Part 51

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?..."