Part 57

"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!..."