  He never denies me anything I ask him....
+Depend upon it, he will do everything in his power
+for your father, Mademoiselle!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked all thanks, saying in her voice of silver:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I shall pray with redoubled fervor for His Imperial
+Majesty.  And for you, Monseigneur&mdash;be well assured of
+it!  Now, with all my gratitude, I will retire if your
+Highness permits?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She swept her curtsey, and would have withdrawn then
+had not Monseigneur called out eagerly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No, no!  We have still eight of our ten minutes!  Don't
+go!...  I do so like the way you talk....  Mon Dieu!
+What would the Empress say to me if she knew that I had
+left a lady standing!  Pray sit down here, Mademoiselle!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned round the writing-chair in which he had been
+sitting, made her take it&mdash;perched himself upon the corner
+of the writing-table, a schoolboy of fifteen in spite of his
+uniform, pouring out his heart to a girl older than he.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It was horrible here until you came!...  I was so
+lonely!  Everybody looks so strange, and no news comes
+through.  It would have been better to have stayed at
+Metz, where there is fighting.  But no!  We were
+compelled to return to Châlons....  On our way we were
+nearly caught by the German cavalry.  They are terribly
+daring ... they even ventured into our lines at
+Longeville....  But we got to Verdun and traveled to Châlons
+in a third-class carriage.  Frightfully dirty, and full of
+things that bit....  And I washed my face in a thick
+glass tumbler, out of which I had drunk some wine they
+brought me....  Fact, I assure you!...  But we
+soldiers don't mind hardships....  We get used to them,
+Mademoiselle!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked up at the brightened face with the tenderness
+of an elder sister.  He went on with increasing animation
+and growing confidence:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Do you see that little black box standing there in the
+corner?  That's my officer's kit&mdash;all the baggage we're
+allowed to have on Active Service.  There are other boxes
+with other things..."  He blushed.  "The valets look
+after them....  But this I keep under my own eye.  And
+here!...  This I hold as a great treasure.  Do you think
+I would show it to everyone?...  <i>Non, merci!</i> ... Behold,
+Mademoiselle!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took from a pocket beneath his tunic and showed her
+a splinter of rusty iron wrapped in an envelope.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Guess what this is!  A bit of a real German bombshell....
+It burst quite close to the Emperor and me....  I
+thought a lot of old iron was being shot out of a cart, there
+was such a racket....  This should be a keepsake for the
+friend one loves above all, should it not?  Otherwise I
+would give it you, Mademoiselle!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monseigneur is too generous....  I need no token by
+which to remember him!...  Have I not the remembrance
+of the sympathy and condescension with which my
+Prince has listened to a daughter's prayer?...  Now,
+indeed, I must take leave of Monseigneur!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He persisted with boyish eagerness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No, no!  M. d'Aure will certainly return at the end of
+our ten minutes.  And I do like you so much,
+Mademoiselle!...  Will you write and tell me when the Emperor
+obtains the release of M. le Colonel? ... Will you let me
+hear how you liked the little sketch I gave M. de Straz for
+you?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was puzzled, and looked it:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monseigneur will pardon me, but the name of M. de
+Straz is that of a stranger....  Yet he has received from
+Monseigneur a message for me?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Louis Napoleon explained.  She listened with a gravity
+that chilled his amusement over the message he had sent
+to the supposedly elderly sender of the violets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said, looking at him steadily with her sincere eyes:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I sent Monseigneur no violets, with messages written
+or otherwise.  To have done so would have been presumptuous,
+and lacking in delicacy....  If this M. de Straz
+were but here....  If Monseigneur could but describe
+him!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Monseigneur caught up the unfinished caricature:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Look, Mademoiselle!  This is he!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was he....  The Assyrian head, great torso, and
+short legs had been grotesquely exaggerated.  But the
+ferocity, sentimentality, and sensuality mingling in the
+exotic temperament of the Roumanian, had been conveyed
+with a mastery of technique and a grasp of character
+astonishing, considering the artist's youth.  And seeing,
+Juliette recognized the man they had encountered in the
+vestibule.  Just as he had passed them, Adelaide had cried
+out, and sunk down helplessly in a genuine swoon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah, yes, Monseigneur, I have seen this gentleman, but
+a few moments ago.  We encountered him at the instant
+of entering the house.  But I do not know him&mdash;I have
+never before met him!  Why, then, should M. de Straz
+speak familiarly of me?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boy said, with a tactfulness that was ingratiating:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Never mind!...  He was playing some stupid trick!...
+He shall be punished if he offends you.  See!  I am
+tearing up the ugly picture!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Oh, Monseigneur!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was too late to save the drawing.  He went on,
+tossing away the bits:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Meanwhile&mdash;since the sketch I meant for you has been
+given to this person, you shall have my shell-splinter,
+though at first I meant it for&mdash;Cavaignac."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had never uttered this name, about which so many
+lonely day-dreams clung, in the hearing of any second
+person.  He could hardly believe that he had done so now as
+he went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Take my souvenir, and shut your hand over it, and
+promise me you will never part with it.  If you will, I can
+tell you about Cavaignac&mdash;my friend, Mademoiselle!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She complied with his wish, smiling at the tone of
+authority.  She thought, looking in the beautiful frank blue
+eyes, that Cavaignac must be proud of his high place in
+this princely young heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He is brave, Mademoiselle, and handsome and wonderfully
+clever.  Once he gained the second prize for Greek
+translation at the Concours General.  And Greek is horribly
+difficult.  M. Edeline could never teach it me.  I find
+the grammar so dreadfully dull!  And yet Alexander the
+Great was a Greek general, and would have told me all
+about his campaigns in the Greek language....  I think
+I must find it hard to study because the figures of people
+mean more to me than letters and words!...  I like better
+to draw caricatures of my masters than to listen to them!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette said, with something maternal in her accent:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That is unwise, Monseigneur....  For the better we
+learn, the sooner we part with the teacher, do not we?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said, in a tone of wounded pride rather than vanity:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I have always attended carefully to my Military Governor
+when he gave us lessons in scientific warfare.  For a
+Napoleon must always be a soldier and a strategist....
+Riding came easily&mdash;anybody can learn to ride well!...  When
+I have pleased my tutors most, my reward has been&mdash;unless
+it was in July or August&mdash;a day with the stag-hounds
+at Fontainebleau, or St. Germain or Compiègne....
+The Emperor has given me two magnificent Irish
+hunters...."  He added with naïve boyish vanity: "And
+the uniform of our Imperial Hunt is splendid, you know....
+Gold-laced cocked hat with white plumes, green coat
+with crimson velvet facings, white leathers and jack-boots.
+Last night I dreamed I was hunting with Cavaignac
+... the brown forest flying by as we galloped through the
+frosty fern....  The sky was pale red, and a diamond
+star hung just under the tip of the new moon of November.
+We were foremost of all when the stag turned to bay
+at the Pools of Saint Pierre....  Then the horns sounded
+the <i>hallali</i>, the Chief Huntsman offered me the knife, and
+I said to him: '<i>M. Leemans, you will give it to my friend,
+M. Cavaignac!</i>' ..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And then, Monseigneur?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had told the dream with unexpected spirit and fire.
+That gallop through the wintry forest-rides had been
+stimulatingly real to Juliette.  She had thrilled as the
+hard-pressed buck had leaped into the pool, and turned with
+antlers lowered against the ravening jaws of the pack.
+Now, though she shrank from the thought of the spilled
+blood&mdash;she wanted to hear the rest of it.  She wished
+always to remember this story, told solely for her, by the
+son of her Emperor....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Shall I tell you?  The end is not as nice as the beginning
+or the middle...."  He hesitated, frowning a little,
+then took up the broken thread: "I thought I took the
+knife and held it out to him, and he suddenly snatched it
+and I felt the blade pierce my heart right through....
+He said, with his dark, bright eyes on mine: '<i>Son of my
+father's enemy, I slay despots, not animals!</i>' ... And I
+felt the hot blood bubbling in my throat as I answered:
+'<i>You have killed a great faith and a great love!</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was rhetoric of a bombastic, youthful kind, but not
+without pathos.  His lips quivered.  He nipped them
+together, and blinked away the stinging salt moisture that
+had risen in his bright eyes.  Juliette said, aching to
+console him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Dreams go by contraries, according to my schoolmates
+of the Convent.  Your friendship with M. Cavaignac will
+not be severed by the blade of a hunting-knife."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Or rather it is by my hand that the stab will be given....
+Yet how could that be, when I like him so very, very
+much? ... Is it not strange, I have never spoken to
+Cavaignac, and yet I would have chosen him for my
+companion above all others, before even Espinasse or Chino
+Murat!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I think I understand..." Juliette said, feeling the
+tug of his craving for affection and sympathy, realizing the
+loneliness that had found relief in hero-worship, and
+heartily pitying her Emperor's son.  "When the heart
+speaks, one cannot shut one's ears; one must listen
+always....  Among hundreds of faces there is one that
+paints itself upon the memory ... there is one voice that
+makes good music when others only tire the ear....
+There is one nature that seems more open, fresh, and
+candid than others....  Without knowing that you do so,
+you continually compare it with them....  And when
+you are sad or lonely, you would wish that person to be
+near you....  You remember his gray eyes with specks
+of brown and golden in them, and the curly hair, and the
+pleasant lips.  You regret that when you met him you
+were not more charming, more amiable....  You feel
+chagrin to remember that you were neither of these things....
+You would like to hold out the hand as they do in
+England, and say, 'Pardon, pardon, that I misunderstood
+you, my friend!'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boy's blue eyes rounded.  His fair brows puckered
+in perplexity.  Too well-bred to interrupt, he listened with
+increasing surprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Pardon that I regarded you as a brusque, untidy boy,
+when you had been robbed, and were homeless, and
+suffering from hunger.  For Monica's sake, you hid it.  And
+I applaud that noble silence!  I admire you with all my
+heart!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Prince broke in:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But Cavaignac has not been robbed, and who ever said
+he was hungry?  He lives with Madame, his mother ... they
+are not rich, certainly!  As Madame is a widow and
+he an only son, he is exempt from military service.  He is
+to embrace the profession of Literature&mdash;he will write
+great books or great plays, or edit a newspaper....  And
+I would like to help him to climb to the very top of the
+ladder....  Secretly&mdash;because he would never accept
+anything that came from me!...  Am I stupid, Mademoiselle?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said with warmth that covered a slight confusion,
+caused by that slip of the tongue an instant before:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah, no, indeed! but very kind and generous.  Perhaps,
+if it were possible, M. Cavaignac would be proud and glad
+to know you were his friend.  It may be that the affection
+he inspires in you, he returns, though he does not own it.
+There can be no harm in thinking this, at least!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Prince said, with animation:
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap56"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LVI
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+"I saw him, I am convinced, when we left Saint-Cloud,
+outside the station near the Gate of Orleans.  He stood
+apart from the soldiers and the people....  He was all in
+black, and had grown older and taller.  He looked at me
+earnestly, and slightly raised his hat as the carriage drove
+up.  I saluted in answer, and the Empress asked me: '<i>Who
+is that grave young man?  Do you know him?</i>'  I said:
+'<i>My mother, I have never spoken to him in my life!</i>'
+... You would have thought the Empress very brave, if you
+had seen her, Mademoiselle.  Nobody could have guessed
+she had been weeping.  Though the night before we left
+for Metz ... when she came to me in my bed..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His lips twitched, and one big tear brimmed over and
+splashed on the sleeve of his piou-piou's uniform.  He
+flushed bright red, and whisked it off as though it were a
+wasp that would have stung.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She brought me a new medal to hang on the collar I
+wear always."  He slid a finger inside the edge of his stiff
+military stock, and hooked up an inch of gold chain.  "It
+has on one side a figure of Our Blessed Lady crushing the
+head of the serpent, and on the other there is the Cross
+with two hearts.  The Holy Father has blessed it; it was
+sent to Rome purposely....  Mothers are anxious when
+their sons are called upon Active Service....  It is
+natural, is it not?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette's eyes were wet with pity for the Empress.  She
+bent her head in assent.  The boy went on, shrugging his
+slender shoulders:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For me&mdash;I like better to have soldiers about me than a
+lot of people in embroidered tail-coats.  If I had been
+twenty, I should have been at Wörth with the Duke of
+Magenta....  I would have died at the head of my
+troops rather than have consented to that shameful
+retreat....  '<i>Over my body!</i>' ... that is what I would
+have said to them....  '<i>Do you wish me to dishonor the
+blood of Napoleon the Great?</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He crossed to the fireplace and stood upon the Turkey
+hearthrug, a boyish figure reflected in the great Venetian
+mirror that hung above the carved stone mantelpiece.
+The outpouring had relieved the nervous tension; the red
+flush had died out of his fair temples, the smooth forehead
+was no longer disfigured with a scowl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If I might only have remained with the Army at Metz,
+I would have asked nothing better.  But instead of staying
+to fight the Prussians, we drove away when they came
+in sight.  It was ignominious....  It made me feel
+horribly!...  And the Emperor would not show it, but I
+know he suffered, too.  Then the camp was beastly....
+There was no pretense of discipline.  Their officers could
+hardly restrain the mobilists.  There was even mutiny
+among those who had returned from Alsace-Lorraine&mdash;the
+Algerian troops of the Army of MacMahon!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His agitation made him stutter as the words came
+pouring from him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They wanted to be led once more against the Germans!&mdash;to
+be avenged for all their losses and misfortunes!...  I
+understood why they were difficult....  They did not
+understand why we did not march at once to the northeast
+frontier.  No more did I....  I was unreasonable, like
+them!  But now we are advancing&mdash;soon, soon, you will
+hear something!...  We will effect a junction of our
+Army with M. de Bazaine's, and sweep the Prussians out
+of France!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was walking up and down, swinging his arms,
+gesticulating, grinding his heels into the arabesques of the
+Aubusson carpet at every turn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Then there will be great popular rejoicings&mdash;the
+Emperor will receive his due&mdash;there will be no more
+misunderstandings.  For the Emperor is terribly misunderstood,
+Mademoiselle, and he is no longer young or strong....
+He has so many bitter enemies....  I have heard him say
+so, weeping&mdash;the Emperor, Mademoiselle!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Oh, hush, Monseigneur!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he did not heed Juliette's entreaty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I have heard him crying out to God in his room at
+midnight, when he thought everyone was asleep, and he
+was quite alone: '<i>My God! is this the beginning of the
+punishment?  Must the price of my success be ruin,
+defeat, disgrace!</i>'...  Then I stole away and made a prayer
+for him and for myself, Mademoiselle....  I say it
+regularly every night since then."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His boyish pompousness, pride, and vanity had fallen
+from him like a tinsel diadem.  Chivalry and loyalty,
+unselfishness and devotion shone from and irradiated the
+child.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'<i>My God, if Thou dost save up happiness for me, I
+pray Thee to take it away, and give it to my father, who
+needs it so badly....  And, my God, if Thou indeed art
+angry with him, I beseech Thee to grant him Thy pardon,
+and punish me, instead.  All I ask Thee for myself is that
+I may know Thy Will, and obey It, that I may do my duty
+bravely, and die when the end of my life comes without
+dishonor and without fear!</i>'  Is that a good prayer, do
+you think, Mademoiselle?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before she could command herself sufficiently to answer,
+there was a knock at the door, and the equerry came in.
+He looked eager and vexed, excited and disappointed.
+Varying emotions seemed to clash in him.  But he said,
+smiling and saluting as the Prince turned toward him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The ten minutes are over, Monseigneur!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ten minutes ago, Monsieur, to speak correctly," said
+Monseigneur, with a mischievous look.  Then his face
+changed.  "News!" he called out eagerly.  "You have
+dispatches from the Emperor!...  Don't play a farce
+with me, Count, I beg of you! when there is the telegram
+sticking out of your cuff!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And with the nimbleness of a gamin and the audacity of
+a spoiled princeling, he threw himself upon the equerry
+and captured the prize.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"From the Emperor at Rheims&mdash;no! don't retire,
+Mademoiselle!  You are discreet&mdash;not like women who
+talk! ... You shall share my good news with me....
+He says: '<i>There has been furious fighting at Mars la Tour.
+Battles are raging at Flauville, Flavigny, and Vionville.
+The Prince will remain for the present at Bethel, where the
+Emperor will rejoin him on the 27th.  As it is not considered
+advisable to effect a junction with Bazaine, the march
+of the Army of Châlons is directed upon Sedan.</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mischief died out of the dancing eyes, the mobile
+face whitened with disappointment.  He repeated, staring
+blankly at the paper:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For what did we leave Châlons, if not to assist
+Bazaine?...  <i>Mon Dieu!</i>...  What infamy!...  Why
+am I not a man?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He grew crimson and burst into a tempest of sobbing.
+He tore the pale green paper into fragments and trampled
+them beneath his feet.  His eyes blazed through the tears
+that streamed from them as he stammered between his
+gasps and chokings:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Cowards!...  Traitors!...  Disgraced forever!...  Is
+there no honor left in France?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Come, Mademoiselle, in pity!" entreated the equerry,
+as deadly pale as Monseigneur was red.  He held open the
+door with a shaking hand, and Juliette hurriedly quitted
+the drawing-room.  The door shut upon the sobs and
+outcries.  The Count said, with a sigh of relief, wiping the
+perspiration from his face:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You will not speak of this?  His Imperial Highness is
+overwrought and excited.  It will pass presently.  Let me
+conduct you downstairs!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hall of the Prefecture reached, a servant in the
+livery of the establishment approached the equerry.  It
+appeared that the lady who had accompanied Mademoiselle
+had recovered from her indisposition, and departed,
+leaving no message for her young friend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madame will have returned to her hotel," said the
+equerry.  He added: "By chance, Mademoiselle, the
+dispatches we have just received contain proof that your
+friend has been misled by false intelligence.  Colonel le
+Bayard has not been taken prisoner.  He is now in
+command of his regiment with the First Brigade of Cavalry
+of General Clérambault's Division, now engaged with the
+Third Corps in the neighborhood of Metz."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then as Juliette turned red and pale, and looked at him
+in breathless questioning, he added, pulling a vestibule-chair
+from its place near the wainscot and making her sit
+down:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Rest there one moment....  I will speak to Colonel
+Watrin.  He is now at mess with his officers in the
+Prefect's billiard-room."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Watrin of the Bodyguard, Chief of the Prince Imperial's
+escort, came clanking and jingling from his dinner to
+confirm the fact as stated by the equerry.  The 777th
+Chasseurs, belonging to de Clérambault's Division of the Third
+Corps of the Army of Bazaine, were certainly now engaged
+in the neighborhood of Gravelotte.  But as certainly they
+had not come into contact with the enemy previously to
+the fifteenth of the month.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fifteenth!&mdash;the very day on which Adelaide had
+baited her trap with an imprisoned father....  Joy at
+the discovery, indignation at having been so easily cajoled
+into captivity, brought back the red to Juliette's pale
+cheeks and the light to her sad eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This strange, wayward, mysterious mother might exercise
+over her daughter a certain degree of maternal authority.
+The supreme obedience, the first duty was to the
+father, that was clear.  Now she was going straight to
+him, wherever he might be.  She was strong enough, for
+his dear sake, to take whatever risks were involved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suppose Adelaide insisted on accompanying her?  It
+was unthinkable that even so hardy an offender should
+venture into the presence of one so wronged....  Meet
+his look!...  Read in his face his scorn of perfidy!
+Juliette put away the possibility from her with both hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We know that Madame Adelaide had contemplated this
+very move upon occasion.  But she had not met
+Mademoiselle de Bayard then.  Since the encounter had taken
+place she had realized that the establishment of maternal
+influence, strong enough to make of her daughter a
+confederate and ally, was a task beyond her powers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her grace, her charm, were lost upon this pale, frigid,
+obstinate little being, in whom she saw her mother-in-law
+over again.  For than this girl, sprung of her own flesh,
+whose veins were filled with her blood, nothing could be
+more unlike Adelaide, that magnificent creature of impulses
+and desires and appetites....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dominion over de Bayard could never be regained and
+established while his daughter sat by his hearth a virgin
+unwed.  Why had Adelaide hindered her marriage to
+M. Tessier?  Pacing the Turkey carpet of the Prefect's
+library, Madame admitted that she had acted inadvisedly.
+That the plan of bringing Juliette into contact with the
+Prince Imperial would be discounted by the innocence of
+the girl and the inexperience of the boy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She could imagine the dialogue they were holding at that
+moment, all, "<i>Oh, Mademoiselle!</i>" and "<i>Ah, Monseigneur!</i>"...
+The girl should have been permitted to celebrate
+her nuptials with this dull young husband of her
+father's choosing....  Then a few years later would have
+come the opportunity.  She ground her teeth, thinking
+how her precipitation had spoiled everything ... thrust
+her....  Ah, Heaven! how one shuddered at the recollection,
+almost into the clutches of the Wielder of the Bowstring,
+the ingenious inventor of the Ordeal of the Looking-Glass....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Straz....  At the sight of him her heart had stopped
+beating.  In imagination those strangling silken folds had
+closed, shutting out light and breath....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How he had leered, rolling those fierce black eyes of his.
+"<i>So,</i>" his jeering smile had said, "<i>my Sultana and her
+slave have met again.  Did I not prophesy truly, sweet
+one, tell me? when I said you would never again look in
+your toilette-mirror without remembering me!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her nerves were raveled to threads&mdash;her will was
+weakening....  Despite her hatred and her overwhelming
+fear of the man, she knew that he was her master.  That
+if he fixed those eyes upon her and beckoned <i>Come!</i> she
+would have to obey....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Was he still here?  The book-lined walls seemed closing
+in on her.  The atmosphere was suffocating ...  she must
+escape from this place or go mad.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Prefect's wife had been called away, after kindly
+ministrations with smelling-salts and red lavender.
+Adelaide opened the library door a little way, and looked
+forth cautiously.  Except the two Cent Gardes on duty at
+the foot of the principal staircase, there was nobody
+stirring in the hall or vestibule.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As she told herself so, a red baize-covered door at a
+flagged rear passage-end was opened.  The Prince's equerry
+came out with the Chief of the Bodyguard, an oblong pale
+green paper was in the equerry's hand.  Both officers' faces
+were pale.  Colonel Watrin's was livid and distorted with
+emotion.  He said to his companion in a low voice, and
+with a despairing gesture:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It needed but this to hasten the catastrophe!...  All
+is over!...  The Empire is lost!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he went back.  The red baize door shut upon him.
+The equerry came through the passage, entered the hall,
+and went quickly up the stairs.  He was going to break to
+the Emperor's son the news of some terrible disaster
+... to say to him, as Watrin had said: "<i>All is over!...
+The Empire is lost!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With all a woman's intuition, Adelaide leaped at the
+truth and comprehended the situation.  What did she in
+the galley of a ruined, sinking Empire?  What advantage
+was to be gained by reconciliation with Henri de Bayard
+now?  And with Straz in the neighborhood, what madness
+to remain here....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for the girl, she was possessed of money.  Let her
+go to her father, or to her friends, or elsewhere....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Adelaide went out into the hall, still haunted by
+horrible memories of the Roumanian.  She found the porter.
+He hailed her <i>fiacre</i> from its waiting-place.  Madame
+stepped in gracefully, and was jingled away, straight into
+the jaws of Straz!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mademoiselle is courageous," commented the Chief of
+the Escort when Juliette's determination to seek the shelter
+of her Colonel shaped itself in a request for a military
+pass, a thing without which nobody could penetrate the
+immediate area where the dreadful thing called War was
+actually going on.  The speaker resumed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Cavalry Camp of the Third Corps is at present at
+Châtel St. Germain....  Provided Mademoiselle gets there
+without accident, and can endure the noise of the
+bombardments&mdash;Mademoiselle may be quite as safe"&mdash;he
+shrugged and twirled his imperial&mdash;"there as anywhere
+else!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A little vague, more than a little doubtful, considering
+the huge conflict then waging, that was to wage until
+nightfall of the morrow, between the Imperial Army of
+Metz and the First and Second Armies of Germany.  But
+the permit was written and signed with a flourish, and
+gracefully handed over to the keeping of Mademoiselle.
+Then she thanked Colonel Watrin and went away, declining
+the attendance of the servant whom the officer would
+have sent with her, and descended the steps of the
+Prefecture under the raking eyes of the crowd....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For, owing to a mysterious leakage in Imperial
+dispatches, something approaching to a panic was brewing....
+The Place of the Prefecture was packed with people
+... the news of the frightful struggle near Metz was
+buzzing from mouth to mouth.  It was whispered that
+defeat was certain, that M. de Bismarck had a secret
+understanding with M. de Bazaine....  Later on, when
+peasants who had hurried in from villages on the outskirts,
+stragglers who had quitted the Army at the commencement
+of its misfortunes, soldiers who had deserted from the
+Colors in action, came flocking into the town; despite the
+presence of the Bodyguard and the gendarmerie, and the
+local Fire-Brigade, an attack upon the Imperial party at
+the Prefecture was anticipated; so threatening became the
+attitude of the people, egged on by those among them who
+were agents and spies of the enemy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps the arrival of the Emperor would throw oil upon
+the troubled waters.  Perhaps it would be wiser to warn
+him not to come.  Well might the officers who guarded the
+person of the Heir of a crumbling Empire groan under the
+burden of their responsibilities.  Well might the Prefect
+perspire, to the ruin of his collars and cravats.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+It may be imagined that the lack of Adelaide's company
+did not greatly depress Mademoiselle de Bayard, as, cheered
+by her interview and armed with her permit, she tripped
+through the crowded streets to the Hotel of the Crown,
+where they had spent the previous night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madame had already returned," said the respectable
+Frenchwoman in charge of the bureau.  "She gave notice
+of departure, and asked for the account.  Then the gentleman
+arrived&mdash;a handsome man with splendid eyes, brilliant
+as carbuncles, and hair and beard&mdash;my faith! what hair
+and what a beard!  Madame cried out with ravishment
+upon his entrance, for he would not be announced&mdash;he
+went up at once.  Possibly it was Madame's husband, or
+some near relative?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette made some ambiguous reply to the question.
+She was intent upon the problem of rescuing her traveling-bag.
+Without money one could not reach Châtel St. Germain,
+and in the bag was her little store of cash.  Trembling,
+she crept upstairs to the room she had slept in, a
+dressing or maid's apartment, opening out of Madame's.
+The discovery that the door was locked and the key in
+Adelaide's possession was appalling.  She was delivered
+from the dilemma by a chambermaid with a master-key.
+As she stole in and seized her bag she heard voices in the
+next room.  Certainly one was Adelaide's and the other
+male.  A thickish voice, speaking with a drawl and a
+muffled softness that somehow recalled the Assyrian
+hawk-features and fierce black eyes of Straz.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>When the little Queen of Diamonds comes,</i>" the voice
+said, "<i>you shall present me!</i>"  And a chuckle followed on
+the words that made her cold.  Fortunately, some noise
+in the corridor covered her retreat with her rescued
+property, and facilitated her departure unobserved from the
+Hotel of the Crown....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The station was near enough to be reached in a few
+minutes.  She learned there that a train would leave in ten
+minutes for Verdun.  At Verdun she would have to change,
+provided the branch-line trains were running, or proceed
+to Châtel St. Germain by road.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Those ten minutes expanded into hours as the girl sat
+in the dirty station, waiting.  She was escaping from even
+greater perils than she had feared, and yet when she found
+herself actually in the train, and the train moving out of
+Bethel, she knew a moment of passionate regret.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had been so happy there....  She would never
+forget, even though she lived to be an old, old woman, that
+half-hour spent in easy, confidential talk with her Imperial
+Prince.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The littered third-class carriage expanded, became the
+formal drawing-room of the Prefecture....  Lingeringly
+Mademoiselle went over the interview, and the parting&mdash;ah,
+me! there had been no farewell!...  And yet, upon
+the step of departure, standing upon the muddy curbstone
+of the Place, full of soldiers and scowling people, she had
+looked wistfully up at the row of four big round-topped
+shining windows on the balconied first floor of the
+Prefecture and seen...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Only a boy's face, blurred and stained with crying.
+Only a boy's hand, waved behind the pane.  As she
+whispered "<i>Adieu!</i>" looking up at him with passionate love
+and loyalty, she wondered if ever they two would meet on
+earth again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was to be never again for the boy and girl whose
+chivalrous and noble natures had struck out, at first
+meeting, the white spark that kindles to Friendship's sacred
+flame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What misfortunes were coming, thick and fast, upon the
+luckless child of the Empire!...  What a cup of dreadful
+judgment was to be offered to those guiltless lips!...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So young, so noble, so unfortunate!  The pity of it!...  He
+who might have breathed new life into the dry bones
+of the Napoleonic Legend, and given France an Emperor
+without fear and without reproach.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+What a string of waking nightmares, the days that were
+to follow!...  That journey by road to Mézières ... that
+brief sojourn at Sedan.  The sudden flight to Avesnes,
+where the guns could be heard thundering, betokening the
+defeat of a demoralized, dejected army, conquered almost
+before the shock of battle, paralyzed by the premonition of
+inevitable disaster, as much as by the perfect preparedness,
+the masterly strategy, and the overwhelming numbers of
+the enemy....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From Landrécies to Maubeuge follow the boy sorrowfully....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What an hour was that when his protectors stripped him
+of his darling uniform, dressed him in civilian garments,
+took him out by the hotel back-door, and smuggled him into
+the omnibus that was to convey him to Belgian ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His father a prisoner, his mother a fugitive, crowds
+hustling him in their curiosity to see the son of the toppled
+Napoleon, what wonder that the memory of that journey
+haunted him his brief life long.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was to attain manhood in exile.  Transplanted to the
+soil of a foreign country, he was to develop into the
+<i>beau-ideal</i> of a youthful King among men.  High-minded,
+pure-hearted, excelling in manly sports and martial exercises,
+the soul of honor, the fine flower of French chivalry.  And
+in the spring of his manhood he was to die by the assegais
+of savage warriors, leaving nothing behind him but the
+broken heart of a mother, some fragrant memories, and the
+undying story of that lion's life-and-death fight among the
+trodden grasses on the banks of the Imbazani.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap57"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LVII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Following the devious route of narrow paths by which
+the peasant had guided them, P. C. Breagh made his way
+back to the battle-ground between the Bois de Vionville and
+the Bois de Gaumont.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Prussian spade-parties had made good progress during
+the three hours of his absence.  Part of the field had been
+cleared, long parallel trenches dug at twelve-foot intervals
+in the soft, soaked ground, and German bodies decently
+interred therein.  Huge canvas sacks crammed with
+identification-tags, papers and purses removed from these
+stood ready to be carted away.  Volunteers and Red Cross
+helpers had rendered like services to dead Frenchmen.
+And at the head of a trench, marked by a board on which
+was chalked in awkward letters:
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  "CHASSEURS OF HORSE OF THE IMPERIAL GUARD.<br>
+  OFFICERS, 6;<br>
+  TROOPS, 200."<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+a single widish grave had been dug, in which had been
+deposited the body of de Bayard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The place was marked by a cross made of the broken,
+halves of a Uhlan lance lashed with a fragment of cavalry
+picket-rope.  About the cross Mademoiselle de Bayard's
+veil had been loosely tied, and the vertical shaft topped,
+grimly enough, with M. le Colonel's talpack.  None of the
+heavy clay soil had been thrown back.  Waiting some hand
+to draw Earth's rude coverlet charitably over him, de
+Bayard lay, staring back in the brazen face of the sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His green silver-braided dolman had been torn open&mdash;the
+blood-drenched ceinture cut, showing the mortal lance-thrust.
+The red, silver-striped pantaloons had been slashed
+at the hips, no doubt in search of pocket-book and purse.
+It was difficult to credit that the sternly extended right
+arm, and the determined frown graven deep between the
+eyebrows, did not mean that Life was extinct, but merely
+in abeyance; that the cold glitter of the bold dark eyes and
+the grim setting of the pale mouth under the martial
+mustache would not warm and soften and relax into a
+smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was so disdainful in his rigid silence, so much a chief
+of men, even in death, that the disheveled scallawag who
+dared to love his daughter winced at the cold stare of those
+dark, glittering eyes.  But for Juliette's sake P. C. Breagh
+nerved himself to the sticking point&mdash;got down into the
+squashy clay beside de Bayard, and took his medals, and
+Cross of the Legion of Honor, giving him Juliette's Rosary
+instead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You know, sir, I don't intend to take a liberty," he felt
+like saying: "I'm only carrying out what I've given my
+word to do.  If I'm not quite up to your mark, please
+overlook it!  As to being worthy of <i>her</i>&mdash;<i>is</i> any man
+breathing?  Ask yourself the question, and the answer will be
+No...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Save the Algerian, Crimean and Sardinian medals, and
+the Cross, nothing of value remained upon the Colonel....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some soldier having left a spade sticking in the clay at
+the head of an unfinished trench, P. C. Breagh possessed
+himself of the utensil, and began to fill the grave in, though
+the dead face looked at him so haughtily that until he had
+covered it with the black silk veil, he boggled hideously at
+the task.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Winking away the tears that blinded him, and gulping
+down the lump that stuck in his throat, he finished.
+Remained but the need of a Catholic priest to read the Office.
+You saw the caped cloak, and the broad-brimmed hat, or the
+cossack and biretta of the Roman ecclesiastic, working side
+by side with the Jewish rabbi, the English Protestant
+clergyman, and the Lutheran pastor, in these harvest-fields
+of death.  The secular priest and the tonsured religious
+were to be found with the Red Cross Ambulance-trains and
+in the temporary hospitals; doing their best for the souls
+and bodies of their broken fellow-men, now that War had
+done the worst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To whom should one appeal?  Hardly to the burly,
+bearded Franciscan, who passed supporting a laden
+double-stretcher at the upper end.  You saw his brown robe
+hitched up under his white girdle, and his muscular bare
+legs, ending in boots of the elastic-sided description, stained
+as though he had been treading out ripe grapes in the
+press.  An Army chaplain succeeded the monk, upright and
+thin, in a dark military frock and black-banded forage-cap,
+half leading, half carrying a French corporal of infantry,
+who had received a bullet through both eyes.  Farther off,
+a gray-haired ecclesiastic, whose dress betokened his
+episcopal dignity, was administering the Viaticum to a dying
+Mecklenburg Hussar.  Even as the sublime Mystery of
+Faith was uplifted&mdash;even as the Englishman bent the knee
+in adoration&mdash;his glance fell upon the kneeling figure of
+an old man a few yards away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Undoubtedly a priest, the poor shepherd of some poverty-stricken
+country parish, for the cassock that covered the
+frail, wasted body was threadbare, green with wear and
+heavily patched.  Absorbed in devotion, his broad-brimmed
+hat lying on the ground before him, his thin hands crossed
+upon his sunken breast, his white head erect, his rapt gaze
+fixed upon the Host, he remained immovable, until the
+brief but solemn rite was at an end.  Then he looked up at
+the sky&mdash;shaking back the long white hair that had fallen
+about his peaked and meager features&mdash;making three times
+rapidly the sign of the Cross.  And the serene and beautiful
+peace that rested on that broad furrowed forehead, the
+radiant smile upon the toothless mouth, and the beaming
+kindliness in the brilliant dark eyes that rested on
+P. C. Breagh's, told him that here was the needed man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet he hesitated to speak to the priest, who rose and
+moved a few steps farther to where a shell-torn horse,
+tangled in the rope-harness that had attached to it a smashed
+artillery caisson, lay groaning and thrashing its long neck
+and tortured head to and fro.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Parties of Uhlans told off for the purpose, were even
+then shooting such hopelessly wounded victims.  But no
+merciful bullet had ended the pain of this suffering beast.
+It groaned again, and coughed up blood as the old man
+stopped to look at it, and fixed its haggard eyes almost
+humanly upon his face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The appeal went home.  Stepping over the prone body of
+its dead comrade, the old man bent over the horse and
+gently stroked its neck.  He said, and the words came
+clearly to Carolan:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Poor creature of God! be thy sore anguish ended.  In
+the Name of the Father ..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he ended the Triune Invocation, the horse's head
+sank down heavily.  A deep sigh heaved the creature's
+sides, and exhaled in a gasp.  The hind legs contracted
+sharply toward the body, and then jerked out, heavily
+hitting the axle of the ammunition-cart.  All was over.
+The Samaritan moved away, but P. C. Breagh followed and
+overtook him, crying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My Father..."  And the old man halted and turned
+himself, leaning for support upon a knotted ash-stick and
+saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Surely, my child.  Do you need my poor assistance?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A lisping voice, speaking with a country accent.  And
+with that smile of radiant kindness making it angelic&mdash;the
+face of Voltaire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were the features of the Philosopher of Ferney,
+rendered familiar to this later age by many portraits and
+busts.  The broad and lofty brow, the great orbital arches,
+the mobile expressive eyes, wide-winged, sensitive hawk-beak,
+thin-lipped mouth, with the subtly-curving corners
+and the deeply cleft humorous chin, were all there.  The
+face lacked nothing of Voltaire but cynicism and devilry.
+In place of these imagine a Divine simplicity, and a
+tenderness so pure that the young man was abashed....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My Father," he got out: "in charity to the dead and
+pity for the living, will you consent to read the Office of
+Burial by a Catholic soldier's graveside?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Surely, surely, my child," nodded the wearer of the
+threadbare soutane.  And pulled out of his pocket a
+red-cotton handkerchief, wrapped about a battered Office-book
+and a shabby stole, and trotted back beside the Englishman.
+Then, standing opposite to where the green and red-plumed
+talpack topped the broken lance-shaft, he read the
+Absolution, the <i>Libera me</i>, <i>Paternoster</i> and Collects, and
+with a wide and sweeping gesture, solemnly blessed the
+grave and the trenches it neighbored, saying, at the close of
+the <i>De Profundis</i> that followed, with one of those rare
+smiles that made the old face beautiful exceedingly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My poor prayers are for all my children.  Now kneel
+and make your confession.  No one will hear you&mdash;it is as
+though we were together in my poor little church."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But, my Father!..." P. C. Breagh protested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The old man said, looking at him penetratingly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My child, you would tell me that not so very long ago
+you discharged your religious obligations.  But to-day is
+the Octave of the Assumption of Our Blessed Lady, and
+you have not confessed or received Communion since
+Whitsuntide.  Will you tell me that your conscience is clear
+enough to meet death without apprehension, when Saints at
+the moment of dissolution tremble, anticipating the terrors
+of the Divine Judgments of God!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tears stood in the radiant eyes, brimmed over and ran
+down in two channels worn by that sorrowful-sweet smile
+of his....  He clasped his hands entreatingly, then threw
+them wide, crying in a very passion of pity and love:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My poor child, with Death on every side of you, will
+you turn from Him Who is Lord and Giver of Life?  And
+what shall I say to Him when I stand before Him, and He
+asks me: '<i>Didst thou suffer a sinner to depart whom
+pleadings might have won?</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no resisting that passionate entreaty.  Another
+instant, and the barrier of pride broke down.  P. C. Breagh
+knelt in the raw, moist clay by Henri de Bayard's
+graveside, and poured out his full heart under the light yet
+thrilling pressure of those thin old hands upon his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the murmured blessing that followed the Absolution
+the hands were withdrawn and their owner went away.
+How he went and whither he betook himself, his penitent
+never knew.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap58"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LVIII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+The hamlet of Petit Plappeville lay strangely still and
+silent in the westering sunshine.  Hitherto a small oasis of
+untouched ordinary life situated on the edge of a vast area
+of blackened devastation, it now partook in the general
+aspect of upheaval and ruin.  The doors of the dozen cottages
+forming its single street stood wide open.  Household!
+goods, furniture, clothing, broken loaves of bread, smashed
+and empty wine-bottles were strewed upon the street and
+in the little, flowery front yards.  All the doors stood open,
+some that had been locked and driven in hung crookedly on
+twisted hinges, the broken windows displayed shattered
+splinters edging gaping holes.  Not a human being showed,
+not a fowl pecked among the litter.  The hand of the
+marauder had plainly been at work.  P. C. Breagh groaned
+as he crossed the threshold of Madame Guyot's cottage,
+such a scene of domestic chaos housed between its denied
+walls.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chests of drawers and cupboards had been ransacked of
+clothes and linen, these, hideously befouled, had been rent
+into rags and thrown upon the floor.  The fragments of the
+Englishman's knapsack, temporarily left in Madame Guyot's
+keeping, the ruins of his shaving-tackle, and some
+stray leaves of filled note-books, deplorably appealed to
+their late owner's eyes.  But P. C. Breagh's eyes were
+busied elsewhere.  With the ripped-up feather bed from
+the inner chamber, where Juliette de Bayard had passed
+the previous night.  With the soiled and trampled
+remnants of some delicate articles of feminine underwear&mdash;a
+lace-frilled night-robe, a filmy chemise.  He took them up
+with reverent, shaking hands&mdash;looked instinctively for an
+initial....  There were letters embroidered in dainty
+Convent-taught stitchery&mdash;"J. M. de B."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He would have cried out, but the cry stuck in his throat,
+and a chilly sweat broke out upon and bathed him.  He
+had glanced toward the corner occupied by the truckle-bed
+whereon my Cousin Boisset had lain.  Covered with a sheet
+dyed partly red, something long and stark and still lay
+outstretched upon the palliasse.  And a lance driven home
+to the shaft stuck upright in the body, from whose drained-out
+veins the last drops splashed heavily into a dreadful
+pool that slowly widened on the stone-flagged kitchen floor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Something snapped in P. C. Breagh's brain at that sight.
+His under-jaw wrenched to one side and dropped idiotically.
+He yelped out wildly the name of his Infanta, and
+went on yelping, and could not stop:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Juliette!  Juliette!  Where are you?  What have they
+done?...  Oh, Juliette!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then the piercing agony of his loss and the certainty
+of a fate of nameless horror for her, were lost in an
+immense relief.  Underneath the bed of death something
+moved and rustled.  The slender thread of a voice replied:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur Breagh, I am here!  Do not be so alarmed, I
+beg of you!  Terrible things have happened, but I am not
+hurt at all!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the ensanguined pall was pushed aside and the little
+figure crept out from its hiding-place.  Dust and cobwebs
+could not dim her in the eyes of her true worshiper.  He
+choked and made a dive to help her, stumbled and fell upon
+his knees as she rose to hers.  And then she was in his
+arms, not clinging to him, but leaning against his broad
+chest, and shivering as though she were perishing cold.
+And through the chattering of her teeth he heard&mdash;did he
+really hear her falter:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I knew&mdash;I knew that you would come!  When a priest
+had been found to bless the grave of my father.  Not
+before!...  You would never have returned before!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her faith in him filled him with a joy that was anguish.
+He rose up, lifting her toward the light, but not at all
+releasing her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I came as soon as I had done my best to keep that
+promise.  Shall I ever forget what I felt when I set my
+foot in at the door?...  Oh, Lord!...  Ten million
+times worse than when that luckless Angéle poisoned
+me!...  Didn't I make sure you were dead or worse than
+dead!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is he who is dead!"  She drew her small, cold hands
+from his that were as icy, and went to the bed and turned
+back the upper end of the sheet that covered the still form.
+"Monsieur Breagh, you look upon a noble soldier, who
+gave his life for me," she said proudly, and showed the
+snow-white face of my Cousin Boisset.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Wouldn't I die for you?  If I got the chance!...  Don't
+you know it?...  No&mdash;how can you know it?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carolan clenched his hands in jealous misery, and she
+looked back at him to say:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I do know it!  To-day you placed yourself between me
+and the violence of those Prussians.  I have no words to
+thank you for your courage, sir!  Had I words for <i>him</i>"&mdash;she
+looked back at my "cousin"&mdash;"he would not hear
+them....  Nor can he be sensible of this&mdash;&mdash;"  She
+stooped and kissed the dead man's forehead between the
+boldly arching eyebrows.  "Yet with all my gratitude I
+place it there!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh said, flushing scarlet to his hair-roots: "I
+would change places with him to get that&mdash;and I believe
+you know it!  Cover him up and let me take you away
+from here...."  He added, as she looked at him in breathless
+questioning, "Somewhere where you'll be safe.  There
+must be somewhere!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Until night comes to cover us," she told him, "we are
+more safe here than anywhere.  You do not think the
+comrades of those savage men who made this scene of desolation
+would halt in passing to ravage a plundered nest?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But here ... you can't stay here ... in all
+this&mdash;beastliness."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His gesture of repugnance was as forcible as the word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She thought, and said as the outward shadows lengthened,
+and a deep red sunset streamed through the shattered
+window-panes:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Behind the house there is a little cabane ... I should
+say, 'a shed,' where Madame kept her firewood.  We will
+hide ourselves in there until the dark.  For what are you
+looking?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He answered, stirring the <i>débris</i> on the flagstones:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For a comb and a razor for choice, out of my knapsack.
+No!...  Except the rags of a spare jacket&mdash;they've
+left me nothing but this."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One stout clasped notebook had suffered little.  He thrust
+it into his pocket and turned to Juliette.  She said, with a
+rueful catch of the breath as she regarded the wreckage of
+her own property:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Me they have not left anything at all of luggage.  The
+little <i>portemanteau</i> and the <i>sac de nuit</i> I brought with me
+from Belgium ... behold their contents destroyed by
+those most wicked men!  Is it not deplorable?  Pray look,
+Monsieur!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Monsieur, suddenly seized by an attack of ultra-British
+prudery, had turned away to rummage in the corner
+of a cupboard, where perchance might lurk a loaf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing was there but a little knitted white shawl, which
+Juliette recognized as her own, and claimed gladly....
+She threw it about her head and shoulders, and they passed
+out cautiously together by Madame Guyot's back door, as
+destitute a young couple as ever tramped.  But not before
+Juliette de Bayard had replaced the sheet over the face of
+the dead gunner, and sprinkled it with holy water from a
+crockery stoup that hung above the bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He was so good....  He should now be safe in
+Paradise.  But we must always remember him in our
+prayers!..."
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+It would not have been wise to move about, but they
+could talk in whispers, partly buried in the heap of clean
+dry dead leaves filling half of the lean-to.  Thus
+P. C. Breagh learned the story of the death of my Cousin
+Boisset, and told in return his own tale.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You had departed, it might be one-half hour, when a
+man came running down the street, who cried: 'Hide!
+Run!  The Uhlans are coming!  They have plundered the
+Château Malakoff, and drunk M. Bénoit's <i>eau de vie</i> and
+wine!'
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"This Château Malakoff is the house of a rich peasant
+whose vineyards have suffered much by the German guns.
+You will remember Madame Guyot saying so, and M. Boisset
+responding, full of gaiety, 'He will get all the better
+prices, my cousin, for the old vintages he has in
+store!'  Naturally the outcry made much confusion, one peasant
+running this way and one that....  Madame Guyot
+caught hold of me and would have forced me to accompany
+her, saying that in the quarries beyond the village would
+be found a refuge.  But I refused to leave the house!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He broke in:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Think what you risked!  Why didn't you escape with her?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked at him wonderingly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why, do you ask me? ... Had I not given you my
+<i>parole</i> to stay?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He could not speak.  She went on quickly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So I said: 'I will remain, wearing my brassard of the
+Croix Rouge, and the Prussians will take me for the nurse
+of M. Boisset.'  But when Madame and the villagers had
+gone, hearing the galloping of horses approaching and a
+howling as of wolves, that brave soldier said to me:
+'Mademoiselle, when men like these are mad with wine, they care
+nothing for the Red Cross!  Cover me over with a sheet,
+and hide underneath the bed I lie on.  Thus they will think
+me dead, and possibly go away.  The good God may let me
+save you, though I have often sinned against Him!'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A tear brimmed over and fell on her white cheek.  She
+brushed it off and went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I obeyed, Monsieur; I locked the door, taking out the
+key and hiding it.  Then I covered M. Boisset with the
+sheet, took a crucifix from the wall, and laid it on his
+breast.  Then I got under the bed, for I heard men at the
+door.  There was the 'tinc' of spurs and the sound of
+breathing.  Then heavy blows struck on the door until the
+lock gave way....  They entered....  Monsieur Breagh,
+that noble man had said to me, '<i>For your life, do not make
+a sound!</i>'  For my soul, more precious than life, I could
+not have spoken or moved!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Above the narrow band of black velvet that clipped it,
+P. C. Breagh could see her little throat swelling.  Her
+tragic eyes seemed to have no room for him.  He waited,
+possessed by a strange hazy feeling that this meeting with
+her amidst surroundings so frightful must be taking place
+in a dream of uncanny vividness.  That he must wake up
+next moment in the clean spare bedroom of the gardener's
+cottage, to find his garments, cleansed of soil and stain,
+brushed and repaired by the deft hands of the charitable
+Sisters, and a battered tin bath of genuinely hot water,
+waiting to receive the Englishman.....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They came in," said Juliette, "talking in their guttural
+language.  Me, I could never learn more than ten words of
+German at school....  But I comprehended that they
+were angry at finding so little in the cupboards and closets
+of my poor Madame Guyot.  That was why they tore up
+clothes and linen&mdash;broke the dishes and glasses&mdash;behaved
+as wild beasts, rather than men.  That they were drunk, I
+knew, though I saw their boots and not their faces.  The
+smell of wine and brandy made me desire to be sick....
+But when they approached the bed, with what anguish of
+apprehension I waited....  If I could have screamed, it
+would have been in that moment, when they pulled back
+the sheet...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her eyelids shuddered over trembling eyeballs.  Her
+nostrils quivered with each sharply-taken breath.  Her
+tragic upper lip shut down upon its neighbor as though it
+would never relax in smiles again:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I heard my own heart beat&mdash;so loud it was like thunder.
+I felt M. Boisset trying to hold the breath....  I
+prayed to the Mother of God to cover us with Her <i>manteau</i>.
+I think she has certainly heard me when the Uhlans put
+back the sheet....  Alas, how terribly I am to find myself
+mistaken!  When the Uhlan moves from the bed I believe
+he is about to go.  Then&mdash;there is a savage cry!&mdash;a groan,
+hollow and terrible....  The lance comes plunging through
+the body of M. Boisset, through the palliasse&mdash;through the
+sacking that is underneath&mdash;through the sleeve of my dress,
+which is soaked with blood....  See!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she drew out a fold of the loose sleeve, and showed
+the rent made by the steel in it and the wet red patches
+fast drying into brownish stains.  And he who saw could
+only choke out, as his brows scowled and his yellow-flecked
+eyes burned tigerishly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The brutes!...  The cowardly beggars!  Oh, if I had
+only been there!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Of what use?" she said.  "They would only have
+killed you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"An Englishman," he blustered: "I'd like to have had
+them try!  Why, we're neutral.  No Germans would
+dare&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said, bending her great black brows upon him, and
+sternly drawing down her upper lip:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur, they would have killed you, as they killed
+my father.  They have no pity, these men with panther
+hearts.  How should they, when he has none&mdash;that
+soldier-Minister whom Germany worships to idolatry.  Contradict
+me&mdash;say that I am wrong&mdash;to convince me would be
+impossible.  For I read the soul of Count Bismarck when I
+looked him in the face."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the owner of the domineering voice that had roused
+her from her stupor of misery was for Juliette de Bayard a
+very Moloch, ravenous for flesh of men, insatiable in thirst
+for blood.  And comprehending this, P. C. Breagh put
+forth no plea for a more tolerant judgment of his erstwhile
+hero, beyond lamely saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He's a great man&mdash;a terribly great man, however you
+look at him.  And he&mdash;do you know, he saved my life
+once!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said, with her deeply cut nostrils swelling and
+quivering:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Our Lord will say to him upon the Day of Judgment,
+'You saved this one.  How many others have you given
+to death?'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, as P. C. Breagh winced at the brief, semi-contemptuous
+'This one,' Juliette healed the wound with one gentle
+glance.  The delicate voice crept to his sore heart
+soothingly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But for that rescue, I should now be quite alone in my
+great misery.  I think that God permitted it, knowing this
+day upon its way to me."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh said, tingling all over:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Do you really believe that?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She answered simply and directly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If I did not, I would not say it....  Now I will shut
+my eyes and rest a little.  I am so very tired, me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she leaned back with lowered lashes on her rustling
+pillow of last year's dead leaves.  He asked himself what
+had she not gone through on this day, poor fragile, tender
+child!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Had the news of her father's death been brought to her
+in London or Paris, there would have been closed doors, a
+darkened chamber for the mourner, the presence of some
+well-loved consoler, the counsel of her director, the silent
+sympathy of understanding friends.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But here, where every custom and conventionality was
+suspended or shattered&mdash;where human life was bared to the
+bedrock by the furious struggle of nations in War, she
+had sought for a wounded warrior, to find a bloody corpse
+amidst a jumble of other corpses, and returned from that
+overwhelming experience to sit with strangers at a
+peasant's board.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No wonder Juliette was very tired.  Would her reason
+suffer from the results of this shock?  Would she droop and
+die of the horrors undergone?  Was it possible that in a
+body so frail there dwelt an indomitable and unconquerable
+spirit?  It had looked out of her stern eyes, it had sat
+upon her lips when she had spoken of the Iron Chancellor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even as P. C. Breagh leaned toward the small white face,
+brooding over it, breathlessly studying it, she opened
+sapphire eyes upon him, to say, with the suddenness of a child:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I have been told that the Crown Prince of Prussia is
+good and has a noble nature.  Do you not think that if he
+knew how wickedly those Uhlans have killed the poor
+M. Boisset he would without mercy have them shot?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh, caught staring, confusedly opined so.  She
+said, her heavy eyelids weighed down with drowsiness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They were cowards, for they took the alarm and mounted
+and rode away calling that the Franzosen were
+coming....  Yet when they had gone and I crept out from my
+concealment, what do you imagine is all that I view?  In
+effect, nothing more terrible than an old, bent, white-haired
+priest in a ragged soutane, who was walking through the
+village saying his Rosary...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She went on, as P. C. Breagh pricked his ears, and
+opened his eyes widely:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He looked so good and like the pictures of the holy
+Curé d'Ars, for whose intercession I had been praying, that
+I cried to him: 'Help, my Father!  Help for one dying!
+Help for another in misery!'  But he must have been less
+holy than he looked, or very deaf, for he passed on.  Then
+I crept back under the bed, and then&mdash;at last, you came to
+me.  What should I have done if you had not come,
+Monsieur?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For once Carolan did not hear her.  His thoughts were
+busy elsewhere.  He was asking himself if the old priest
+in the patched cassock who had shown himself to Juliette,
+could be the Curé who had read the Office at the grave of
+de Bayard?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And if that priest were mortal man, how had he covered
+the distance between the battlefield and Petit Plappeville,
+and what had scared the drunken marauders from their
+prey?  And was it not strange that the resemblance to the
+saint of Ars had appealed to both Carolan and Juliette?...
+The problem must remain unsolved for all Time, it
+might be.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet this fact had stamped itself on P. C. Breagh's
+consciousness, deeply as his own heavy nailed boots had bitten
+into the clay by the Colonel's graveside.  On the moist
+surface of the spot where the Servant of Heaven had been
+standing, the clumsy iron-buckled, wooden-soled shoes had
+left no print at all.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+An interesting illusion, bred of the exaltation of the
+senses under emotion, produced in part, says my friend the
+Physiologist, by subconscious Memory.  A significant
+phenomenon, remarks my other friend, the student of Psychology,
+testifying to the thinness of the Veil dividing the Visible
+World from the Unseen.  While my Catholic terms it
+a rare but not isolated or uncommon revelation, pointing
+the stupendous truth contained in that clause of the <i>Credo</i>
+referring to the Communion of Saints and illustrating the
+dynamic force of Prayer.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap59"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LIX
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Juliette breathed so evenly, and lay so long without moving,
+that P. C. Breagh believed her asleep.  Twilight showed
+nothing but a black shape, vaguely feminine, a pale oval
+patch represented her face....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suddenly as before, her eyes opened and met his.  She
+said, following up some previous train of thought:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is nobler than the portraits, and yet more pitiless.
+I speak of the face of my country's enemy....  See you
+well, Monsieur Breagh ... if I were Our Lady, I would
+never rise from my knees until Our Lord had saved
+France!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What would save France?" Carolan asked her.  She
+answered, turning in her rustling couch of leaves:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Death, striking the hand that slowly strangles her....
+Death, freezing the brain that plans her fall....  Death,
+overtaking the merciless giver of Death to her children....
+Nothing else could now save France!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He who heard was dumb, knowing that this harping was
+the very note of madness.  She went on, speaking with
+somber earnestness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Always is it that women are accused by men of weakness.
+Frenchwomen are, in addition, termed 'timid and
+frivolous.'  Yet France has twice been saved by the courage
+of her daughters....  Remember the holy Jeanne d'Arc,
+beloved of God and Our Lady ... and Charlotte Corday
+also, Monsieur!&mdash;the courageous citizeness of Caen....
+At school I learned her words, spoken before the Revolutionary
+Tribunal....  '<i>Me, I have slain one man to save a
+hundred thousand!...</i>'  Why has not France a Charlotte
+Corday now?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was something in her tone that menaced like the
+flicker of lightning, seen through a rent in stormy wrack.
+That a creature so frail and slender should dream of heroic
+vengeance was incredible.  One would have expected it
+from a heroine of the Krimhilde-Brünhilde type.  To
+divert her from the dangerous theme by changing the
+conversation was impossible.  The only thing to do was to
+feign to doze.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He yawned, stretched his aching body on the clean dry
+litter, shut his hot and sandy eyes, seeing rings of
+green-blue fire.  Oblivion descended on him.  Pretense became
+reality.  He sank into a very gulf of sleep.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Long after her comrade's heavy respiration had told her
+that he was wrapped in slumber, Juliette Bayard sat
+staring out into the deepening dusk.  Insomnia born of
+nervous strain and mental shock claimed her as a victim.  She
+was far more near to madness than Carolan had dreamed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a night of chilly breathings from the northwest,
+and violent contrasts in light and shadow; a high bright
+moon making black silhouettes of hills and trees, and
+bottomless infernos of hollows and ravines.  Gigantesque
+clouds up-piled monstrous ramparts on the southeast
+horizon, others topped these with the strangest sculpturesque
+shapes....  An iceberg with a veiled crouching figure on
+it; a mammoth with elevated trunk and great curved tusks,
+bellowing in dumb show; wrestling shapes of Titans prone
+or erect; lovely children playing in meadows of asphodel;
+vast winged shapes of genii with hidden faces, speeding
+across unthinkable distances of cold, crystal-blue
+atmosphere.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the cloud-shape that most persistently recurred was
+that of a heavy-browed, mustached Colossus, who sometimes
+was helmed and cuirassed, and bestrode a monstrous
+horse of war.  In other vaporous pictures he addressed
+great multitudes from a high rostrum, or from some
+fantastic hill-peak urged on rushing armies; or sometimes
+counseled a crowned figure that sat upon a high-placed
+throne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet whatever the giant was, there was sure to be another
+figure, slender, weak, fragile, a mere vaporous wisp of mist.
+And the watcher had strange cognizance that this was the
+appointed Fate of Colossus, and that her constant presence
+was an augury of ill for him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He walked amid trees in a wood, and his Fate dogged
+his footsteps, a pistol or poignard ready for her country's
+enemy....  He ate at a daïs-table in a banqueting hall&mdash;she
+served him a golden cup of wine iced and poisoned. ... He
+lay down to sleep on a lordly bed, the frail shape
+glided in with a torch and fired the curtains....  He
+dreamed of Power on the brink of a precipice, and his tiny
+Fate crept near unseen, and thrust him screaming down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moon had long southed, the cloud-shapes were growing
+vaguer, the eyes of the stars looked through their
+thinning veils.  The wind had fallen, the silence was profound
+and awful.  She shuddered, thinking of the battlefield....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What of de Bayard lying under his clay coverlet?
+What of the thousands of bodies buried in the newly-dug
+trenches?  What of the myriads yet unburied, lying stark
+and awful under the canopy of Night?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Did they understand, the Dead, whose hand had really
+poured red life from them, and thrown them like empty,
+broken vessels abroad upon the trodden fields?  Did they
+curse him with their stiff, silent lips, and point at him with
+their rigid fingers?  Would they know, in Paradise or
+Purgatory, if anyone avenged them?  In Hell they would
+be sure to know, because their murderer would be
+there....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Ting....</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What was that faint approaching sound, drawing nearer
+and nearer through the darkness, that banished the haunting,
+dreadful images that crowded in her brain?  It loosed
+the iron band that was bound about her aching temples.
+It melted the icy armor that was riveted about her torn
+and sorrowful heart....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Ting-ting!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She turned her head to the quarter whence it came, and
+listened, breathing quickly.  Again came the silvern tinkle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Ting-ting-ting! ...</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now the sound of heavy approaching footsteps came
+with it, and Fear fell from her like a pall all snow-wet.
+She rose up among the rustling dead leaves, bent, laid her
+hand on the shoulder of the sleeper, and roused him
+cautiously.  He awakened, and said through the fingers she
+laid in caution on his lips:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Who is it?..."  And then instantly remembered,
+and passionately kissed the warning hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Ting-ting, ting-ting!...</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Do you hear, Monsieur?" she panted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She snatched away the hand.  He rose to his knees and
+listened....  Dawn, creeping into the hovel, painted their
+hands and faces gray.  White teeth flashed in the gray of
+his, as he said to her joyfully:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is a priest, with the Blessed Sacrament!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No more was said.  They took hands and went out of
+the hovel, and passed round and through the little flowery
+front yard into the littered street of Petit Plappeville.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At its upper end two black figures, encircled by the
+yellow halo of a lantern-flame, moved toward them.  Their
+shadows were thrown sidewise upon the littered road and
+the whitewashed garden walls.  The bell tinkled, telling
+of the coming of Him Who is the Light of the World.  The
+wheezing of someone troubled with asthma accompanied
+the clumping of wooden-soled country shoes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Presently came in sight an old woman in sabots, carrying
+an immense umbrella, and a huge and antique lantern with
+horn slides.  The stout figure of an elderly priest followed
+her, covered with a biretta, wearing a wide black mantle,
+and walking at a slow and decent pace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At intervals he tinkled the small hand bell he carried
+in his left hand.  His right arm was folded over his
+breast.  As Juliette sank down in the dry dust, her
+companion hesitated an instant, then knelt down beside
+the girl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The priest stopped as he neared the kneeling pair, and
+blessed them in silence.  His round face looked puckered
+and anxious.  He said, as his glance took in the bareheaded
+young man and the slender young woman, and their
+environment of ruin and desolation:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My children, are you the only living creatures
+remaining in this unhappy village?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette was praying.  P. C. Breagh answered in a
+reverent whisper:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Yes, my Father.  The Prussian horsemen came, and
+the villagers left their houses....  There was a wounded
+soldier in the cottage of Madame Guyot.  He feigned to be
+dead, and the Uhlans ran him through with one of their
+lances.  He lies within there!  May his soul rest in peace!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The priest solemnly raised the Host, and blessed the
+house of death.  Then he said to Carolan and Juliette:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It will be best that you should follow me to the place
+where I am going.  A person lies there in extremity, to
+whom I carry Our Lord.  Your presence will be something
+of an additional protection, in case any of these foreign
+soldiers should offer insult to Him I bear."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He rang the bell, and moved on along the street that
+was cumbered with the wreckage of humble households.
+The old woman in sabots preceded him, assiduously lighting
+his path.  And the boy and girl came after the priest,
+walking side by side decorously.  But presently, when
+Juliette stumbled, Carolan took her hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Ting!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They might have been walking to the Sepulcher on that
+earliest Easter morning, when He Who wrought man in
+His Own Image broke asunder the bonds of Death.  The
+air was sweet with a wonderful reviving fragrance.  Their
+pulses throbbed calmly, their blood flowed through their
+veins smoothly as new milk.  Presently the old woman who
+walked before them began in a monotone to recite the
+Rosary.  They answered, murmuring the sacred words in
+unison, moving on as though in a dream.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Over the smoldering villages in the southeast the August
+moon was setting, hanging like a great ripe glowing fruit
+against a background of translucent silvery hue.  A broad
+band of primrose-yellow banding the purple blackness in
+the East betokened daybreak.  Above, there hung one star
+of blazing emerald.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When they turned out of Petit Plappeville into a lane
+that trended upward, they could see upon the right the
+long lines of Prussian watch fires twinkling like rubies out
+of a mist that covered the low-lying country like a shallow,
+milky sea.  Upon the left rose the ivied stone wall of some
+orchard or chateau garden.  Steps rose to an archway in
+which hung the fragments of a door that had been battered in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Ting!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the priest rang his bell a bareheaded man appeared
+in the doorway.  He was very pale, his dress was
+disordered, and his eyes had a strained and anxious look.
+He bent the knee and crossed himself, then stood aside as
+the Curé mounted the doorsteps.  His wild eyes questioned
+the faces of the strangers who followed the lantern-bearer.
+He seemed reassured by what he saw there, and said to
+the priest in a muffled tone, loud enough to be heard by
+his companions:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Take care ... there is broken glass strewed everywhere
+about here.  Do not put out the lantern; it will be
+safer walking with more than one light!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he took up a heavy silver candlestick he had set
+down upon a sort of rustic flower stand.  The candle wax
+had guttered all down one side, making what old women
+call a winding sheet.  He glanced at this as he took it up,
+and then at Mère Catherine.  Then he moved forward,
+taking her place as guide, and the glass of smashed wine
+bottles that covered the ground cracked and crackled under
+his own boots, and the Curé's wooden-soled shoes.  The
+huge sabots of Mère Catherine made short work of the
+splinters.  Following in her Brobdingnagian footsteps,
+Juliette's small feet took no hurt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A long, low house rose up before them.  Its rows of
+barred basement windows indicated an extensive cellarage.
+Many of the windows were broken, and some of the ground-floor
+shutters had been wrenched off.  Shattered furniture
+was thrown about in confusion, shrubs and rose trees had
+been ruined, broken bottles were here, there, and
+everywhere.  And as a slight sound of astonishment came from
+Juliette, the priest having mounted some red-brick steps
+and entered after his guide at an open hall door, the old
+woman, to whom silence was evidently a sore penance,
+glanced back at the young one and said to her in a whisper:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"This is the Château Malakoff.  Perhaps you remember?...  And
+all those broken bottles....  The soldiers
+drank the wine...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then she hung her old white-capped head, and hurried
+after the Father, finishing the last decade of the Rosary as
+she went.  Juliette and Breagh would have waited in the
+square hall on which the front door opened, but from the
+landing immediately above the aster of the house looked
+back frowning, and imperatively beckoned them to
+ascend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They went upstairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The door of the death chamber stood open.  From within,
+came the murmuring sound of the priest's voice.  Red-eyed
+servants knelt in prayer about the threshold.  The
+master of the house was just within the door.  His square
+black head and vigorous shoulders looked angry and wrathful.
+Old Catherine whispered to Juliette as she beckoned
+her to kneel beside her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is his wife, Madame Bénoit....  They were only
+married a year!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then she clashed her great Rosary and joined in the
+prayers vigorously, while the thin crying of a baby in an
+adjoining chamber pierced the sudden, deep, profound
+silence that fell upon all present when the priest elevated
+the Host.  A little later she broke down again, and hissed
+in Juliette's ear that Madame was dying, that the baby
+had been born too soon, because the mother had been
+frightened by the Prussians ... that M. le Curé would
+give the Holy Oils after administering the Viaticum.  And
+then in a gray pool of quiet that ensued some moments
+later, a woman's voice cried out with astonishment and
+terror and anger in it:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Mon mari!...  Mon mari!...  Au secours!...  Les
+Prussiens&mdash;&mdash;</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the cry broke off short with a horrible suddenness;
+there was a momentary confusion, and then the priest
+came out, looking stern and sorrowful.  He opened the
+door widely, beckoning in several of the women.  And
+Juliette, rising to make way for him, saw the wavering
+flames of tapers burning on either side of a Crucifix on a
+white-draped table, and the figure of the house master,
+with a face of ashen grayness turned toward her, leaning
+over a white bed, clasping something even whiter in a
+desperate embrace.  Only two great hair plaits that flowed
+over the bosom of the dead woman glittered like solid
+bands of burnished copper in the wavering candlelight.
+And Dawn crept in through the open window, with the
+scent of the crushed and trampled roses, and the smell of
+wine spilled and staling, and the uneasy twittering of
+frightened birds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then&mdash;they were picking their way over the broken
+glass-covered gravel walk, and the priest, released from the
+obligation of silence, was eagerly asking for more particulars
+of the death of my Cousin Boisset.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For the villagers of Petit Plappeville are hiding in the
+quarry of Seulvent.  They will not return until the
+Prussians have left the neighborhood; they have learned what
+they have to expect from these men when they are full of
+wine....  We will stop as we pass, and tell them what has
+happened....  Then you had better come back with me to
+my presbytery.  The soldiers have not left us much, but
+there will be coffee and bread!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But for me," said Mère Catherine, clumping along
+stoutly, "there would not be even bread and coffee.  But I
+have my hiding holes of which I tell nobody.  And as
+Monsieur le Curé did not know, he could not say where they
+were!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That was a pleasant meal in the little deal-shelved study
+that had somehow escaped when the presbytery was turned
+upside down.  It stood next the church, a little ancient
+plain stone building with a square belfry tower and a spire
+covered in with blackened slating, and two recumbent
+effigies of the twelfth century, that were dear to the good
+Curé's heart.  After <i>déjeuner</i> he explained that he was
+going to visit these treasured relics for the purpose of
+ascertaining whether they had suffered damage at the
+Germans' hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He carried a basket with him when he trotted away on
+his errand.  P. C. Breagh, as he leaned by the open casement
+of the little ground-floor study, rather wondered why
+it should contain a corked bottle and a biggish loaf of
+bread.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette had gone to help Catherine restore order in the
+kitchen.  The young man's hand was in his trousers pocket
+as he wondered, staring after the stout retreating figure in
+its cassock of rusty black.  Suddenly he uttered an
+exclamation, and pulled out the hand with something shining
+in it.  The piece of gold given him by Juliette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He put a hand on the sill, and was out at the window
+in time to see the priest unlock the heavy sunken door that
+led into the belfry tower, and vanish into the dusk of the
+sacred place.  He followed, to find the Curé struggling
+with a heavy ladder that led up to a trap hole in the
+huge-beamed, plastered ceiling of the belfry&mdash;a ladder that was
+evidently seldom shifted from its cobwebbed place against
+the whitewashed wall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Couldn't I do that?  I'm a good deal stronger than, you
+are....  Halloa!...  Lucky I was there!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh had thoughtlessly spoken in English, and
+the priest, who had not seen him enter, had nearly dropped
+the ladder.  He said quite reproachfully, as the young man
+caught and steadied the ponderous bit of timber:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why have you followed me?  Is it that you wish to
+speak to me privately?  If so, pray do not do so in your
+English, which is sufficiently like German to give me an
+unpleasant agitation of the nerves!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh explained, exhibiting the golden coin, that
+it had been given him by Mademoiselle to secure a Mass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But certainly she shall have a Mass.  Though five
+francs will be more than sufficient.  Retain the coin,
+Monsieur, until I can find the necessary francs of change.  You
+see, we are poor in this neighborhood ... it is to be
+expected!"  The good Curé smiled, and added: "As you see
+me, I am rich compared with many of my <i>confrères</i>&mdash;even
+richer than some of my superiors.  Therefore, if you will
+describe to me the features of the priest who read the
+Office, it may be arranged with more propriety that he shall
+offer Mass."  He added, seeing the young man hesitate:
+"Recall his features.  Describe his person, if you
+can!" ...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh recalled and described.  When he had done,
+the Curé said, in a tone of quiet conviction:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That priest will not need Mademoiselle's five
+francs! ... And he is not only my superior....  He ranks above
+the angels....  Monsieur has spoken face to face with a
+glorious Saint of God!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Something like an electric shock tingled from the roots
+of P. C. Breagh's hair down his spine, and passed out by
+way of his heels into the worn flagstones.  He tried to
+speak, but his palate and tongue were stiff.  The priest
+went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Upon earth he was the Curé of Ars.  As a Catholic,
+Monsieur has learned of him.  But that he foretold this
+War, possibly Monsieur does not know?...  A year before
+his holy death....  Since it has happened ... this War
+that the holy Curé prophesied, he has revisited the earthly
+places where he prayed and labored and suffered....  He
+has succored the wounded....  He has appeared, just as
+he was when alive, to the dying, and cheered and consoled
+them so that they have departed in joy and peace....
+In the world this will not be credited.  It does not
+matter!...  What matters is, that those who perhaps asked the
+Saint of Ars to intercede for them in their hour of
+desperate need have received proof that in heaven, where he
+now dwells, he is still what he would have wished to be:
+a worker on behalf of souls....  He said this to me, twelve
+years ago, with that smile that the good God had given him,
+to make poor doubters sure that He Himself will one day
+smile on them in heaven&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stopped and wiped his face with a handkerchief that
+was unaffectedly a blue duster, and, noticing the sweat
+that had started on the other's face, interrupted himself
+to cry:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But Monsieur is still holding that heavy ladder!...
+How could I be so forgetful!...  No! it is not to be
+replaced against the wall.  It is to be attached by the rings
+in the uprights to those hooks at the edge of that
+trap-door....  Since Monsieur has been favored with a vision
+of the Saint of Ars, he is worthy of all trust and confidence.
+Let Monsieur but fix the ladder while I turn the key in
+the door, and then he shall see a pigeon that I keep in the
+belfry tower!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the good man bustled to the door and locked it, and
+then came back to test the steadiness of the ladder, and
+mounted with asthmatic wheezings and much display of
+darned socks and venerable carpet slippers, and tapped
+three times at the trapdoor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was lifted at the signal, and P. C. Breagh beheld the
+gaunt and sunburnt face of a French Cuirassier, peering
+down out of the gloom of the spire that was faintly lighted
+by delicate lines of morning sunshine, gilding the upper
+edges of the shingle boards that roofed it in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Thanks, thanks, my Father!" the Cuirassier muttered,
+as the bottle of coffee and the loaf were handed up into
+his eager, shaking hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Did you sleep?" the priest asked him, and the soldier
+answered in the affirmative, adding that he had been
+awakened by footsteps in the church below him at the earliest
+break of day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Curé:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My child, it was I.  A member of my parish was dying&mdash;I
+came to the church to take the Blessed Sacrament from
+the Tabernacle....  I forgot that you would probably
+awaken and suppose that your presence here had been
+betrayed!...  But all is well! and a cart of brushwood will
+stop before the presbytery this evening and carry more
+than its load when it is driven on.  It is going to a farm
+near Audun&mdash;from there you will be able to escape into
+Luxembourg, and from thence rejoin the Army when your
+wounds are sufficiently healed.  It is said that the Army of
+Châlons, with the Duke of Magenta and the Emperor, now
+marches north from Rheims toward Sedan."  He added as
+white teeth flashed in the dark face, and the sullen eyes
+gleamed scornfully: "You will please yourself as to
+serving again!  You have already suffered greatly for our
+country!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The soldier said roughly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I would die for her with a good heart!...  But I will
+not fight again for this Emperor and his Marshal, by whom
+France has been sold and betrayed!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Well, well!...  <i>Au revoir</i>, my child, and may Our
+Lord protect you," said the priest, sighing and beginning
+a puffing retreat down the ladder.  "Shut the trapdoor
+down carefully, keep perfect silence, and remember that
+it is very dangerous to smoke.  The curls of vapor can be
+seen rising between the shingles.  I observed it when we
+had workmen here in Spring!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he descended, and with P. C. Breagh's aid put back
+the ladder, unlocked the belfry tower door, and they went
+out into the clear bright autumn air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That soldier came last night," the Curé whispered, as
+they stopped to lock the door with the heavy iron key that
+was corroded with rust where use did not maintain its
+brightness.  "He was taken prisoner in yesterday's battle,
+found to be wounded, disarmed, and left to shift for
+himself, with others in the same condition.  One of them&mdash;in
+whose company this man was&mdash;had concealed a pistol, and
+had the daring to attempt the life of M. de Bismarck&mdash;or
+General Moltke&mdash;I am not sure which!  But the shot missed
+its mark, and instantly all those who had seen it fired, with
+others who knew nothing, were massacred in cold blood.
+This man by a miracle&mdash;escaped!...  How, I know not!
+He says he fell into a pit full of dead, and lay there
+expecting to be buried with them, until the darkness came
+to cover his resurrection from the grave."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They went back into the presbytery.  The priest went to
+look for the fifteen francs of change out of Juliette's gold
+piece.  She came out of the kitchen, from which Catherine's
+bedroom opened, and showed herself freshly laved, and
+attired in spotless neatness, her face no longer swollen
+with weeping and weariness, her superb hair brushed to
+dull cloudy silkiness, and newly coiled upon the summit of
+her little queenly head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her eyes shone brilliant and hard as blue jewels, as she
+said to her friend in a low, vibrating tone of excitement:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mère Catherine says that yesterday a French prisoner
+tried to shoot M. de Bismarck, and nearly succeeded....
+See you well, I would like to meet that man!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why, Mademoiselle?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To kiss the hand of one so brave, Monsieur!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He regarded her in silence.  She went on almost with
+hardihood, throwing back her head, and looking at him
+with eyes that gleamed between their narrowed lids.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"See you well&mdash;if I were only beautiful, I would give my
+beauty to the man who saved France!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her hearer's heart began to pound violently, and a
+dimness like mist came before his sight.  Through it he was
+aware of long eyes that gleamed like wonderful azure
+jewels, and a small red mouth that pleaded for the soul of
+P. C. Breagh....  He saw that the underlip was like the
+bud of a pomegranate, and that the curve of the upper
+disclosed teeth as white as curd....  Then he heard the
+silver voice say with a sigh in it:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But I am not beautiful ... not even pretty.  Ah,
+Monsieur, if I but were!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was hating herself as she saw his look respond to
+hers.  As the amber sparks in his gray eyes leaped into fire
+and his under jaw thrust out savagely, she thought:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There is something of my mother in me&mdash;more than a
+little!  How dared I scorn her&mdash;I, who can speak and look
+like this?"  And she repeated with a plaintive, lingering
+inflection: "If I were ... if I but were!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the primal Eve is in all women, believe me.  When
+the first Woman bowed herself in her apron of leaves to
+strike out between the lump of iron ore and the flint flake,
+the spark that, blown within its nest of dried moss, begat
+Fire, she laughed and then wept; for she remembered how
+she had learned of old from the Serpent, wise Teacher of
+guile and evil! to kindle the hot spark of Desire in the
+hearts of men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This knowledge would have come to Juliette as a legacy
+from Eve, her earliest ancestress, even had she not been
+born of Adelaide.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile Breagh saw nothing but the little red mouth
+with the subtly wooing smile on it ... the gleaming jewels
+that were shadowed by their covert of black lashes....
+Her will bent heavily on his, weakened by his worship of
+her.  In another instant he would have asked what she
+wanted him to do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the heavy footsteps of the priest, clumping on the
+little crazy stair, recalled Breagh from the rapids toward
+which he had been drifting.  In another moment the Curé
+came into the room.  He had a knotted blue handkerchief
+in his hand, which weighed somewhat heavily.  He said
+with a good-humored smile as he untied one of the knots,
+and took out a little pile of silver:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Here behold my savings bank!  Your fifteen francs,
+Mademoiselle!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was earnest to count them out and return them to
+her, and she was as earnest that the coins should not be
+given back....  But she could not deny her poverty when
+the good man charged her with it, saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Accept the return of this money as a mortification
+salutary for the health of your soul!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he tied up the handkerchief and stuffed it away
+under his cassock, and asked them:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Where are you journeying together, my children?  I
+have a reason for wishing to know!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had turned to P. C. Breagh, still thrilling with the
+memory of that strange look Juliette had cast upon him.
+The young man answered, glowing through his sunbrown:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Wherever Mademoiselle de Bayard is desirous to go!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Curé pursed his mouth and turned to Juliette; and
+then sabots clumped in the passage, and a cracked voice
+cried from the door:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'Mademoiselle' and 'Mademoiselle,' when she is no
+more 'Mademoiselle' than I am! ... Why not
+'Madame'? ... Call things and folks by their right names!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a terrible pause.  Juliette was enduring
+agonies.  The Curé pursed his mouth, and rounded his mild
+eyes behind their iron-rimmed spectacles.  Mère Catherine
+went on triumphantly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It was her father's dearest wish that she should marry
+his old friend's only son.  She told me that when we were
+washing up the coffee bowls, out in the kitchen there....
+When the Prussians came to France, she went to Belgium
+with the young man's mother.  '<i>To celebrate my
+marriage,</i>' she told me, '<i>because M. What's-his-name was
+there!</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh had a sensation as of a weight of cold lead
+in the stomach.  His feet seemed shod with lead, his arms
+hung down inertly.  His tongue might have been turned
+to lead, so impossible was utterance.  "<i>Married!...</i>"
+kept on ticking inside his head.  "<i>Married!...</i>"  and
+with maddening iteration, slowly as the clapper of a tolling
+bell.  "<i>You knew it ... She knew it ... Married all the
+time!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His dull stare was set upon the face that had smiled on
+him so wooingly.  It was snow-white now, and the eyes
+were hidden beneath their heavy fringes of black.  The
+eyebrows were knitted, the pale lips set rigidly.  The Curé
+looked at them a moment, and then asked, plump and
+plain:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You are really married?  My good Mère Catherine is
+not deceiving herself?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette shut down her stern upper lip upon its little
+neighbor, and raised clear, sorrowful eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"As she says, I went to Belgium to celebrate my marriage.
+Now that I have returned, I shall await my husband
+here in France.  My father esteemed him highly.  He is
+M. Charles Tessier.  He lives in the Rue de Provence, in the
+town of Versailles."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whether the good Curé scented the quibble, we are not
+at all inclined to ask.  We are concerned with P. C. Breagh,
+whose enchanted castle had crashed into dust and brickbats.
+One glance at his face, sharp as a wedge of cheese,
+and bleached under its wholesome freckles and sun-tan,
+told his Infanta what ruin she had wrought.  But if he had
+seized and shaken her and cried: "You lie!" she would
+have lied again, defiantly.  Was she not married, when her
+Colonel had believed so....  She would be, from now, in
+thought and word, the wife of Charles Tessier.  Ah,
+Heaven!...  The thought was more unwelcome than ever
+it had been.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah, Heaven! if that dear dead father could but have
+known this brave young Englishman.  Would he have been
+in such haste to break his daughter's heart?...  And&mdash;ah,
+Heaven!&mdash;again, if this burning of her boats meant
+parting, how could one live without one's comrade now?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was so simple, and Juliette adored simplicity.  He
+was so straightforward and honest, one could not guard
+the heart.  When he had thought her dead, how piteously
+he had cried to her, "Juliette!  Juliette!..."  When she
+had crept from under the bed the lance had plunged
+through, barely missing her, and Breagh had dived at her
+and caught her up and hugged her, despite her terror and
+misery, she had known a wonderful thrill....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mine!" those fierce young arms conveyed, as they had
+strained her to his broad breast.  Was it wicked, was it
+unnatural in one so newly bereaved of the noblest and
+dearest of all fathers, to have been taken by storm in those
+moments of desolation&mdash;to have dreamed since then of the
+rapture of being able to answer: "Yes, yes!...  If our
+very own!...  Never anyone's but yours...."?
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Alas! if Juliette had been unnatural in yielding to such
+thoughts, was she not now punished?  She had dealt with
+her own slight arm the blow that had shattered the fabric
+of her dreams as well as his....  She would never again
+see that light in the eyes of Monica's brother; never&mdash;against
+all the accepted traditions ruling the pre-matrimonial
+affairs of a young French girl of good family&mdash;be
+hugged in that rude, possessive, British way.  But what
+loneliness, what terror, what danger had driven her into
+the arms that enfolded....  Besides, she would atone by
+marrying Charles Tessier.  A tepid future passed by the
+side of the young cloth manufacturer extended before her....
+She could not restrain a shudder at the thought, even
+while she mentally renewed her vow that, for the sake of
+him who had planned it, she would embrace such a future
+with resignation....  It flashed upon her now, with blinding
+clearness, that not only must the future be embraced,
+but the man....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Tear the picture....  Forget the dream!</i>"  The words;
+of de Bayard's letter came back to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah, well!&mdash;she had done with pictures and dreams....
+For her, realities.  The comrade looked as though Reality
+had hit him smashingly.  She barely recognized his
+cheerful voice as he answered to some leading question put by
+the Curé:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am ready and willing to act as escort to Madame.
+It would be risky for her to attempt to return alone to
+Versailles."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She tried to meet his sorrowful gray eyes and succeeded.
+She bent her little head and said with an admirable
+assumption of newly wedded dignity:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur Breagh is very amiable.  I will accept his
+offer with gratitude.  When my husband learns of his great
+goodness, he too will thank him.  Alas! at this moment my
+poor Charles is far away!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She sought for a tear, and found more than she had
+expected.  For a whole thunderstorm of big, bright drops
+burst from those wonderful eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She fell into a Windsor armchair polished by the worthy
+Curé's stout person, and dropped her arms upon the table,
+and her head on them, and sobbed, sobbed, sobbed....
+The priest beckoned Breagh from the study.  They were
+going to make arrangements for the journey.  Horrible
+Mère Catherine, cause of all the misery, came and cackled
+over the prone, abandoned head....  Madame was going
+to start early to-morrow morning....  Allowing for the
+disorganization of the railway service, Madame would
+reach Versailles by noon of the same day.  The husband of
+Madame would presently arrive to find her waiting for him.
+Heaven would shed blessings on their joyous reunion.  Let
+Madame take her occasion of soliciting the patronage of
+St. Christopher, patron of all travelers.  The first little
+male cherub that should bless the union of Madame and
+Monsieur would naturally be christened by the name of the
+good Saint.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap60"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LX
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+They drove in a country cart to Etain over roads bestrewn
+for the most part with the <i>débris</i> of the falling
+Empire, and there caught a train starting for Verdun.  It
+was crammed with wounded French soldiers lying on
+straw in trucks and horse boxes.  Women jostled one
+another at the doors of these, to supply the poor sufferers
+with soup and fruit, bread and coffee.  The news of the
+retirement of Bazaine upon Metz was in every mouth,
+although, thanks to the cutting by Uhlans of the telegraph
+line between Metz and Thionville, the Emperor did not
+receive the Marshal's wire until the 22nd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Warlock had lost no time.  Already the blockade of
+the doomed fortress city was so far completed that only
+the most daring French scouts were able to worm their way
+through the enemy's investing lines.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For, even as the octopus, desirous of increasing his family,
+throws off a spare tentacle which becomes another octopus,
+from the First and Second Armies of United Germany
+had been evolved a Fourth Army of Six Corps under the
+command of the Crown Prince of Saxony, whose Advance
+of Guard Cavalry were already over the Meuse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Army of the Prussian Crown Prince had traversed
+the roads south of Toul and entered the basin of the
+Ornain.  The King of Prussia, with Bismarck and Moltke,
+had started to march on Paris through the dusty white
+plains of Champagne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His Great Headquarters had already reached Bar-le-Duc.
+One of his scouting squadrons of Uhlans had captured a
+French courier at Commercy.  Thus Moltke had learned
+that the mounted regiments of Canrobert's Corps had been
+left behind at the Camp of Châlons, and that Paris was
+being placed in a state of defense to resist an investment
+expected hourly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On this very day the vast Camp had been abandoned,
+the Imperial pavilions, the mess houses, officers' quarters
+and kitchens were blazing merrily, the lines of rustic
+baraques usually occupied by the troops were marked out
+by crackling hedges of fire.  While MacMahon, at his camp
+near Rheims, was torn between Ministerial orders emanating
+from the Empress, insisting on the immediate relief of
+Bazaine, and his own conviction that the order of march
+should be back by the directest route to defend the
+menaced capital.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Man of Iron to Roon, whiffing a huge cigar as
+the steady downpour of rain swirled down the gutters and
+drenched the Bodyguard on duty outside the King's
+Headquarters at Bar-le-Duc:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"We barricade the straight road that leads to Metz.
+Will the fellow face the risks of a circuitous march leading
+him near the Belgian frontier?  I should be personally
+obliged to him to decide quickly....  One does not desire
+to linger in a Capua as dismal as this."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bismarck-Böhlen brought him a telegram.  He was about
+to open it when the Warlock hastily entered the sitting
+room that served as ante-chamber, flourishing a copy of
+<i>Le Temps</i>, issued in Paris on the previous day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A Uhlan of the Advance has got me this paper.  He
+took it from the person of a respectable bourgeois at whose
+house in Cligny he and his comrades called to drink a drop
+of wine.  Judging it a welcome gift to me, the brave fellow
+rode here to bring it."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There is wine of another kind on those pages," said
+the Minister, pointing to the journal with a smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moltke read from the blood-stained paper:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'<i>The speeches delivered yesterday at the Chamber are
+unanimous in the declaration that the French people will
+be disgraced forever if the Army of the Rhine be not
+relieved.  The dispatches received during the sitting of
+yesterday's Privy Council, from the Prefecture of Police, the
+Ministry of War and of the Interior, were of a nature to
+cause apprehension of the keenest.  But the disposition of
+the people of Paris can be ascertained by any person whose
+ears are not stuffed with Court cotton-wool.  Do not these
+shouts of "Dethronement!"&mdash;these cries of "A Republic!
+A Republic!" become louder every day?</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He added:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"This bears out the text of Palikao's intercepted wire of
+yesterday to the Emperor; and the second from the
+Empress, virtually saying: 'Abandon Bazaine and Paris is
+in revolt!'..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Commented the Minister:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Empress-Regent talks like a young woman.
+Palikao argues like an old one&mdash;the speakers in the Chamber
+gabble like a pack of old gossips, not one of whom looks
+beyond the end of her own nose.  Paris was in revolution
+at the beginning of August.  She will be a full-blown
+Republic before Christmas, whether Bazaine be abandoned
+or not."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moltke said, helping himself from his silver snuffbox:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"MacMahon has not the courage to resist a consensus of
+quackers.  He will march east and uncover the Paris road.
+I may say I had already drawn out private tables of
+marches which would thwart him in any case.  What have
+you there?  A wire in Secret Code?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bismarck answered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is in Russian, with which language the sender knows
+me to be acquainted.  He is an agent of our Secret Service,
+who combines the trade of wool stapler with the profession
+of notary, and holds the post of Sub-Prefect in the town of
+Rethel.  He communicates by private wire that the
+Emperor has telegraphed the Prince Imperial that the
+junction with Bazaine will not be attempted, and that the
+march of the Army of Châlons will be directed upon Sedan.
+He states that when he quitted Rheims to-day the Imperial
+Headquarters had left for Tourteron...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Ei, ei</i>!  Is he trustworthy?" asked the Warlock, putting
+away the silver box.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister answered succinctly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The intelligence he supplies is usually worth the money
+he is paid for it."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He has got into touch with the Roumanian Straz, who
+has not received cash for some dirty work he did in July
+at Sigmaringen, and who judges it advisable&mdash;Napoleon
+Bonaparte Grammont &amp; Co. being insolvent&mdash;to transfer
+his services to the opposite firm....  He adds that Straz
+possesses, or says that he possesses, free access to the Prince
+Imperial.  He appears to think our interests would be
+served by kidnapping the boy."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Would they?" asked Moltke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister raised his shaggy brows, and answered
+smilingly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You are acquainted with the Countess's views in
+connection with the youngest Bonaparte.  If the Queen does
+not want him to hand her tea and comb her lap dog, why
+should I not take M. Lulu home as a present to my wife?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You are jesting!" said the Warlock, shaking the wise
+old head in the scratch wig.  "You have told this stinking
+rogue that decent German men make not war upon women
+or children....  When the time comes that we are guilty
+of such things, United Germany will be near her fall."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Her barometer predicts a rise," said the Minister
+dryly, "at this particular moment."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"With God's help, we shall fulfill the prediction!"
+returned the Warlock, going to a table where lay spread a
+map on a comprehensive scale of an inch to a mile.  "We
+will talk over this with the King, when the Crown Prince
+and Von Blumenthal come over from Ligny.  It will be
+wiser to delay the movement on Paris, and hit this weather
+cock of a Marshal with all our forces.  So, he marches his
+Army on the Meuse!  <i>So'o!</i>..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he hummed a bar of the little song about the weeping
+flowers and the shining starlets, as he set the mental
+machinery in motion that resulted in the Grand Right
+Wheel.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap61"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LXI
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Repeated rings at the bell of the white-painted gate of
+wrought iron upon the right of the heavy <i>porte cochère</i>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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&mdash;regiments and regiments marching with
+their bands!&mdash;and the guns&mdash;thousands of guns rolling and
+rolling!&mdash;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?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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&mdash;but
+they will not blow them up yet.  They will wait until the
+Prussians come!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Grand Dieu</i>!  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:
+'<i>My brother!</i>' or '<i>My husband!</i>'&mdash;or '<i>My son!</i>'..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"This means good-bye, I suppose, doesn't it?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette returned, with her heart wavering in her like a
+wind-blown taper flame:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If you desire it, Monsieur, of course it is good-bye!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He perused the gravel walk with an appearance of great
+interest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now Madame Charles turned to her and told her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Great Heaven!"  Little Madame Potier threw her
+hands and eyes heavenward.  "What wretches!  What
+terrible dangers Madame has surmounted!...  What
+horrors one hears of!&mdash;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..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame Potier winced and drew herself together.  Her
+black eyes glared.  The red spots sank out of her sharp
+face.  And Juliette went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I traversed one of these huge fields of carnage.  Many
+Germans were there&mdash;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!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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&mdash;and all was blackness
+about me!...  I felt no more ... I breathed no more
+... I thought: '<i>This must be death!</i>'  Then a voice spoke
+to me....  I was too far away to answer.  It called me
+loudly&mdash;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!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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&mdash;she needs that before all!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said P. C. Breagh, trying to speak lightly and naturally:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What do you want me to do?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.  "<i>It is not mine,</i>" 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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And if I dream ... and accuse ... am I not
+justified?...  Because he saved your life, do you take his
+part?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Breagh answered her with a sudden spurt of anger:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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&mdash;lovely or queer, strange or awful.  And
+that is the country of Madness, where live the insane....
+Even those who love her as I&mdash;as your friends and your
+husband love you!&mdash;can never reach her there!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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&mdash;is that the right
+word?  My nature is not gentle&mdash;not amiable!&mdash;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!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Of your mother?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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&mdash;of whom I dread to speak!&mdash;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>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh looked at her doubtfully, fearing&mdash;what he
+most feared for her.  She said, drawing a folded envelope
+from the bosom of her black school dress:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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: '<i>Mademoiselle shall hear it because
+she is discreet!</i>'..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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&mdash;whom
+I had discovered to be my mother!&mdash;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 ...  '<i>When she comes, you shall present me to
+the little Queen of Diamonds!</i>'  And he laughed....  <i>Mon
+Dieu!</i> 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: '<i>The discovery
+was inevitable!  Now, with your leave, I am going to
+sleep!</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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!&mdash;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....  '<i>Only a woman of fashion would be guilty
+of such infamy!</i>' ... What made you start so violently,
+Monsieur?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What were the words that had preceded the sentence,
+scathing in their irony, terrible in their implied contempt?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>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!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was speaking:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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&mdash;there are
+hands that wave to me and beckon.  But I clench my own
+hands and lie still&mdash;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&mdash;riding a great horse, or borne upon
+the shoulders of guards.  And then I resist no more, for
+it is useless!  I wake!&mdash;and I am standing in the middle of
+my room!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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&mdash;do you
+not, Monsieur?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'<i>Madame!...</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap62"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LXII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+How strangest of the strange, to love a person so nearly a
+stranger!... What had Monica's brother been thinking
+of?  In January they had met, and parted coldly ... in
+August they had met again, and had spent together not
+quite three days....  But what days! to brand themselves
+upon the memory.  After that morning on the bloody field
+of Gravelotte&mdash;that night spent in the woodshed behind the
+cottage of Madame Guyot&mdash;that gray dawn when they had
+walked, hand clasped in hand, behind the bearer of the
+Blessed Sacrament, could He and She be ever anything but
+friends?...  Close friends ... dear comrades, linked by
+indissoluble bonds of memories ... of perils shared, of
+experiences unforgettable by both....  What would Life
+be like when one had to face it shorn of the sympathy and
+companionship of Monica's brother?...  Juliette did not
+dare to question.  The thought of such loneliness was
+enough to freeze the heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile, here was Madame Potier, heated and
+triumphant, proclaiming Madame served with the best that
+could be got.  A lentil soup&mdash;an omelette with ham, coffee,
+and fruit from the garden.  One would do better later, let
+Madame only wait....  The apartment of Madame Tessier
+had been got ready for Madame ... the small room usually
+occupied by M. Charles might be prepared for the Belgian
+gentleman....  Or&mdash;since that room was dismantled
+for cleaning purposes, and Madame Potier herself occupied
+the apartment adjoining ... would Monsieur mind
+sleeping at the garden cottage?  She would guarantee there
+cleanliness and more than comfort.... Was not the
+bedroom hers and her poor Potier's?...  Had they not slept
+in that bed for ten years past?...  Ah, wherever her poor
+Potier might now be sleeping, he would never find the
+equal of his own bed....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The proposal, possibly prompted by discretion on the
+part of the excellent Madame Potier, was gratefully
+accepted by Breagh.  And from that hour, under the
+sheltering wing of the hectic little caretaker, began a little
+idyll of happiness for two young people, who asked
+nothing better than that it should last.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was exquisite autumn weather.  They rose early, and
+passed out of the iron gate together, and so through the
+quiet streets to Mass at the great church of Notre Dame
+in the Rue St. Genevieve.  Or they would attend it at the
+Chapel in the Convent of Carmelites that is now the Petit
+College in conjunction with a colossal Lycée.  Then they
+would come back to <i>déjeuner</i>, laid on a table under the
+trees on the lawn, and afterward they would work in the
+garden, or read, or talk.  But they read no newspapers,
+and for the best part of two months they never exchanged
+a word about the War.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the treatment devised by P. C. Breagh, who had
+failed of his practicing degree in Medicine, and under this
+<i>régime</i> the shadow that had rested upon Juliette lifted day
+by day.  He had taken Madame Potier into his confidence,
+and she entered into a conspiracy for the better nourishing
+of one whom she firmly believed to be the wife of her
+master.  She dragooned Juliette into drinking a vast quantity
+of milk, and the girl's haggard outlines began to fill out,
+and her dreadful dreams ceased to haunt her.  Sleep
+returned, strength revived, her grief for the lost father,
+unassuaged, became less poignant.  She could look back upon
+the happiness of their old life together without the anguish
+that rends the heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Daily she doled out to Madame Potier the small sum
+necessary for housekeeping.  Under the able management
+of the hectic little woman, a very little money went a long
+way.  Such butter, such cheese of Brie, such excellent
+bread, milk and cream, such country chickens, such fruit,
+and vegetables from the garden, were daily set upon the
+table, that a honeymooning Prince and Princess could not
+have been better served.  The reward of Madame Potier
+was to see her handiwork vanish under the combined
+onslaughts of Madame Charles and Monsieur....  She
+waited upon them at table, and joined in their conversation,
+after the inconvenient habit of her simple kind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As, still after the habit of her kind, she conceived an
+affection for her young mistress, she developed cunning of
+a wholly lovable sort.  The first time she heard her idol
+laugh, she clapped her hands with rapture.  Another day,
+in pursuance of a stratagem she had elaborated, she placed
+upon the dinner table a dish, with the blatant boast:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My poor Potier used to declare by all that is sacred
+that no living woman could cook <i>ragoût</i> of veal except his
+wife!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She whipped off the cover.  Madame Charles helped
+Monsieur in silence, and unwittingly P. C. Breagh played
+into Madame Potier's hands.  For he sniffed approval, and
+said, as she set his sizzling hot plate before him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"M. Potier was quite right!  If the woman lives who
+can cook a better <i>ragoût</i>, I've never met her, Madame!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette's eyes sent forth blue sparks as she sat erect at
+the head of the table.  Her sloping shoulders sloped
+terribly, her upper lip was preternaturally long.  She helped
+herself to a very little of the dish before her, and began to
+eat without perceptible enthusiasm.  Madame Potier stood
+back and watched her, her red hands on the hips that were
+embraced by her apron of blue stuff.  She said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madame Charles will perhaps have forgotten the <i>menus</i>
+she used to prepare for Madame Tessier and M. le
+Colonel."  She crossed herself at the mention of the dead
+man's name.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette's blue eyes filled, and the stiffness went out of
+her.  She laid down her knife and fork.  P. C. Breagh
+scowled savage reproof at Madame Potier.  But Madame,
+at first overwhelmed, recovered herself.  She went on, as
+though she had never broken off:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Menus</i> composed of excellent&mdash;but excellent dishes!...
+What a pity to think that Madame Charles cannot
+make them now!&mdash;Look you, to cook well is an art that may
+be easily forgotten!...  Hey, Madame is not eating to-day!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame said in accents that were dignified and frigid:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There is a little too much sugar in the <i>ragoût</i>, dear
+Madame Potier; otherwise it is, as Monsieur says&mdash;excellent!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'Sugar.' ... But one doesn't put sugar&mdash;&mdash;"  P. C. Breagh
+was beginning, when both the women turned on
+him and rent him, figuratively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Who does not put sugar?  Will Monsieur answer me?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The piercing shriek was Madame Potier's.  And the
+silvery accents of Madame Charles took up the burden,
+saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Dear Monsieur Breagh, the delicate brown of coloring
+that pleases you&mdash;the suavity that corrects the sharpness
+of the salt&mdash;these are due to sugar&mdash;burnt and added at
+the last moment.  But one should use it with delicacy, or
+the effect is absolutely lost!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Can you really cook?" he asked, in his senseless, masculine
+fashion, smiling rather foolishly and staring at her
+with his honest gray eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Juliette answered with a trill of delicate, airy
+laughter:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Do you find it so incredible?  Well, I will not boast
+now, but presently&mdash;you shall see!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Next morning, when Madame Potier returned from
+market, with an unusually heavy basket, Madame Charles
+donned a stuff apron of the good woman's, and vanished
+with her into the kitchen, whence their voices could be
+heard chattering as though a particularly shrill-voiced
+pea-hen were singing a duet with a reed warbler or crested
+wren.  The twelve o'clock <i>déjeuner</i> was memorable, the five
+o'clock dinner a marvel, from the <i>croûte au pot</i> to the <i>sole
+au gratin</i>, and from the sole to the <i>filet aux champignons</i>!
+There were <i>beignets</i> afterward&mdash;crisp, adorable, light as
+bubbles.  P. C. Breagh ate hugely, and praised, while the
+excellent Potier chuckled.  Her work, she told herself, sat
+at the head of the table, in this slender creature with the
+wild-rose cheeks and the beaming, sparkling eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juliette had found in a trunk full of garments that had
+been committed by her to Madame Tessier's keeping a
+simple dinner dress of thin filmy black.  Jet gleamed in
+the trimming of the skirt and polonaise, and upon the
+elbow sleeves and about the V-shaped neck of the bodice,
+the somber gleam of it threw into marvelous relief the
+ivory whiteness of the young, fresh skin.  Her dainty
+slimness was emphasized by the absence of all ornament.  Her
+marvelous black hair, fine as cobweb, silky without
+glossiness, crowned her chiseled temples with its dusky coils.
+When she lifted a slender arm to thrust in a hairpin more
+firmly, the sunset reflection from the sky caught the fragile
+hand and reddened the delicate palm of it, and the tiny
+nails that shone like rosy, polished shells.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She did not look as though she had been toiling in a
+kitchen among casseroles and stew pots.  Rather an elfin
+Queen of Faerie&mdash;a Titania robed in cobweb and moonbeams,
+whose smile sent a breeze of happiness flowing
+through the sad, empty places in one's heart.  For the
+heart of the young man who loved her grew the emptier
+the more her sweetness filled it, and realized its own sorrow
+the more she showed herself to be naturally a daughter of
+joy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She belonged to Charles Tessier, and all these sparkling
+looks and lovely flushes, these sweet, unconscious provocations
+of gesture and tone and inflection were for him&mdash;and
+no other man....  This remembrance was always alive in
+Breagh to rear a barrier between him and his Infanta....
+And other knowledge, too, was his, held in common with
+Madame Potier and many thousands of other people, that
+he had not dared to share with Juliette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But to-night he had realized that the truth could no
+longer be kept from her.  She was cured.  There could
+hardly be a relapse into the old conditions, even when she
+learned the dreadful truth.  And even if risk there were,
+she must be told that truth by him to-night, or hear it from
+the lips of some stranger.  It was a miracle that she had
+remained so long in ignorance of the fate of France&mdash;her
+beloved France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For seven weeks we have played together like two children
+on the brink of an open grave!" he said to himself.
+"Have I been right or wrong?  Only Time can tell!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame Potier had clattered out of the room, and across
+the hall, and down the kitchen stairs to make the coffee.
+Behind those little black beady eyes of hers she hoarded
+the knowledge of well-nigh unspeakable things.  She had
+been faithful in guarding them from the knowledge of
+Juliette.  But now she had said to P. C. Breagh: "You
+must speak to-night, Monsieur!  We have done our best,
+but we two cannot keep from the poor little lady that
+to-day the King of Prussia will enter Versailles!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had given him a look as she had left the dining room
+that had said: "Remember!"  P. C. Breagh, nerving himself
+to the ugly task, felt like one who seethes the kid in its
+mother's milk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he pondered, something cool and fragrant struck him
+on the forehead.  He picked up the red carnation that had
+fallen upon the dessert plate before him.  He inhaled its
+fragrance lingeringly, holding it so as to hide his mouth.
+Over it his troubled gray eyes scanned the face that was all
+alight with sparkling gayety.  Why had Juliette thrown the
+flower?  Why had she challenged him?  She, who had up to
+this moment been decorous and reserved almost to stiffness.
+Was it true that in every woman lives a coquette?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was asking herself the same question, pierced by the
+conviction that her grandmother would have been horrified.
+But it had been impossible not to hurl the perfumed missile
+at the brooding face with its smear of dark-red meeting
+eyebrows, and the short, square nose and the pleasant lips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had on the shabby suit of brown, for his funds did
+not permit of a visit to the tailor.  His new linen was
+spotless, and under the narrow turned-down collar he wore
+a loose-ended black silk tie.  The bow was pulled out upon
+one side so much longer than upon the other that
+Mademoiselle's feminine fingers itched to adjust it.  How
+careless he was in matters of dress, this adorable young
+Englishman!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was restless this evening.  He had aroused her
+curiosity.  Some hours after she had retired upon the previous
+night she had risen, and stolen barefooted to the open window
+that looked upon the moonlit garden, and parted the
+thin curtains that hung before it, and peeped out....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was not a breath of air to bring the autumn leaves
+down.  A white dew sparkled on the turf that Breagh kept
+closely cut.  The countless clocks of the white town of
+royal palaces tinkled and chimed and belled and boomed
+out the witching hour of two.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her room was on the east front, facing the garden....
+A downward glance showed her that Breagh was pacing
+there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Up and down, backward and forward, leaving black
+prints of footsteps upon the lawn that was all be-gemmed
+with dewdrops.  The presence of so many reservoirs makes
+Versailles more than a trifle damp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How rash!...  How unwise!  Did the young man desire
+a fever?  Juliette, accustomed of old to subject her
+Colonel, for his health's sake, to a daughterly surveillance,
+had a lecture ready on the tip of her tongue.  She might
+have spoken, had not the patroling figure come to a standstill,
+and looked up wistfully at her shrouded window, and
+said something in a low, dogged, dejected tone, and shaken
+his head and gone away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I've got to tell!&mdash;and I don't want to tell!&mdash;and I don't
+know how to tell, that's the bother of it!...  Give it up!...
+For another night!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without the muttered words, the glance and the headshake
+would have conveyed his doubt and his perplexity, to
+the subject of his sore reflections, returning in a flutter of
+strange, sweet wonder, and expectation, to her recently
+vacated couch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You may imagine how she tossed and turned, seeing his
+miserable gray eyes looking at her out of the shadows in
+the corners.  Those eyes could blaze in tigerish fashion
+when he was angry, for she had seen....  When she had
+crept from under my Cousin Boisset's death bed, they had
+flamed with a wonderful light of joy and triumph, and
+when he had caught her fiercely to his breast....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh! to be snatched again into those strong young arms,
+and held against the heart that shook one with its beating....
+Was it wicked to feel that one hated Charles Tessier?
+Was it unnatural, in these days of mourning, to think of
+anyone except her lost Colonel?...  Was it not
+exceedingly unmaidenly to determine that Monica's brother
+should say whatever it was he had got to say, and did not
+want to say, and did not know how to say, no later than the
+following night?...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+True&mdash;she had purposefully conveyed to him the impression
+that she was married, but she would explain that she
+had meant that she would be by and by....  Alas! what
+would her grandmother, that sainted woman, have said
+regarding this lapse from the way of truth?
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap63"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LXIII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+But she certainly had not planned to throw the carnation.
+The missile hurled, she had been seized with paralyzing
+fright.  The shade of her grandmother seemed to rise,
+appalling in its shocked propriety.  One could almost hear
+her saying: "<i>My unhappy child, you have become more
+like your mother than I could have believed, had I not
+seen!...</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now in sheer desperation she mocked on, dissembling
+her terror.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What is the matter?  Why are you so dull and <i>distrait</i>?
+Are you tired of living shut up in a garden?  Answer
+me, I pray you, Monsieur!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked at her, and his cleft chin squared itself, and
+his broad red eyebrows lowered into a line of determination.
+He said doggedly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The happiest time of my life has been spent shut up in
+this garden!  I believe you know that very well!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She burst into silver laughter and cried to him teasingly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But you did not look at all happy when I peeped at
+you in the night from my window.  See!  Thus, with the
+hands miles deep in the pockets, and the shoulders elevated
+to the tips of the ears!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She jumped up and mimicked the slouching gait of the
+midnight cogitator, brilliantly and with fidelity, parading
+between the dinner table and the long windows that opened
+toward the lawn.  He recognized himself, and reddened,
+while he laughed with vexation.  He had never before seen
+her in this mood of Puck-like mischief.  He had yet to
+become acquainted with another phase of Juliette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Did you learn to act so well at your Convent?" he
+asked her, and she answered with sudden gravity:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Acting can never be learned, Monsieur....  It is a
+gift, of the good angels or the bad ones, which can be
+brought to perfection by use.  To 'make' an artist of the
+stage is not possible.  He or she is born ... and that is all
+I know...."  She added: "When I make my appearance
+at the Théâtre Français, they shall send you a <i>billet
+de faveur</i>.  Then you shall see acting.  I promise you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was more like Queen Titania than ever as she held
+up her fairy finger, and smiled and sparkled at the
+bewildered young man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For example, if MM. les Directeurs assign to me the
+part of a grandmother of sixty, do you think I shall put
+on wrinkles with paint? ... <i>Non, merci</i>!  The true artist
+says to herself, '<i>I am old!</i>' and she is old....  '<i>I am ugly!</i>'
+and she becomes hideous.  '<i>I am wicked!</i>'  See here!...  Is
+this a face to regard with love, Monsieur?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The last sentence had been croaked, rather than spoken.
+No Japanese mask of a witch could well have been more
+furrowed, puckered, scowling, or malignant than the face
+that had been Titania's a moment back.  Breagh called
+out in protest, half angry, half amused, wholly fascinated;
+and Oberon's bright Queen came back again to say:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Or I can be stupid, very stupid&mdash;if that will please
+you!...  Gentlemen sometimes admire stupid girls....
+We had one at the Convent&mdash;your countrywoman and a
+great heiress.  Miss Smizz&mdash;the daughter of Smizz and Co.,
+Tea Merchants, of Mincing Lane."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She banished all expression save a smile of absolute
+fatuity, puffed out her cheeks, narrowed her eyelids,
+permitting her eyes to twinkle through the merest slits.  She
+giggled inanely, and said, combining the consonantal
+thickness of catarrh with the gobbling of a hen-turkey...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"All the eggstras....  Whad does expedse battere whed
+you've got a Forchud to fall bag od?  Besides, Ba says I
+bust barry iddo the Beerage, ad accoblishbeds are dod
+usually expegded of a doblebad's wife!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She added, in her own voice, summarily banishing Miss
+Smith, her expectations, and her splutter:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Do not be vexed with me, Monsieur Breagh, I beg of
+you!...  I am perhaps a little excited.  There is something
+strange in the air....  I have a humming in my ears
+as though great crowds of people were talking very softly....
+What is it?" she asked in bewilderment, pressing the
+fine points of her small fingers into her temples.  "What is
+the matter with me to-night?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then P. C. Breagh spoke out, in a tone that hurled a
+challenge to Destiny:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There is nothing the matter with you!...  That is the
+glory of it!  You were ill, and now you are well....  You
+can laugh again, and sleep again, and cook a dinner and
+help to eat it....  You have made capital use of your
+time!...  For we came here on the twenty-first of August,
+and this is the fifth of October.  We have been shut
+up in a garden, as you say yourself, for more than six
+weeks!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Can it be possible?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked at him intently and realized his earnestness.
+He answered with a glow of pride in his work:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Fact!  And in all the time you have never seen a
+newspaper or asked a question about the War.  Even when you
+have heard the great guns firing from the forts below
+Paris&mdash;Issy and Vanves and Montrouge and the rest&mdash;you never
+said a word that showed you noticed....  Do you know
+why?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His voice wavered exultantly.  She looked at him and
+slightly shook her head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Because I willed you to.  By George! there are times
+when I believe that even yet I'd make a doctor.  Mental
+suggestion was the line I took with you...."  He rubbed
+his hands.  "Not that I could have done anything without
+the help of Madame Potier&mdash;first-class little woman!&mdash;regular
+brick that she is!...  You see, your brain had sucked
+up all the trouble it was capable of holding.  You wanted
+rest....  Well, you've had it, thank God!  Night after
+night I've walked up and down, backward and forward, on
+the lawn, just as you saw me doing last night, saying:
+'Sleep!  Forget!  You have my orders to!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tone of mastery thrilled, even while the muscles of
+her mouth twitched with repressed laughter.  He was
+beautiful in her eyes as he leaned forward smiling at her.
+She said, repressing her tears, and concealing her
+admiration:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But last night you did not say 'Sleep!' but something
+else, Monsieur...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a swift change in him, telling her that for
+once he was not listening.  His eyes were alert, his ear
+eagerly drank in a sound composed of many sounds that
+grew louder as they came more near.  Now the whole room
+was full of the trampling of horses and the fainter clink of
+spur and scabbard and bridle....  Cavalry were passing
+up one of the great avenues south of the Rue de Provence&mdash;not
+the Avenue of St. Cloud&mdash;probably the Rue des
+Chantiers&mdash;there was a distant roar of cheers....  Then in
+one little oasis of silence came the rolling of carriages, and
+then the walls shivered with the roaring of lusty lungs:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Hoch der König!  Hoch der Kronprinz!</i>"&mdash;and the
+shouts were drowned in a great burst of martial music, and
+the trampling of men and horses, mingled with the beat of
+drums and the blare of trumpets, rolled on tumultuously
+again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The blood ebbed from Juliette's cheeks and lips to her
+heart as she listened.  Then the double doors of the dining
+room were butted open with the corner of a wooden coffee
+tray, and Madame Potier appeared with a steaming pot
+and two cups.  She was pale round the hectic patches that
+blazed in her thin face.  Her black eyes leaped to Breagh's
+with an eager question in them ... "<i>Have you told her?</i>"
+... and he answered with an almost imperceptible shake
+of the head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then before either of them knew, Juliette had risen.  She
+went to the little woman and kissed her on the cheek.  She
+said, taking one of the gnarled work-worn hands in one of
+hers and holding out the other to Carolan:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Dear friends, to whom I owe so much, tell me now
+what in your great compassion you have kept from me.
+For I think the time has come when I must hear!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The time had come, indeed, with the ring of Prussian
+cavalry hoofs upon the ancient cobblestones, and the roll
+of the carriages that came with them.  And before either
+of those the girl addressed could speak in answer, the
+resonant sound of a Prussian trumpet pierced their silence:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Clear the way!  Clear the way!  Here comes the King!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And followed a cry, pitiful as the wail of a hare in a gin
+trap: "Those are Prussians!" ... and another scream,
+shrill and thin and clear....  Then a crash!...  Madame
+Potier had dropped her coffee tray....  Before the
+hot steam of the spilled liquid rose up from the Tessier
+carpet, the small hand Breagh had clasped was suddenly,
+violently snatched from him.  He sprang to his feet, but
+Madame Potier had been quicker than he.  She had caught
+the girl round the waist, and now wrestled with her....
+The silent, desperate strife was horrible.  The slender
+black-clad figure writhed for freedom like a snake....
+Then all at once the life seemed to go out of it....  They
+carried her to the sofa and laid her down....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur should have told her!" Madame Potier said
+angrily.  "Why leave it to the Prussians to break the
+news?..."  Tears were running down her cheeks as she
+unfastened the girl's dress, and rubbed the limp hands,
+while Breagh dropped Cognac between the little teeth, a
+drop or two at a time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And presently Juliette was looking at them, not wildly,
+and Madame Potier was answering: "It was nothing!...
+Madame was startled into an attack of faintness when
+I was so clumsy as to drop the coffee tray.  Now I shall go
+and get more, and Monsieur will talk quietly to Madame
+as she lies there.  She must hear everything that we have
+kept from her....  Yes, yes! that is quite understood!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she clumped away, with a backward glance of disdain
+directed at the masculine boggler, and Breagh drew a
+chair near the sofa where his wan Infanta lay, and sat
+down and told her all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Red sunset flooded the autumn garden as he talked.  Not
+a leaf stirred, hardly a bird uttered a nooning note.  But
+the strange sound that had haunted not only the ears of
+Juliette went on incessantly.  It was the sighing and
+whispering and muttering of the vast crowds that had filled the
+Rue des Chantiers behind the lines of troops to witness
+the entrance of the conquerors, and now gorged the great
+Place of the Prefecture (above whose entrance flaunted
+the standard of the Hohenzollerns)&mdash;filled the upper end
+of the Avenue de Paris&mdash;and surged over the vast expanse
+of the Place d'Armes, beating in black and restless human
+waves against the lofty blue and golden railings of the
+Royal Château, above whose golden dome floated the
+black-and-white Prussian Standard and the white Flag with the
+red Geneva Cross.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We know what he had to tell her....  The false step of
+MacMahon, the unavailing attempt of Bazaine to break out
+of Metz, the conflict on the Meuse, ending in defeat and
+the loss of 7,000 prisoners with guns and transport.  The
+flight and escape of the Emperor to the fortress city of
+Sedan....  The battle between the ill-led, unfed, dispirited
+French forces and the Three Armies.  The taking of 20,000
+French prisoners, the wound of MacMahon, leading to his
+resignation of the chief command into the hands of General
+Wimpffen, summoned from his command in Algeria in time
+to capitulate.  The pitiable surrender of the Emperor's
+sword to the King of Prussia.  His transport into Belgium
+as a prisoner of War.  The flight of the Empress from the
+Tuileries.  The formation at Paris of the New Government
+of National Defense.  The entry of the King of Prussia
+into Rheims, and the arrival of the First and Third Armies
+in force before Paris.  The fight upon the heights of
+Châtillon&mdash;the defeat of Ducrot by a Bavarian Division&mdash;the
+German advance upon Nemours and Pitiviers&mdash;the investment
+of the capital, now encircled with an iron ring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For three days the Crown Prince had been established
+with his Staff at the Prefecture.  This day had seen
+the Great Headquarters of the Prussian King removed
+to Versailles, from Baron Rothschild's Castle of
+Ferrières....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Truly it had been time to break the news to Juliette.
+She lay still during the recital, only quivering now and
+then.  She drank the coffee when Madame Potier brought
+it, and thanked the faithful soul affectionately.  When the
+gas lamps were lighted, and the shutters shut, she bade
+P. C. Breagh good night in a faint whisper, and gave him
+both hands, saying with a liquid glance:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Thank you, my friend!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He whispered as he kissed the little fingers:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You will sleep to-night, will you not?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she nodded in assent.  But when he had gone to
+his bed at the cottage, the old terrible thoughts came
+crowding back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That electrifying blast of glorious sound from the silver
+instrument of the Great Staff trumpeter had wakened and
+brought them like hornets buzzing and stinging about her
+ears....  She longed for her friend, but he had departed.
+And the loneliness was too terrible to bear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She caught up a little white shawl that she had brought
+with her, and often wore when walking in the garden upon
+chilly evenings, or going to Mass in the early mornings,
+before the sunshine had warmed the air.  One turn of the
+wrist draped it faultlessly about her head and body.  Thus
+shielded, she went into the hall, and laid her hand upon the
+lock of the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As she did so, cavalry horses ridden at a sharp trot came
+clattering down the cobbled street.  They were pulled up
+outside the Tessier mansion.  There was an imperious tug
+at the gate bell.  She waited for the opening of the kitchen
+door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then she heard it unlocked, and the clatter of Madame
+Potier's clogs upon the terrace.  <i>Klop&mdash;klop&mdash;klop!</i> they
+crossed the leads, descended the three steps that led to the
+gravel walk, and went on to the iron gate.  It was locked,
+as always, in the absence of Madame Tessier.  Presently
+the keys clashed, the lock scrooped back from the mortise,
+and the hinges uttered a protesting cry....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then the harsh tones of a man, speaking French with a
+frightful German accent, turned the listening girl to ice.
+There was an exclamation from Madame Potier, a rejoinder
+in the stranger's gutturals.  A horse trampled.  The rough
+voice of the rider swore at the brute in German.  Then
+there was a clatter of boots upon the pavement, with a
+great clinking of spurs and scabbard, and the now-dismounted
+rider said in his infamous French jargon:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Go you before and open!  His Excellency is coming in!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Terrified, Madame Potier obeyed ... scuttling across
+the terrace like a frightened beetle.  Juliette, paralyzed
+with horror, heard the heavy spurred footsteps crunch and
+jingle up the gravel walk and ascend the steps to the hall
+door.  Almost directly, as little Madame Potier darted
+panting up the stairs from the kitchen, the hall doorbell
+clanged a deafening peal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A carriage had rolled down the Rue de Provence, and
+stopped before the smaller gate, ere the doorbell's iron
+echoes had ceased shouting through the house of the
+Tessiers.  There were other voices at the gate, other footsteps
+upon the gravel....  They mounted the steps.  A
+resonant, unforgotten voice said to the ringer in German:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Herr Intendant General may spare himself the
+trouble....  I will interview the people of the house
+myself!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The person addressed replied in the harsh tones that
+had terrified Madame Potier:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But supposing Your Excellency be met with some insolence?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The resonant voice answered with a smile in it: "In
+that case, Herr Intendant General, my Excellency will take
+the risk.  There are only women in the house, and should
+they offer violence, I have Count Hatzfeldt and Count
+Bismarck-Böhlen here!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a laugh&mdash;gay, mellow, and careless&mdash;and a
+young man's voice answered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your Excellency may safely rely on our protection!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was another laugh.  Under cover of it, Madame
+Potier hissed into the head folds of the white shawl:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They have quartered the Prussian Chancellor and the
+Foreign Office upon us.  That is what the sacred brute in
+the big boots and spectacles shouted, when I went down
+to open the front gate....  What is the Prussian Foreign
+Office?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the white folds of the shawl a sibilant whisper
+hissed at her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is a man.  They call him Count Bismarck.  Now
+if you love me, be quiet, and watch and listen.  He shall
+ring the bell with his own hand....  Then I open the
+door!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But, Madame!..." whispered the distracted caretaker.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No verbal answer....  The white shawl pulled closer,
+shrouding round the slender form and girlish features.  A
+little hand, firm and unfaltering, ready upon the latch of
+the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Poor Potier whimpered....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madame Charles....  My child! my treasure! for the
+love of Christ and Mary!...  Tell me what you are going
+to do!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bell rang again, with a new and imperious hand
+upon it.  She well knew whose was the hand.  And the
+snow-water in her veins became liquid fire.  She threw
+open the hall door and stepped back to admit the Man of
+Iron.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stood upon the doorsteps like the house's master, a
+huge dominating figure, dressed as she had seen him on
+the battlefield of Gravelotte, in his high black,
+pewter-buttoned military frock and white peaked Cuirassier cap,
+riding cords, and great black jack-boots with long steel
+spurs.  He was powdered with dust as a man newly come
+off a journey, though his boots were clean, for he had
+driven in a carriage from Ferriéres.  Upon the step below
+him stood Count Hatzfeldt, his First Secretary, a man of
+thirty, tall, broad-shouldered, and <i>débonnaire</i>, wearing, as
+did Bismarck-Böhlen, the semi-military Foreign Office
+undress.  The lean trap-jawed personage in a dark uniform
+with velvet facings, whom we must recognize as the Intendant
+General, waited in the background, glaring through
+his spectacles at the tardy portress in the white shawl, and
+the peaked face and flaring black eyes of little Madame
+Potier, who stood beside her mistress as ready to spit
+and scratch for her sake as a pussy cat to defend its
+young.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no pause.  The dominating figure stepped
+into the hall.  His great Cuirassier sword clanked on the
+threshold.  He touched the peak of his cap with his bare
+right hand, and said, looking down from his great height
+upon the women:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"This is the house of the Famille Tessier?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the women, who was swaddled in a white shawl,
+dropped him a stiff little middle-class reverence.  Behind
+her, the other bobbed a serving woman's curtsy.  He went
+on, addressing White Shawl as the superior:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"This house, Madame, has been selected as the official
+residence of the Prussian Foreign Office.  We shall pay
+you an adequate sum for our accommodation, and remain
+here some weeks ... possibly three."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He glanced at Hatzfeldt, and said with a flicker of
+sardonic humor playing in his heavy blue eyes, and about the
+corners of the deeply cut mouth that was masked by the
+heavy iron-gray mustache:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Though the actual duration of the visit depends&mdash;not
+upon ourselves&mdash;but upon the decision of the United
+German Powers, and the position which they shall decide to
+take up with regard to Conditions of Peace.  We are not
+the invited guests of France, whose stay can be cut short
+because our manners do not prepossess our hostess.  We
+came because we thought it advisable ...  we will go when
+it is convenient to depart!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If Jules Faure could hear Your Excellency!..." said
+Bismarck-Böhlen, grinning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He would cast up his fine eyes more tragically than he
+did at Ferrières," said Hatzfeldt, "when the three words,
+'<i>Forfeiture of Territory</i>,' drew from them so many
+patriotic tears...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He is a weeper," said the Minister, pulling off his left
+glove, "and Wimpffen was a posturer, with his '<i>Moi, soldat
+de l'Armée Français</i>'&mdash;and the Duke of FitzJames is a
+manufacturer of bugaboos....  Our German caricaturists
+should draw him as a pavement artist, holding the hat
+beside a horrible red-and-yellow chalk picture of our
+atrocious cruelties in Bazeilles."
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap64"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LXIV
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+We know that Bazeilles had been on the thirty-first of
+August a town of 2,000 inhabitants, mostly weavers, gathered
+about the ancient château that sheltered the boyhood
+of the great Turenne.  Bazeilles had not observed the
+Law of the Neutrality of the non-combatant.  The village
+had formed the extreme right of the French position on the
+day of the Battle of Sedan.  Lebrun's Corps had occupied
+it, and its inhabitants had been seized with the fighting
+fever, and had helped to hold back a Bavarian Division for
+nearly six hours.  Elderly civilians armed with antiquated
+rifles had displayed desperate bravery.  One old woman,
+possessed of an ancient horse pistol, is said to have shot
+down three of the enemy.  The men, their women and
+children, were now cinders mixed with heaps of calcined
+brickbats.  The grim lesson had been taught very
+thoroughly.  Bazeilles served as an object-lesson on Prussian
+methods throughout the remainder of the War.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>I will remember Bazeilles!</i>" had flashed through the
+young head that was swaddled in white woolen.  "<i>My
+friend shall not forget to tell me what was done there!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the imperious hand of the Minister was upon the
+door of the billiard room.  She saw it summarily thrown
+open.  He went in, followed by Hatzfeldt, Bismarck-Böhlen
+at their heels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Capital!" he said to them.  "We will have this arranged
+as a Bureau for the Councilors, the dispatch secretaries,
+and the cipherers.  What is this?"  He went to the
+glass door that led into the winter garden, looked through,
+and commented: "One could smoke a cigar here after
+dinner in wet weather; very well, it seems to me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The owner of the quick ears sheltered by the shawl of
+white woolen understood but little German, as she had
+previously said to her absent comrade.  But what slight
+lore she had in the abhorred tongue had been gained in
+conversation with a Prussian mistress.  She found that,
+thanks to the enemy's clear, melodious diction, she had no
+great difficulty in comprehending the substance of what
+he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His long heavy strides carried him next into the drawing-room,
+that apartment destined to become famous in history
+as the seat of the various negotiations which led to the
+treaties with the States of South Germany, the proclamation
+of the King of Prussia as German Emperor, and later,
+to the surrender of the City of Paris, and the settlement of
+the Conditions of Peace.  The simply furnished, medium-sized
+room boasted a few mediocre oil paintings, a cottage
+piano, a sofa, some easy-chairs, and wall mirrors framed in
+handsomely wrought ormolu.  Upon a little table against
+the wall stood an old-world timepiece, surmounted by a
+bronze figure with fiendish attributes, which engaged his
+attention curiously.  His great laugh burst out, as he
+contemplated the grotesque.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Now," he said, his voice still shaken by amusement,
+"if that malignant little demon be a model of the guardian
+spirit of the Famille Tessier, the Socialists and Ultramontane
+will be of opinion that I have come to the right
+shop!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young men laughed at the jest uproariously.  He
+joined them, crushing down their lighter merriment with
+a mirthful giant's thunderous "Ha, ha!..."  Then the
+double doors of the drawing-room opened.  He came out
+with his followers into the hall place, demanding of little
+Madame Potier in fluent French whether gas was laid on in
+the rooms above:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I think it probable, for you are a luxurious people in
+your habits, even down to the <i>bourgeoisie</i> and peasantry of
+France.  At home, I am accustomed to go to bed with a
+candle, and blow it out when I get between the sheets.  But
+here in Gallia I shall do as the Gauls!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There is gas in the bedrooms, Monseigneur!" shrilled
+White Shawl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So!"  He looked down from his great height upon the
+speaker.  She caught up a box of matches from the hall
+table and thrust it into Madame Potier's shaking hand....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Go up quickly.  Light the gas in the bedrooms.
+Monseigneur wishes to examine them all!"  She added in her
+shrill voice: "They are in use at the moment, but can be
+vacated and got ready for the occupation of Monseigneur
+in something less than half an hour!"  She broke off to
+shriek to the ascending Madame Potier....  "Quicker,
+Jeannette!  Thou art always as slow as a tortoise!...  But
+I come myself!..."  And with a halting, shuffling
+gait which made Count Bismarck-Böhlen grin, and even
+the polished Hatzfeldt put up his eyeglass, she jerked
+across the beeswaxed parquet of the hall, and mounted the
+gray-and-red drugget-covered stairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What virtue lies in contrasts!  When Juliette de Bayard
+walked, you learned what poetry could be in simple motion.
+Her skirts had a rhythmic swing and flow.  Those little
+feet of hers made twenty steps to the stride of an ordinary
+English girl.  At Mass, when folded in her white School
+veil, she advanced to the Communion rail to receive the
+Blessed Sacrament, she swam, she rocked as though
+upborne on waves of buoyant ether.  Watching her, you
+would have said that thus Our Lady must have glided
+onward, bearing the gracious burden of her Divine Child.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This peacock-voiced creature who hid under a white
+shawl what the men who sneered at her dimly felt must
+be a countenance ugly to repulsiveness, had one shoulder
+thrust upward and forward, reaching nearly to the ear on
+that side....  A palpable curvature of the spine caused
+the curious gait, and possibly to this deformity might be
+attributed the voice that was so harsh, raucous, and
+torturing to the ear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Do not laugh....  It is pitiable rather than ridiculous,"
+she heard her enemy say, in his own tongue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hot wrath, fulminating indignation, mingled in Juliette
+with the pride of the comedian who has made an effective
+exit....  To be pitied by him, and for a second time!
+That liquid flame that circulated through her veins,
+illuminated her brain in its every cell and convolution.  By its
+lurid light she saw her own intention in all its ugliness.
+Was she to blame, who had fled from this her destiny?  Had
+she sought for her vengeance?  Of his own will had he not
+come, this world-shaking Colossus, to find his Fate waiting
+for him?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Breagh.  What of her promise to her comrade?
+The thought was a knife-keen stab compelling a shriek.
+She stifled it in the folds of the shawl, bent down her head,
+and with an exaggeration of the grotesque gait, scuttled
+upstairs with the agility of an escaping spider, provoking
+a guffaw from the Twopenny Roué, a laugh from the well-bred
+Hatzfeldt, even a deep chuckle from the Enemy.  Let
+him laugh!  As she fled from room to room, and the gas-jets
+leaped up flaring and shrieking under her small, fierce
+hand, like little Furies and Vengeances, and tell-tale
+articles of feminine attire and use were caught up and thrust
+into a small portmanteau, she bade him laugh as much as he
+would.  As she opened a cupboard by the chimney-piece
+where Madame Tessier had kept medicine and cosmetics,
+and took from the shelf a flat-topped, wide-mouthed
+chemist's vial, and thrust it within her dress, deep into her
+bosom, she told herself that France should laugh before
+long!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile, her enemy and France's waited, chatting in
+the hall at the foot of the stair.  When she descended, he
+went up with Hatzfeldt and Bismarck-Böhlen, and made a
+brief inspection of the rooms.  His own choice was made
+with the least delay possible.  Opening from the square,
+skylighted landing at the head of the main staircase, was
+a room, some ten paces long and seven broad, lighted by
+one window on the right side of the main front, looking
+toward the stables, and commanding a view of the pleasance
+and shrubbery from two more windows in the eastward
+wall.  This apartment, which was partly above the
+dining room, and had been occupied by Madame Charles
+Tessier, the Minister appropriated to his own use.  A second
+room, communicating with this, and looking on the pleasance,
+and boasting also a glass window door leading out
+upon the iron bridge topping the conservatory on the south
+side, he set apart for Bismarck-Böhlen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A somewhat better-furnished room looking upon the
+Rue de Provence would serve, as would the drawing-room
+upon the ground floor, for the reception of strangers and
+guests.  Privy Councilor Abeken would occupy the bedroom
+next to this, also with an outlook upon the Rue de
+Provence.  A tiny cell near the back stairs, only big enough
+to hold a bed, chest of drawers, and washstand, was set
+apart for Secretary Bolsing.  Upon the second floor
+Dr. Busch or Privy Councilor Bucher would occupy the best
+bedroom, the two Prussian body servants from the
+Wilhelm-Strasse sleeping in the attic overhead.  The two
+remaining chambers on the second floor&mdash;small, angular,
+ill-ventilated places&mdash;the women of the house were free to
+move into, and retain, if they desired.  "Only in that
+case," said the masterful voice, "they must contribute their
+services toward keeping the house in order.  Where I
+live, there must be no idlers.  That is understood!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Below in the hall, White Shawl and Madame Potier
+heard his strong laugh echoing amid the empty chambers
+and his heavy stride shaking the rafters above their heads.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am pleased with my room, though it has a window
+opening toward the stables, where the detachment of troops
+supplying the sentries will be quartered for the present,
+with my orderly and coachman and the two grooms.  But
+common sights do not annoy me, any more than common
+noises, and there are two other windows overlooking the
+park.  The trees in their autumn coloring will remind me
+of my own woodlands at home.  Altogether the place has
+been chosen intelligently.  A more roomy and better-furnished
+house might afford spiteful people an excuse to
+accuse the Chancellor of the Confederated States of
+luxury&mdash;the love of which has never been a besetting sin of mine.
+True, I must have a table supplied well, punctually, and
+generously....  That is always an understood thing.  A
+<i>sine qua non</i>, in fact....  The King is quite aware of this....
+I told him again yesterday, ... '<i>Sire, I must be fed
+properly if I am to make proper terms of peace!</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His great laugh sounded again as he came trampling
+downstairs, bringing with him a masculine perfume of
+Russian leather and cigars of super-excellent quality.  And
+Hatzfeldt was saying in his languid, well-bred accents:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"With Your Excellency's permission, I will now take
+leave of you&mdash;I must go and see the place where I am
+quartered.  It is at No. 25, Avenue St. Cloud."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So, then....  A pretty good distance from the Chancellor
+of the Confederation, should he require at some
+unusual hour the services of his First Secretary....  You
+will have to find the Count more convenient lodgings."  The
+Minister turned to the Intendant General, who barked:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"At Your Excellency's honorable orders, the change
+shall be immediately made!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Oh, for Heaven's sake, not to-night!" expostulated
+Hatzfeldt, with graceful peevishness.  "I am horribly done
+up with the heat and the dust we had on our way here.
+Why should the King have dragged us to Choissy-le-Roi,
+in order to see the troops?  Cannot he see troops every
+hour of his existence?  Ah, by the way!  Did Your Excellency
+notice that at Villeneuve St. George the bridge of
+boats had been blown up?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister shrugged:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Who can understand this destructive mania?  It is a
+national disease peculiar to the French.  Since the beginning
+of the war, they have destroyed bridges and railways
+to the tune of millions&mdash;for the sheer pleasure, one would
+suppose, of building them up again.  Well, good night!"  He
+held out his hand pleasantly to Hatzfeldt.  "Good
+night to you, Herr Intendant General!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Intendant saluted stiffly and barked in his peculiar
+style:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I wish a very good night to Your Excellency!"  Then
+he clanked down the steps after Hatzfeldt and over the
+gravel walk to the front gate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I know what Count Paul has it in his mind to do,"
+chuckled Bismarck-Böhlen, looking after them.  "He will
+take a bath and dine at the Hôtel des Réservoirs."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It would not be a bad plan to follow his example," said
+the Minister, "since some of the Foreign Office <i>fourgons</i>
+may be late in getting here.  Unless Madame Tessier is
+prepared to supply us with a dinner upon the spur of the
+call?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He added:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Come, shut the hall door.  I see they have already
+placed sentries.  The grooms and Niederstedt will bring
+in the luggage by the back door and up the servants'
+staircase."  He continued as Bismarck-Böhlen obeyed: "They
+are particular about such matters in French houses, where
+there is so much wax polishing of the floors and woodwork.
+Where are the women? ... There were two.  A <i>bonne</i> and
+her mistress, the proprietress...."  His powerful glance
+fell upon them standing near the doorway of the dining-room.
+He motioned them to enter, and followed them in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madame Tessier!" he began, taking as by right the
+chair at the head of the long shining dinner table, upon
+which the tapestry cloth had not yet been replaced.  He
+looked at White Shawl.  The shrill voice cackled:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madame Tessier is in Belgium....  I am Madame
+Charles Tessier, the wife of Monsieur, her son!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said in his excellent French, laying on the table the
+flat white Cuirassier cap he had removed on entering:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I congratulate M. Tessier!  Can your servant cook,
+Madame?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The shrill voice responded:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monseigneur must be judge of that when he has tried
+her dishes.  She does her best&mdash;the excellent Jeannette!  But
+if Monseigneur is to be served as befits his state and
+consequence ... I should prefer to cook for him myself!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>So!</i>"  He leaned one elbow on the table, meditatively
+regarding the speaker, and the lambent blue flame of humor
+danced and flickered in his eyes: "Since we do not require
+you and your domestic to leave the house&mdash;only to confine
+yourselves to the two smaller bedrooms on the second floor&mdash;it
+may be as well that you should assist to a degree in
+the kitchen....  But for all that does not require women
+we have our servants&mdash;you understand?  And the <i>chef</i>
+attached to the service of the Prussian Chancellery is
+extremely competent.  He is&mdash;rather a personage in his
+way!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bismarck-Böhlen sniggered in his characteristic fashion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Shawl shrilled, gesticulating with a hand that
+resembled a claw:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If your Prussian cooks better than I do&mdash;or even the
+<i>chef</i> of our <i>gredin</i> of an Emperor, he may call me a
+Bonapartist and I will not slap his face!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister drew his well-shaped sunbrowned hand over
+his mustache, perhaps to hide a smile at the epithet.
+He asked with his powerful glance intent upon Madame
+Charles Tessier:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So, then, you are not a lover of the Bonapartes?  What
+is your party?  Are you Republican or Monarchist?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shrieked with raucous energy:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am a patriot, and a citizeness of the French Republic!
+All my life I have execrated the Bonapartes.  See you
+well&mdash;I do not love Prussians!...  But you have humiliated
+and dethroned this sacred pig of a Napoleon....  And for
+that I could kiss the hand that received his sword!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The person to whom the shrill tirade was addressed
+listened with imperturbability, although Bismarck-Böhlen,
+standing on the other side of the table, between the
+windows, involuntarily clapped his hands to his sorely
+sacrificed ears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now the Minister said in his suavest French accents:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The hand was not mine, Madame, I beg to assure you,
+but that of the King of Prussia, who is hardly likely to
+pay us a visit here....  Should His Majesty elect to do so,
+your ambition may be partially gratified.  You will see
+the monarch who has paid your Imperial bugbear so
+thoroughly well in his own coin."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here Bismarck-Böhlen broke in....  "Excellency! ... talking
+of coin ... you told me to remind you of what
+happened the other day...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah, so I did!" said he.  "It is a mere coincidence, but
+worth remembering....  Upon leaving the weaver's hovel,
+near the village of Donchery, outside which you and Leverstrom
+waited while I discussed the terms of the capitulation
+with Napoleon in a garret containing a table, a bed,
+and two rush-bottomed chairs, the French Emperor
+presented five pieces of gold to the weaver, which Leverstrom
+afterward told me he vainly endeavored to buy of the man.
+His stupidity or the weaver's, we will not say now which
+was the greater!...  But the coins displayed in unbroken
+sequence&mdash;the portraits of five rulers of France.  There
+was Napoleon I., imperially wreathed, on a fine fat piece of
+1820; a Louis XVIII., inane and aristocratic; a Charles X.,
+with the knob in his nose; a Louis Philippe, looking like a
+bourgeois, and Napoleon III., Emperor of Ready-Made
+Plebiscites...."  He broke off to say: "And now, Madame,
+what news of this dinner?  Can you supply it, or
+must we go elsewhere?  Decide.  I am always an economist
+of time!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the penetrating glance shaded by the shaggy eyebrows
+of the Minister questioned the meager peaked countenance
+of which merely a wedge showed between the curtaining
+folds of the white shawl....  Lover of good cheer
+as he was, he was perhaps asking himself whether a
+creature so mean and pinched-looking could set before him the
+nourishing, well-flavored, well-cooked dishes, calculated to
+restore energy to his giant's frame.  She was studying the
+face revealed in the circle of light cast downward by the
+shaded lamps of the gasalier above the dinner table, half
+loathing, half fascinated by the tremendous personality
+now revealed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How much the published portraits of the man lacked, she
+realized now, clearly.  What mental and physical power,
+and force, and energy were indicated in the lines of the
+great domed skull and the astonishing frontal development.
+What audacious courage and ironic humor were in the
+regard of the full blue eyes that rested lightly upon her
+own insignificance....  What deeply cut, pugnacious
+nostrils he had; what a long stern upper lip the full gray
+mustache curtained!  He had a cleft in his chin that reminded
+her of a friend she loved....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This last and the other characteristics of the visage that
+confronted her were fuel to her roaring furnace of hate.  A
+baleful light blazed in the eyes she curtained from him.
+Her heart seemed a goblet brimmed with intoxicating,
+poisoned wine.  And then a little thing tamed the snake in
+her.  It drew in its quivering, forked tongue, covered the
+fangs that oozed with venom, lowered its hooded head, and
+sank down, palpitating among its cold and scaly coils.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With all its power, the profound weariness of his face
+had suddenly come home to and arrested her.  He looked,
+as was indeed the fact, like a man who had not known a
+good night's rest for weeks.  There were sagging pouches
+of exhaustion under the masterful eyes, and the lines about
+the forehead and mouth and jaws were deeply trenched
+with fatigue and anxiety.  With pain, too, for he was
+suffering from facial neuralgia brought on by nervous strain
+and overexposure, and divers galls and blisters, the result
+of days spent in the saddle by an elderly heavy-weight.
+Now he yawned and leaned back in his creaking chair, and
+suddenly was no despot helmed with terrors, armed with
+power, mantled with ruthlessness, but a man fagged out,
+and tired and hungry, athirst for rest and the comforts of
+home.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had a wife living, she knew, and sons serving in the
+Prussian Army.  Perhaps he had a daughter who loved
+him, too....  Perhaps she was thinking of him ... praying
+for his return in safety....  Oh, God!...  The dreadful
+thought was not to be tolerated....  It must be driven
+away ... banished from the mind, if one was to carry out
+the plan....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All these thoughts volted through the brain under the
+white shawl in the passing of an instant.  The next, she
+heard the shrill voice say:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is for Monseigneur to decide!...  There is no difficulty
+about dinner&mdash;that is, provided Monseigneur can eat
+a good soup of artichokes made with cream!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His startlingly blue eyes laughed.  He acquiesced,
+seeming to snuff the air with his deeply cut nostrils.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There is nothing better than puree of artichokes&mdash;provided
+it serves as the prelude to a solid, sustaining, and
+well-cooked meal."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Shawl shrilled:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There might follow a six-pound trout, boiled, with
+sauce <i>à la Tartare</i>....  One came in this afternoon, fresh
+to a miracle, a fish from the Gauche near Montreuil."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said to Bismarck-Böhlen:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The trout of the Cauche are capital eating ... especially
+those caught in the upper part of the stream, a mile
+below Parenty.  What else, Madame?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She proclaimed in the raucous voice that made
+Bismarck-Böhlen grimace and shudder:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A dish of cutlets and a <i>ragoût</i> of partridges with little
+cabbages.  It is now upon the fire, simmering in the
+casserole&mdash;I meant it for next day!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Like the trout, it had been designed for P. C. Breagh's
+delectation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She added:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And there are a cold ham, a peach tart, and a jelly of
+Maraschino, and I could toss up a savory omelette to
+follow the sweet dishes.  As for dessert ... we have pears
+and plums from the garden....  But, Monseigneur..."  It
+was greed that made the woman's strange eyes glitter so
+intolerably&mdash;"I shall be well paid for the excellent food
+and all my trouble, shall I not, Monseigneur? ... In good
+French money&mdash;not in Prussian notes?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Under the heavy mustache he showed his sound, even
+teeth in a laugh of enjoyment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"In good French money.  You have my promise.  So&mdash;you
+do not like our Prussian notes?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Shawl screamed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They are good where they come from, it may be,
+Monseigneur!...  But here&mdash;the people would as soon take
+dead leaves for pay!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He thrust his hand in his breeches pocket, pulled out a
+gold Napoleon, and threw it ringing on the shining table.
+Her eyes snapped.  The little clawlike hand darted from
+the folds of the enveloping white shawl and pounced on the
+gold piece.  She curtsied like an elder-pith puppet to the
+great figure sitting at the table head, and with the extraordinary
+gait that combined a hitch, twist, and shuffle, hobbled
+out of the room, shrilling as the door closed behind
+her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Jeannette!  Jeannette!  Monseigneur will dine here!
+Make you up the kitchen fire!  I will go myself to the
+cellar and get the fruit....  And the wine ... Monseigneur
+will certainly require some wine!  Later on you must help
+me get ready the bedrooms.  Put out sheets and pillow
+cases to air!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bismarck-Böhlen was saying, as he followed his great
+relative into the drawing-room, and extended himself upon
+the green plush sofa, as the Minister selected the largest
+armchair, and lighted one of his huge cigars:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What a woman!  What a voice!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other laughed through the fragrant smoke rings:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You could say no more and no less of an operatic <i>diva</i>,
+had you recently fallen a victim to her charms.  My
+landlady pleases me.  My tastes, as you know, are somewhat
+peculiar....  But you need not feel anxious on the
+Countess's behalf.  My sentiments in this instance are
+highly platonic."  He added, smoking and speaking almost
+dreamily: "If in cookery Madame's performance equals
+her promise, what with trout, and partridges <i>aux petit
+choux</i>&mdash;cold ham to fall back on, and a savory omelette, we
+ought not to do badly at all!...  With half a dozen
+bottles of that champagne we brought from Rheims, and a
+little of the Epernay..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He added, yawning and stretching his great limbs: "I
+am not usually poetical, but I have a fancy with regard to
+the deep blue, green-fleshed grapes of the country, that
+their color affects the river into which the hillside
+vineyards drain.  The Marne water is as brilliant and green
+as though it were made of melted emeralds.  And the must
+from those grapes yields the best champagne of Rheims
+and Epernay...."  He yawned again and went on:
+"There is something in surroundings!  In this house I feel
+that I can work comfortably.  The view of old trees, and
+bushes and flower beds from the room I have chosen as a
+bedroom and study will make one feel almost at home.  Two
+of my servants shall sleep upstairs in the attics&mdash;of which
+there are several, and my coachman Niederstedt&mdash;who was
+my porter at the Wilhelm Strasse, shall have a shakedown
+somewhere belowstairs.  He is as strong as Goliath and as
+sharp as a needle.  An unusual combination of qualities,
+because giants are supposed by little people to be
+dull-witted and easily taken in!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sent out a long column of fragrant blue vapor, and
+added, looking at the antique bronze clock surmounted by
+its grotesque bat-winged shape: "A fallacy, since I
+myself belong to the family of the Anakim.  Do you observe
+that my landlady's familiar spirit appears to be winking at
+what I have just said?...  Kobold or gnome, there is a
+family resemblance between his countenance and Madame's.
+I must get her to sell him to me, to carry home to Berlin."
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap65"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LXV
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh had gone back to his bedroom at the gardener's
+cottage, under the garret where had slumbered the
+unlucky Jean Jacques Potier.  The pet rabbits of the young
+man were even now in a hutch in the stable yard, and his
+striped house jacket and the green baize apron he used to
+wear when cleaning the Tessier silver hung on a hook in
+Madame Potier's closet, with the civil integuments of
+M. Potier, now deceased.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was too early to go to bed.  He pulled off jacket and
+waistcoat, filled and lighted the venerable briar root, and,
+sitting on his bed, re-perused by the light of his tallow
+candle a letter in headings, and bearing the date of
+September 23rd, which may be reproduced as written, here:
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+288 GREAT CORAM STREET,
+LONDON, W.C.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"MY DEAR YOUNG MAN!
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  I WAS SURPRISED AND GRATIFIED<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+To Receive Letters dated respectively July 28th, 31st,
+August 4th, 11th, 26th, Sept. 5th, 19th, from:
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  ONE WHO HAD VANISHED<br>
+  SWALLOWED ALIVE<br>
+  BY THE ROARING WHIRLPOOL OF WAR.<br>
+  THEY ARE SLAP-UP AND NO MISTAKE!<br>
+  ROBUST TO BRUTALITY!<br>
+  THEY HAVE BEEN ACCEPTED<br>
+  PUBLISHED AND PAID FOR!<br>
+  BY THREE SUBURBAN EDITORS<br>
+  SIMULTANEOUSLY.<br>
+  A NEW IDEA<br>
+  LONG CHERISHED<br>
+  BY SOLOMON KNEWBIT.<br>
+  A MAN BORN BEFORE HIS AGE!<br>
+  THE BOSS OF A FLEET ST. WEEKLY<br>
+  IS NOW NIBBLING AT<br>
+  'BANG!<br>
+  A DOG'S TALE.'<br>
+  I Have Recovered My Fifteen Shiners And Have<br>
+  Cash in Hand<br>
+  For My Young Swell<br>
+  WHEN HE COMES MARCHING HOME!<br>
+  MARIA SAYS<br>
+  YOU HAD BETTER LOOK SHARP!<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  AN IMPORTANT CLUE<br>
+  DISCOVERED!<br>
+  MYSTERY OF LOST FORTUNE<br>
+  ABOUT TO BE CLEARED UP!<br>
+  ABSCONDING TRUSTEE<br>
+  HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED IN ECCENTRIC LODGER<br>
+  BY THE LANDLADY!<br>
+  PROOFS IN A SEALSKIN WAISTCOAT!<br>
+  BE READY!<br>
+  AT ANY MOMENT THE SUMMONS MAY COME!<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+  I remain,<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;My dear young man,<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Truly and faithfully yours,<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;SOLOMON KNEWBIT."<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+At the bottom of the last page was written in a curious
+up-and-down handwriting:
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"Dr mr Breagh,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"yu kno How mr Knewbit Has a Way of Puting Things
+queer but it Wold be Best For you To Come Home it Realy
+Wold.  There Is a Pore Siner only Wating To maik Amens
+wich Is Mind must alwais Have Bean weak and People
+Puting There Afares in the Hands of sutch a Trustea Can
+ixpect Nothing but Truble, mr Chown of Furnival's Inn
+is To Be let kno If He Gives Warning to Leeve the House
+wich i think never will Drink being got Hold of him to
+sutch an xtent dear mr Breagh you have thought you were
+Pore.  But your Fortune of 7,000 lbs was only took awai
+by the Almighty Goodness to Be Given back again, trust
+and beleive.  I am Dr mr Breagh,
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+  "Respectfully and afexnly<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Maria Ling."<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh folded up the pregnant pages&mdash;owing to
+Mr. Knewbit's professional predilection for capitals and
+spacings, the double letter covered a good number&mdash;and
+put them away and began to think.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Would it not be best that Juliette should return to her
+husband in Belgium, since M. Tessier gave no sign of
+returning?  And whether she agreed with the notion of
+leaving Versailles or not, was it wise of P. C. Breagh to stay?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He loved her.  He would love her always.  There were
+times when her eyes had tenderness in them for him.  Those
+unforgettable days passed together ... those strange and
+dreadful sights seen in common, those perils mutually
+encountered had made a bond between them that might never
+be broken now.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But was it wise to remain near her, breathing her atmosphere,
+drinking in her rare, delicate, exquisite beauty, and
+growing more besotted in his worship of it with every day?
+He knew that it was not.  By the anguish the mere thought
+of leaving her cost him, he realized how deeply the love of
+Juliette Tessier had taken root in his heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His nature, as simple as hers was complex, made it easy
+to hold her blameless in all.  She had not led him on.  They
+had been flung together by force of circumstances.  That
+there was something guileful in her very guilelessness never
+suggested itself to Breagh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gate bell pealed as he sat ruminating, causing him
+nearly to leap out of his skin.  That M. Tessier had
+returned was the possibility that instantly suggested itself.
+He knelt by the window of the low-ceiled cottage chamber
+and leaned out into the deepening dusk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+German voices at the gate, the stamping of horses, and
+the clinking of bridles....  The grinding of heavy boots
+on gravel, the jingle of spurs and the sound of scabbards
+scraping against the ground, rapping against the steps.  A
+pause and a voice he knew said clearly and resonantly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Herr Intendant General may spare himself the
+trouble.  I will interview the people of the house myself!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A loud voice barked out something unintelligible to the
+listener, ending with "insolence."  The voice of the Man
+of Iron returned:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"In that case, my Excellency will take the risk.  There
+are only women in the house, and, should they offer
+violence, I have Count Hatzfeldt and Count Bismarck-Böhlen
+here."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If there were any further words, the listener missed
+them, so deafeningly loud was the drumming of the blood in
+his ears....  The door was opened.  There was a gleam
+of something white in the dusky hail place.  And <i>He</i>
+entered and the other men followed him....  What did they
+there?  What was it best to do?...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now one by one the upper rooms were illuminated.  The
+house door was opening.  Two men came out and descended
+the steps.  One who walked lightly and hummed a tune
+between the whiffs of his cigar passed away, still humming,
+toward the Avenue St. Cloud.  The second who trailed a
+clanking sword gave harsh-voiced orders in the staccato
+tone of Prussian military authority to some persons in the
+street outside, mounted a charger held by an orderly, and
+rode jingling away toward the Boulevard de la Reine.  His
+helmet and his orderly's could be seen bobbing over the top
+of the wall that screened the Tessier house from the Rue
+de Provence, and the dark silhouettes of the heads and
+bodies of men who crowded the double box seats of two
+private luggage vans that waited beyond the <i>porte cochère</i>
+under an escort of cavalry.  No doubt they were <i>fourgons</i>
+sacred to the traveling Foreign Office of the Minister,
+bearing, besides the material of diplomatic labor, a working
+staff of Chancery clerks.  Other vehicles were waiting, and
+videttes of cavalry were posted at each end of the quiet
+street.  The trampling of their horses could be heard
+distinctly, with certain gruff admonitions, presumably
+addressed to pedestrians desirous of using the thoroughfare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now the leaves of the <i>porte cochère</i> were being opened
+and hooked back by the dusky silhouettes of a couple of
+men.  Liveried grooms, because of stray gleams of light
+flashed back from buttons and cockades.  Light thrown by
+the blazing yellow lamps of a large, empty, traveling
+landau that rolled in under the lozenged archway, at the heels
+of a splendid pair.  The horses smelt of dust and sweat,
+and whinnied as they whiffed the stables.  They were driven
+by a huge coachman, and a second carriage followed, piled
+with luggage, and containing three persons, who might have
+been secretaries or body servants, one could not decide.
+Four led horses followed, guided by orderlies of Cuirassiers.
+These did not follow the carriages, as they turned up
+the short avenue and pulled up at the hall door.  The
+orderlies, quite as though they knew the place, rode down
+the longer gravel drive that ended at the gates of the stable
+yard.  One trooper got down and opened the gates, and the
+eager horses were conducted in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Tramp, tramp, tramp!...</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A detachment of infantry, marching down the Rue de
+Provence.  Turning in under the archway of the carriage
+entrance, an eighth company belonging to a regiment
+impossible to specify, because of the enfolding, deepening
+dusk.  They also smelt hot and dusty and tallowy.  A
+subaltern was in command of them, and an under officer.
+They halted, marked time while they posted a sentry at
+each of the gates, then tramped on toward the gardener's
+cottage, and turned into the Tessier stable yard.  They
+were going to bivouac there.  It was all clear and plain and
+simple.  It was as fascinating as a shadow play&mdash;but for
+the tragic element that mingled in.  Now the servants and
+grooms were unloading the luggage from the carriages and
+marvelously deft and noiseless they seemed at the work.  A
+little later&mdash;and both carriages turned from the house, and
+were driven into the stable yard.  You could hear the
+grooms and the big coachman hissing as they unharnessed
+the weary horses, and the horses snorting recognition as
+they scented their stable mates.  And then P. C. Breagh
+became aware that the venerable pair of ponies that drew
+Madame Tessier's basket carriage were not to be permitted
+to remain in their comfortable loose boxes....  He could
+hear the elderly man who groomed and fed and exercised
+the ponies vainly protesting at the summary eviction of
+his charges, and the officer who commanded the detachment
+of infantry&mdash;Green Rifles, as it turned out&mdash;answering his
+complaints:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Find the beasts another stable, and the rent and forage
+will be paid for.  But remember!&mdash;if you grumble, His
+Excellency will have you shot!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the ponies were led away in search of new quarters,
+as the Foreign Office <i>fourgon</i>, with its escort of Uhlans,
+ground over the trampled gravel and pulled up at the
+terrace steps.  One could hear the voice of Madame Potier
+and the creaking of the Venetian shutters.  Then the
+billiard-room windows threw broad stripes of light across the
+terrace toward the wall.  They were going to carry in the
+dispatch boxes and light traveling safes, the copying
+presses and letter books and the rest of the Foreign
+Office impedimenta by way of the long windows....  One
+guessed whose idea that had been.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A dominating, transforming spirit had invaded the quiet
+house in the Rue de Provence, bringing with it this
+purposeful, orderly bustle, this disciplined irruption of
+elements strange and new.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of all these servants and attendants, some would certainly
+take up their abode at the gardener's cottage.  Would
+P. C. Breagh, like the Tessier ponies, be presently turned
+out to seek cover elsewhere?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Juliette....  The thought of her roused all his
+stinging apprehensions.  He told himself that presently,
+when the house should have resumed something of its normal
+quiet, he would steal across the lawn in the shadow of
+the trees and borders, and lie in wait for a glance ... for
+a word....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He would force her to leave at once for Belgium.  She
+must not remain in the house with all these men....  The
+time crept by with maddening slowness as he waited.  Dark
+shadows moved in lighted rooms, passing across the blinded
+windows....  The whole house was flaring with gaslight
+now.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How long....  The slatted Venetian shutters of the
+dining-room were now unbarred and thrown open.  He
+could not see into the room by reason that it faced east
+toward the pleasance, while the window from which he
+watched looked southward, immediately commanding the
+hall door.  But broad beams of light were thrown down the
+steps and across the grass plot.  Tall shadows moved across
+the streaks at intervals.  There was the clatter of china,
+glass, and cutlery, a smell of cooking delectably savory.
+The Man of Iron was dining, and Hate had spread the
+board.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A shudder went through Breagh, and a cold perspiration
+bathed him.  His hair seemed to rise and stiffen upon
+his creeping scalp.  A sound broke from him ... perhaps
+a groan, perhaps an exclamation.  There was a soft step in
+the darkness under his window and a whisper like a sigh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur Breagh....  Do not descend!  It will be
+better that I mount the stairs to you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His first impulse was to reassume the discarded coat and
+waistcoat.  Then he remembered that it was dark.  The
+floor creaked under his stealthy footsteps as he reached the
+landing and crept on stockinged feet down the narrow
+stairway.  She had pushed back the unlatched door and
+passed into the tiny passage.  He met her almost on the
+threshold, felt for and seized her little hands.  How
+feverishly hot they were!  He pressed them as he whispered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I guessed what had happened!...  I know who has
+come here!...  For hours I have been waiting my chance
+to get a word alone with you.  I was just coming when I
+heard you under the window!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She whispered&mdash;and, although her hands burned in his,
+they trembled and her teeth chattered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monseigneur de Bismarck desired to dine here.  Every
+day one does not entertain a guest so noble.  See you well!
+I have cooked for Monseigneur with my own hands a dinner
+worthy of&mdash;himself!  He has devoured like an ogre the
+trout <i>à la sauce Tartare</i>, and the cutlets, and is now
+engaged upon a <i>ragoût</i> of partridges.  When it is time to fry
+the savory omelette that follows, Madame Potier will ring
+the little bell, and I shall run back to the house."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sentence ended in a stifled titter.  An ugly sound
+that sickened Breagh as he heard it.  He pressed the small
+hands, whispering entreatingly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Don't laugh!  You must not laugh.  Go back and get
+what you need for a journey.  Tell Madame Potier I am
+taking you to Belgium.  Back to your husband! ... your
+place is where he is!  You shall not stay here ... you
+must not, I forbid you!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She ceased to laugh and pulled her hands away from his.
+Her answer came: an inflexible utterance to be breathed so
+softly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I remain here, Monsieur, until my husband comes!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He panted the old prayer:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Juliette, for the love of God...!  You don't know
+what terrible danger you are risking!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The reply fanned past his cheek like the velvety wing of
+some great night moth:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur, I remain here, until the arrival of M. Charles
+Tessier.  Although you will do wisely to depart while you
+may&mdash;unseen!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said between his gritted teeth, while the pounding
+of his heart choked him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I shall stay here! ... I decline to be sent away!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She seemed to cogitate.  Then came the mere breath of
+an utterance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Will you swear to be secret and faithful?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said hoarsely:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Juliette, I must first know what you intend to do."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She whispered, and her voice set his blood rushing and
+the fragrance of her maddened him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Stoop!...  Why are you so tall?  Bend down your head!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stooped from his majestic altitude of five feet nine
+inches and a bittock, and two little hands that scorched
+him clasped his neck about.  Light and soft as the touch
+of a flower was the contact of the mouth that whispered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I will tell you....  There is a line of one of your
+English poets&mdash;I forget his name&mdash;but the words run like
+this....
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  "'<i>Throw but a stone&mdash;the giant dies!</i>'<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+He gasped:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I hear you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She whispered, still with her mouth against his cheek:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"See you well!&mdash;for the deliverance of my country, it is
+I who am going to throw that stone!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He panted through the shuddering that had seized him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Do you know what will happen, whether you succeed
+or fail?  You will be led out&mdash;placed with your back
+against&mdash;this wall perhaps&mdash;and shot!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He felt her lips smile against his cheek as she answered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And what of that!  It will be the fortune of War!
+But you..."  She sharply drew her face away, and the
+slight hands thrust him from her.  "I will have you leave
+this place to-night!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A weakness seized him.  He sank down upon his knees
+and stretched his arms out, in the darkness, to the dimly
+outlined silhouette of the slight elfin creature standing on
+the threshold, and the scents of rose and jasmine came to
+him in gusts from the night-veiled garden with another
+fragrance that had no name.  He whispered, driven beyond
+himself:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I will not go!  I love you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I have nothing to do with Love&mdash;who have consecrated
+myself to vengeance.  And your presence here might ruin
+all....  He knows M. Breagh, the Englishman....  Have
+you not told me over and over that once he..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She broke off there.  But the intolerable stab brought
+Breagh to his feet.  He snarled at her through his clenched
+teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He may know Breagh, the Englishman, but he doesn't
+know Jean Jacques Potier.  Tell Madame that I shall wear
+her nephew's clothes and take his name, and do his work
+about the house and garden.  All his duds are in the
+cupboard up in my room there, and his apron and clogs and
+so forth...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Appalling triviality of the sex feminine.  The conjured
+picture evoked a titter.  She breathed, and he was stung
+with rage to know her shaken with irresistible mirth:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But you do not know how to sweep and clean, and how
+can you conceal your very red and curly hair?  French
+servant men have not such hair!  You will be betrayed by
+it, Monsieur!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His blood boiled, and he thundered in a whisper:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I shan't!...  Call it what color you like to-night.  It
+won't be there to-morrow!  There are clippers in the
+cupboard, and I shall have it off."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A distant bell rang.  She was gone like a bat in the
+darkness.  His word was given.  He was pledged now to follow
+her wherever fate should lead.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap66"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LXVI
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Versailles, always a town of martial music.  Royal or
+Imperial fanfares of brass, and welcoming salutes of
+deep-voiced cannon, had been&mdash;since a day early in October,
+when the girdle of iron and steel had closed about
+Paris&mdash;resonant with Prussian bugle calls and throbbing with
+Prussian drums.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From dusk to dawn the electric search ray now mounted
+on the summit of the Arc de Triomphe, as the broad wheeling
+beams from Vanves, Issy, Mont Valérien, and the whole
+ring of forts that guarded the great, magnificent, menaced
+capital, whitened earth and sky in token of the unsleeping
+vigilance of the Parisians, and their ceaseless expectation
+of a German night attack, even as the long indicatory fingers
+of brilliant blue-white light, stretching from the ridge
+of St. Cloud and from the heights of Clamart, from Marly,
+Vanesse, Epinal, Noiseau, Choisy, and Bourget&mdash;no less
+than the formidable battery of big guns on the Place
+d'Armes, with their muzzles placed so as to sweep the
+avenues radiating from the Château&mdash;betokened the invaders'
+anticipations of yet another sortie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah, why had there been no sortie earlier than that
+abortive effort toward Chevilly on the thirtieth of
+September?  There were, at the beginning of the Investment, no
+more than 180,000 German troops of the Crown Prince's
+Army encircling Paris.  Up to the tenth of October what
+a triumphant turning of the tables might have been
+effected by a vigorous sally, effectively carried out!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Huge German forces were engaged in the sieges of Metz
+and Strasburg, Belfort and Soissons, Schelsstadt and
+Verdun.  General von der Tann was engaged with the
+Army of the Loire near Artenay.  The stubborn resistance
+of Orleans kept an Army Corps of the Red Prince extremely
+busy.  The Grand Duke of Mecklenburg, with the right
+wing of the Prussians' covering army south of Paris, was
+actively engaged with the French at Dreux and Le
+Mans.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And there were 55,000 troops of the Line within the
+walls of Paris; there were 105,000 Mobiles&mdash;not fighters to
+be sneezed at.  There were 30,000 National Guards&mdash;perhaps
+too soft in muscle and well-developed in the region of
+the corporation to be very effective&mdash;pitted against such
+seasoned warriors as Schmidt, Klaus, Kraus, and Klein.
+But add to these, 25,000 Marines, Douaniers, Gardes-Champêtres
+and Forestiers, and there you had a force of 485,000
+trained Frenchmen, asking nothing better than to sally out
+by St. Denis, Villejuif, and Charenton, cut the line of
+investment north, clear the blocked road south, effect a
+junction with the Army of the Loire, destroy the Warlock's
+subtlest combinations, promptly raise the Siege of Paris,
+and deliver France from the invader.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What was Trochu, Military Governor of Paris, thinking
+about?  What were MM. Ducrot and Vinoy doing, to delay
+until the garrison and fortress of Strasburg were surrendered,
+until the Capitulation of Metz on the twenty-seventh
+of October, and the fall of Verdun on the seventh of
+November, had released the main Army of the Red Prince for
+the strengthening of that steel and iron girdle that lay
+outside the defiant ring of forts?  The tentative sally of
+the twenty-ninth of November was foredoomed to failure
+from the outset.  No wonder Trochu and his plans
+furnished hungry Parisians with abundant food for mockery,
+when the Specter of Famine brooded over the City on the
+Seine.  Narrow-eyed and tight-lipped, cold, sinister, and
+mysterious, the man was a mere bag of wind, when all was
+said and done.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile, the great bronze muzzle-loaders of the Forts
+of Mont Valérien, Issy, Montrouge, Vanves, and Charenton,
+St. Denis and its twin sisters, roared at intervals throughout
+each day, raining common shell, chain shot, solid ball,
+and shrapnel into the lines of the investing host.  But the
+trenching and battery-making went on steadily; the high-walled
+farmyards and gardens of country houses in the
+environs were being converted into emplacements for artillery
+of the largest caliber.  Already several of Krupp's
+stupendous siege-howitzers, with muzzles cocked at angles
+of forty-five, demonstrated the possibilities of the
+bombardment for which the German Press daily shrieked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Not for the reduction of the military defenses, but to
+produce by the exercise of sheer terror, bodily suffering,
+and destruction of private property, such an effect upon
+the unarmed multitudes&mdash;subjected to a hail of incendiary
+shells within their encircling ring of walls and fortresses&mdash;as
+to compel the chiefs of the Government and garrison to
+come to terms at command of the popular voice.</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus the leader-writers of the <i>Berliner Zeitung</i> and other
+journals&mdash;peaceful-looking, stout men, with full beards and
+short-sighted eyes behind spectacles&mdash;wrote, as though they
+longed to dip their quills in newly shed French blood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is sad, very sad," said the Warlock, vexed for once,
+"that the siege trains conveying more than 100,000 hundred-weights
+of ammunition cannot be brought over a single line
+of rails with sufficient quickness to gratify these excellent
+gentlemen....  Yet for the present we can do no more
+than invest the place and wait for the means of attacking it.
+The process of starving out is, as the mighty fortress of
+Metz has shown, a very slow one.  But as the loud voices of
+one hundred and one guns have already proclaimed to our
+Berliners&mdash;the empty stomach triumphs over the most
+obstinate resistance.  We now require an army to guard
+300,000 prisoners of War!  Since the Babylonian Captivity
+the world has not heard the like!  And yet the chamber
+prattlers and the journalists accuse us of tardiness.
+Already from several anonymous quarters have reproachful
+or ridiculing letters reached me.  One even contains a
+villainous comic verse, which I am told is sung in the music
+halls in Berlin."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the great tactician read, with the expression of one
+who savors the bouquet of sulphureted hydrogen or asafetida:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+  "<i>Guter Moltke, gehst so stumm?<br>
+  Immer um das Ding herum:<br>
+  Bester Moltke, sei nicht dumm,<br>
+  Mach' doch endlich: Bumm, bumm, bumm!</i>"<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+And he tore up the rude verses in indignation and threw
+them into the waste-paper basket of the Prussian Great
+Headquarters at the Palais de Justice, on the right of the
+Prefecture, and strode downstairs, too much out of tune
+to hum.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To have been called slow and stupid, and affectionately
+urged to hurry up and make an end of things with bang,
+bang, banging!...  He was almost glad that his departed
+Mary was not alive to know of the humiliation inflicted by
+these scurrilous rhymesters on her beloved old man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was an unfortunate moment chosen by a new junior
+assistant <i>aide-de-camp</i> upon the Chieftain's personal staff,
+for tendering a request for leave of absence until the
+following day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What, what?...  You have barely entered upon your
+new and important duties, the wine in which your comrades
+of the Guard pledged you is still bubbling in your veins....
+Is it another congratulatory banquet, or a supper
+<i>tête-à-tête</i> ... Am I right?"  The Warlock's keen
+glance glittered between his lashless eyelids at the tall,
+fair-headed young officer standing rigidly before him.
+"<i>Prut!</i> that reminds me!..." he added.  "In whose company
+did I see you lunching only yesterday at one of the little
+round tables in the ante-chamber of the dining salle at the
+Hôtel des Réservoirs?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Valverden, his blue eyes meeting the sharp gray
+glance with a charming candor:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Excellency, the lady is the recently married wife of a
+Roumanian noble.  Her name, if Your Excellency desires
+to know it, is Madame de Straz."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Field Marshal with an acute look and a dry
+intonation:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"In Berlin, not so long ago, she called herself something
+else!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Valverden answered, with a conscious side glance at the
+twist of silver braid that marked his rank of Captain:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Her first husband was killed in action with his regiment
+at Gravelotte.  She is now legally married to M. de
+Straz."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moltke took snuff and said laconically:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She has not taken long in changing her state."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Valverden began, rather lamely:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madame had virtually been separated from M. de
+Bayard&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Like a bayonet thrust came the retort:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Since your Cousin Max ran away with her from Paris,
+fourteen years ago!  The woman is an adventuress, whom
+you will be wise to avoid."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Valverden answered, with his disarming look of frankness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your Excellency, I was applied to by the person you
+mention for advice in a matter of serious urgency.
+Madame de Straz has unhappily lost all trace of the
+whereabouts of her daughter, Mademoiselle de Bayard....  She
+has entreated me to solicit for her an audience with Your
+Excellency, in the hope that you might aid her to recover
+the young girl."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The War Eagle croaked, ruffling his feathers with indignation:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Does the woman suppose that I have got the unfortunate
+young creature in my pocket?  Or does she suspect
+you of knowing where she is to be found?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Valverden said, hastily and flushing:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your Excellency, upon my honor, I have never seen
+the girl!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Warlock tucked away his snuff box and pointed
+the terrible withered finger at the left side of the young
+man's bosom, where hung upon a broad black, white-bordered
+ribbon a cross of dark metal, edged with a narrow
+line of silver, and bearing a crown and the letter "W."  A
+terrible grating voice said, and with all his cool
+effrontery Valverden quailed at the words and the stern look
+that accompanied them:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To you, young man, upon whom the Second Class of
+the Iron Cross has been conferred by the hand of your
+Crown Prince, for daring and gallantry upon the war
+field&mdash;no more I say than this: Do nothing to disgrace the
+wearer of that decoration&mdash;which should be sacred in your
+eyes...."  He added: "The leave you ask is granted.
+Until twelve noon to-morrow, Captain von Herding will
+take your place."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And His Excellency the Field Marshal returned his
+aide-de-camp's salute and wheeled sharply, and had taken a
+couple of strides across the vestibule, when he halted to
+ask:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"This girl you speak of&mdash;how came she lost?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Valverden, hesitating slightly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"According to Madame her mother, the ladies were on a
+visit to Rethel during the time when the Prince Imperial
+of the French was staying at the Prefecture.  They had
+obtained an audience of the Prince....  Madame de Straz
+was prevented by illness from accompanying her daughter....
+The young lady&mdash;Mademoiselle Juliette de Bayard&mdash;has
+never been seen since."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lean neck and spare features of the greatest of
+strategists became suffused with indignant scarlet.  He
+said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The mother is a trollop of the very first water.  She
+took the girl to the Prefecture&mdash;why did she contrive an
+interview?  She sends her up alone&mdash;she declares that she
+has never since seen her....  <i>Pfui!...</i>  The affair, in my
+nostrils, fairly stinks of vulgar intrigue.  Have no more to
+do with it&mdash;though the unlucky girl is no doubt to be
+pitied....  I will speak to His Excellency, Count
+Bismarck, who has agents in Rethel."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he steamed across the marble vestibule of the great
+hall of the Palais de Justice, crossed the Place des
+Tribunaux, and vanished into the Prefecture, over whose
+entrance hung the Hohenzollern banner and the Prussian
+standard, that was very soon to show a stripe of red beside
+the black and white....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the hitherto recalcitrant States of Baden and Hesse
+had joined the Bund.  The King of Saxony had
+signed,&mdash;Würtemburg would sign the treaty of Federation shortly.
+There were prospects of a definite settlement with the King
+of Bavaria.  The ambition of the Man of Iron was shortly
+to be realized....  Bismarck was to rule a German Emperor!
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+You might have seen him, upon this bland November
+morning that had succeeded a night of shrieking northerly
+gusts and driving pelts of sleety rain, walking with the
+Count Hatzfeldt in the garden of the Tessier mansion in
+the Rue de Provence.  The house immediately opposite
+had now been converted into a guard post.  Sentries in the
+uniforms of the Green Jaegers were on duty at the gates.
+Over the principal entrance hung the black and white
+Prussian standard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sky was deep blue, with argosies of white clouds
+sailing toward the northeast.  The leaves that yet remained
+upon the elms and poplars shone in the sunshine like newly
+minted gold.  Those that the gale had stripped lay in wet
+drifts upon the grass and gravel, though the three oak trees
+on the pleasance yet retained their suits of crisping russet
+brown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To the right, at the rear of the house, a young man
+servant was sweeping away the leaves that adhered to the
+narrow terrace of steps running round three sides of the
+building.  The swish of his birch broom punctuated the
+sentences of the newspaper article being read by Hatzfeldt
+to his Chief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the continuation of the article in the <i>Berliner
+Zeitung</i> that had roused the ire of the Warlock a little
+while before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Unanimously," it concluded, "and in the interests of
+Humanity, we demand that this measure be taken at once.
+We reprehend in the sternest terms, not only those military
+commanders who are in favor of procrastination.  We cry
+in the ears of the Chancellor-and-Minister-President, Count
+Bismarck himself, who is credited with being the main
+factor in this policy of delay: <i>Mene, mene, tekel
+upharsin!</i>&mdash;'Thou
+art weighed in the balance, and found to want!'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Man of Iron to Hatzfeldt:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Did I not know that my wife regards women who
+enter the lists of journalism as unsexed, and outcasts
+beyond the hope of redemption, I should be inclined to
+believe she had written this."  He added: "I have often
+been accused of inhumanity, but to be reproached for an
+excess of tenderness is something quite new to me.  How
+shall we reassure these excitable gentlemen?  Buschlein"&mdash;he
+referred to his Press article-writer, the rotund author of
+the famous "Recollections"&mdash;"Buschlein shall write that
+he has authority from Count Bismarck to state that his
+universally credited predilections for slaughter have not
+been blunted by recent experiences, and that he much
+approves of the bombardment idea, but that he has no control
+over those high military functionaries who command His
+Majesty's investing forces, and is not accustomed to be
+consulted by them."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He spat and resumed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Private correspondents worry me to know whether I
+am really averse to the bombardment, and why I won't
+allow firing into the town?  What pernicious rubbish!
+They will be blaming me next for all losses during the
+investment.  Which are not small; for in little skirmishes,
+and during the short time occupied by those abortive
+sorties, we have lost more troops than we should have done
+had we regularly stormed the place."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He added, looking humorously at Hatzfeldt, whose handsome,
+<i>débonnaire</i> countenance invariably fell at any reference
+to a bombardment:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"By the way, another balloon has been taken with letters
+from Paris, some of which I have already read, and a
+Figaro of yesterday's date.  It has been decreed by the
+French Government that all wine and provisions are to be
+taken away from private people, as the poorer classes
+have already begun to fricassee their dogs and pussy cats.
+So your American father-in-law will have to look out for
+his cellar&mdash;an excellently stocked one, as I have heard from
+you.  And your wife's famous mouse-gray ponies will probably
+be made into cutlets&mdash;a pretty piece of intelligence for
+your next letter to Madame!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah!... for Heaven's sake, Your Excellency!" cried
+Hatzfeldt, with ruefully elevated eyebrows, "I implore
+you not to conjure up the image of my wife's indignation
+and despair.  Every letter I receive from her begins and
+ends with her precious ponies."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister appended:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Her mother, father, and her brother, Henry, who is
+living at their estate of Petit Val, near Marly&mdash;I think you
+told me&mdash;being sandwiched in between the little beasts."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were pacing the garden paths.  The Chancellor had
+recently risen, and seemed inclined to be in a jesting mood.
+He continued, throwing away the butt of a finished cigar:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I must be careful, or the Countess will send me no
+more <i>pâté</i> of pheasants, or sausages.  Pray tell her, with
+my compliments, that both were excellently fresh and good....
+Did you notice written on my table card that the
+Mayor of Versailles is to have a ten-minute interview before
+M. Thiers arrives at half-past twelve?  If I have not
+polished off the Republican official before Thiers toddles up
+the doorsteps with his portfolio under his short arm, and
+his gold spectacles twinkling, engage him in conversation
+below here for an instant&mdash;do not send him up straightway
+to the torture cell."  Thus the Minister had christened
+the small room adjoining his private apartment.  He
+went on: "I do not want him to go down to Sèvres with his
+white flag and his escort, and meet Jules Favre with a
+string of tales about our orgies and revelings, of the
+enormous expense of which the Mayor is coming to complain."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What insolence!" commented Hatzfeldt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It seems," continued the Minister, "that we all cost
+the town too much to keep, the chief offenders being the
+grand ducal and princely personages at the Hôtel des
+Réservoirs.  Of course, one knows that the Tinsel Rabble
+eat and drink a great deal more than they require, and
+waste much more than they consume.  But to a Frenchman,
+one cannot admit as much.  So I shall tell the Mayor that
+he must apply to the French Government at Tours for
+permission to raise a substantial money loan, and as
+M. Thiers has only just come from there, he would naturally
+buttonhole the old gentleman if he encountered him.
+Which&mdash;as our plump, neatly shaved old Professor is as
+timid as a hare and as soft as a baby&mdash;would discompose
+him very horribly...."  He continued: "He is dying to
+make peace with us, because there will soon be famine in
+Paris.  Imagine how I caught him out when I told him
+yesterday: '<i>Monsieur, you have only visited the city for a few
+hours.  We know better about the contents of its magazines
+than you do.  They have ample provisions to last until the
+end of January....</i>'  What a look of incredulity!  I had
+only been feeling his pulse, as it were....  His amazement
+told me what I most wanted to know.  What a man to
+make a bargain about an armistice, an invalidy civilian,
+who cannot conceal his feelings!  Who lets himself be put
+out of countenance and pumped!&mdash;actually pumped!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned aside to cough and hawk and expectorate
+copiously....  "There!" he said, wiping his mustache
+vigorously with a large white cambric handkerchief.  "You
+see what it is to have a stomach as sensitive as mine is....
+That injustice done me in the <i>Berliner Zeitung</i> with
+reference to the bombardment has caused an overflow of bile,
+by which I was already incommoded.  Thiers will be
+certain to remain closeted with me for two hours.  He is
+nothing if not expansive and flowery, and redundant.  I shall
+not be able to get on horseback before three o'clock, and we
+dine at six."  He went on, punctuating the sentence with
+more coughs and hawkings: "And as our table is to be
+graced&mdash;<i>tchah!</i>&mdash;by a huge trout pasty, a love gift to the
+Chancellor of the&mdash;<i>hah!</i>&mdash;Confederation, from a Berlin
+restaurant keeper who throws into the bargain&mdash;<i>ahah!</i>&mdash;a
+cask of Vienna March beer and his photograph, taken with
+his wife and&mdash;<i>brr'r</i>!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned aside and spat vigorously, before ending,
+resuming, as he used the big white handkerchief:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"One would desire to do justice to a gift so welcome....
+More bile!...  I spat like this half the night through....
+Decidedly I am not as well as when we galloped along
+the highroads with the Great Headquarters Staff....  I
+have wondered: Do I eat too much?  Does this sedentary
+life conduce to indigestion?" He spat again, and answered
+himself: "How can it be so, when I breakfast on a couple
+of eggs with dry toast, and a cup of tea without milk?  I
+don't lunch&mdash;lunch is a mockery of a meal&mdash;but in the
+evening I make a hearty dinner.  With beer and champagne
+in plenty, and wash all down with half a dozen cups of
+tea.  Then I go to bed&mdash;as you know, never before
+midnight.  There's a doze&mdash;and I waken up with my brain as
+bright as daylight&mdash;all sorts of things running through it,
+and my mouth full of this bitter&mdash;<i>faugh!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Your Excellency will need a fresh handkerchief," said
+Hatzfeldt, slightly shuddering, as the Chancellor vigorously
+crumpled the soiled cambric into a ball.  "Shall I send
+Your Excellency's servant to fetch another?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No, no!  As it happens, I have sent Grams out.  And
+Engelberg is busy.  There is Madame Charles's factotum!"  He
+called in French: "<i>Hola</i>, Jean Jacques!  Approach,
+my brave young man!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His full blue eyes, their whites now red-veined and
+biliously injected, had turned to where the strongly built
+young male servant was still sweeping the steps of the rear
+of the house.  Cropped to the scalp, you saw the fellow
+attired in a well-worn morning jacket of striped linen, a
+blue waistcoat and tight blue cloth trousers, yellow piped
+at the side seams.  Summoned by an imperative word and
+gesture, he knocked the damp leaves off his broom, stood
+it up against the side of the conservatory, and shambled
+to where the Chancellor was standing, muttering with a
+downcast air and a furtive, sulky look:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Ouiche, Monseigneur?...</i>   What is it Monseigneur
+desires?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Minister, with a smile that curved the great
+mustache and showed the white, square teeth that a young
+man might have envied:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monseigneur desires that without delay the brave Jean
+Jacques would betake him to the kitchen, and desire Madame
+Charles Tessier of her goodness to favor Monseigneur
+with a clean handkerchief....  Perhaps two would be
+better....  Ask for two, Jean Jacques, and compel thy
+legs to rapid motion, for to <i>croquer le marmot</i> is not a
+favorite pastime with Monseigneur!  Comprehend you?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jean Jacques replied in his extraordinary patois, with a
+bow of the clumsiest:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Ouiche, Monseigneur!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>De quel pays sont vous?</i>" asked Hatzfeldt curiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jean Jacques responded with sulky unwillingness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>La Suisse, Monsieur!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hatzfeldt said, as the young man returned to the scene
+of his abandoned labors, picked up his broom, and went
+round the end of the conservatory toward the kitchen
+quarters:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There are Frenchmen who call themselves Belgians or
+Swiss because they are too funky to fight!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Minister:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madame Charles Tessier, who knows all about this
+fellow, describes him as a native of Neufchâtel.  Here she
+comes herself, bringing my handkerchiefs.  Thank you a
+thousand times, Madame!  But why inconvenience yourself?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame Charles, whose black hair, heavily streaked with
+white, was crowned with a dreadful lace cap with lappets,
+parted in the middle, and brushed down in two old-fashioned
+festoons on either side of her haggard white wedge
+of a face, shrilled in her raucous voice that it was no
+trouble whatever....  The laundress's basket with
+Monseigneur's clean linen had but that moment come in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame Charles wore a gray poplin gown of rich, stiff,
+antique material, trimmed with black gimp upon the gores,
+round the bottom of the expansive skirt, and upon the
+sleeves and waist.  It had been discovered in a wardrobe
+belonging to the mother of M. Charles Tessier.  She had
+on one of Madame's black silk aprons, a pair of her black
+silk mittens, and the black chenille net adorned with steel
+beads that confined her back hair had housed the iron gray
+curls of her respected mother-in-law.  Over her narrow
+shoulders hung the inevitable white woolen shawl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She curtsied deeply to the Chancellor and slightly to
+Count Hatzfeldt, and went on into the garden, and
+disappeared round the corner of the ivy-bordered path.  Seen
+thus in the searching daylight, the elevation and forward
+thrust of the left shoulder that lent her gait its unpleasant
+peculiarity, and the curvature in the lower part of the
+spine were even more painfully apparent.  It occurred to
+her as she moved away from the two men, whose eyes,
+reluctantly or curiously, were following her, that to ape this
+deformity so persistently might be to bring it in reality
+upon herself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shivered a little, despite the bland warmth of the
+November sunshine.  Round the corner of the green glass
+conservatory, well out of sight of those who walked in the
+garden, Jean Jacques Potier was shivering, too.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the Chancellor had coughed and spat and spat
+again, the knees of Jean Jacques had shaken beneath him.
+His heart had sunk like a leaden plummet, and the sweat of
+terror had started on his skin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was afraid&mdash;horribly afraid.  Not for himself, but
+for another.  There was no knowing.  The thing he feared
+might happen at any time.
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+"<i>Throw but a stone&mdash;the giant dies!...</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+He could hear now the very voice in which she had
+added: "See you well, it is I who am going to throw that
+stone!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had expended all the eloquence he possessed with the
+object of turning Juliette from her purpose.  He did not
+know whether he had succeeded.  She would give him no
+promise.  She was sphinxlike, inscrutable....  You
+could never feel sure that in the middle of the night there
+would not be a cry&mdash;and then a commotion of running feet
+upon the stairs, and then&mdash;the arrest, and the accusation.
+He had made up his mind to say, when that happened:
+"<i>It was my doing.  She knew nothing about it.  It was I
+who put poison in the food of this man!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he would be taken out and shot.  It would be done
+instantly, whether the owner of the life that had been
+attempted died or got well.  Perhaps the man would not
+die?  He had an iron constitution and the frame of a Titan.
+But sometimes he looked weary and haggard and bilious.
+And when he spat as just now, and pulled wry mouths
+over the bitter stuff he expectorated, the heart of
+P. C. Breagh would sink to the pit of his stomach, and his legs
+would shake under him, as they were shaking now.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap67"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LXVII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile, the Man of Iron had commented to Hatzfeldt:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Our landlady is going for a little promenade ... she
+does not fear damp, that is quite plain ... see how she
+trails her skirts over the wet grass.  Now, if she were to
+show her feet, should we be grateful, or the reverse?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A light of cynical amusement flickered in his blue eyes
+as he noted Hatzfeldt's disgust of the creature of whom he
+spoke.  He went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ugly women have sometimes pretty feet, and hands
+that are exquisite.  Have you ever looked closely at the
+hands of Madame Charles?  If not, I recommend them to
+your notice.  They are well worth looking at."  He added,
+ignoring the shudder that convulsed the dandy: "I propose
+that we follow her&mdash;discreetly and at a distance.  I
+have still a few minutes before the Mayor arrives."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He led the way.  They crossed a portion of the lawn and
+turned into a gravel walk, damp and miry and drifted over
+with wet and rotting leaves.  The shining patent-leather
+boots of Hatzfeldt suffered by their contact.  The
+Chancellor, observing this, said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Never mind....  You can have them cleaned!  My
+man Niederstedt polishes boots capitally!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hatzfeldt returned plaintively:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I can have them cleaned, as Your Excellency observes.
+But never again will they be the same after a wetting.
+And they are made by the only man in the world who
+knows how to make boots."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister said brutally:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Order another pair of the fellow!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hatzfeldt returned with a shrug and a rueful look:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He lives in Paris&mdash;Rue de Lafayette.  And Your
+Excellency is going to have Paris bombarded!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Bismarck, his great frame shaken by internal
+laughter:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The fellows who write the newspaper articles out of
+their own heads know a great deal better than that....
+According to them, I am a humanitarian&mdash;altruistic to
+imbecility."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But we, who only write to Your Excellency's dictation,
+know Your Excellency better than they!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The injury to his immaculate foot coverings, and the
+impending destruction of his bootmaker's establishment,
+incensed Hatzfeldt to the point of an imprudent retort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The granite face turned.  The heavy regard rested upon
+him.  With his characteristic stutter&mdash;a signal as warning
+to those who knew him as the rattle of the <i>crotalus</i> hidden
+in the brake, the Minister said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So I am not a philanthropist, or a&mdash;or an apostle of
+light and sweetness.  I would prefer to build an Empire
+with the fallen towers of the modern Babylon?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hatzfeldt bowed with the grace inherited from the
+Russian Princess, his mother.  The Minister went on in a
+lighter tone:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"As a boy, I always preferred the apples that hung on
+the highest branches.  They were bigger and sweeter and
+rosier than the others, though in stealing them I risked
+both my breeches and my neck.  Well!  To be plain, there
+are two apples just now that I particularly covet: the
+Bombardment&mdash;and the Proclamation of the Emperor of
+Germany from the Tuileries...."  He added: "The <i>via
+media</i> is not the surest road to an arrangement that shall
+be lasting.  The most convincing arguments are uttered by
+the iron mouths of big guns!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They had emerged from the shrubbery at the bottom of
+the garden.  The patch of green still spread upon the
+eastern boundary wall, where the water trickled down.
+The aquatic plants had been weeded, and the tiny pond
+cleaned out by Breagh under the supervision of his
+Infanta, but the pipe remained unsoldered because the
+plumber's men had gone to the War.  Thus the Satyr's
+mouth remained dry, though the chuckle still sounded in
+the Satyr's throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame Charles had been standing near the mask as the
+Minister and his courtly First Secretary stepped into the
+open.  She started slightly, glanced round, bent her head,
+and limped painfully away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Chancellor, barely glancing after the awkward,
+misshapen figure:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I hope that it has not occurred to Madame Charles to
+look over the garden wall!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hatzfeldt's eyebrows went up in mild surprise.  He
+objected:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It would hardly be possible.  The wall must be eight
+feet high, and how in the world could a woman, elderly and
+with that distressing deformity&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The laugh that shook the great figure beside him
+puzzled as much as the utterance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She is a daughter of Eve&mdash;and it would be possible, by
+putting a toe in the jaws of yonder grinning gentleman,
+to ascertain that I have had two sentries posted on the
+other side of this wall.  Listen!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He rapped on the masonry with the walking stick he
+habitually carried, and an answering rap came from the
+other side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There is a good large garden there, belonging to an
+unoccupied house," he added.  "And ranged along the
+wall are bushes, behind which my two men stand well
+screened."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Did Your Excellency apprehend danger from that
+quarter?" inquired Hatzfeldt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Hardly," said he, "though it is as well to be on the
+safe side, and Versailles is pretty well packed with people
+by whom I am rather particularly detested.  But as a fact,
+I placed the soldiers for the purpose of catching Madame's
+postman.  You did not perceive as we stepped out of the
+shrubbery that she slipped an envelope into this creature's
+mouth?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hatzfeldt answered, in some astonishment:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why, no, Your Excellency.  I saw nothing of the kind!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister said, shaken with the internal, secret
+laughter:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And yet you have good eyes, better than mine for
+seeing some things at a distance....  A pretty face behind
+a thick veil ... a graceful figure concealed by a shawl.
+Possibly the friend who communicates with Madame
+Charles with the aid of this grinning fellow admires her....
+There is no accounting for tastes...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hatzfeldt asked in a tone of disgust:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Who is Madame Charles's friend?  Is it possible that
+misshapen creature has a lover?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister answered with a curious grimace:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A lover who is apparently a <i>Franc-tireur</i>."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hatzfeldt returned with acrimony:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"One of those marauding free shooters who wear a
+black cloth uniform, and carry a black standard with a
+skull above a pair of crossbones.  Perhaps his lady-love
+sat for the picture of the Death's head?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister returned, with a look of amusement:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Possibly she did....  Though there have been
+moments when, under Madame's extraordinary coiffure with
+the black lace lappets, I have seen peeping at me&mdash;imagine
+what?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I cannot imagine....  Hatred, possibly?" said Hatzfeldt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Hatred, blazing from two extraordinarily blue
+eyes...."  The Minister went on: "But not only hatred....
+Youth, and prettiness.  Now, look here, and&mdash;for I
+am perfectly convinced that you believe me bewitched by
+our landlady&mdash;behold my rival's <i>billet-doux</i>!.."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hatzfeldt could scarcely speak for laughter.  The Minister
+put his hand into the Satyr's mouth and extracted
+therefrom a little envelope, inscribed in a bold, black, inky
+scrawl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>To My Adored Wife.</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Satyr chuckled almost humanly as the Minister held
+the superscription under his Secretary's eyes, and calmly
+proceeded to open the envelope....  Hatzfeldt, at first
+crimson, and writhing with repressed merriment, became
+graver as the Minister read aloud:
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>What of thy husband? dost thou ask in the nights that
+are sleepless and solitary.  Credit, my little one, that thy
+Charles is often near.  In the thought of thy husband, if
+not in person, he rests upon thy heart so faithful and
+fond.</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Hatzfeldt spluttered.  The reader continued:
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>We Francs-tireurs attacked a squadron of Schleswig
+Hussars the other day at the village of Hably....  We shot
+down many of the Prussian marauders and killed their
+horses.  Only eleven escaped with life.  They returned later
+and burned the village, committing unexampled brutalities,
+and murdered several of the inhabitants.  It is well!
+We have another cause to feed our roaring furnace of hate.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>All means of revenge are good, for ours is a holy war
+waged upon a merciless invader.  We number nobles, peasants,
+citizens, criminals in our armed and organized ranks.
+Each man will kill as he knows best.  The rifle, the knife,
+the scythe, or the cudgel, the gardener's shears, the
+chemist's drugs, and the barber's razor are weapons lawful to
+be used against the enemies of France.  We will dig
+wolf-traps for these Prussian foes of ours, who plunder by
+method and wreck scientifically.  We will tumble them
+down wells, drown them in rivers, burn the huts they are
+sleeping in over their heads.  And our sisters?&mdash;our wives?
+They are united with us in our solemn compact of destruction.
+They will embrace to strangle.  They will smile and
+stab!  They will cook savory dishes for Messieurs les
+Prussiens, and the dogs will eat of them and die.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>These kisses on thy sweetest eyelids.  These for thy
+two little hands.  Dost thou love me?  Till death and after,</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+  "<i>Thine and thine only,<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Charles Tessier.</i>"<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+There was a silence.  The Minister broke it with a grim
+sentence:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"When this fine fellow is not murdering Prussians, he
+is making love to his spitfire of a wife.  A fine breed of
+young criminals should spring from such a union!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Satyr's mocking chuckle sounded like a comment
+on the speech.  The Minister had deftly opened the
+envelope without tearing the flap, which was still moist.  He
+now refolded and slipped back the sheet into the envelope,
+wet his finger in the little jet that gurgled from the hole
+in the pipe behind the mask of the Satyr, and reclosed the
+envelope.  He drew out his watch and consulted it, as the
+clocks of Versailles struck the half hour, and said to
+Hatzfeldt, replacing the watch:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Half-past twelve....  Do you know, I read something
+by Félix Pyat very like this"&mdash;he slightly waved the
+drying envelope&mdash;"in a copy of the <i>Petit Journal</i> that was
+brought me the other day....  Now, my Mayor is due, and
+M. Thiers is certain to arrive on his heels....  I must
+return to the house; but I should prefer that you stayed
+here."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Here, Excellency!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister laughed in the amazed face of the Secretary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I want you," he said, "to play the part of Leporello....
+Frankly, I cannot understand why Madame Charles
+herself placed this letter in the gape of the mask....  I
+am curious to know who will fetch it away from there....
+I am going to ask you to hide in the shrubbery and
+find out."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hatzfeldt glanced dubiously at the wall.  The Minister
+nodded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My two men are not sufficiently sharp-eyed to see
+through these bricks.  Really, I must ask you to stay here
+and oblige me.  Von Keudell must keep M. Thiers in play
+instead of you....  Why, you are quite pale!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hatzfeldt gulped and admitted:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That letter gave me an unpleasant sensation.  I am
+regularly shaved by a Frenchman, you understand!...  And
+these <i>Francs-tireurs</i> seem to be everywhere.  Really,
+it is horrible!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister's brow became thunderous.  The lines
+about his mouth hardened to granite.  He said in his
+grimmest tone:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They should be hanged whenever found!  And not cut
+down, but left hanging, for a salutary warning to other
+rascals....  Do you know that the <i>Combat</i>&mdash;the organ
+edited by that blackguard Félix Pyat&mdash;wishes to get up a
+subscription for the purchase of a gold-mounted rifle to be
+given to the scoundrel who succeeds in removing the
+Prussian King.' ... Doubtless they have set their price
+upon the heads of Moltke, and the arch enemy Bismarck.
+Well&mdash;<i>Auf Wiedersehen</i>!  Ride out with me after lunch to
+the aqueduct of Marly, and tell me what I want to know."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the great figure strode away, leaving the First
+Secretary to his unwelcome task.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"After lunch..." he said mentally, as he insinuated
+his graceful figure between a lilac and a lauristinus, and
+the rich soil, rendered marshy by the overflow of the lily
+pool, squashily gave way beneath his once immaculate
+boots.  "Why, good Heaven!... the woman to whom
+that monstrous epistle was addressed actually assists the
+Foreign Office <i>chef</i> with the cooking!  The Chief swears
+by her <i>ragoûts</i> and her omelettes and her <i>beignets</i>.  They
+are certainly excellent....  I must avoid them for the
+future.  A young married man with a family must be
+careful.  I wonder, if anything unpleasant happened, whether
+Touti would marry again?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bushes were wet with rain.  Little cold showers
+sprinkled the dandy's head and shoulders.  His boots sank
+deeper as the wet trickled down his neck.  What a degrading
+task for a First Diplomatic Secretary!  With what
+shrieks of laughter his lively American Countess would
+read his written description of his experiences as a spy!  A
+corn began to shoot.  He sneezed.  This meant influenza
+to a certainty.  Even while he devoted Madame Charles,
+her bloodthirsty spouse, and all her countrymen to the
+hottest corner of Tophet, he kept a bright lookout.  And in
+another five minutes or so he saw the person for whom he
+lay in waiting coming down the mossy gravel path that
+wound through the shrubbery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was Jean Jacques, the clumsy foot boy, whose mistakes
+and blunders kept the Prussian Chancery attendants
+in a continual eruption of abusive German epithets, and
+whose <i>patois</i>, proclaimed to be Swiss, was so extremely
+puzzling that Hatzfeldt, who had piqued himself upon an
+exclusive knowledge of the French of the Tyrol, could only
+assign the youth to a canton of his own.  He thrust his
+hand into the Satyr's toothed gape and pulled out the
+letter, twisted a wry mug as he regarded it, and said, with
+an admirable English accent:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Oh, damn!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, at the urgent tinkle of a bell from the kitchen
+regions, he thrust the missive into the pocket of his striped
+cotton jacket and scampered back to the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You will remember that when Juliette had consented to
+marry the unknown Charles Tessier, she had, for her dear
+Colonel's very sake, adorned the faceless one with features,
+a complexion, shoulders, muscles, and so on.  She had even
+boasted to Monica's brother of the swordsmanship of the
+worthy but unromantic young cloth manufacturer, whose
+most sportsmanlike accomplishment was the shooting of
+thrushes and sparrows, which he would bring home to the
+Rue de Provence in triumph, to be converted by his
+adoring mother into savory pies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, during these days of tension and anxiety, perhaps
+to relieve the strain of an otherwise unbearable
+situation&mdash;possibly with the desire of inflicting on her unfortunate
+adorer the torturing pangs of jealousy, or possibly to create
+and maintain in herself a fictitious interest in the
+supposititious husband, she had begun anew to expatiate upon his
+gifts and graces, and, having begun, could not leave off.
+Her Charles had not red hair and yellow gray eyes, a blunt
+nose, and a square chin with a dent in it.  He was pale,
+with melancholy black eyes and a high brow.  His jetty
+mustache was waxed, his imperial finished in a point of
+the most elegant....  He quoted poetry in a deep voice,
+and was capable of torrential outbursts of passion.  He
+was altogether a perfect specimen of the type of Balzac's
+beautiful young man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Surfeited with these perfections, P. C. Breagh had
+become restive, to the point, one day, of being clumsily
+sarcastic on the immunity of widows' only sons from the
+obligation of military service, and so on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That afternoon Madame Charles had received a mysterious
+communication to the effect that her lord had secretly
+quitted Belgium, penetrated in disguise into France, passed
+through the Prussian lines in a series of hairbreadth
+escapes, and joined a corps of <i>Francs-tireurs</i>.  Since when,
+letters containing tirades inspired by the most flaming
+patriotism, sanguinary descriptions of adventure, and
+passionate protestations of devotion, had been found at
+intervals by Madame Charles in the mouth of the Satyr mask.
+Of late, since she had developed nervousness about fetching
+the letters herself, Jean Jacques had sulkily performed
+the office.  And when she did not, with due precautions,
+declaim these effusions for the benefit of her victim and
+fellow conspirator, his was the task&mdash;inconceivably repulsive
+to a young man suffering the stabs of jealousy, of reading
+them aloud to Madame Charles.  Hence the expletive
+which had betrayed his British nationality to Count
+Hatzfeldt, standing disconsolate in his squelching patent
+leathers under the dripping lilac and syringa trees.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap68"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LXVIII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+From Tours, chief town of the Department of the Indre et
+Loire, 120 miles southwest of Paris as the crow flies, where
+Cremieux, Minister of Justice, and rather too doddery to
+be of efficiency at this crisis, had established the
+Administrative of the Provisional Government of the new French
+Republic;&mdash;whither M. Leon Gambetta, Minister of the
+Interior, Member of the Board of National Defense, had
+recently betaken himself, escaping from the besieged
+capital to Montdidier as a passenger in the car of a
+balloon&mdash;whither the veteran Garibaldi had now arrived to offer his
+services in the cause of Liberty&mdash;from Tours had come
+the famous diplomat and man of letters, contemptuously
+dubbed "Professor" by Count Bismarck, with the object
+of carrying out the peace negotiations in whose conduct
+the tragic patriarch Favre had broken down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You saw the famous Minister and author of the <i>Histoire
+du Consulat et de l'Empire</i>, as a little, stocky, black-clad
+old gentleman with a square gray head, round, clean-shaven
+face, and bright, round eyes, looking through gold-rimmed
+spectacles....  Above all, a patriot, heart and soul
+devoted to France, the position of this famous French
+statesman of seventy-five, newly returned, empty of all but fair
+words and vain courtesies, from a pilgrimage to the Courts
+of various neutral Powers, was horrible and painful beyond
+words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sad, distracted, anxious little gentleman, charged with
+the mission of obtaining those needed terms of peace, or at
+least an armistice from the conqueror upon the threshold,
+can you see him, in the shadow of the magnificent Temple
+erected by the Sun King, toiling and moiling with his
+secretary, the younger M. Remusat, in preparation for
+those anguish-fraught interviews with the German Chancellor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tables of his sitting-room at the Hôtel des Réservoirs
+were piled with books and papers&mdash;papers covered with
+abstruse calculations dealing with the most urgent need&mdash;the
+provisioning of Paris&mdash;papers dealing with the question
+of the Elections&mdash;papers dealing with the General
+Census&mdash;papers of every imaginable kind.  And with these, from
+dawn till midnight, the little, grief-worn man wrestled
+while the Tinsel Rabble and their staffs of German officers
+reveled in the dining-saloons, and trampled and shouted
+and clanked and jingled up and down the corridors, and
+in and out of the bedrooms; and the roar of the guns from
+the forts of the beleaguered city shook the windows from
+time to time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now and then he would lie back exhausted in his chair,
+or lie down and sleep, if sleep ever visited him.  He took
+his frugal meals in a private cabinet opening out of the
+great dining-hall of the restaurant.  Since the thirtieth of
+October he had been engaged in this wise, save when,
+having been first compelled to apply to Count Bismarck
+for a pass and a military safe-conduct, he would meet and
+confer with Favre, or one of his other colleagues, at some
+chosen spot without the walls of the beleaguered capital.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Only the previous day he had trundled down in a little,
+shaky, hired brougham to the half-ruined and wholly
+deserted suburb of Sèvres, preceded by an officer of Uhlans
+with a White Flag on a pole.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Day after day the little brougham had drawn up before
+the modest house in the Rue de Provence, and the little
+gentleman, whose head seemed to whiten perceptibly, had
+stepped out with his portfolio under his arm, as now.
+Day after day the Chancery footmen would open the door
+to him, and Madame Charles Tessier, hovering in the
+background, would drop the representative of suffering France
+her lowest curtsey, and sometimes gain a brief word with
+his unfailing bow and smile.  To-day, as Major von Keudell
+appeared in the doorway of the drawing-room&mdash;the
+Chancellor being closeted in his private interviewing-room
+upstairs with the Republican Mayor of Versailles&mdash;the
+little gentleman said simply, offering his hand to the
+eccentric-looking person in the cap with lappets and the
+white shawl:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The sympathy that is expressed in looks and by silence
+can be very eloquent and very touching.  From my heart
+I thank you for yours, Madame!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as she had burst out sobbing and kissed the hand,
+he had drawn it away with a murmured protest, and had
+passed on into the drawing-room where Von Keudell was
+to hold him in conversation until the Mayor had been
+polished off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But M. Thiers had endured the ordeal with a courteous
+kind of resignation, only looking at his watch from time
+to time, or glancing at the clock over which presided the
+horned, bat-winged, cloven-hoofed and tailed figure that
+tickled the fancy of his oppressor so much.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"His Excellency expected me," he said.  "There has
+been no mistake about the time of the appointment&mdash;named
+by himself at our previous interview.  The greatness
+of the interests concerned are apprehensible by His
+Excellency!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mild sarcasm rebounded pointless from Von
+Keudell's bluff rejoinder:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No, no mistake at all.  His Excellency has merely
+shifted the hour.  From half-past twelve to a quarter to
+one&mdash;His Excellency found it more convenient."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What boors are these Germans!" thought the angered
+diplomat, writhing, as some medieval victim, condemned
+to undergo torture by rack and fire, might have writhed at
+the delay of the hideous ordeal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then the door opened.  The Chief Torturer looked
+in with the salutation:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A pleasant day!  I am quite at your service now, if
+you will come up to me....  You know the way, I
+think?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the great figure vanished, and the heavy footsteps
+thundered up the drugget-covered stairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Did the sorrowful visitor know the way to the
+torture-chamber?  Surely malice must have prompted the query
+addressed to the unfortunate plenipotentiary of France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The room he had so loathed had one window looking
+out on the Rue de Provence, and another at the south side
+of the house, where stood the pine-tree and the turtle-backed
+green glass conservatory with the wrought-iron
+bridge above it.  It had a figured gray carpet, a green
+hearthrug with red edges, dark green stuff curtains, and
+various oil-paintings and steel engravings hung upon the
+walls, which were painted coffee-tinted cream.  It was
+furnished with a writing-table, on which were a terrestrial
+globe, a celestial one, and a tellurion, a large gray
+marble-topped chiffonier, a sofa covered with chintz, pattern
+red-and-gray birds-of-paradise on a background with
+palm-leaves; two cane chairs and a round center-table, upon
+which lay a platter of wood containing the colored glass
+marbles with which one plays the game of solitaire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a game of solitaire which was played in that stiff,
+primly-furnished apartment, in one corner of which stood
+a mahogany bedstead of Empire pattern, with an obsolete
+drapery of green-figured brocade.  Such a game as may be
+played by a grim, greedy, gray-mustached Grimalkin with
+a plump, bright-eyed, feebly-palpitating mouse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M. Thiers had been gravely imperiled by the shell-fire
+of the French guns in the act of returning from Sèvres on
+the previous day, a mischance which had increased the
+palpitations which were caused by his heart disease, and
+wounded his feelings cruelly.  Commented the Chancellor,
+to whom he unwisely related the episode:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Fortunately the cab-horse was too ill-fed to bolt, but
+the window was broken, and you were mud-splashed all
+over....  Not exactly the first time that your countrymen
+have treated you in that way!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And this first scratch of the claw that never failed to
+draw blood was followed by the query whether M. Thiers
+were provided with full powers for carrying on the
+negotiations?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister added, enjoying his victim's start and look
+of horrified astonishment:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My people in Paris tell me that there has been practically
+a Revolution, and that a new Government is coming
+into power.  On the Place before the Hôtel de Ville there
+were yesterday 15,000 persons assembled, most of them
+National Guards from the Faubourgs, disarmed and
+crying: '<i>Vive la Commune! ... Point d'Armistice!</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He went on, unheeding the writhing of the sufferer,
+whose dignity had been so cruelly wounded:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It appears that the Mayors of Paris had been summoned
+by Arago, and were in one room conferring, while
+in the other was the Government.  Mobiles guarded the
+doors, but were thrust back by the insurgents.  General
+Trochu came out and confronted them.  He could only
+mouth and gesticulate in a sort of dumb Crambo.  Cries
+of '<i>A bas Trochu!</i>' drowned his voice.  There was a rush....
+One does not know how, but Trochu finally escaped
+out of their clutches&mdash;got out by a back door and cut his
+lucky to the Louvre....  Here is one of the slips of
+paper that were thrown from the windows of the Hôtel....
+They have '<i>Commune décretée.  Dorian Président!</i>'
+upon them.  There was a scene of confusion peculiar to
+your nation, in the midst of which M. Félix Pyat and other
+virtuous citizens proclaimed the Commune, and constituted
+themselves into a Government embracing Blanqui,
+Ledru-Rollin, Délescluze, Louis Blanc, and Flourens....
+Flourens got upon a table&mdash;made himself heard, it seems,
+finally calling upon the Members of the Government of
+National Defense to resign.  M. Jules Favre refused
+... was arrested with the old Government&mdash;the new Government
+reigned until two o'clock in the morning, when some
+battalions of Mobiles&mdash;the 106th and 90th, under
+Picard&mdash;closed in upon the Hôtel and ejected them.  Trochu was
+there with his staff....  Since, a general sort of
+agreement appears to have been arrived at.  A decree signed by
+Favre was placarded yesterday, announcing that on Thursday
+next a vote is to be taken whether there is to be a
+Commune or not....  What I relate happened the day
+before yesterday.  Now, if Your Excellency saw M. Jules
+Favre at Sèvres yesterday afternoon, he must have told
+you of the turn things were taking.  Oblige me with a plain
+answer to a plain question....  Did he tell you, or did
+he not?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The humiliated gentleman bowed his head assentingly.
+The hot sweat of a mortal agony stood upon his broad
+forehead, and flushed and working features.  His glasses were
+dimmed with the reek of his torment and his shame.  The
+Enemy knew all.  There was no concealing anything from
+one so well served by spies and informers.  Probably the
+cruel interview with his fellow-Minister had been listened
+to, from its beginning to its end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thiers and Favre had sat on two iron chairs at a gayly
+painted little iron table, before one of the wrecked <i>cafés</i>
+that boasted the sign of <i>La Belle Bouquetière</i>.  No one had
+been near except a haggard, absinthe-sodden wretch, who
+lay in a drunken stupor upon the pavement, close under
+the broken window of the deserted restaurant.  Perhaps
+that drunken man had been his spy....  What was he
+saying in the harsh, bullying tones that grated so?...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The mob who rode roughshod over General Trochu,
+and his Council of lawyers and orators, appear to be
+actuated by the desire of fighting things out with us.  They
+burn for a chance, it appears, to pit their undisciplined
+courage against the Army of United Germany.  They are
+hardly to be blamed for accepting literally the theatrical
+bombast with which they have been fed by Favre!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He laughed, and said, with a galling imitation of the
+rhetorical manner of the Democratic barrister of Lyons:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'Not a stone of our fortresses'&mdash;do you remember?
+'Not an inch of our territory!'&mdash;have you forgotten?...
+When it was in the power of the person to whom he boasted
+to have said to him: <i>Every inch.  Every stone!</i>..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He rose up, towering over the unhappy personage who
+sat opposite to him, in a little wicker easy-chair that would
+have suited a child.  His greedy vitality physically sucked
+energy from his victim.  The stare of his great eyes
+oppressed, the roughness of his speech had a wounding
+brutality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Which Party governs France?  The Blue Republicans
+or the Reds, answer me?  Can one treat with a State that
+has no responsible heads?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur le Comte!" screamed the personage thus
+cruelly prodded.  "Do you not know that you are
+insulting me?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had grown deadly pale, and now flushed red, making
+a passionate gesture as though to strike himself on the
+forehead, as the other asked him with bitter irony:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Is the truth so offensive to you as all that?...  If
+you did not wish to hear it, you have come to the wrong
+shop.  The day for compliments and flatteries has passed
+with the tinsel Empire of your Napoleon, unless you compel
+us to bring him back and set him up again at the Tuileries.
+Believe me, he has contemplated this eventuality!&mdash;has his
+carpet-bags ready packed, and his eagle in a traveling-cage....
+And certainly we could discuss the military questions
+at issue better with him than with you civilian gentlemen,
+who do not understand the language of War."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was not possible to get a word in edgeways....  The
+rasping voice tore the nerve-fibers as with a saw-edge, the
+towering figure overwhelmed, the powerful stare fascinated
+and terrified as the pitiless gaze of the snake when fixed
+upon a frog or a bird.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Bismarck went on, deliberately lashing himself into
+a passion:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Are you and your colleagues aware that I suffer in my
+reputation for these procrastinations?  It is said at home
+in Germany that I am over-lenient toward the French,
+our treacherous enemies ... that I delay to reap for
+United Germany the glory and profit for which she has
+paid so terrible a price in blood.  Yourself with
+MM. Ducrot and Favre have considered my terms for an armistice
+inadmissible....  In return I tell you you have forfeited
+the right to criticize any terms that I may propose....
+You would hold the elections&mdash;even in those provinces
+of France which we hold as conquerors!  You would reprovision
+Paris and her fortresses!  We should be hellish
+unpractical if we listened to you!...  What the big devil!...
+Are we to permit the levies, and the recruiting by
+which the French Republic may hurl against us a new
+army to shoot down?  <i>Himmelkreuzbombenelement!</i>...
+Do you take us for sheep's heads?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The unhappy Minister protested in a faint voice:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur le Comte, I do not even comprehend the
+meaning of the term!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah, by God!" thundered the terrible voice, "you are
+ignorant indeed of German words and German meanings,
+and the word that you understand least of all when applied
+to yourselves is WAR!  Silk gloves are not our wear in War,
+and therefore the iron gloves with which we have handled
+you have pinched your soft flesh and made you squeal.
+We might complain of your <i>Francs-tireurs</i>, who hide in
+woods and houses, and shoot our soldiers unawares; and of
+the inhumanity of your mitrailleuses which cut red lanes
+through whole regiments.  But no!  You are the
+sufferers&mdash;you are to be pitied&mdash;even for the injuries you wreak
+upon yourselves...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He struck with his clenched fist the top of the chiffonier
+near which he stood, and the dull shock of the contact of
+that sledge-hammer of muscle and bone with the solid
+marble, made the pictures shake upon the wall, the
+windows rattle in their frames, and the bewildered listener
+leap as if he had been shot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I rode over to St. Cloud yesterday," he went on, "to
+look at the palace you have set on fire with your shells
+from Mont Valérien.  It is burning still, as I don't doubt
+you know.  A well-dressed French gentleman stood looking
+at the smoldering ashes of the conflagration.  Near him
+was a French workman in a dirty blue blouse&mdash;'<i>C'est
+l'œuvre de Bismarck!</i>' said the gentleman to the plebeian,
+little dreaming who was near....  But the cad in the
+blouse only said to him: 'Why, our &mdash;&mdash; gunners did that
+themselves!'  That workman had more sense in his
+pumpkin than the whole lot of you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M. Thiers revived under the fresh insult sufficiently to
+plant a sting:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is said, Monsieur, and on excellent authority, that
+the Imperial Palace was sacked by German troops before
+it was set on fire."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor lowered his heavy brows and demanded
+almost menacingly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Do you assert that His Majesty the King or the Crown
+Prince of Prussia were parties to a crime of this kind?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No, Monsieur, not for an instant!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor said with a short laugh that had no mirth
+in it:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That is fortunate, otherwise I should have been compelled
+to break off, and finally, our negotiations with regard
+to this question of an Armistice, and deal only with the
+question of the territory to be added&mdash;in addition to the
+fortresses on the right bank of the Rhine&mdash;and those six
+thousand millions of francs that we shall certainly take
+from you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The thrust caused M. Thiers to leap to his feet, galvanized
+into a feverish energy.  He screamed, raising his
+clenched hands and sweeping them downward and outward:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It cannot be, Monsieur!&mdash;it is outrage&mdash;robbery&mdash;ruin!
+Europe will intervene if you persist in such a demand!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ha, ha, ha!"  The great jovial giant's laugh set the
+crystal drops upon the mantelshelf-vases and the
+wall-mirror girandoles tinkling, and reached the hearing of
+Hatzfeldt and von Keudell in the drawing-room, and the
+decipherers in the Bureau below.  It vibrated through the
+joists and planks and spaces above the plastered ceiling,
+and made Madame Charles start where she lay upon the
+floor of her bedroom listening, with her ear pressed to the
+uncarpeted boards.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My good sir, you are making game of me....  You
+have visited the Courts of the Powers&mdash;we know to what
+profit....  You have solicited intervention&mdash;to be told
+what both of us knew very well before! ... The British
+Lion may lash and roar, but will not do more, that is
+certain.  England has not sufficiently recovered from the war
+of the Crimea&mdash;from the further drain of men and gold
+caused by the Indian Mutiny....  Austria, in spite of
+creeds and bias&mdash;with her German-speaking population and
+her Germanized institutions&mdash;may be regarded as a powerful
+German State.  Italy lies under the heel of Austria.  If
+the Russian Bear elect to hug, the hugging will be done
+upon our side.  For it is inconceivable that Germany
+should ever be at war with Russia.  Our interests are and
+have always been one...."  He laughed again, and said,
+laughing:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And, knowing this, you threaten me with the intervention
+of European Powers....  You will hear nothing
+with respect to forfeiture of territory!...  You refuse to
+contemplate the question of the Gold Indemnity!...
+Wait!" he said&mdash;"wait until the bombardment is a month
+old and the bread-basket is empty....  Then we shall hear
+you sing to a different tune!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur le Comte!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The old man tottered to his feet.  He was ashen in hue,
+and trembling.  His blue lips hung breathlessly apart, his
+eyes had a lack-luster stare behind their gold-rimmed
+glasses; he pressed a hand over his left breast as though to
+repress a pang of pain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"M. le Comte ... I have suffered too much....  I find
+myself unable to continue our interview....  With your
+permission ... to-morrow?..."  He bowed and took his
+hat and cane, and repeated weakly: "To-morrow?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"With pleasure!" said the Man of Iron, escorting him
+to the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the old, humiliated, fallen King-maker, the great
+literary genius, the polished orator&mdash;tottered away out of
+the presence of the conqueror.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was to return upon the morrow, and for many days
+thenceafter, to be played with and tortured, to be
+tantalized and mocked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was to return flushed with futile hope, only to be
+crushed and retire discomfited.  He was to furnish an
+inexhaustible source of amusement for the delectation of his
+implacable enemy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was to return after a prolonged absence within the
+walls of the beleaguered capital, he and others, faint with
+famine, broken by anxiety, shattered by suspense and
+sleeplessness, forced by sheer hunger to sit and partake at
+the groaning board of their merciless foe, compelled by his
+arrogance to listen to his jestings, moistening the food
+they placed between their livid lips, with the stinging salt
+of tears.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap69"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LXIX
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+The center of a small but lively group, composed of
+admirers and listeners, Prussian officers known in Berlin,
+their Bavarian and Hessian friends and acquaintances,
+American and English Press Correspondents, and a traveling
+Oriental or two&mdash;you might have observed Madame de
+Straz&mdash;a full-blown Comtesse now, in virtue of the patent
+of nobility asserted by her husband&mdash;in the restaurant of
+the Hôtel des Réservoirs&mdash;not always accompanied by her
+Assyrian-featured lord.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide had not grown younger since the adventure of
+the Silk Scarf.  Her bold and striking beauty had suffered
+gravely, though her figure, set off by its fashionable and
+well-chosen dress, was as supple and graceful as of yore.
+She looked like some gorgeous fruit that the wasps had
+ravaged, and to conceal this she made up heavily and wore
+thicker veils.  What she now lacked in loveliness she
+endeavored to make up in <i>espièglerie</i> and easy-going
+good-fellowship.  Not a few officers responded with enthusiasm
+to her pressing invitations to breakfast or lunch at the little
+country villa she and M. de Straz had rented, at Maisons
+Lafitte beyond St. Germain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One need hardly say that there was play on these occasions,
+besides excellently prepared dishes and a liberal flow
+of the champagne, besides the cognac and liqueurs of which
+Madame drank a good deal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To quiet her nerves, raveled by the unhappy situation
+of her beloved country, she declared, for it suited her to be
+a Frenchwoman now.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She would have dearly liked to inveigle a Duke, Grand or
+Hereditary, or even a Prince Regnant, to her roof-tree and
+her baccarat-board, but these personages, bestarred and
+beribboned, furred, jack-booted, buck-skinned and
+long-spurred, were as shy as the hares and partridges in the
+forest, that were incessantly cracked at by hungry
+pot-hunters.  Wherefore the sumptuous Adelaide must
+perforce be contented with Counts and Barons, whose purses
+were less lengthy than their pedigrees, as a rule.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A solitary nest and too remote, it may be....  But
+for a bride and bridegroom, solitude and remoteness have
+their advantages!" had proclaimed M. de Straz, with a
+shrug of infinite meaning, and suggestive glances of his
+black Oriental eyes.  Certainly the guests of Madame and
+Monsieur, even when conveyed to the destination in hired
+broughams and victorias, were wont to find the road,
+running through abandoned villages and by deserted châteaux,
+unexpectedly barricaded with felled timber and scarred
+with unfinished trenches, more than a trifle long.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The nest of these love-birds, half a mile from the sacked
+railway station and the broken bridge of Maisons Lafitte,
+was enclosed in private grounds.  The villa Laon&mdash;how or
+from whom acquired, nobody ever thought of questioning&mdash;was
+a cottage with Swiss gables and East Indian verandas
+standing in gardens adorned with glass arcades and Italian
+pergolas, their vines and roses stripped and shuddering in
+the bitter wintry winds.  There were also Chinese bridges
+crossing pieces of ornamental water, aviaries of finches and
+canaries, and wired enclosures once well stocked with silver
+pheasants, now, thanks to the nocturnal ravages of
+mysterious marauders, depopulated in a manner painful to
+behold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You pretend," said Valverden teasingly to Adelaide,
+"that the neighbors creep out at night and annex the
+pheasants, or that our cavalry pickets take them for the
+mess-pot, or that they are stolen by <i>Francs-tireurs</i>.
+<i>Francs-tireurs</i> there are in plenty in the neighborhood&mdash;every
+hour some honest German soldier gets his death at the
+hands of one of these scoundrels!&mdash;but as far as concerns
+the vanished inmates of the pens and cages, I believe you
+and M. de Straz have eaten them yourselves."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stretched his long spurred legs out over the brocade
+of an Empire sofa gracing Madame's boudoir, and leaning
+back his handsome head, looked up at her teasingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"With my assistance, for that <i>salmis</i> we had for breakfast
+was of home production I am certain.  Come, own
+that I have guessed as well as Mariette can cook at a
+pinch."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide frowned and bit her lip.  But she let her gaze
+dwell lingeringly on the upturned face of the handsome
+Guardsman, and said, seeming to search for her own sulky,
+splendid image in the blue eyes with which Adonis made
+play:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If you were less like Max I believe I should detest
+you!..."  She added, after an instant: "And if you
+resembled him more than you do, you would find no
+welcome here."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Beyond <i>salmis</i> of pet pheasants, and stewed carp out
+of your landlord's fish-ponds."  His red lips rolled back in
+a grin that showed the strong white teeth, the fuzzy ends
+of his fair mustache sparkled as though the hair had been
+sprinkled with gold-dust.  "Who is your landlord?  I am
+dying to know.  Do you rent the place of the gardener, or
+that pompous-looking butler who has not got the key of
+the cellars, but nevertheless can produce champagne of
+Comet brand and excellent Roussillon.  Or is it a speculative
+partnership?  Some of us have dropped a good deal
+of money here in play lately....  They are beginning to
+grumble noisily&mdash;particularly that little black-haired
+<i>aide-de-camp</i> of the Duke of Coburg, and von Kissling of the
+squadron of Blue Dragoons quartered here at Maisons
+Lafitte....  What's in the wind I don't pretend to know,
+but they might get you turned out of here&mdash;they might
+even obtain an order from Headquarters for the return of
+their lost cash!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Bernhard!"  Her ringed white hands tenderly caressed
+his forehead.  "You will protect me from them!&mdash;you will
+stand my friend!  Oh! how horrible it is to want
+money&mdash;always money!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Valverden said, neatly biting off the end of a cigar and
+spitting the nipped-off end through the open glass-doors
+leading out upon the veranda:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Has not M. de Straz got any money?  And did not
+my Cousin Max give you enough?...  You used to seem
+uncommonly flush of the ready when one saw you queening
+it among the gay <i>cocottes</i> of Berlin."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His tone cut like a whip.  But Adelaide was growing
+used to take insults with outward meekness.  She
+swallowed her wrath and even tried to smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was horribly true that she had need of money.  Even
+before she had fallen into her present state of servitude,
+she had known that a day was coming when she would be
+penniless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Like all other women of her sensuous tastes and clamorous
+predilections, Adelaide devoured money as a pussycat
+crunches up small birds.  Her dead lover had spent
+upon her lavishly, had provided that an income should be
+paid her out of his private estate.  But it was not sufficient
+for a woman so extravagant, and Adelaide had supplemented
+it in various ways.  Firstly, by obtaining information
+for the Prussian Secret Intelligence Bureau.  Secondly,
+by tapping the bank-balances of admirers of the
+wealthier order.  Thirdly, by signing Bills of Exchange
+and Promissory Notes for cash at ruinous rates of interest.
+When she had conceived the idea of obtaining a reconciliation
+with Henri de Bayard, the prospect of incarceration
+in a debtor's prison had loomed very near.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cunning fable of her riches that had been devised to
+tempt him to his ruin, had failed through the very whiteness
+of the man's integrity.  Ah, Adelaide!  The way to
+have triumphed over the Colonel would have been to have
+crept in tatters as a beggar to his door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But she had never understood the man.  Let us hope
+that generous soul of his was spared knowledge of the
+degradation of the woman he had worshiped, as Valverden
+went on, barely deigning to hide his contempt of her, or to
+modify even slightly the insolence of his tone:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You have asked me to protect you.  I have no objection
+to doing so.  My sympathy is not at all with the losers
+who squeal.  Even when I was as poor as a church-mouse
+I had the gift of being plucked without wincing.  Besides,
+I won money that night when Von Kissling dropped such
+a lot....  And of course my testimony would be
+worth&mdash;something...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His tone of bargaining was unmistakable.  Adelaide
+flushed a dusky-red, through which the fading streaks of
+Straz's love-gift showed plainly, and her dark eyes gleamed
+covetously as she bent over the young man.  She whispered
+with her hot lips almost touching the diagonal white
+band of forehead above his soldierly sunburn:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What, Bernhard?  Tell me what it would be worth to
+you...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His long blue eyes laughed up into hers, lazily.  He said,
+feeling for the silver case in which he carried his fusees:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Shall we say ... a little information regarding the
+whereabouts of Mademoiselle Titania....  M. de Straz has
+piqued my curiosity, you will observe."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She reared above him like a furious Hamadryad,
+whispering thickly, for rage dried up her tongue:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So it is of my daughter you and Nicolas have been talking
+apart together, both here and at the Hôtel des Réservoirs.
+Are you both mad?  For a pale, plain, dull school-girl ... a
+peaky, undeveloped, mincing doll!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He raised himself to a sitting posture, and answered her
+coarsely:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Women like you cannot realize what is or is not pleasing
+to men of my standard.  The Prince Imperial must
+have seen a good many pretty women, young as he is, yet
+he found your daughter charming, I am told....  M. de
+Straz, who is a judge, admires her excessively....  If my
+curiosity is tickled, the fault is your own, for it was you
+and not M. Straz who first engaged my interest in that
+quarter....  Did I not speak to Count Moltke at your
+request of Mademoiselle?  Well, he did&mdash;though at first he
+scouted the notion&mdash;sound Count Bismarck on the subject,
+when he called to congratulate him on his First Class of
+the Iron Cross, and be complimented on his own Order
+<i>Pour Le Mérite</i>."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He folded his arms on his broad chest and dropped the
+words out lingeringly, relishingly, his blue eyes gloating
+over the changes in her tortured face:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And the Chancellor answered him: '<i>Do not you trouble
+yourself!  All is well with the pretty young daughter of de
+Bayard, by that disreputable old woman who played the
+mistress of Count Max in '67.</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She screamed, and struck with her clenched hand at the
+fair, flushed, grinning face as though she would willingly
+have battered out its beauty.  He caught her wrist with a
+fencer's quickness, and prisoned the other in the twinkling
+of an eye.  He went on, holding her immovable, leisurely
+enjoying the changes upon her tortured face:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"As a good German I do not interfere with my superiors.
+His Excellency knows where the girl is, and does not at
+present choose to tell.  But you, Werte Frau, have the
+right to question His Excellency, whose answer was
+repeated to me by my Chief, Count Moltke.  Do not forget,
+however, that you lay claim to the disrepute as well as the
+daughter when you present yourself at the Foreign Office
+... in the Rue de Provence...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She panted breathlessly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I shall not go!  No one shall compel me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Oh, in that case," said Valverden, rising and releasing
+her, "I can only leave you to the arguments of M. de Straz.
+He is coming now&mdash;I can hear his voice in the garden.  <i>Auf
+Wiedersehen!</i>"  He said over his shoulder, as he lounged
+out of the cottage: "In the affair of Von Kissling, do not
+count on my assistance.  It is only given on condition you
+fall in with our views."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So he and Straz were in league....  Rage stung her to
+the mad imprudence of rebellion&mdash;the proud sultana whom
+a thousand freakish cruelties on the part of her swarthy
+master had taught to be a trembling slave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Roumanian, we know, was nothing if not subtle.
+When Adelaide flatly refused to call at the Foreign Office
+in the Rue de Provence in the character of a bereaved and
+yearning mother, he smiled on her, almost tenderly.  He
+kissed the wrists Valverden's grip had bruised.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Queen Rose of my Garden of Delights," he said, "why
+did you let the girl go in the beginning?  You recognized
+her value even when you did not know that she has money
+in her own right."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Money....  A new light began to break upon Adelaide.
+The fear of a sudden and violent death no longer stiffened
+her muscles.  She moistened her lips, pale under their
+rose-tinged salve, and lifted her eyebrows inquiringly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Money, soul of my soul," said Straz, who had almost
+reverted to the original gushing and poetic Nicolas of
+Adelaide's remembrance, the lover whom in pre-Sigmaringen
+days she had cajoled and despised and betrayed.  "Not a
+large fortune certainly, but between her grandmother's
+estate and her father's savings she has a sum of 80,000
+francs invested in the Belgian cloth manufactory and
+dyeing works of M. Charles Tessier.  Not a fortune, but not a
+sum to be at all despised."  He added: "I have obtained this
+information from a person&mdash;formerly a clerk in the employment
+of the Versailles firm of solicitors who enjoyed the
+confidence of M. le Colonel and his sainted mother."  The
+quirk of his lips and the roll of his eyes as he made this
+reference, so unsavory in the ears of Adelaide, cannot be
+described.  "From this retentive person&mdash;I refer to the
+ex-clerk&mdash;I have purchased the intelligence I now divide with
+her who has the right to share the secrets of my heart."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide had previously seated herself, at a motion of
+his finger.  She looked up now as he thrust a hand between
+his vest and shirt-bosom.  Their glances met.  He said to
+her with a snap of his thick white fingers:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No!  Put that out of your head, <i>ma cocotte</i>!  Not a
+sou of de Bayard's will ever come his widow's way."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This uncanny faculty of the Roumanian for reading her
+unspoken thoughts was one of the secrets of his power over
+Adelaide.  She shuddered now, encountering his look.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Don't you know," he was demanding, "that with her
+unique beauty Mademoiselle would be a fortune in our
+pockets even were she penniless?  What! you doubt the
+justice of my taste&mdash;which placed on you the seal of
+approval when your own charms were at their perihelion.
+You who have paid the price for those supreme moments
+when celestial flames enveloped you&mdash;when you knew
+yourself nearest to the bosom of the Sun."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Were all the men in league with this man to taunt and
+mock and torture her?  A fierce surge of blood rushed to
+her brain.  She heard his thick chuckle as she loosened,
+with shaking hands, the lace about her throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why do you not kill me outright?" she cried to him,
+as the tide rushed back to her heart, and left her livid.
+"Are you not yet weary of playing this hideous farce of
+marriage?  Why murder me by inches?...  Will you
+never set me free?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said, combing his clubbed beard with his thick
+yellow-white finger-tips:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"When you have helped to get back Mademoiselle, I
+will think about providing you an honorable retirement.
+Come!  Be pliant....  You have my word that you shall
+be free.  But without funds," he shrugged, "who can do
+anything?  And Mademoiselle has these expectations
+... and beyond these I have certain definite arrangements
+with&mdash;a certain personage&mdash;who is&mdash;content to pay handsomely
+for an introduction to her."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She cast caution to the four winds and shrieked at him
+furiously:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'De Bayard's daughter by that disreputable old
+woman!...'  Ah, for that he shall indeed pay handsomely!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For though the sentence quoted by Valverden bore the
+unmistakable stamp of the Iron Chancellor's mintage, the
+tone in which the words had been repeated, the icy glance
+of contempt that had accompanied them, rankled in the
+flesh of the unhappy woman, like barbed thorns.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The venom wrought in her still, even to hardihood and a
+courage bordering on effrontery, when a few days later her
+hired carriage drew up before the sentried gate of the
+Tessier mansion in the Rue de Provence, early in the
+forenoon of a December day.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap70"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LXX
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+One of the black-garbed Chancery attendants opened the
+yellow-painted hall-door.  Madame tendered him a card,
+and said in her most musical tones, plying the archery of
+her fine eyes:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madame de Straz, formerly de Bayard.  By appointment
+to see His Excellency the Chancellor."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Von Keudell looked out of the drawing-room and signaled.
+The Chancery attendant caught his eye.  Madame,
+borne upon a gale of costly perfume, swept her velvets and
+Russian sables over the Foreign Office threshold, and
+amidst the tinkling of lockets, and charms, and bracelets
+innumerable, was ushered into the drawing-room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the door shut, and the Chancery attendant resumed
+his bench and his German newspaper, Jean Jacques Potier,
+who had been polishing the hall parquet with a flannel
+clout on one foot and a brush strapped on the other,
+resumed his labors with a very red face.  Madame Charles
+Tessier, who had been watering the ferns and pot-plants on
+the console-tables, wrapped in the woolen shawl that
+seemed parcel of her individuality, might have struck the
+young man, when he furtively glanced at her, as being
+whiter than her shawl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the deadly whiteness passed, and the rigor of terror
+could add little stiffness to the gait that was a compound
+of a limp and a shuffle, as the Twopenny Roué's bugbear
+climbed the back-stairs to her second-floor room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame Potier slept in the next.  One could hear her
+making beds on the first-floor beneath one.  Judging by
+the sounds, she was sweeping the Chancellor's sleeping-room.
+<i>Knock-knock!</i> went her busy broom every instant,
+against the furniture or the wainscot.  <i>Flip-flap!</i>  That
+was the duster, being shaken out of the window.  When
+the Minister was unwell, and kept his room, Madame did
+not sweep, but merely dusted and made the bed.  And he
+lay on the sofa, pulled near the fire and lengthened with a
+settee, or worked with his back to the window, at a table
+in the middle of the room.  There were two great black
+leather dispatch-boxes on the table, and a great many
+maps of France, covered with marginal annotations; and
+the brass-handled mahogany bureau near the washstand-alcove
+was piled high with boxes of long, strong Bremen
+cigars.  And by the bed was the night-table, with the
+framed photographs of his daughter and Countess
+Bismarck, his traveling candlestick, a supply of hard wax
+candles in a box, matches; a volume of Treitschke's
+"Heidelberg Lectures," with several little good books, in cloth
+bindings, "Daily Readings for Members of the Society of
+Moravian Brethren," and "Pearls from the Deep of Scripture,"
+as well as a bottle of patent medicine and a box of
+pills, both of which nostrums were renewed constantly,
+and neither of which seemed to do him any good.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For he coughed and hawked and spat bile continually.
+Rarely was he silent before two o 'clock in the morning, and
+then it might be that one ceased to hear him, because one
+had succeeded in wooing sleep for oneself.  Something
+ailed him.  Those who knew him best gave no name to his
+ailment.  Others whispered of catarrh of the stomach.
+Yet others were oracular upon the subject of dyspepsia of
+the acute kind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whatever the indisposition, it was fostered by the
+indiscriminate generosity of his admirers, who continually
+forwarded from all parts of the German Fatherland huge
+consignments of delicacies solid and fluid for the
+delectation of their Chancellor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Choice wines, rare cigars and fine tobacco, liqueurs and
+old corn-brandies, cold punch in barrels, beer of Berlin
+and Leipzig, and the brunette drink beloved of Bavarians.
+Smoked Pomeranian goose-breasts, cakes, sausages
+of every variety, fresh salmon and sturgeon, pickled
+tunny, herrings and caviar, game of all kinds, smoked
+hams of bear, deer, mutton, and pig.  Magdeburg
+sauerkraut and Leipzig pastry, preserves and fruit, fresh
+and candied, gorged the capacious storerooms and cellars
+of the Tessier mansion, which would have been found
+inadequate to accommodate all these mountains of good
+things, had not each Privy Councilor, Secretary and
+decipherer of the Chancellor's perambulating Foreign Office
+possessed a capacity for gorging only inferior to the
+Chief's.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In truth, this great Minister, so pitiless in his mockery
+of the idiosyncrasies and weaknesses of others, habitually
+overate himself; showing as little mercy toward his stomach
+as the staff of the Berlin Chancellery displayed toward
+the gorged and replete leather dispatch-bags that came to
+him by every post.  He was horribly greedy, and drank a
+great deal, and his stomach-aches, like himself, were on the
+colossal scale.  More than once Madame Charles had ministered
+to their assuagement with infusions of carbonate of
+soda and peppermint.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"One should check the appetite when one suffers thus
+from overindulgence," she had once said to him, stirring
+her dreadful infusion with an ivory measuring-spoon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The French climate does not suit me...." he had
+answered her.  "In Germany I can eat a great deal more
+than I do here.  Not that I eat much really, because my
+dinner is my only meal."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But, just Heaven!  Monseigneur! what a meal!" she
+had screamed at him in horror.  And the room had
+resounded to his giant's Ha, ha, ha!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Without a head and stomach of iron," he told her,
+"such as we Bismarcks inherit from our ancestors, and
+Göttingen has helped to render more tough, it would have
+been impossible in my young days to get on in the Diplomatic
+Service.  We drank the weaker men under the table,
+then lifted them up, propped them between chairs, and
+made them sign their names to all sorts of concessions
+which they would not have dreamed of making otherwise....
+To this day I can toss down the strongest wines
+of the Palatinate like water with my dinner.  Champagne
+I need, and the bigger glasses I get it in the more it agrees
+with me....  Port, such as the English sip with dessert,
+I prefer as a breakfast-wine.  Corn-brandy, such as our
+Old Nordhausen, is indispensable for the oiling of my
+machinery; and I derive benefit from rum, taken after the
+Russian fashion, with my eight or nine cups of
+after-dinner tea."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He added, sipping Madame Charles's fiercely-smelling
+nostrum:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not that anything I have drunk or eaten mars my
+capacity for cool reflection and close argument....  When
+I and one or two others are laid by, men will only peck and
+sip.  There will only be chatter about eating and drinking....
+<i>Grosser Gott!</i>  What things I used to do in that line
+when I was young!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he tossed off the contents of the tumbler, and
+mouthed at it, and set it down upon the little tray she held
+and dismissed her with a nod of thanks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Madame Charles carried away with her an idea of
+him as he had been in those old days, huge, loud, voracious,
+powerful, tempestuously jovial or ironically grim.  She
+crowned the domed head with thick waving locks of brown
+hair, lightened the shaggy brows, and gave the blue eyes
+back their youthful fire; smoothed the deep lines from the
+florid face, restored his long heavy limbs their shapeliness,
+and reduced the girth of his waist.  And it was impossible
+to despise the finished picture, because the man was so
+much a man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Day by day, while the War went on, and Paris lay
+raging and spitting fire within her impregnable, impassable
+girdle of human flesh and steel and iron&mdash;to this house
+where he sat solid and square at his table in his bedroom-study,
+reading over documents vomited by the great dispatch-boxes,
+or letters and papers captured with balloon-posts,
+or driving the pen with that tireless hand of his over
+sheets to be conned by Monarchs and rulers of States&mdash;came
+the Crown Prince of Prussia, handsome and débonnaire,
+or the dry, withered gentleman who bore the great
+name of von Moltke, or the War Minister von Roon, or
+M. Thiers, or the Saxon Minister von Friesen, or the Grand
+Dukes of Weimar or Baden, or the Duke of Coburg, or the
+Representatives of Austria-Hungary and Bavaria, or the
+English Ambassador, who had recently come upon a Mission
+to Versailles.  Night after night, other and stranger footsteps
+crossed the threshold.  Sometimes blindfolded officers
+in stained and weatherbeaten French uniforms had been
+led upstairs to that mysterious room where he sat, weaving
+his huge web of diplomacy, or manipulating with deft,
+capable touches the threads that moved both men and
+Kings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everyone came to this house on the quiet by-street of
+Versailles, that had become the throbbing center of the
+world....  From the greatest to the smallest, from the
+worthiest to the vilest.  Now, last of all came&mdash;Adelaide
+de Bayard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And with her came the question: How much he suspected.
+There had been one or two moments when Juliette
+had been temporarily thrown off her guard.  Could one
+really deceive him, who was so subtle, watchful,
+observant?...  Past master in cunning, ripe in diplomacy....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She heard his heavy footstep on the staircase as she held
+her bosom and listened.  Madame Potier had finished his
+bedroom, and taken her broom and dustpan to the next.
+Madame de Bayard had been shown into the smaller
+interviewing-room, where the Brussels carpet had been paced
+into threadbare alleys by the feet of men who were topped
+by aching responsibilities&mdash;where the Crown Prince of
+Prussia smoked his big painted pipe of Latakia as he
+chatted with the Chancellor&mdash;where M. Thiers sat through
+long ordeals of torture in the little wicker arm-chair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Would the mother of Juliette de Bayard sit in that
+chair?  Her daughter knew how superbly she would rise
+and sweep her reverence to the Minister.  How smoothly
+she would pour forth some false and specious tale....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister strode in upon Madame, carrying his cap
+and riding-whip.  His heavy countenance had the healthier
+flush of exercise, his great spurred boots were plastered
+with clayey mud.  He had but just returned from an early
+ride with Count Hatzfeldt, taken at this hour "To escape,"
+as he had explained to that elegant functionary, "the
+detestable clattering and knocking of that female Kobold,
+whose day it is to sweep my room."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why let her sweep?" Hatzfeldt had asked, and his
+principal had answered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I approve domestic cleanliness.  And a room that is
+used as bedroom and study somehow harbors both spiders
+and dust.  And I abhor spiders&mdash;nearly as much as
+cockroaches.  Those long-waisted insects that swarm in the
+conservatory here give me almost a sensation of sickness
+when they scuttle away from my boots.  I find a physical
+relief, actually, in crushing them."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He experienced something of that nausea and its resulting
+impulse toward extermination, meeting the bold eyes
+and the false ingratiating smile of the still beautiful
+Adelaide.  He said, standing huge and adamantine between
+the woman and the window:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Be seated, Madame....  No ... not that chair!  Possibly
+I grow old, but I find that I can best deal with certain
+persons when the morning light is on their faces."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"As you will, Monseigneur!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adelaide mentally execrated his coarse brutality as she
+bit her lip, pulled down her flowered veil more closely, and
+prepared to sink into the little wicker chair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No!" he said, stopping her, "not that chair!&mdash;take
+the other.  To my idea the seat you at first selected
+represents at present the Throne of France, or at least the
+Presidential fauteuil.  M. Thiers occupies it when he comes to
+see me....  And he is a person whom I hold in much
+respect."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She winced at the side-thrust.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I regret, Monseigneur, to have forfeited your good
+opinion."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I do not usually bestow my good opinion," he told her,
+"upon ladies of your reputation, even though I may have
+reason to praise their sharp wits.  Now pray state your
+business here.  My time is limited."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She half rose up with a pained stare of wounded feeling,
+thought better of it, sank down again amidst her velvets
+and sables, and recited her lesson as taught by Straz.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Roumanian, by dint of diligent, patient inquiry,
+had collected and pieced together with marvelous cleverness,
+the information gathered, correlative to the movements
+of Juliette.  Her departure from the Prefecture at
+Bethel, her frustrated journey to the Camp at Châtel
+St. Germain&mdash;her halt at the village of Petit Plappeville, her
+search for the Colonel upon the battlefield, were all pieces
+in a mosaic miraculously restored.  M. de Straz knew that
+Count Bismarck had seen and spoken to the young lady&mdash;had
+ordered separate burial for the body of de Bayard.
+He could even name a soldier of the German burial-party,
+who had helped to dig the grave.  Subsequently Mademoiselle
+had been seen in company with a young Englishman ... she
+had returned with him to Petit Plappeville.
+The village had been raided and sacked by Prussian cavalry.
+Since when, Mademoiselle, with the young Englishman,
+had returned to Versailles....  She was occupying the
+Tessier mansion up to the moment of the arrival of the
+Chancellor with his Foreign Office Staff.  And&mdash;by a most
+curious and deplorable coincidence, from that psychological
+moment to the present, all trace of Mademoiselle had been
+lost....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Consequently," Adelaide wound up her well-conned
+lesson, "myself and M. de Straz have no resource but to apply
+to Your Excellency.  Naturally M. de Straz desires that
+the daughter of M. de Bayard and myself should be extricated
+from a compromising position and placed under our
+joint guardianship.  He takes&mdash;such chivalry is innate in
+his nature&mdash;a parental interest in the poor young girl!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Minister, smiling with cynical amusement:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Therefore in the interests of Chivalry and Morality&mdash;you
+call on me&mdash;as proprietor of the seraglio in which you
+suppose Mademoiselle to have been hidden away....  You
+demand"&mdash;he struck the riding-glove he had removed upon
+the palm of the right hand it had covered&mdash;"and the hint
+of such a demand is a menace&mdash;do you hear?&mdash;a menace&mdash;that
+I should render the girl up to you, or pay through
+the nose for what I once declined to buy.  You think at
+this epoch in the history of Germany&mdash;when the search-ray
+of international interest is turned upon the doings of that
+fellow Bismarck at Versailles&mdash;that I should not care to be
+classed with the Minotaurs who devoured youths and
+virgins.  Madame, they were French monarchs, I am only a
+Pomeranian squire...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He rose up, towering over the quaking woman, and
+strode across the shaking floor and pulled the green silk
+bell-rope by the fireplace.  It came down in his hand, top
+ornament, wire and all, and he said as he looked at it and
+tossed it from him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That is a suggestion on the part of your Fate which I
+shall not adopt, though I could hang you and your paramour...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He added, speaking loudly as Von Keudell opened the
+door, and the wretched woman rose and tottered toward
+him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Did I hold the secret of your daughter's hiding-place,
+I would not betray her to you....  <i>Adieu</i>, Madame de
+Bayard....  You observe that I do not add, 'and <i>au
+revoir</i>!'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The great resonant voice had sounded through the whole
+house like a beaten war-gong.  Lying upon the floor of
+her room, straining her ears to catch some fragments of
+their colloquy, it broke over Juliette in waves of thunderous
+sound.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jean Jacques, below in the hall, was told by Von Keudell
+to "see the lady to her carriage," which, in virtue of her
+appointment, had been admitted through the Tessier
+<i>porte cochère</i>.  The Swiss youth obeyed with even a clumsier
+grace than usual, the polishing-brush being still strapped
+about one instep, and the clout still swathed about the other
+foot, as he hobbled down the shallow doorsteps to open the
+brougham-door for Madame.  As she stepped in and took
+the seat, her strained eyes leaped at his face suddenly.
+As he leaned in arranging the rug about her knees&mdash;what
+was it he heard her say:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You are the English boy I saw in July at the house of
+M. de Bismarck.  Do not attempt to deny; I never forget
+a face!  When can you come and see me?...  I must
+speak to you!  I swear to you that I mean no harm to
+Mademoiselle Juliette de Bayard!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her lips were ashen under their rose-salve.  The ringed,
+bare hand she laid on his rough paw burned like fire.  He
+muttered in the weird <i>patois</i> that passed as Swiss with
+some German occupants of the Tessier mansion:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madame will pardon....  One does not understand!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She gave a disjointed, unmusical peal of laughter, that
+rattled the brougham windows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Droll boy!  But you will come, whether you understand
+or not.  The Villa Laon, Maisons Laffitte, near
+St. Germain....  Night-time will be best&mdash;to-night or
+to-morrow night."  She added, looking at him over the
+lowered window as he shut the door upon her: "Ask for
+Madame de Straz.  I shall be waiting for you.  Do not
+forget!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The carriage drove on.  He stood upon the lowest doorstep
+staring after it, for only privileged vehicles were
+admitted by the <i>porte cochère</i>.  A hand fell heavily on his
+shoulder, startling him hideously.  A terrible grating
+voice said in his ear, speaking in the Minister's excellent
+English:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So, Madame Delilah has been trying her sorceries, has
+she?  Come this way, my young English friend....  I
+want two words with you!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap71"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LXXI
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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!&mdash;what have
+you admitted to that Witch of Endor, <i>la veuve Bayard</i>?
+You are no friend to her daughter if you have told the
+woman that Mademoiselle is here, under this roof."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So you&mdash;know?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His victim, with lips screwed into the shape of a whistle,
+had murmured:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Post Office....  Gee-whillikins!...  they've given
+me away!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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 <i>give yourself away</i>, 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,&mdash;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&mdash;who
+is supposed to be ignorant of any language save his
+own extraordinary gibberish&mdash;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
+<i>laissez-passer</i>.  You will return to me a certain half-sheet
+of Chancellery notepaper which I gave you in the Wilhelm
+Strasse last July!  Further&mdash;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!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Marry her promptly!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She is married already, Sir!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Quatsch!</i>" 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."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But&mdash;my God, sir!&mdash;I have seen her husband!" cried
+the young man desperately.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"When did you see him?" asked the resonant,
+compelling accents.  The answer came, bringing down his
+frown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I&mdash;cannot tell you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Came, curiously lisped, the words:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I fear I must compel you.  All this may lead to
+something more serious than I have thought...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh snarled, knitting the broad red eyebrows so
+industriously sooted:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Twice....  There can be no harm in my saying so."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And how recently?"  The grating voice scooped into
+one's brain like a dentist's burred scraper.  P. C. Breagh
+shook his head, saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I can't tell you that!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why not, if there is no harm in telling?"  The voice
+was almost pleasant.  "Was it as recently as three days
+ago?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Was it as recently as two days? ... as twenty-four
+hours? ... Will you not answer for your own sake?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The stubborn head was shaken resolutely.  The Minister's
+voice said, blandly, persuasively:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You may, for all you know, be answering for hers!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a stubborn silence.  The Chancellor said,
+with his suave, but warning lisp more perceptible than
+usual:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Be good enough to touch that bell upon the table near
+your hand...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh obliged.  Grams and Engelberg presented
+themselves.  The Minister said, looking at them over the
+head of his sacrifice:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"One of you will convey my compliments to Madame
+Charles Tessier, and request her to speak to me here and
+now."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said, meeting his heavy, powerful stare with eyes of
+burning sapphire, steadily under leveled brows of jetty
+black:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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 <i>patois</i>, 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!'..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was laughing now, unmistakably.  He said, smoothing
+the heavy mustache with a hand that twitched a little:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was going on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;(as though an artist needed the adventitious aid of
+towels and stockings!)&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  "BASSELOT & TESSIER.<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  "WHOLESALE MERCHANTS,<br>
+  "WEAVERS AND DYERS OF WOOLEN FABRICS.<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+  "MONS-SUR-TROUILLE,<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"BELGIUM.<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"December 20, 1870.<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"MADEMOISELLE:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Relying on your good sense and amiability, permit me
+to make you a confession.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Torn between the urgent commands of filial duty, and
+the dictates of ardent affection, I have yielded to the
+irresistible promptings of Love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Wedded to her I adore&mdash;the name of Mademoiselle
+Clémence Basselôt can hardly be strange to you&mdash;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&mdash;that you will confer upon us the greatest
+obligation by consenting to remain beneath our roof.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+  "Respectfully and sincerely,<br>
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"CHARLES JOSEPH TESSIER."<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+The reader added, as he looked about him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Where is the wedding-cake?&mdash;that white thing! ... thank you!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"In the face of this&mdash;are you married, Mademoiselle?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She answered him dauntlessly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No, Monseigneur!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Th-then," he asked, with his portentous lisp, "wh-why
+on earth did you&mdash;did you pretend to be?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She answered with surprising quietude:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To make my place in this house more secure."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah!  Might one ask why?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He put the question with irony.  She answered with
+astonishing composure and dignity:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Because at that period I desired to gain the
+opportunity to&mdash;kill you, Monseigneur!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The firelight was full upon Juliette as she answered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Because you have made this War;&mdash;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&mdash;Chiefs of her Government&mdash;who have stooped to beg
+from you consideration ... for these things, see you
+well&mdash;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!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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&mdash;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!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I should not have tried to escape, Monseigneur!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He commented sarcastically:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Fanatics are the most dangerous of conspirators.  Life
+has no value&mdash;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?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said between her close-set teeth, hissingly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It should, Monseigneur, but for one thing!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His powerful glance rested on her curiously:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah, Fury!&mdash;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?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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&mdash;I
+have an excellent memory for such utterances: '<i>It would
+be better to cadge in the dustbins for a living than make
+money out of information gained by trickery.</i>'  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&mdash;a kind of stink!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The prodded victim uttered an incoherent exclamation.
+Juliette cried indignantly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She flamed out all at once into a rage and cried, seeming
+to tower to twice her stature:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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&mdash;at what risk you know!&mdash;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!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"All that about my daughter's portrait is <i>quatsch</i>!"  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&mdash;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 <i>Franc-tireur</i>&mdash;full of bombastic
+vaporings and bloodthirsty denunciations borrowed from
+the columns of Parisian rags?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monseigneur!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was taken aback.  She faltered, flushed, whitened,
+conscious of the reproachful stare of Breagh's honest gray
+eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Did I not tell you?&mdash;everything is known to me!...
+Not only have I read those letters you hid in the mouth of
+that grinning Pan in the garden&mdash;but here is the bottle
+you threw away!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took it from von Keudell and showed it her&mdash;a squat,
+wide-mouthed chemist's ounce vial, half full of whitish
+powder, and read from the label:
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+  "ARSENIC: (<i>Poison.</i>)<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="quote">
+"<i>The powder as prescribed, to be diluted with
+Three Parts of Milk, and applied as directed,
+for clearing the complexion and freshening
+the skin.</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+Crash!...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"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...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Foolish child!  Silly girl!...  Little coquette!&mdash;pretending
+to be married to torture a sweetheart; vaporing
+of murder&mdash;acting the heroine&mdash;to take a gaby's breath
+away!...  What you want is a decent, sensible mother
+to administer a good whipping...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A shudder convulsed her slight body.  In the firelight
+her face looked rigid and drawn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He might have pursued, had not the gaby to whom he
+had unceremoniously referred stopped him by crying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Be silent!  I will not stand by and listen to such
+language!  I will not permit you to speak to her so!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>So!</i>"  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>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh said desperately:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I do not know how&mdash;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."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Retire to your room, then!" he said to her grimly.
+"Henceforth you do not meddle in the kitchen, Mademoiselle.
+You cook capitally, your <i>beignets</i> 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&mdash;in compliment
+to your unflinching candor&mdash;I will ask you to give
+me your <i>parole</i> not to attempt to escape!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She put up both hands to her eyes, and they were
+trembling.  When she took them away there were tears upon
+her face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monseigneur, I thank you.  I give my <i>parole</i> not to
+run away."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So be it!" he said, and slightly acknowledging her
+deep curtsey, motioned to Von Keudell to open the door.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap72"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LXXII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+She passed out of the room.  Von Keudell held open the
+door for her.  As he did so, he glanced toward his Chief
+for instructions.  The Minister said, answering the
+interrogation in the look:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No.  I prefer to extend to Mademoiselle the semi-liberty
+of the <i>parole</i>."  He added: "Exceptional cases
+must be treated exceptionally.  Upon a different kind of
+young woman I should promptly turn the key.  Tell Grams
+and Engelberg that they are released from duty outside
+there.  And Niederstedt...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He whistled, and the great red face and huge unwieldy
+figure of the East Prussian ex-door porter filled up nearly
+the whole width of one of the long windows.  The red face
+disappeared as the steam of its owner's breath dimmed the
+glass, and the effect was so quaint that the Minister laughed
+irresistibly as he opened the window and relieved the
+impeccable guard, saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why, my good Niederstedt, you are frozen&mdash;you smoke
+like a volcano.  Go down to the house-steward&mdash;tell him
+to give you some old corn-brandy, hot, with sugar and
+pepper.  That will thaw you inside as well as out!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shut the window, and came back to the fireplace,
+pushed forward the great green brocade armchair, and
+threw himself into it, saying as he stretched his long legs
+out to the glowing billets:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You may go, Mr. Breagh; there is no cause for detaining
+you.  But while you remain here, revert to your own
+dress, and leave it to more experienced hands to polish the
+floor and balusters, to which I adhere like a fly who has
+walked upon treacle, half-a-dozen times in a day.
+Remember&mdash;I see no reason for denying you reasonable access to
+the society of Mademoiselle de Bayard&mdash;unless she objects
+to your visits, in which case she will probably notify
+me!&mdash;&mdash;"  He added more genially: "Sit down.  Take
+that chair opposite me....  You need no longer stand in
+the attitude of a suspected criminal.  Indeed, I rather
+think you have repaid a small service I was enabled to
+render you in pulling you out of a Berlin crowd, last July.
+Ah, that reminds me.  I must ask you for the return of
+that paper...."  He watched with a slight expression of
+amusement as P. C. Breagh produced the shabby note-case
+from a pocket inside his livery waistcoat, commenting:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Had you been searched, those papers would have
+betrayed you instantly.  One more skilled in the art of
+disguise would have carried nothing that could afford
+information.  That is a very elementary rule."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh said, meeting the powerful eyes fully:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I have already had the honor to explain to Your Excellency
+that my disguise was not assumed for any purpose
+but that of remaining near Mademoiselle de Bayard."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He rose and offered the folded half-sheet of Chancellery
+note to the Minister, who took it, unfolded and glanced at
+the black upright characters above the signature, then tore
+the paper to pieces, and, leaning forward, dropped it into
+the heart of the fire.  Then he kicked back a charring log
+with the toe of his great riding-boot, and said, leaning back
+in the green armchair:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Credited&mdash;as to your statement about the reason of
+your impersonation.  You should see to it that Mademoiselle
+rewards such chivalry.  As regards the pass I have
+just cremated&mdash;did you find it useful or&mdash;otherwise?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The one and only time I did use it, it proved of service
+to me.  But later&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Speak frankly," said the Chancellor.  "I have no
+disrelish for candor, you are aware."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh said, flushing to the temples:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Later, the accidental discovery that I possessed it,
+exposed me to the accusation of being a spy."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So you chose to do without it?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I thought," said P. C. Breagh, "that I would try to
+do without it.  And upon the whole I managed&mdash;better
+than I expected to...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To put it baldly," commented the resonant voice of
+the Minister, "you preferred to travel in blinkers and with
+hobbles on&mdash;for the sake of a scruple of the genteel kind.
+That is your Celtic blood....  You remind me of the
+story&mdash;I think it hails from Dublin, of the little old
+spinster lady of high family, who was reduced for a living to
+hawking pickled pig's-trotters in the streets.  She accepted
+the money to buy the license, with the basket and the first
+installment of trotters, and went forth into the streets to
+sell them&mdash;but beyond this, as a gentlewoman&mdash;her feelings
+did not permit her to go.  So she cried, in a whisper:
+'Trotters! who'll buy my trotters!  Only a penny!  Pickled
+trotters!  Please God, nobody hears me!' ... and nobody
+did hear her, so that was the end of her...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had told his absurd tale with one of those comic
+changes of face and voice characteristic of him.  Now he
+reverted to gravity, and said, as P. C. Breagh rose to
+withdraw:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Go! but remain here as my guest for the present.
+You are not under <i>surveillance</i>.  But there is one question
+I must again put to you.  What of this mysterious
+personage who represented himself to you as M. Charles
+Tessier?  You must now be convinced that Mademoiselle
+knows nothing of him?  Well, then, I will repeat the
+simple questions which you refused to answer just now.
+Where did you first see him? how long ago? and how many
+times have you encountered him?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh had been first addressed by the stranger
+when returning from an errand in the character of Jean
+Jacques.  Putting it roughly, about a fortnight back.  Since
+then, he had been twice spoken to by the same man.
+Interrogated as to the appearance of the stranger, he ruminated
+a moment, then answered: "The man was of middle
+height, but broad and tremendously muscular.  He was
+remarkable to look at, very dark; with great black
+eyebrows, and a profile like that of an Egyptian hawk-god.
+No! ... He was more like those curly-bearded
+man-bird-bulls Layard dug up in the mounds of Babylonia and
+Assyria."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said the Minister:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You have answered all my questions in that simile....
+The man is Straz the Roumanian, who is supposed to have
+married Madame de Bayard.  What was it she said to you
+this morning when I had the ill-manners to break upon the
+lady's confidences?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said Breagh, with a pucker between the broad eyebrows
+that would be red when he had washed off the
+soot:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Whatever she is, she is Mademoiselle de Bayard's
+mother, and I would ask Your Excellency to remember
+it too."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Quatsch!</i>" said His Excellency roughly.  "Mademoiselle
+de Bayard&mdash;for whom I have a sneaking sort of kindness,
+in spite of her avowedly bloodthirsty intentions
+toward myself!&mdash;has no worse enemy than that
+adventuress-mother of hers, and you should be aware of it by
+this time.  In plain words, she visited me in the Wilhelm
+Strasse upon an occasion you will remember, to offer to
+sell me Mademoiselle as bait for the better catching of an
+Imperial fish.  I did not take the high horse with her, but
+refused her simply as declining an unsuitable business
+proposal."  He laughed and added: "These good ladies
+have conveniently short memories.  Imagine her coming
+to appeal to me to-day, in the character of a bereaved
+mother with a yearning heart!...  Well, now she has
+asked you to go to see her?  Have I not hit it?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Answered Breagh:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She told me that I was English, and that she remembered
+having seen me at Your Excellency's.  She asked
+me where her daughter was, and then&mdash;when I pretended
+stupidity&mdash;she laughed, and insisted that I must visit her
+to-night or to-morrow night.  How late did not matter.
+She seemed certain that I would come."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Well, you will go to her," said the Minister, "but
+not to-night, I think!  To-morrow night would be
+preferable!... If you appeared to-night, she would think that
+you are to be easily got over, and she would not show her
+hand to you.  Go to her late.  Twelve o'clock will not be too
+late for her.  Women of her type are usually night-birds&mdash;and,
+besides, most people sit up on Christmas Eve.  Report
+direct to me at whatever hour you may get back.  I
+myself am not likely to turn in before daylight, because
+the Crown Prince and the three Bavarian Envoys dine
+here."  He added, looking quizzically at the young man:
+"Now you are saying to yourself, 'That has something to
+do with the scheme for the accession of the South German
+States to the North German Confederation....  An agreement
+has been definitely arrived at.  That is why Bismarck
+let that fat plum drop about the New German Empire just
+now.'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He laughed outright as P. C. Breagh reddened, but made
+no effort to deny the charge, and went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Baden and Würtemburg have come to terms.  You
+cannot use the intelligence before it will be known by
+everyone in London, so I risk nothing by telling you.  Our
+chief stumbling-block has been the King of Bavaria, who
+suffers from gumboils, and considers that in turning the
+Palace of Versailles into a military hospital, we have
+outraged the shades of Louis XIV., Madame de Montespan,
+Louis XV., Madame de Pompadour, and Queen Marie
+Antoinette."  He added curtly: "There! be off, and tell
+Grams to send word to the stable that I am ready for the
+horses.  I ride with Count Hatzfeldt another hour
+to-day.  And change those clothes, if you would have me
+cease to address you as a footboy....  Clothes cannot
+make a man, but the lack of them can mar him&mdash;if they
+make him appear a clod."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The horses came, and he rode out with Hatzfeldt.  There
+was a piercing northeast wind and a spatter of freezing
+sleet, much resented by the Diplomatic Secretary and his
+thin-skinned thoroughbred, and even displeasing to the
+Chancellor's great brown mare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The iron lions of Mont Valérien were growling and
+spitting shell down into the surrounding valleys, thickly
+wooded with trees, now stripped&mdash;all save the firs and
+pines&mdash;of leaves, and glittering-white with frost.  The
+lakes in the parks were frozen.  Hundreds of thrushes
+drifted like leaves before the icy gale, toward the
+low-growing coverts of ivy and brushwood.  A balloon rose
+within the Bois de Boulogne, soared, and traveled south-west.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Reaching the Aqueduct of Marly, they dismounted, for
+the purpose of taking what the Minister termed "a peep
+at Paris from the platform," and, leaving their horses to
+the care of the grooms, transferred themselves there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Behind the Forest of Marly the red sun of December
+was sinking over the frosty landscape.  The Minister
+glanced casually through his glasses at the ruined houses
+of Louvéciennes in the foreground, sheltered amidst their
+clumps of whitened trees; and sweeping over the villages
+of La Celle and Bougival, looked long toward Fort Mont
+Valérien, where the great stronghold sat perched on its
+height with its many windows glowing like furnaces in
+that fierce reflection from the crimson west.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The line of the Rennes and Brest railway running from
+Courbevoie through the Park of St. Cloud and Versailles
+showed strongly held by Prussian outposts.  Beyond,
+between banks dotted with damaged hamlets, and bordered
+on the north side with fanged ice sheets, the silver-gray
+Seine wound, flowing sluggishly about her islands,
+wrinkling her lips in disgust at the jagged buttresses of the
+bridges that had been blown up.  Farther south, over the
+lopped trees of the Bois de Boulogne, rose the great
+shining dome of the Invalides, bathed in that ominous
+ruddiness, looking like a great cabochon ruby studding a shield
+of silvery-green bronze.  For Paris from this point of
+view is shield-shaped, crossed with the bar-sinister of her
+historic river; backed with her fortifications as by the
+enamel-and-silver work of a cunning jeweler; set with
+points of diamond where the bayonets of a column of
+marching infantry moved out from the ramparts along the
+road toward Fort Vanves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was frightfully cold.  Said Hatzfeldt, stamping to
+recover the circulation in his numbed feet, and beating his
+gloved hands vigorously upon his sides:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"How cold!...  I can smell more snow.  Heaps of it, coming!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chief turned an eye toward the speaker without
+lowering the glasses through which he was looking.  He
+completed his survey before he said, restoring the binoculars
+to their case, and speaking with a jarring note of anger
+in his voice that made the Secretary arch his eyebrows:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I do not smell what I should like best to smell, and
+that is, the smoke of a German bombardment!"  He added:
+"We have to thank women and priests, and Jews and Freemasons,
+if our operations are not conducted as energetically
+as they should be.  To begin with, Monsignor Dupanloup
+has Augusta by the apron string&mdash;the Crown Prince,
+cajoled by his wife and bullied by Victoria, his
+mother-in-law&mdash;is ready to give up the command if I insist that
+we begin....  Do you know how many weeks it has taken
+me to get our Most Gracious to consent that the siege
+train should be moved from Villa Coublay and placed in
+position?  And then Moltke and the generals asserted that
+we had not ammunition enough....  Given three hundred
+powerful siege guns&mdash;ninety of them howitzers&mdash;with fifty
+or sixty mortars, and five hundred rounds of ammunition
+for each&mdash;could not we pour sufficient shell into the city
+to bring her to reason?  Give me the post of Commander-in-Chief
+for twenty-four hours&mdash;and I will take it upon
+myself!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hatzfeldt said mentally:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah, the devil! wouldn't you&mdash;and with a vengeance!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chancellor went on, deep lines of anger and
+vexation digging themselves into his gloomy face:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Never were two men more reluctant to reap the fruits
+of a great victory than our Most Gracious and his Heir
+Apparent&mdash;who in this matter, as in some others, needs a
+candle to light up his head!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His face took on a sullen cast.  He stamped his foot
+upon the ground, and bayed out like some deep-mouthed
+bloodhound:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If they have no ambition of their own&mdash;these
+Hohenzollerns&mdash;do not they owe something to mine?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He ended, breaking into his great laugh, evoked by
+something in the expression of his Secretary:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Here am I&mdash;applying to you for sympathy, who are
+just as petticoat-ridden by your Countess as the King and
+Prince Fritz by their respective better halves.  Have you
+not your mother-in-law and your millionaire papa-in-law
+shut up there in the Rue de Helder&mdash;to say nothing of
+your wife's pet pair of pony cobs?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hatzfeldt returned, shrugging ruefully:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I had another letter from my wife about the cobs
+this morning.  Heaven knows whether they are still
+alive!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister said with a touch of malice:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is quite certain that there has been no fresh meat in
+Paris now for some time.  Except ass and mule flesh at
+fifteen francs a pound.  Dogs and cats are getting scarce,
+consequently <i>ragoût de lièvre</i> has become the staple dish at
+all the restaurants...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hatzfeldt rejoined with a sigh:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am not quite sure that a little starvation would not
+be good for myself personally, and one or two others of the
+Prussian Foreign Office staff.  For there is no denying we
+eat a great deal too much.  Your Excellency knows there
+are few nights when we spend at the dinner table less than
+two hours and a half."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The answer came:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You should eat little for breakfast, and nothing in the
+middle of the day; then your stomachs would neigh and
+prance at the dinner call as mine never fails to do.
+Sometimes you see me dine twice without ill results&mdash;as when I
+am going to the King, who keeps a bad table&mdash;and find it
+necessary to fortify myself beforehand...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He broke off speaking to cough and expectorate, and
+Hatzfeldt, noting the deep yellow hue of his jaws and
+temples and forehead, and the sagging pouches under the
+great eyes, and the caves that his anxieties and labors had
+recently dug about them, said to himself that the Chief's
+health was not what it had been; that any fool could see
+with half an eye he was terribly liverish; that he slept
+little and spat bile continually, and that his superhuman
+capacity for work, in combination with his superhuman
+powers of eating and drinking, were maintained at high
+pressure by a remorseless vanity that proved him no
+stronger or wiser than other men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What was he saying in tones tinged with mockery, for he
+had probably taken that reference to the excess of luxury
+at the Foreign Office in the Rue de Provence as a thrust
+directed at himself:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If you would really like to try high living after the
+latest Parisian style, I have at home among some letters
+taken from a balloon captured yesterday the menu of a
+dinner given at Voisin's on the twenty-first by some rich
+Americans: <i>Potage St. Germain....  Côtelettes de loup
+chasseur....  Chat garni des rats rôtis, sauce poivrade.
+Rosbif de Chameau....  Salade de légumes.  Cèpes à la
+Bordelaise.  Dessert, none at all</i>....  I gathered from the
+same source that the Government are going to take over all
+private stores of provisions, and that the edible animals
+confined in the Jardin des Plantes are to be shot and cut
+up for sale."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Good-bye to poor Touti's ponies, then," said the Secretary,
+with resignation, "and possibly farewell also to my
+hopes of a sturdy son and heir."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah! if things are as serious as that," said the Minister,
+"you had better telegraph to the Countess.  Prince
+Wittgenstein, Clarmont, and little Desjardin, Secretary of the
+Belgian Legation in Paris, left there yesterday morning by
+special permit from General Trochu.  All three packed
+into a <i>coupé</i> belonging to Prince Croy&mdash;these equine
+treasures of your wife's were harnessed to the vehicle.  They
+were to spend the night at Villeneuve St. Georges&mdash;and
+you will probably find them in Versailles when we get
+back."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He added as the Secretary thanked him with effusiveness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"As regards the family in the Rue de Helder and your
+bootmaker&mdash;the only man in the world who can turn you
+out properly!&mdash;you may tell them, if you are in communication
+with them, that until the twenty-seventh of December
+they may sleep in peace....  As to-morrow is Christmas
+Eve, that means four unbroken nights of slumber.
+After that&mdash;the Deluge; not of water, but of fire and steel
+and lead."  He added, ignoring the Secretary's start and
+half-suppressed exclamation: "Call to Reichardt to bring
+up the horses.  I find it chilly&mdash;let us be getting back!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap73"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LXXIII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Christmas Eve came with an unloading of all the countless
+tons of snow that had lain pent up behind those skies
+of leaden grayness.  The Seine froze in thin crackling
+patches, Paris and the surrounding country lay under two
+feet of snow.  Kraus, Klaus, Schmidt, and Klein of the
+Army of United Germany told each other gleefully that it
+was going to be a real German Christmas, after all.  Nearly
+every man had packed up and sent a French clock or a
+porcelain vase as a seasonable gift to his family in
+Germany, or some article of furniture of a bulkier kind.  Now
+upon the side of the senders of these love gifts was a great
+unpacking of strongly smelling parcels directed in well-known
+characters, and containing cakes, sausages, pudding,
+loaves of black bread, cheeses, barrels of Magdeburg, sauerkraut,
+and salt meat to eat with it, sweets, tobacco, cigars,
+and pipes.  Each hospital and barracks, camp and quarters
+displayed elaborate preparations for merrymaking; the
+most distant outpost wore a festive air.  Wagonloads of
+holly, ivy, and mistletoe creaked over the snow.  Miniature
+forests of fir trees, large and small, had been cut down,
+and set up in tubs of earth for the festival.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+French eyes regarded these preparations upon the part
+of their foes with curiosity.  For Catholics there would be
+Midnight Mass at the churches&mdash;by consent of the German
+authorities!&mdash;Holy Communion&mdash;and some sort of
+supper&mdash;possibly none this War Christmas&mdash;upon the return from
+Church.  But this setting out of tables of presents under the
+fir-branches adorned with colored tapers hung with
+child-rejoicing trifles such as gilt nuts and gingerbread, apples
+and sugar plums; this singing of carols; Luther's "<i>Euch
+ist ein Kindlein heut geboren</i>," with "<i>Der Tannenbaum</i>,"
+and "<i>Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht</i>," the frequent references
+to Santa Claus and his sack, and the Christkind&mdash;apparently
+regarded as a benevolently disposed Puck or
+Brownie, was to the adult non-German inhabitants of
+Versailles excessively puzzling, unless they happened to be
+English Protestants.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of these honest Britons there was a fair sprinkling, the
+majority of them being exceedingly depressed and out-at-elbows
+refugees from Paris, whose exodus from the city in
+the previous month of November had been achieved under
+the auspices of the British Government, and the personal
+superintendence of Lord Henry Fermeroy, Secretary of
+Lord Lyons's Embassy at Paris, armed with a safe conduct
+from General Trochu.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Despite his low-bosomed vests, Imperial, and French
+accent, this sprig of British nobility behaved like a man.
+From the old lady who brought a tin bonnet box full of
+jewelry and a case containing a stuffed pug, with the prayer
+that these heirlooms might be taken care of at the
+Embassy, and the courtesan, Cora Pearl, who requested formal
+permission to carry on business, during the siege, under
+the protection of the British Flag, as from each individual
+unit of the army of distressed Britishers who flocked to
+seek his aid or counsel, Lord Henry earned gratitude, and
+praise, and good-will.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the provisions and money subscribed to the Fund
+for the aid of the many destitute English residents in Paris
+were at an end, he did not hesitate to dip his hand into
+his own breeches pocket.  His shining patent-leather boots
+carried him not only into the attics and cellars where grim
+Starvation crouched on a bed of damp straw.  They tripped
+over the Aubusson carpets of the drawing-rooms where
+Genteel Famine sat sipping hot water out of Sèvres cups,
+wherewith to quell its gnawing pangs, and retired, without
+having trodden upon a single corn during the accomplishment
+of their owner's charitable errand.  He bombarded
+Count Bismarck with official Notes, until he had obtained
+permission from that grim Cerberus for his little army of
+refugees to pass the Prussian lines.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of his dreary three days' journey in charge of the string
+of country carts containing the exiles, who were permitted
+to travel to Versailles via the Porte Charenton, Brie-Comte-Robert,
+and Corbeil, Lord Henry afterward penned a Narrative.
+Which literary effort, printed, bound in cloth of a
+soothing green, and adorned with a Portrait of the Author,
+the young man bestowed upon his friends.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps you can see the blue eyes of Juliette peering
+between the frost flowers encrusting the window of her
+bedroom on the second floor, which commanded a view of
+the garden of the Rue de Provence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had, upon the previous evening, received an intimation
+from the Minister that she would be permitted to take
+exercise regularly in the garden between the hours of nine
+and ten.  Thus with a throbbing heart, she dressed the
+shining tresses so long concealed under Madame Charles
+Tessier's chenille net and white shawl, and arrayed herself
+in the plain black silk skirt and bodice that we have seen
+once previously&mdash;looped over a cloth petticoat of the same
+mourning hue.  She sought for, found, and put on the
+gray velvet jacket trimmed with Persian lambskin, and
+the little gray toque that matched it, despoiled of its azure
+feather.  These things, with many others, had been packed
+away in a trunk and stowed in the attic now occupied by
+Madame Potier, when Mademoiselle had departed for
+Belgium under the charge of Madame Tessier.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She wound a white silk scarf about her throat, tied on a
+veil, and found herself wishing for a knot of violets to
+brighten the pale, somberly clad reflection in the
+looking-glass....  Color ... and her Colonel's grave lying under
+the first-fallen snow....  She blushed deep rose for very
+shame of her own vanity, and then in all conscience the
+picture was bright enough.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The pleasance, like the rest of the world, lay under a
+mantle of sparkling whiteness.  The orderlies and grooms
+had already cleared and scraped the paths in the vicinity
+of the house.  The ring of the shovels and the swish of the
+brooms might be heard in the distance.  Mademoiselle
+sighed, thinking of Jean Jacques Potier.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then timidly she stole down by the back staircase and
+passed through the hall door into a world all glittering.
+The keen air was as exhilarating as champagne.  It breathed
+on her cheeks, and renewed the roses that had bloomed
+there when she had frowned at the girl in the mirror.  The
+frost kissed her eyes, and they sparkled like sapphire-tinted
+icicles.  She tripped down the short curved avenue,
+passed the gardener's cottage, and turned into the kitchen
+garden.  Not that she was looking for anybody there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All through the autumn and winter in a sheltered corner
+had bloomed a large standard rose tree of the hardy,
+late-flowering kind.  The storms of October had passed over
+and left its fragrant pink blooms unscathed, the bitter
+winds and night frosts of November had done no more than
+brown the edges of an outer petal.  The tree in its
+fragrance and beauty, and its strange immunity from hurt of
+wind and weather, had been an unfailing source of pleasure
+to Juliette.  When an overblown flower shed its leaves,
+she had gathered up and kept them.  When a new bud
+plumped and bravely unfolded, her heart had known a
+delicate thrill of joy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Mademoiselle went on into the kitchen garden, whose
+paths had not been cleared of snow.  There was her
+tree&mdash;standing in its corner, but buried to the lower branches in a
+drift that had formed in this sheltered angle of the
+southward wall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The roses had met their match at last.  Drooping and
+yellow, sodden and heavy, they had no more courage or
+hope to give away.  Juliette kissed both her hands to
+them, in farewell, and turned to encounter P. C. Breagh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The green baize apron and other integuments of the late
+Jean Jacques Potier had been replaced by the old brown
+Norfolk suit so often mentioned in these pages.  It had
+been sedulously brushed and his linen was scrupulously
+white, and he had bestowed infinite pains upon the knot
+of the black silk, loose-ended tie.  His cropped hair would
+grow again, and his broad red smear of eyebrow was echoed
+on his upper lip by a young but decidedly red mustache
+with rather fuzzy corners.  The pleasant lips smiled at sight
+of her, and a hot flame leaped into the gray-and-amber eyes.
+Her own could not be likened to sapphire icicles now.
+They were tender, and her long upper lip was haunted by
+flying smiles that came, and vanished, and came again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is you!  Ah, my friend," she said, "I am so glad&mdash;I
+am so glad!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He caught the gloved hands she stretched out to him,
+and held them in his, that were reddened with Jean Jacques
+Potier's labors, and kissed them eagerly.  The little gray
+gloves were not buttoned&mdash;his warm lips feasted unchecked
+upon each blue-veined wrist, until she told him breathlessly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No more!&mdash;there must be no more!...  Pray cease,
+my friend!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had withdrawn her hands....  He said with a catch
+in his breath and with eyes that implored her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I do not offend you?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked at him full and drew off one glove and laid
+the bare hand in his extended palm.  Warm and soft, it
+seemed incredibly small as it lay there.  The touch of it
+infused a melting sweetness; a thrill went through the
+man from head to foot.  Perhaps the thrill was communicated,
+for she drew her hand away quickly.  She said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You are very generous to one who has so often deceived
+you....  How many times I have condemned myself for
+my wickedness, thinking: 'Of all those noble deeds I have
+described in the letters, not one has been really performed
+by M. Charles Tessier....  All are invented to make a
+good face!'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said in a whisper:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I could forgive you for making even a worse fool of
+me&mdash;now I know you never were married!  It was your
+telling me that knocked me out of time....  Nothing else
+mattered much afterward....  You said to Monseigneur
+yesterday that it was to retain your place in this house you
+pretended to be the wife of its master.  But why did you
+pretend it in the first place to <i>me</i>?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She began to change color from pale to red, and tried
+to free her hand.  It was impossible.  He said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I mean to know....  I have the right to know!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She faltered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"See you well, Monsieur, I cannot explain...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said doggedly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Then I shall explain it for you.  You told me that to
+make me jealous!  Now, did you not?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She winced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur ... not then!...  Upon my faith, I assure
+you....  See you well, I had promised my father that
+M. Charles should be my husband....  I would have kept
+that promise <i>à tout hasard</i> ... had M. Charles not
+married Mademoiselle Basselôt.  And so I told you I was
+married, not then to make you jealous ... that came after.
+But to make it ... possible to be true!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He almost reeled under the sudden shock of the terrible,
+exquisite confession.  He would have given a year of life
+to let himself go with the sweet roaring current that
+tumbled foaming through his veins and sent its red sparkling
+bubbles to his brain.  But there were steps and voices on
+the other side of the high laurel hedge that divided the
+kitchen garden from the pleasance.  He recognized
+Bismarck-Böhlen's snigger and Hatzfeldt's lazy, well-bred
+accents&mdash;telling an anecdote of the Minister one could not
+doubt.  The languid voice reached their ears distinctly.  It
+said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He was an officer of French Imperial Hussars, who had
+been taken prisoner at Sedan, and had broken his <i>parole</i>.
+He had been taken again in arms against us, fighting under
+General Chancy at Le Mans.  So she comes post-haste to
+Versailles, lays siege to the King, who will not see her&mdash;to
+the Crown Prince, who will not see her&mdash;and finally to
+Moltke, who will not see her, because all three of them are
+cowards at the sight of a woman's tears.  Finally the Chief
+consents to receive her....  It was yesterday, in his room
+at the Prefecture.  She comes in&mdash;all in black, which to a
+blonde of her type is very suitable, full of hope at not
+being made to <i>croquer le marmot</i> for long.  She reels off a
+long tale about her Frederic, his bravery, and his excellent
+heart.  The Chief listens sympathetically, looking at the
+clock from time to time.  Again the heart is pressed upon
+his notice.  It is heavy with grief at the thought of a life
+parting from Madame, who is Frederic's mistress, by the
+way&mdash;and not his wife!...  It is weighed down with
+suspense at the delay of the Prussian <i>Kriegsrath</i> in answering
+the loved ones his prayer....  She gets so far, when the
+Chief looks up at the clock, and says, touching his table
+bell: 'Madame, that excellent heart of your client is even
+heavier than it was five minutes ago....'  'How,
+Monseigneur?' cries Madame.  'He was shot,' says the Chief,
+'just now when I looked up at the clock.  And, as a rule,
+seven out of the ten bullets shot off by the firing party are
+found to have lodged in the region of the heart.'  So the
+poor woman screamed and fainted.  They carried her past
+me with her teeth set and all her fine hair hanging
+down...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bismarck-Böhlen's snigger greeted the <i>dénouement</i>.  The
+footsteps grew fainter.  Juliette and Breagh exchanged
+glances.  She said with white lips:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monseigneur can be merciless!  And yet, when I heard
+him tell my mother that did he know of my hiding place,
+he would not betray it, I said to myself: '<i>How you have
+misjudged this man!</i>'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her comrade had started at the reference to Madame de
+Bayard, remembering the rendezvous to be kept that night.
+Juliette went on, with a liquid look:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur, I have a favor to ask of you....  All those
+weeks when I struggled with that purpose from which you
+tried so faithfully to dissuade me, I did not once dare to
+set foot in Our Lord's House.  But when I threw away that
+wicked bottle, I found that I could pray once more....
+I went to the Carmelite Fathers and made my confession....
+I received Our Lord in the Holy Communion ... and
+my soul began to be at peace again.  Now it is Christmas
+Eve and I should much like to attend the Midnight High
+Mass, or the Second Mass at daybreak, and I had intended
+to ask you to take me, but I am upon <i>parole</i>....
+Therefore, I entreat of you&mdash;pray for me when you
+make your own Communion.  How much I need Divine
+pardon and guidance ... even you can hardly
+know...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His conscience stung.  He had not intended to evade
+the sacred obligation, yet he had wavered as to when he
+should comply with the command of the Church.  He
+said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It shall be as you ask.  I shall attend High Mass at
+the Church of the Carmelites at midnight.  Afterward, I
+have an appointment&mdash;at a place some distance from here."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So late, Monsieur?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her glance had not only surprise in it, but fear for him.
+He said lightly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Very late....  I may not get back until&mdash;some time
+near the second breakfast....  Madame Potier will have
+some hot coffee ready for me...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She flushed and knitted her small hands together
+anxiously.  She asked:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Could you not&mdash;could you not take me into your
+confidence?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said bluntly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Not without myself committing a breach of
+confidence...."  He added, holding out his strong hand:
+"Try to trust me.  If it were possible to tell you, I would
+do it, you must know."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I know it, and I trust you, Monsieur, always...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was faith in her eyes.  He kissed her hands and
+released them, and turned with her silently....  They
+walked back together as far as the house.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap74"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LXXIV
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+At six o'clock, when the snow had ceased falling and the
+old moon of December glowed redly through a thinning veil
+of frost fog, the Crown Prince arrived to dine with the
+Minister.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Heir Apparent of Prussia came with an escort of
+Dragoons of the Bodyguard, driving with one of his
+aides-de-camp in a closed sledge belonging to the exiled Empress,
+an exquisite vehicle, finished like an enameled <i>bonbonnière</i>,
+supplied with a great white Polar bearskin, and
+drawn by two superb black Orloffs, whose glossy coats had
+the burnish of old Italian armor in the ruddy light of
+torches held by orderlies and grooms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister, followed by Hatzfeldt and his Chief Privy
+Councilor, went down bareheaded, between a double row
+of Chancery attendants, dressed in their new dark-blue
+liveries, with black velvet facings, to welcome his Crown
+Prince.  The broad breast of "Unser Fritz" displayed the
+Order <i>Pour la Mérite</i>, with the First-Class of the Iron
+Cross, and the Red Eagle, with an English Order, bestowed
+by Queen Victoria upon her son-in-law.  He sported new
+shoulder straps, distinctive of his newly conferred rank as
+Field Marshal, and cut a very gallant figure, as may be
+supposed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps you can see him at the head of the long table in
+the dining-room of the Tessier mansion, his Chancellor and
+host upon his left hand.  Upon his right sat the Bavarian
+plenipotentiary, Count Maltzahn.  Count Holnstein,
+another Bavarian Minister, newly arrived from Munich with
+a letter from his King, and the Bavarian Minister of War,
+Von Pranky, were severally disposed according to their
+degrees.  Prince Putbus was there, and a certain Herr von
+Zadowski, a large red-faced man in a green Hussar
+uniform, wearing a white patch with a red Cross, the badge
+of the Knights of St. John, and the Iron Cross, was also
+present, and the Secretaries and Privy Councilors filled
+the lower end of the board; sporting the new Foreign
+Office uniform of dark blue, with black velvet side stripes
+to the trousers, and a black-velvet-collared, double-buttoned
+military frock.  Sword belts and black-hilted swords
+with gold knots caused the more stout and elderly among
+the Councilors infinite discomfort, to the secret but acute
+delight of Bismarck-Böhlen and Count Hatzfeldt.  The
+dinner, composed of love gifts from admiring German
+patriots to their Chancellor, was of a quality, quantity,
+lusciousness, and length calculated, as Privy Councilor
+Bucher piously whispered to a neighbor, "to make a guest
+imagine himself a banqueter in Abraham's bosom before
+the time."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Long before his table companions had reached the zenith
+of their sensuous enjoyment, the Crown Prince had finished
+his temperate meal.  The Chancellor commented mentally,
+glancing at the clear, rather set features of the great
+golden-bearded figure seated beside him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Fritz is endeavoring to impress myself and these
+Bavarians, with whom it rests to decide whether he is
+Emperor or no Emperor, <i>par la fermeté de son attitude</i> with
+regard to the pleasures of the table, and by the Spartan
+simplicity of his habits and tastes.  How I should like to
+offer him black broth and barley bread in a special wooden
+bowl and platter.  But that, I suppose, would be <i>lèse
+majesté</i>."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And closely emulated by Von Holnstein and Von
+Pranky, he gave free reign to his Gargantuan appetite,
+taking twice of nearly every course, and washing the huge
+meal down, as was his habit, with floods from Rheims and
+Épernay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the cloth was drawn and fresh relays of wine appeared,
+the Prince accepted but a single glass of <i>fine champagne</i>
+with his coffee.  When the costly cigars were offered,
+he pulled from his pocket a porcelain pipe bearing
+his crest and monogram, painted and sent him by his
+English wife as a Christmas present, and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I should prefer to smoke this, if Your Excellency does
+not mind."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dinner over, His Royal Highness, with the Bavarians
+and the Minister, repaired to the salon.  Overhead,
+Mademoiselle de Bayard, lonely in her prison bedroom on the
+second floor, heard their voices&mdash;deep, sonorous bass, shrill
+tenor, and penetrating, resonant baritone&mdash;engaged in
+discussion or joining in argument.  At ten o'clock the Prince
+took leave, attended to his vehicle as previously by the
+Chancellor, to whom he said, in a low tone, as he pressed
+his hand:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"We are now no longer North Germans, but Germans.  I
+shall urge upon my father the speedy proclamation of the
+Empire with all external state.  Names, arms, titles, colors
+place us before the world in a proper light.  I have never
+coveted a Crown Imperial.  I denounce the idea of a
+bombardment as brutal and unnecessary.  But I am willing
+to reap all the honors and advantages that can be gained
+from our victory.  Impress this upon my father, who
+treats pomp and solemnity with indifference.  As to
+demanding the old crown of Charlemagne from Vienna, I do
+not at all see the necessity for that.  I shall write to my
+wife to-night!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And <i>Unser Fritz</i> got into the exquisite sledge that had
+been given to the beautiful Empress by the Third
+Napoleon, and was whirled away in a glittering dust of snow,
+kicked up by the fiery Orloffs' heels.  And the Chancellor,
+recovering from his deep, ceremonious bow, wheeled and
+went back up the steps, with his bald head glittering in
+the ruddy torchlight....  None might guess what savage
+triumph swelled the heart beating under his white
+full-dress uniform, upon this the night that set upon the
+fabric of the man's colossal labors the copingstone of
+Success.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Bavarian plenipotentiaries took leave within ten
+minutes.  Count Hatzfeldt had been summoned to the
+salon a few moments previously.  When the unseen bustle
+of their departure had subsided, the Secretaries and
+Councilors, smoking and drinking tea in the dining-room, were
+unexpectedly joined by the Minister.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All rose up as he suddenly opened the folding doors,
+thrust in his head and shoulders, and surveyed them,
+smiling.  Behind him was Hatzfeldt, pale and excited, and
+with eyes that seemed dancing out of his head.  There was
+a silence of expectation, then the great figure moved to
+the table, and men scattered to make space for him as
+though his contact might have slain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He wore full-dress White Cuirassier uniform, without
+the steel cuirass, and the First and Second Classes of the
+Iron Cross, and the Red Eagle, with the peculiar deporation
+that he always sported, and which had been given him
+in his young manhood for saving life.  His bald forehead
+and great domed cranium were studded with shining drops
+of perspiration, under his tufted brows his blue eyes blazed
+with a triumph almost fearful; his straight-bridged,
+snub-ended nose, thick cheeks, and bulldog jowl were crimson
+and dripping.  He drew out his handkerchief and wiped
+them&mdash;and the hand that held the linen palpably shook.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said to them all, and they held their breath to listen:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Gentlemen, the Bavarian business is settled, and
+everything signed and sealed.  We have got our German
+Unity&mdash;and our German Empire!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a deep silence for a moment, broken by
+Busch's request to be allowed to take the pens with which
+the treaty had been signed.  He got permission.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That little Busch," said the Minister, "will never lose
+anything for want of a tongue.  If he thinks to find there
+the gold pen set with brilliants, that was sent me by the
+Hamburg jeweler, he is mistaken.  Come!" he added,
+"this is a great occasion!" and bade Hatzfeldt ring for a
+servant and order up more champagne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wine was brought and opened.  He said to the
+servant who officiated:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Let the house steward know that some wine is to be
+sent to the clerks and decipherers in their room.  The
+servants also are to have what they like best for
+drinking&mdash;I fancy Niederstedt will choose Old Nordhausen.
+But&mdash;short of my best liquor, let what each likes best be
+given to him.  No!&mdash;not that glass.  I will drink out of
+my biggest goblet!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the fizzing bumper in hand, he waited until all had
+been served, looking, as he reared his great bulk at the
+head of the full table, the biggest man, mentally and
+physically, who had ever served the Hohenzollern.  In his most
+powerful tones, he called the toast:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Hoch!</i> to His Imperial Majesty, our Kaiser Wilhelm!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every man there strained his lungs to the utmost, but
+the great bull voice of the Chancellor drowned every other
+there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He talked a little more: "We should never have hooked
+the King of Bavaria, but for the pluck of Holnstein, who
+set off from Munich to tackle His Most Gracious at his
+Palace of Neuschwanstein, and&mdash;there being no railway&mdash;made
+in six days a journey of eighteen German miles on
+foot and on horseback over mountain passes, agreeably
+diversified by forest tracks and timber roads."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He drank and went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He arrived, to find His Majesty nursing his toothache
+in absolute solitude, invisible to human eyes, save those
+belonging to the dentist, his valets and fiddlers and grooms.
+At first the King refused to receive him, but Holnstein was
+clever enough to gain over the dentist to deliver a letter
+from his own hand, and incidentally one written by myself...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He went on, with a smile that curved the great mustache
+into lines of gayety:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Knowing myself particularly detested by King Ludwig,
+I had taken pains to make my letter acceptable.  I said in
+it that my family had enjoyed the patronage of his family
+a trifle of five hundred years ago.  I mentioned that
+reinstitution in the Wittelsbach good graces had been the
+object of my whole life's labors.  I incidentally pressed the
+claims of the King of Prussia to be made Emperor of
+Germany.  I enclosed, with many apologies, the draft of a
+letter which expressed the concurrence of Bavaria.  'Your
+Majesty has only to copy this and sign it,' I added, 'and
+the troublesome business is closed.'  What a prospect to a
+monarch afflicted by an obstinately throbbing gumboil!
+There was no paper or pen at hand with which to answer,
+so the dentist presented his patient with a sheet out of his
+pocketbook, and the patent ink reservoir pen with which
+he writes his prescriptions.  King Ludwig sits up in bed,
+scrawls a copy of my draft reply, and the German Empire
+is made....  The Festival of the Orders and the
+Proclamation of the Emperor will come off in the Great Hall
+of Versailles upon a certain date not far off....  I will
+leave you to guess what the date is likely to be!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the midst of a deafening tumult of joyful outcries and
+congratulations, he turned his great eyes upon one excited
+face after another, and drained his capacious glass and set
+it down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And with all this, gentlemen, our hopes might have
+foundered....  The Royal sign manual might have availed
+us nothing!... the Treaty might never have been signed!...
+Everything has depended upon a question as trivial
+and ridiculous as indeed are most of our human vanities.
+Imagine the gravity of the question at issue!...  Whether
+the Bavarian officers are in future to wear the marks of
+their military rank upon their collars as heretofore, or on
+their shoulders, like us North Germans?...  Upon that
+the German Empire has dangled, do you hear?  Ah! how
+many times," he said, "I have been tempted to break out
+and tell those fellows in the devil's name to sew their stars
+and badges on the seats of their breeches.  But I comforted
+myself with the old adage: <i>Politeness as far as the
+last step of the gallows, but hanging for all that!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They roared with laughter.  He called:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Fresh bottles!  A little excess may be pardoned, upon
+this of all the nights in the year.  Really, I need a buck-up
+after all that I have suffered, what with this Bavarian
+business, with Gortchakoff's Note, and the bumptiousness
+of the English, who, without knowing why or wherefore,
+are bellowing for war.  All that danger has been avoided
+by the exercise of a little diplomacy....  But how can
+we expect to be taken seriously by the Powers when we
+procrastinate in the matter of the Paris Bombardment&mdash;which
+ought to begin at once!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a hubbub of acquiescence, from which only
+the voices of Hatzfeldt and Abeken were missing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bismarck-Böhlen begged leave to propose a toast.  The
+Minister asked, tolerantly regarding his young relative,
+who vibrated with suppressed hiccups, and was palpably
+unsteady upon his long legs:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What is this toast we are to drink?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bismarck-Böhlen, in labor with speech, got out with a
+final effort:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The&mdash;<i>hic!</i>&mdash;bombar&mdash;<i>hic!</i>&mdash;ment!  Big&mdash;<i>hic!</i>&mdash;potarroes
+for Paris!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah, as God lives!" he said to them, "I must drink
+that toast!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It went round.  Hatzfeldt followed with:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Our glorious Chancellor!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Our glorious Chancellor!  Our great, ineffable,
+powerful Kaiser-maker!  <i>Hoch!</i> the Fürst von
+Bismarck-Schönhausen, Imperial Germany's master-mind!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sobs mingled with their acclamations.  Their faces were
+now purple red with the exception of Hatzfeldt's, which
+was ghastly, and Bismarck-Böhlen's, which presented a
+combination of shades, in which pea green and orange
+predominated, as, bathed in tears, he staggered to embrace
+his august relative.  He was turned off with a single jerk
+of the Minister's wrist, to fall weeping on the bosom of
+Privy Councilor Abeken, who, shocked at finding himself
+involved in something approaching to an orgie, was in the
+act of escaping from the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My thanks for the toast!" said the resonant voice in
+their dulled and singing ears, "but pray all remember that
+I am no longer the North German Chancellor, or even the
+Chancellor of the Germanic Federation, but Chancellor of
+the German Empire, which has a better sound!  And this
+is now, or will be by the New Year&mdash;the Imperial German
+Chancellery, and Foreign Office, while you, my friends, are
+Imperial Privy Councilors, Secretaries, and so on.  We will
+baptize your green honors in a fresh round of champagne,
+and then I must leave you.  I have yet before me some
+hours of hard work, and must keep my head clear and
+cool."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He held his great glass to the now drunken servant to
+be filled up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Prosit!</i>" he said, and lifted the capacious vessel high,
+and tossed off the wine and dashed the costly goblet into
+the fireplace, where it exploded in crystal fragments and
+sparkling dust.  Had they tried, his satellites could not
+have followed his example.  Their leaden arms could only
+lift the wine to their dribbly lips.  They drank&mdash;and one
+by one each toper collapsed and buckled as though the
+solid oak floor had given way under his boneless feet.
+Hatzfeldt sank prone across a chair.  Bismarck-Böhlen
+had rolled under the table some moments previously, where,
+judging by the ominous nature of the sounds that asserted
+his presence, Madame Tessier's Brussels carpet was suffering
+for his excess.  Similar noises, stertorous snores were
+reëchoed from other quarters as the Minister surveyed his
+fallen warriors:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Men cannot drink in these days!" he commented, and
+left the room.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap75"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LXXV
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+He threw on his cap and his great white cavalry cloak
+lined with Russian sables and passed out by the front door
+into the still white night.  The snowstorm was over, the
+fall had lessened to the merest sprinkle.  The bitter northerly
+wind no longer drove the blizzards screaming before it,
+each tree stood immovable under its burden, the overloaded
+evergreen bushes lay flat upon the ground.  And the moon
+sailed high, drifting away eastward.  Through the tatters
+of the frost-fog shone the great blazing jewels of the stars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Twelve o'clock struck near and far, and from the great
+Cathedral of the Place St. Louis, as from every bell-graced
+tower and steeple in Versailles, rang the Christmas
+carillon.  Many voices broke upon the piercing, windless quiet.
+Many footsteps were passing through the snowy streets.
+Catholics were going to their Midnight Mass and Communion
+to be celebrated by permission of the Prussian
+Minister.  He pictured the crowds that would flock to the
+great churches of Paris&mdash;how Notre Dame would be packed
+to the doors, and Ste. Marguerite, also the great Church of
+the Carmelites, and the ancient church of the Augustine
+Fathers in the Place des Victoires....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He imagined the flower-decked High Altars in the
+churches and chapels of Versailles thronged about with
+war-weary, famine-bitten refugees and residents.  German
+Catholics would mingle with them&mdash;the conqueror and the
+conquered kneeling side by side.  Wounded soldiers of
+both nations would help each other to limp to the
+Communion rail; the atmosphere of the hushed, crowded
+sanctuaries would throb and vibrate with prayer....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For what boon would all these suppliants entreat High
+Heaven most fervently?  Pacing in and out of the snowy
+garden alleys, his giant shadow passing over the moveless
+tree shadows, he asked himself the question.  There was
+but one reply:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For Peace....  They would pray to GOD for Peace ... that
+Bismarck was not going to give them yet a while.
+Under the icicles that had formed on his great mustache
+he laughed.  And a Satanic pride swelled within him
+as he told himself that this was his crowning hour of life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wild sweet frenzy of the bells was dying down.
+Distant refrains of sturdy German carols came from the
+military quarters and the barracks.  The bells stopped,
+wavered, broke out again, grew faint, and were still.  And
+it seemed to the man standing in the chill silence of the
+snowy garden as though he heard the Spirit of France and
+the Spirit of Germany communing in the depths of this
+Christmas Night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the voice of France that wept:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Alas! miserable that I am, what hast thou done to me?
+Why have thy fierce hordes rolled down upon me from the
+strange Pagan lands in the inclement East?  Was it my
+fame, or my wealth, or my beauty that tempted thy
+Hunnish warriors, the yellow-haired footmen, with hard,
+blue-eyed faces and huge hairy limbs, and the uncouth, fierce
+tanned horsemen, who ride as though they were one with
+their beasts?  Woe is met for my white breasts that were
+kissed by the conquering Roman! must I yield them again
+to be bruised by the ravishing Frank?  A curse on thee! thou
+treacherous, deep-flowing, swift river, that hast again
+proved no barrier to the Prussian invader!  I am fallen a
+prey to the Confederation set up by the Corsican upon the
+Rhine.  Oh! hard as the nether millstone!  Wilt thou
+unpitying, behold Famine devour my beauty?  See, the white
+limbs that show through my tattered garment are fleshless!
+No man who looks upon me would desire me more!  For
+what hast thou dug a pit about me and set up thy terrible
+war engines?  Was I not willing to make terms with thee,
+as the conqueror?</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the Voice of Germany that answered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>O Gaulish Queen! thou wert willing, but not for the
+conquered is it to appoint the sum of the ransom, or hold
+parley with the victors regarding the price of blood!  Hearest
+thou, O fallen one?  I withdraw my triumphant legions
+when it pleases me.  This is a land where the wine and the
+women are luscious.  When we have drunken deep enough,
+we shall load ourselves with spoil and treasure and go.
+Yet ere I withdraw, I shall have known thee as a lover,
+whose desire is kindled the fiercer because of thy hate.
+Death shall be the priest who celebrates our espousals.
+He shall unite us with a ring of steel and fire.  Then I
+depart, leaving thee to the enemies of thine own household,
+who shall wreak thee greater ruin than thy foes.  But
+a child shall be born of thy long resistance and my fierce
+triumph and our brief mingling, who shall be called Peace!
+Hearest thou, O France?</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He listened, standing on the hard-frozen, white-powdered
+garden path between the swept-up snow mounds.
+There was no answer.  He returned, stamping the snow
+from his clogged spurs, to the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The door stood open as he had left it.  The even tread
+of the sentries came from the Rue de Provence.  He had
+heard the guard being changed at the entrance gates and
+beyond the wall at the bottom of the garden.  Those
+without were vigilant if those within were not.  He
+remembered, noting the absence of the usual Chancery attendant
+from the hall bench, that he had given permission to the
+servants, without distinction, to make merry upon this
+night.  He could hear no clinking of glasses and bottles
+belowstairs.  Perhaps sleep had overtaken them as it had
+the revelers in the dining-room.  He softly opened the
+double doors of that apartment.  A stench combined
+of stale tobacco, spilled wine, and alcoholic humanity
+offended his nose, and he withdrew it.  But not before he
+had ascertained that with the exception of Abeken, who
+had left early, and Count Hatzfeldt, who must have been
+taken home&mdash;the Staff slept there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked into the drawing-room.  The fire lay in gray
+ashes between the fire dogs.  On the table lay the signed
+Treaty with Bavaria.  He picked it up and rolled it, looking
+at the mantelshelf, where the bat-winged bronze demon
+brooded over the ormolu clock.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The room, whose hearth was cold, whose windows, closely
+shuttered, bolted and blinded, had the curtains drawn close
+over them, was lighted by a yellow ray shining through the
+glass door opening into the conservatory.  He crossed to
+this door and looked through.  Commendably sober, the
+two officers of the guard of Green Jaegers who were
+quartered here sat chatting in whispers and smoking by the
+stove.  Between them on an upturned tub bottom stood a
+little, twinkling, taper-lit Christmas tree.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Von Uslar!  Bleichröder!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister opened the glass door and looked in.  The
+officers sprang to their feet and stood saluting him.  He
+smiled at the little tree, and asked, nodding at the door at
+the end of the conservatory, leading to a room where the
+library of the late M. Tessier had peaceably moldered until
+the clerks and decipherers of the Prussian Foreign Office
+had been assigned it for their quarters:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Have those fellows yet gone to bed?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And even as he queried he knew by the peculiar smile
+upon the faces of Captain von Uslar and his subaltern,
+that the scene in the dining-room was repeated here.  He
+said with a shrug:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Oh, well!...  They had my permission to make a
+night of it.  One would like to be sure, though, that there
+are no candles to upset!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The junior officer moved to the library door and opened
+it, setting free a puff of hot air laden with wine fumes, and
+a chorus of snores ranging from piping alto to deep bass.
+Nothing could be seen except the vague outlines of prostrate
+bodies, revealed by a pale gleam of moonlight that
+made its way down the chimney and shone upon the dead
+ashes of the hearth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Shall I wake anybody?" queried the lieutenant's look.
+The Minister made a sign in the negative, bade a pleasant
+good night to the two officers, and withdrew, shutting the
+glass door.  He quitted the drawing-room, went into the
+hall, tried the fastenings of the hall door, and crossed to
+the hatchway under the main staircase that led to the
+kitchen quarters.  A gas jet was flaring in a draught at
+the bottom of the staircase.  He went down, regulated the
+light as he passed to a safer volume, and tried the handle
+of the door leading to what had been a housekeeper's
+parlor, and was now used by the house steward and the
+Chancery attendants as an upper servants' hall.  A gasalier
+of flaring jets revealed five persons in here, wrapped
+in the heavy sleep of drunkenness.  One, the house steward,
+snored, recumbent on a sofa; Grams and Engelberg, those
+monuments of rigid respectability, reposed with their heads
+and shoulders resting on the table, appropriately decorated
+with empty bottles and upset glass beakers, and in
+the center of which stood a great china bowl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister peeped into this vessel curiously.  Apples
+stuck with cloves, and cinnamon sticks left high and dry at
+the bowl bottom testified to the Yuletide correctness of
+the punch, brewed by the skilled hand of the Foreign Office
+cook.  He, the artist responsible for the dinner which had
+astonished the three Bavarian plenipotentiaries, leaned
+back, slumbering profoundly in a high-backed armchair.  A
+china pipe, gayly tasseled and painted, drooped from one
+side of his relaxed mouth.  His feet rested upon the sprawling
+back of the gigantic Niederstedt, who had gone to sleep
+upon a sheepskin rug in front of the wood stove.  His huge
+right hand still grasped an empty bottle that had contained
+his favorite Old Nordhausen.  He opened one eye as the
+Minister stooped to inspect him&mdash;uttered a stertorous
+snort, and relapsed again into his hoggish Nirvana, leaving
+the Minister, as he deliberately turned out the gas and
+quitted the steward's room, to realize that, save himself,
+the two officers smoking in the winter garden, and the
+women presumably sleeping on the second floor, the house
+whose outer precincts were so vigilantly guarded, did not
+contain a sober head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Well, well!  A bout of drunkenness may well be condoned
+in the servants when the master himself gave the
+signal for revelry!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He told himself so, smiling as he made the round of the
+basement house doors.  Nothing had disturbed his
+equanimity saving the discovery that Niederstedt was
+incapable of speech or movement.  For with his strange
+characteristic mingling of audacity and caution, the Minister,
+while leaving Mademoiselle de Bayard practically free
+within the house limits, had insured by private orders that
+the giant East Prussian should sleep henceforth outside
+his master's bedroom door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again, as the master's long strides carried him upstairs
+to the hall again, and he took his bedroom candle from the
+row on the Empire console, he knew a moment of inward
+f rat.  There was nobody to help him undress, and put away
+his clothes.  Wherever Fate and the Intendant General
+had assigned the Minister's sleeping quarters, the deft
+Grans, or the attentive Engelberg had always appeared&mdash;or,
+failing these, the stolid Niederstedt&mdash;to render these
+and other personal services, the lack of which after long use
+is keenly felt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Is was a hellish nuisance to a middle-aged man to have
+to get himself out of his full-dress uniform.  One grew hot
+at the mere thought of unfastening the shoulder belt and
+sword belt, collar hooks, buckles, swivels, and so on.  Last,
+but not least, the final wrestle with the polished, spurred
+jack boots....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"God be thanked, I am not wearing the cuirass!" he
+said to himself devoutly, as he laid hand upon his bedroom
+door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It swung back, and then his vexation passed from him.
+On a little table near the hearthside, where yet some embers
+of a fire glowed redly, stood a little gayly-caparisoned
+Christmas tree.  Under its branches, adorned with red-and-white
+tapers as yet unlighted, lay the gifts that came from
+home.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He crossed the room in two long steps and stood smiling
+before the little fir tree.  The purplish redness died out of
+his great cheeks and jowl, the congested veins no longer
+stood out like ropes upon his throat and temples.  The
+great eyes that had blazed with Satanic pride softened into
+tenderness, as he picked up the gifts one by one and looked
+at them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"From His Daughter to Papachen," said an embroidered
+tobacco pouch.  "From Bill" and "From Herbert" a gold
+fusee box and a smoker's knife were respectively labeled.
+"From thy wife Johanna" was written on a slip of paper
+attached to the case that contained a handsome cup of Tula
+ware.  He turned the cup in his hands many times before
+he returned it to its outer husk.  He said fondly,
+familiarly, as though the giver were standing beside him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Little thou carest, thou good heart!&mdash;whether thou art
+wife to a Chancellor of the North German Confederation,
+or the Chancellor of the German Empire.  One object in
+life thou hast&mdash;and that is to get the old man home
+again!"  After a moment he added, pitching the Bavarian Treaty
+on the center table, unhooking and removing his sword belt,
+and throwing it on the couch: "Babel must be bombarded,
+or thou wilt not be pleased with me ... am I not a good
+pupil, to have learned my lesson so well?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The shoulder belt came off with a slight degree of twisting
+and fumbling.  He laid it aside, and moved to the slaving
+glass, and by its aid unfastened from his collar swivel
+the Iron Cross.  "Good!" he commented, and laid it on
+top of a dispatch box on the center table.  Then he began
+slowly and methodically to unfasten the other Orders from
+his breast.  As he pricked a finger with the pin of one in
+wrenching at it angrily, it occurred to him that it would
+have been perfectly feasible to have removed his dress tunic
+with all its decorations, and this discovery stung him to
+wrath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Kreuzdonnerwetter!</i>&mdash;am I, then, such a sheep's head?"
+he said angrily to himself.  Something dropped upon the
+floor with a tinkle and rolled away merrily under a chair,
+leaving its owner with the thick silver pin that had secured
+it gripped between his finger and thumb.  It was the medallion
+bestowed upon him in '42 for an act of gallantry, the
+obverse a shield of silver on a circle, bearing a red-enameled
+Prussian eagle, and on the reverse the inscription:
+"<i>Für Rettung aus Gefahr</i>."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The pin remained in his hand.  Cursing his own clumsiness,
+he took the lighted candle he had placed upon the
+center table upon entering, and stooped to recover the
+evasive prize.  Both hands were required for the task, that
+was quickly apparent.  Half unconsciously he reverted to
+a habit for which his wife had often playfully scolded
+him&mdash;nipped the broken silver pin between his teeth and bent
+down to resume his search upon the floor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he stooped, the detonation of a driving charge and
+the deafening roar and shriek of a huge shell were followed
+by an ear-splitting explosion.  His practiced ear told him.
+that the shell had been fired from the Fortress of
+St. Valérien.  Half a dozen others followed in rapid succession.
+No alarm trumpet sounded.  Dogs barked, near and far,
+the echoes of the cannonade rattled among the woods and
+high grounds, then died out.  He said to himself:
+"Those sugar plums have done damage somewhere near
+St. Germain....  Now, then, where is this runaway medal?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he queried, a sudden spasm of the windpipe shot him
+to the perpendicular.  He coughed and hawked as he had
+never done before.  With a hand upon his side, he coughed,
+straining horribly.  With streaming, starting eyes he
+coughed, clutching at his throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, with a sudden stab of pain beneath the uvula
+and a strangling access of coughing, he realized that a
+familiar home prediction had been fulfilled:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Otto, you will certainly swallow that pin!...</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He could almost hear the voice of his wife speaking.
+How absurd! he thought, and laughed; and the agony in
+his lacerated gullet brought on a fit of choking worse than
+those that had gone before.  He seized the candle and held
+it to his face before the shaving mirror, opening his powerful
+jaws to their widest and straining his eyes that were too
+blind with tears to see his own swollen, discolored features.
+He spat furiously, ejecting showers of saliva streaked with
+blood, but not the obstacle that was choking him....
+He thrust his hand into his mouth, and groped as
+far down his throat as his fingers could reach&mdash;all to no
+avail....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Help!...</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He gasped the word, realizing that if no help came, he
+was a dead man.  And he seized the bell rope and rang
+furiously, until the rope came down in his hand as had
+that of the reception-room a day or so previously, followed
+by a long trail of rusty wire that, when tugged, evoked no
+metal clang below.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Help!  For the love of God!" he croaked, and whirling
+vertigo seized him.  Whooping with a dreadful croupy
+intake, he tripped over a footstool, and fell upon his hands
+and knees, and struggled up again in a last strangling
+effort, and staggered to the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The door handle seemed to stick, or could it be that his
+grasp had lost its power?  In the light of the gas and his
+yet flaring candle, he looked at his knuckles and saw that
+they were turning blackish blue....  A wave of blackness
+rose and fell, swamping consciousness.  He emerged from
+drowning waters, and found himself upon the landing,
+gripping some round object that proved to be the wrenched-off
+door handle, and moaning in the whisper that he
+thought a shout:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Help, help, help!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bismarck, the man whom Kings and Emperors meant
+when they spoke of Prussia&mdash;the great Minister who had
+made three Wars&mdash;was dying.  Would no one come?  Not
+one of those who loved the man would ever know the true
+story of his sordid, solitary ending....  Not one of those
+who hated him but would hear every ugly detail of it, and
+recount it for others, smiling at its grim, grotesque
+absurdity....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Choked by a pin!...  An end rather less noble for a
+great Chancellor than being run over by a donkey cart or
+smothered in a midden pit full of liquid manure....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Someone was groaning horribly, close beside him.  Deep
+ruckling, gasping groans with a rattle and a catch midway.
+Were they his own death groans?  What was this?  The
+walls were melting and vanishing.  Clear, vivid, definite,
+there unrolled before his filming eyes a picture of Varzin,
+his Pomeranian country home.  It was Spring.  The dark
+pines about the house shone as though newly varnished.
+The larches were caparisoned with tassels of pale green.
+The blue sky was vivid as Persian turquoise.  He saw his
+daughter in a white dress step out from the low wide porch
+and stand smiling upon the terrace.  She had a bunch of
+primroses in her belt, and his great hound Tyras had
+followed her and was rubbing his great head against her
+sleeve.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Dying!" he tried to say to her.  "Help your father!"
+... But it seemed to him that he uttered nothing but a
+groan.  There was a thundering in his ears like the noise of
+a field battery.  His great bulk reeled toward her....  He
+pitched forward and fell heavily....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He heard a scared voice crying: "Monseigneur!..."
+and knew no more.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap76"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LXXVI
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+Juliette had not gone to bed, this snowy night of the Noël.
+She had said her Rosary and waited until the Christmas
+carillon.  Then she knelt and prayed for her own pardon,
+for light and guidance, for a blessing upon those living
+friends she held most dear, for the souls of the beloved
+departed.  And then she had waited, pacing solitary in her
+bedroom or sitting by her fire, for the sound of Breagh's
+return.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame Potier had gone to the Midnight Mass at the
+Cathedral.  There would be crowds of communicants&mdash;she
+might not reach home before three.  And in her absence
+had Juliette wished to sleep, sleep would have been
+banished by the sounds of revelry going on in the regions
+belowstairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Those first shouts for the Kaiser had been followed by
+others for the Chancellor.  Even in her remote eyrie she
+could hear the clinking of glasses and the popping of corks.
+Then after a wild outburst of cheering she had seen,
+peeping between the frost flowers on her window into the
+snowy, moonlit garden, the great figure in the white
+Cuirassier cloak move down the path between the snow-laden
+trees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was possessed by a great sense of loneliness, and a
+vague unreal sensation of living somebody else's life, and
+not the life proper of Juliette Bayard.  She locked her
+door and built up the fire to a cheerful hearth blaze, and
+sat upon the rug in her white dressing gown, combing and
+brushing her glorious hair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Never again need those superb waves of jet-black spun
+silk be confined in the chenille net of Madame Charles
+Tessier.  One could be charming if one chose&mdash;there was
+no grim reason for being ugly, thought Mademoiselle, as
+she brushed and brushed....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What was that?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So strange a sound from below that she dropped comb
+and hairbrush and sprang to her feet quivering....  She
+had heard such a groan uttered when the lance of the
+Uhlan had plunged through the body of my Cousin Boisset....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again! ... the sound of a door thrust violently open.
+Heavy footsteps thudded on the gaslit landing of the next
+floor, and a muffled voice cried out as though for help.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A man's voice....  Again it cried.  No voice sounded
+in answer.  She unlocked her door, and set her foot upon
+the stairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A few steps down....  Then she saw him, the tottering
+giant with the distorted, blue face, and the open mouth
+that trickled with saliva and blood.  What had befallen
+Juliette's enemy and France's pitiless oppressor?  His
+huge staring eyes were fixed on her.  Tears rolled from
+them as the deep groans issued from his gaping mouth and
+his broad chest heaved and labored vainly for air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>Choking!  Help!</i>" his gesture seemed to say to her,
+and a terrible shudder convulsed her as the huge body
+crashed down prone at her feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a strange mingling of pity and aversion she knelt
+down beside him and looked at him closely by the light
+of the flaring gas jet that illuminated the landing and
+stairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had turned a little in falling.  His blackening face
+and staring, agonized eyes spoke to his desperate
+condition....  What was to be done?... The obstruction in
+the throat must be removed somehow....  She rose up and
+went into the empty room upon her left hand, and felt in
+the darkness for the bell.  There was none.  The bell rope
+had been pulled down by the hand of the Minister, for
+this was the torture chamber, where M. Thiers underwent
+his periodical ordeal of thumbscrew and rack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Air....  He must have fresh air.  She desperately
+flung both the windows open, admitting a gush of piercing
+cold.  He still groaned, but more faintly.  The man was
+dying.  Was not this the Judgment of Heaven?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the hour of his triumph the sword had fallen.  France
+would be saved&mdash;there would be no bombardment of
+Paris if the enemy were to die to-night.  This she told
+herself, standing in the sharp draught from the open
+windows, and knew a thrill of intolerable triumph,
+thinking:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Our Lord has delivered him into hands as weak as mine!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Ting!...</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her heart leaped and stood still.  She looked breathlessly
+from the window.  Along the middle of the snowy
+Rue de Provence, where pedestrians must walk to avoid the
+dangers of the frozen sideways, a lantern moved, carried
+by a squat, muffled shape.  A taller figure followed, moving
+steadily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Ting-ting-ting!...</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A shock and thrill of mingled awe and terror passed
+through her.  To some dying Catholic, saint or sinner, in
+the dawn of this day of the Christ-birth, the Body of the
+Virgin-born was being conveyed....  Was it not to aid a
+soul in dire temptation&mdash;two souls, it might be&mdash;that He
+had bidden His minister pass this way?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She bent the knee and made the Sign of the Cross,
+trembling, then rose and sped back to the suffocating man.
+With a strength that she could not have believed herself
+possessed of, she raised his discolored head upon her lap....
+His great jaws were wide open.  She thrust the tiny
+hand within them.  Shuddering, sickening, she probed with
+her slender fingers, thrusting them down into the
+contracting, gulping throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Something bright projected beneath the swollen uvula,
+wedged firmly into the membrane, blocking the orifice of
+the trachea.  She nipped the projecting end in the little
+fingers and pulled.  It yielded.  He gave a gulp of relief.
+As the big teeth snapped together, she plucked the little
+hand from peril, bringing with it the broken silver pin.
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap77"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LXXVII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+He was instantly, tremendously sick, as an overeaten ogre
+might have been in an Eastern story.  When he had
+finished vomiting, he heaved up his huge, shuddering bulk.
+She put her slight shoulder under the groping hand, and
+guided him.  With this slight aid he reached his room.  The
+couch stood drawn forward at an angle toward the fireplace.
+He staggered to it, let himself drop upon it, and
+said, in a groan:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Drink!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He pointed to the night stand at his bedside.  When she
+poured from the jug that stood there into the glass and
+brought it to him, he gulped the contents greedily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Barley water ... good for the throat!" he gasped,
+giving the glass back.  She filled it again, and again he
+emptied it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His sweat-dabbled face was regaining a more natural
+color.  She went to the washstand, filled a small shaving
+basin with cold water from the hand jug, and brought it
+with a fine clean towel to his side.  She dipped the towel
+in the water and laved his face and forehead.  That he
+experienced relief and refreshment from this she saw by
+the placid air with which he submitted, leaning his head
+back against the pillowed sofa end, and closing his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She dried his face, and suddenly the great eyes opened.
+The voice of the Chancellor said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There....  That will do!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the passive victim he had suddenly reverted to
+the master; potent&mdash;authoritative....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Go to bed, Mademoiselle de Bayard, and sleep," he
+told her.  "I am comfortable ... I shall do well enough!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She replaced the basin and towel in silence, bent her
+head to the figure sitting upright on the sofa, and moved
+noiselessly to the door.  As she touched the broken handle,
+he said to her abruptly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You will be silent upon the subject of
+to-night's&mdash;misadventure?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She answered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I will be silent, Monseigneur!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said, lifting a finger to detain her yet another instant:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Do not err in supposing me ungrateful.  I know very
+well that you have saved my life!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A shudder passed through her slight figure.  She averted
+her eyes, remembering....  He finished:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I lunch with the King at the Prefecture to-morrow.  I
+will see you before I leave the house."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"As you will, Monseigneur!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He added with something like a twinkle:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"With regard to all that ... <i>débris</i> upon the landing
+... it will not be the first time Niederstedt has been guilty
+in that way.  Good night, Mademoiselle&mdash;or, rather, good
+morning....  Hark!  Was not that the bell of the house
+door?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I&mdash;am not sure, Monseigneur!"' she said, in hesitation,
+for so ragged and weakly a peal had been evolved by
+the ringer that the sound might have passed unnoticed by
+ears less keen than his.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They are all asleep or drunk belowstairs!"  He began
+to raise himself stiffly from the sofa.  "I will go down...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"No; I will go!" she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she left the room.  He let himself sink back on the
+sofa.  "<i>Grosser Gott!</i>" he said to himself.  "How near a
+thing! ... And that the little Fury should have stopped
+the brand from quenching....  Well, now, at this rate, I
+may live another thirty years.  Not that I should find
+much zest in a prolonged spell of power and authority.
+The King-Emperor in the ordinary course must die before
+long.  My master in that event would be a good-natured
+booby, who in assuming the supreme dignities of Imperial
+authority would value the stage setting beyond anything
+else!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He quoted with acerbity increased by recent suffering:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'Pomp and solemnity' ... 'The ancient Crown of
+Charlemagne from Vienna' ... 'I shall write to my wife
+to-night' ... Pray do!...  And while Your Royal Highness
+is about it you had better consult little Prince
+William, who would probably give you as valuable advice."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His thoughts reverted to the fair-haired, puny-limbed
+eleven-year-old urchin in kilt and plaid of Royal Stuart
+tartans....  "Now," said he, "what sort of a future
+Emperor may be enclosed in that husk?...  That the boy has
+a crippled left arm, and a capital set of sharp teeth, which
+he uses on the calves of his Military Governor and tutors,
+is practically all I know of him....  Come in!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had been so lost in thought as to miss the sound
+of chains undone and bolts drawn back, though he had
+shivered unconsciously as the opening of the hall door had
+admitted a volume of fresh, piercing air to the heated
+house.  Now he reared himself upright upon the sofa,
+stared for a moment at the figure that responded
+to his gruff "Come in!" and burst into an irresistible
+laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Quite right, Mr. Breagh!" he said, in his clear and
+fluent English.  "I told you to come up to me at whatever
+hour you might get back.  But I forgot that you would
+naturally visit Madame de Bayard in the costume proper
+to Jean Jacques Potier, to whom I suppose that extraordinary
+overcoat and the wolfskin cap must have belonged.
+Frankly, I did not recognize you....  The condition of
+your clothes, and that bandage on your forehead are
+responsible, more than my lapse of memory.  You certainly
+look rather shaken.  Let me hope you have sustained no
+serious hurt?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh grinned mirthlessly, and looked ruefully
+down at his snowy boots and trousers, from which the
+melting snow was beginning to drip in little rills upon
+the carpeted floor.  By the light of the two gas lamps
+depending above the table, it could be seen that the gory
+bandage surmounting his pale face had been applied by an
+experienced hand.  He needed no immediate surgical aid.
+But his blue lips and drawn and pallid features betrayed
+him exhausted.  The Minister, noting this, pointed to a
+chair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Sit down," he said, "and rest before you speak!  There
+is brandy in that flask that stands upon the bureau....
+But something hot would be better for you&mdash;that is what
+you most need."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a sound upon the landing ... a faint tap
+upon the door panel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"See who it is!" said the Chancellor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Breagh rose, the door opened, wide enough to admit a
+little tray bearing two steaming coffee cups.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Capital!" said His Excellency, addressing the unseen
+cup-bearer.  "Now, that I call an excellent thought!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took a cup from the tray Breagh offered, bidding
+him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Sit down and drink the other.  I should have got none
+except for you!"  When the steaming cup was empty,
+"Proceed," he said, ignoring the gray daylight outlining
+the curtain poles and filtering between the drawn curtains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"At what hour did you get to Maisons Lafitte?  For I
+presume you did get there?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I got there at about two o'clock....  I had an appointment
+at the Cathedral, otherwise I should have started
+before."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I hope she was pretty!" said the Minister, smiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh went on, as though he had not heard:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The snow was beginning to freeze.  It was not such
+bad walking, but that hill of St. Germain was a winder, and
+in the Forest I lost my way....  If a party of men&mdash;peasants
+in sheepskin caps and jackets&mdash;forest keepers possibly&mdash;had
+not turned out of an avenue and kept marching
+ahead, I might never have got as far as the Seine
+road...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The men were marching, and not walking," commented
+the Minister, and his great brows scowled, and his bulldog
+jowl hardened as he added: "And they carried guns, or
+you would not have taken them for keepers....  I have
+no doubt that they were <i>Francs-tireurs</i>."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I lost them where the road winds by the Seine," P. C. Breagh
+continued.  "And then I had a real stroke of luck.
+I came across a hack cab from Versailles at a regular
+standstill.  The snow had balled in the wretched horse's
+feet, and the driver was as drunk as David's sow.  The
+fare was asleep inside, but he woke as I opened the cab
+door and flashed one of the lamps in his face, and then he
+said"&mdash;the narrator unconsciously gave the tone and
+accent of the Doctor&mdash;"'By the piper that played before
+Moses, my boyo!  I was dreaming of you, and here you
+are.'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister broke in:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That man was the English correspondent of <i>The Times</i>
+newspaper.  He is of the same surname, though no relative
+of Odo Russell, the English Envoy, who has been sent out
+here upon a Mission to our German Court....  Ill-natured
+diplomatists whisper that Great Britain is jealous of the
+great successes of Prussia, and does not welcome the
+prospect of a United Imperial Germany.  <i>Au fond</i>, we
+Germans have a kind of sentimental regard for your nation.
+She is an offshoot of the great Germanic stem&mdash;it is
+impossible that we should not regard her as nearer to us than
+others....  Though, should we ever seriously quarrel, it
+may be found that the bitterest variance may exist
+between those of the same blood....  And so you have never
+confided to your friend the secret of your presence in
+Versailles!  Reticence in the young is an unusual gift.
+Possibly he gave you a lift in his vehicle?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"&mdash;&mdash;Till the unlucky Rosinante gave out," acquiesced
+Breagh, "and we had to leave her with her Jehu at the
+wreck of the railway station, and then the Doctor stopped
+at the diggings of the friends he was on the way to look up,
+a half squadron of Barnekow's Hussars who are quartered
+in a deserted chateau.  They gave me some sandwiches and
+beer, and then I went on by myself to the Villa Laon where
+Madame de Bayard"&mdash;he stopped and added in a low
+voice&mdash;"used to live."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Something in the tone attracted the attention of the
+Chancellor.  He repeated:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Used to....  Does she not, then, live there now?  Has
+she gone with M. de Straz&mdash;the pair of love birds
+together?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Said P. C. Breagh, seized with a shudder that knocked
+his knees together, and speaking in a low voice:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I&mdash;I beg of Your Excellency to spare her your irony....
+Madame de Bayard is dead!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"So!..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister's ejaculation was followed by the order:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Now the details!...  Has she died naturally, or by
+accident&mdash;or by a murderer's hand?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh said, lowering his voice apprehensively:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She was killed by a shell.  There was a bombardment
+from Mont Valérien....  It broke out at about a quarter
+past two this morning&mdash;just as I reached the Villa
+Laon...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah! now I understand how you got that love token on
+your forehead!" said the Minister.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Breagh nodded, and wiped his wet forehead with a
+blood-stained handkerchief, and shuddered and went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Nobody had gone to bed when I got to the villa.  The
+blinds of what I could see was a dining-room were drawn
+up and the curtains all drawn back.  The room was
+brilliantly lighted, lots of mirrors and crystal girandoles.  It
+was like a scene on the stage, looking at it from the snowy
+garden.  Shin-deep in snow, because the paths had not
+been cleared....  You could not tell where the paths
+were, in fact, so I steered my course by the big shining
+window.  Then I saw him, moving before me&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Queried His Excellency:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"By him, you mean whom?..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A man," said P. C. Breagh, "whom I saw moving along
+before me, taking cover behind snowy bushes and clumps
+of frosted prairie grass.  When he stood up, I saw that he
+was short in figure and had immensely broad shoulders.
+I was quite sure that I had seen the fellow before.  In
+fact&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"In fact," the Minister sharply interrupted, "you
+recognized him as the man who posed as M. Charles Tessier,
+and who can have been nobody but M. Straz.  Now tell
+me, whom was he watching?  Madame and a companion,
+I venture to guess?"  He added, as P. C. Breagh assented:
+"What was the man?  A civilian or an officer?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh answered, repressing another shudder:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A tall, fair officer of the Prussian Guard Infantry.  He
+and Madame were at supper, or they had just finished.  He
+had opened a fresh bottle of champagne and was leaning
+over to fill Madame's glass when I noticed the short man
+standing still, watching them closely.  He seemed to have
+his right hand in his pocket.  He drew it out and
+then&mdash;I don't know very well what happened.  There was the
+heavy boom of a big gun, and a shell came shrieking like
+an express train....  I remember how the spitting flare of
+the fuse lit up the sky.  And there was a terrific
+crash&mdash;and something hit me on the head&mdash;a bit of masonry, it
+must have been&mdash;for when I came to myself other shells
+were hurtling, and hitting, and bursting....  One smashed
+the stables of the chateau where the Hussars are quartered,
+and another has dug a crater, they tell me, in the side of
+the Terrace of St. Germain.  The flashes made everything
+show up clear like lightning, and I picked myself up....
+The blood was running down into my eyes, blinding me.
+But I'm not likely to forget what I saw.  It was ... so
+awfully stagey ... so like a picture of the sensational,
+blood-curdling, highly colored kind."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Go on!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It was like this.  The upper story of the Villa had been
+shaved off&mdash;simply.  There was the interior of the
+dining-room before me, all color and mirrors and gilding and
+twinkling wax candles in crystal girandoles.  The French
+windows had been shattered, and there was a great hole in
+the ceiling.  On the mantelshelf, just in front of me,
+between two Sèvres candlesticks, was a clock, the hands
+pointing to half-past two.  There were Sèvres figures on each
+side of the clock&mdash;I have seen them here in the shop
+windows, '<i>Pierrot qui rit</i>' and '<i>Pierrot qui pleure</i>.'  The
+crying Pierrot had been smashed by the shell splinter that
+shivered the mantel mirror, but the laughing Pierrot was
+untouched.  He seemed to be holding his sides and screaming
+at Valverden sprawling across the table with his skull
+shattered, and Madame de Bayard sitting stone-dead in her
+chair.  She had the cigarette in her fingers, still alight....
+It must have been painless....  There was only a
+small blue hole in her temple&mdash;just here."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Minister was repeating:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Valverden!...  Are you clear that you mean Count
+Max Valverden?...  But of course you are!  There is no
+other officer of that name in the Prussian Guard Infantry.
+How you came to be acquainted you shall tell me
+to-morrow."  He laughed harshly, looking at the clock upon the
+mantel.  "I should say to-day, at a somewhat later hour."  He
+added, as Breagh rose: "Have you told anything of
+this matter to Mademoiselle de Bayard?  Then, I advise
+you, do not enlighten her at all.  Or, if you must do so, tell
+her after you are married!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He drove the sentence home with another that left the
+listener gasping:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"For of course you will marry, you are capitally suited
+to one another.  The mother exists no longer and M. Straz
+if he escaped, which is most likely, will not be able to
+interfere.  Let me recommend you to get some rest.  You
+will require it.  For at twelve you leave Versailles with
+Mademoiselle de Bayard en route for England.  Now
+go!..."
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap78"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+LXXVIII
+</h3>
+
+<p>
+P. C. Breagh and Juliette met upon the morrow in the
+same spot near the rose tree that had borne pink blossoms
+undismayed through the bitter wintry months.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You have bestowed upon me no Christmas present,
+Monsieur," Juliette said to him gravely.  "Now I will have
+you gather one of those roses and give it to me...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He strode into the drift, mid-leg deep, and cut a bud that
+was upon the sheltered side next the wall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Be careful of the thorns, lest they prick you!" Juliette
+cried to him.  "Do not cut your fingers!  Do not get
+wet!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You shall not have this rose," he said, withholding the
+frozen flower, "until you have given my Christmas gift
+to me!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her blue eyes rose, brimming, to meet his.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ah! what is there I can give you?  Tell me, my
+friend!" she said softly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He got out, blushing, and swallowing a lump that rose in
+his throat:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"We have been through so much ... we have seen
+strange and terrible things together!...  We have shared
+dangers ... we have seen a great nation in the death
+throes....  Nothing could ever make us strangers
+whatever came to pass....  But now we are going back to
+England.  Before we leave this garden where we have been
+so happy&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is true....  We have been happy here!" she answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Winged smiles were hovering about her mouth.  Jeweled
+gleams played between the black fringes of her eyelashes,
+as though fairy kingfishers were diving for some new joy in
+those sapphire depths.  She asked demurely, as the clumsy
+male creature choked and boggled:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What do you seek, Monsieur?  Some souvenir....
+Some token of friendship?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said, in a low, dogged voice:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I have never asked mere friendship from you.  But if
+you&mdash;if you&mdash;&mdash;"  He got it out with a desperate effort:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Before we leave this ... if you would kiss me&mdash;once..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She drew back.  A terrible dignity vested her sloping
+shoulders.  Modesty veiled her eyes.  He was going
+miserably away, when she beckoned to him, with that splendid
+sweep of the arm that might have belonged to
+Krimhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde-Britomart and the whole covey of
+Romance Ideals....  He returned....  She spoke, and her
+eyes were wavering under the eager fire of his:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"See you well, Monsieur, a young lady cannot bestow a
+gift of that kind.  It is for the gentleman, having obtained
+consent, to take..."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Breagh caught her to his broad breast and snatched the
+coveted guerdon.  He cried to her in wonder and triumph:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You love me!...  A fellow like me?...  And you
+will be my wife?  We are not going to England to be
+parted!  I am not a beggar any more!  I will try again for
+my practicing degree in Medicine, and get it!  I will write
+books and make a name for myself in Literature.  But not
+unless you'll marry me!...  Oh, Juliette! say when you
+will marry me?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said, with downcast eyelids that veiled laughter,
+though the rose flush had dyed her very temples, and the
+beating of her heart shook her slight frame:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monsieur, my grandmother would have answered:
+'<i>Under the circumstances, the marriage cannot take place
+too soon....  Once a young girl has been kissed, she must
+be married.</i>'  And"&mdash;the smile peeped out&mdash;"I was taught
+always to obey my grandmother...."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Admirably spoken!" said the Chancellor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had come upon the lovers, of set purpose it may have
+been.  Now he stood surveying them in an ogreish, yet not
+unamiable fashion, as they stood before him hand in hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said, and the resonant tones were veiled by a painful
+hoarseness, of which the reason was known to Mademoiselle
+alone:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mr. Breagh, Count Hatzfeldt has the necessary papers
+of which I spoke to you.  You will find him in the
+drawing-room waiting to complete some slight formalities
+inseparable from the granting of passports in time of
+War....  Good-bye to you, good luck and all happiness.
+I am on the point of departure for the Prefecture, so I
+shall not again see you.  For a moment I detain Mademoiselle."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Breagh bowed to Juliette and His Excellency and
+hastened toward the house, the Chancellor said to Juliette:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is too cold to stand here ... it will be wiser to
+walk a little.  There is a path that leads us out near the
+wall at the bottom of the shrubbery."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was where the mask of the Satyr, now with long icicles
+hanging from his eyebrows and goat-beard, jutted from the
+ivy of the boundary wall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The little spring had not frozen, the ferns and grasses
+round its margin were still quite green.  A few pinched
+violets peeped from among their broad leaves.  Juliette
+stooped and gathered one or two of the faintly-fragrant
+blossoms and a leaf of fern and a sprig of ivy.  As she
+slipped them into the inner pocket of her jacket, the
+Chancellor spoke:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mademoiselle, I have to thank you for my life.....
+Now, last night&mdash;&mdash;"  He squarely confronted her, his
+powerful eyes looking down upon the little figure so frail
+and slender.  "Now, last night," he repeated, "had you
+really believed that my death meant the salvation of your
+country....  Well!...  Did you not hold me in the
+hollow of your hand?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She met his stern regard with a look that was clear as
+crystal.  She said in her silver tones:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It is true, Monseigneur.  Our Lord granted me my
+wish.  You so great, so strong, so powerful, were helpless
+as an infant....  I had only not to put out my finger&mdash;and
+you were a dead man!  The power of Life and Death
+was mine, yet I could not let you perish, for Almighty
+God would not permit it....  He willed that you should
+not die....  Crush France or spare her, you will not be
+carrying out the wishes of Count Bismarck.  You will do
+what God permits you to do&mdash;no more and no less!  But
+when you are most strong and most powerful ... when
+you play with Kings and Emperors like pawns, then I
+ask you to remember Juliette de Bayard!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She quivered in every limb, but she went on resolutely:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You are not a good man, Monseigneur!...  Hard,
+subtle, arrogant, cruel and unscrupulous, God made you to
+be the Fate of France.  One day she will lift up her face
+from the mire into which you have trodden it, and the star
+will be burning unquenched upon her forehead.  We may
+both be dead before that day dawns.  But rest assured
+that when next your armies cross the Rhine they will not
+gain an easy victory!...  We shall be prepared and ready,
+Monseigneur, when the Germans come again!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked at her and listened to her in silence, perhaps
+in wonder.  She seemed the Spirit of France incarnate, a
+pale reed shaken by prophetic winds from Heaven.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It may be so," he said to her gravely.  "And now,
+Mademoiselle de Bayard, I shall ask you to give me your
+hand at parting!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Take it, Monseigneur," she bade him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He held it in his an instant, saying in his clear-cut
+French:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I desire no evil to France when I say that I wish that
+every Frenchman had a daughter like you!..."  He
+added: "Thanks for the <i>beignets</i>....  I shall always
+remember you when I am served with them....  And for
+last night again thank you!...  Farewell and all
+happiness attend you, Mademoiselle!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His heavy footsteps crunched the snow.  He was gone,
+and she had almost called after him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Monseigneur, I do not hate you so much as I have
+said...."
+</p>
+
+<p><br></p>
+
+<p>
+On the morning of the 27th of January eighteen seventy-one
+French guns on Fort Montrouge had been keeping up a brisk
+cannonade of the German investing-works.  Meeting no
+response their thunder ceased.  There, upon the east and
+north of beleaguered Paris&mdash;with a simultaneous uprush
+of fierce white flame from the muzzles of seventy giant
+howitzers, with the detonation of driving-charges, and the
+piercing scream and deafening crash of the percussion of
+Krupp's huge siege-projectiles, the bombardment of the
+doomed Queen City of Cities had begun....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A few moments before, as Juliette de Bayard and her
+lover set foot upon the steamer-pier at Dover, an aged
+French lady, who had stopped Count Bismarck on the steps
+of the Prefecture, had imploringly said to him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<i>O! Monseigneur, donnez nous la paix!</i>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the Iron Chancellor had replied to her almost
+smilingly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Dear lady, it is with a peace as with a marriage, there
+must be two parties willing to conclude the contract....
+I am ready to make peace, but the other side is not!"
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br></p>
+
+<p class="t3">
+THE END
+</p>
+
+<p><br><br><br><br></p>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75200 ***</div>
+</body>
+
+</html>
+
+
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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
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+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #75200 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75200)