Part 59

"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.