Part 63

"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