XLIV…

XLIV

For many months he had not crossed his father’s threshold. The great courtyard bore a look of squalor, grass was springing up between the flagstones; flaunting tufts of groundsel and chickweed were growing in the green-painted wooden tubs containing myrtles and oleanders and rhododendrons, that were ranged along the walls and on either side of the flight of steps that led to the hall-door.

The hall-door stood open: Auguste, now gray-headed and stouter than ever, waited with a low-wheeled open carriage that had succeeded the high tilbury with the rampant mare and the tiny cockaded groom. A quiet pair of English pony-cobs were attached to the vehicle. Hector stopped to look at them, and speak to the old servant, then went into the hall.

The trophies of arms upon the walls looked dull and rusty, the bronze equestrian statue of the Emperor was covered with a patina of encrusted dirt. The black-and-white squares of the marble pavement were in shrieking need of a broom and soap-and-water. Then, to the tap-tapping of the two ebony-handled crutch-sticks that had succeeded the gold-topped Malacca cane with the silk tassel, came Monsieur the Marshal, heralded by a dropping fire of oaths.

He was much changed and aged since Hector had last seen him, but bravely bewigged and dyed and painted still. He was wrapped in a furred driving-cloak, despite the warmth of the September sunshine; his cheeks were pendulous, his fierce eyes had baggy pouches underneath. And he stumbled as he shuffled over the marble pavement in his cloth boots that were slit with innumerable loopholes for the better ease of his corns.

He stopped short, seeing his son, and the change in him was painfully apparent. He was hurrying down the hill that ends in an open grave. His morals were more deplorable than ever. The cook, a strapping Auvergnate, was his mistress now, in lieu of an opera-girl or nymph of the Palais Royal: and he drank and played cards with his valet and butler: indeed, servants were his masters, and, from the porter’s lodge to the mansard roof-garrets, dirt and disorder marked their unchecked sway.

Mild Smithwick, lying beside the sister who had been a paralytic, in her quiet grave in the Hampstead churchyard, would have turned uneasily upon her pillow stuffed with shavings, had she known of the goings-on of the debauched old idol of her earthly worship, who had long ago forgotten her.

He opened fire directly, quite in the old manner.

“Hey? What the devil?--so you have remembered us, have you? Well? Was I not right in telling you that that affair of the fusillade would end to your advantage? That the Court Martial was a piece of mummery--a farce--nothing more? There you are with promotion, and the patronage and goodwill of Monseigneur at the Élysée! Though for myself I cannot stomach that Bonaparte with the beak and the Flemish snuffle. Had Walewski but been born on the right side of the blanket--there would have been the Emperor for me!”

He trumpeted in a vast Indian silk handkerchief with something of the old vigor, and went on:

“Because all this swearing of fidelity to the Republic will end, as I have prophesied, in a coronation at Notre Dame, and a court at the Tuileries. My Emperor crowned himself without all this lying and posturing. He said to France: ‘You want a master. Well, look at me. I am the man for you....’ Josephine squawked: ‘Oh, M. Bonaparte!’ ‘Go!’ he told her. ‘Order your dresses!’ just as he said to the Senate, ‘Decree me Emperor!’ While this fellow ... sacred name of a pig!”

He tucked one of the crutch-sticks under his arm, got out his snuff-box, and said as he dipped his ringed, yellow old claws into the Spanish mixture:

“His cant about Socialism and Progress and the dignity of Labor gives me the belly-ache. His groveling to the working man, and slobbering over the common soldier, make me want to kill him. His hand in his trousers-pocket and his eye on a plebiscite--there you have him--by the thunder of Heaven! A corporal of infantry said to me: ‘If I showed M. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte my back--he would kneel down and salute it....’ My Napoleon would have said to that man: ‘Lie down in the mud, so that I may walk dryshod upon your body!’ and the man would have obeyed him. But perhaps half an Emperor is better for France than none!”

He fed each wide nostril with the Brobdingnagian pinch he had held suspended while he talked, and said, snorting:

“We shall see if, for all his cartloads of wine sent to their barracks, and his rolls of ten-franc pieces scattered among the rank-and-file, he is served better than the man who scorned to flatter, and more loved than he who did not bribe.... Who said: ‘Follow me, and I will show you capitals to plunder!’ and when they were conquered, said: ‘Help yourselves, one and all, there are fat and lean!’”

He plunged his shaking fingers back into the box, sputtered a little, and said a trifle wildly:

“Though there was a good deal of fasting going to set against the seasons of plenty. During the Retreat from Moscow in October, 1812, I had a handful of unset diamonds in my haversack, and a beryl weighing thirteen pounds, worth ninety-five thousand francs, upon my word of honor! Well, I swopped that crystal with a Bavarian aide-de-camp of the Staff for a pudding made of horse’s blood mixed with bran and flour.... The man who sold me the pudding was Luitpold von Widinitz, a cousin of your mother’s. It was a dirty action I have never pardoned. Pardieu! Morbleu! A comrade, and sell--not share! Prince be damned!... Huckster! Sutler! Tschah! Faugh! Pouah!”

He dropped the crutch he had tucked under his arm, and, recalled from his ancient reminiscence by Hector’s picking up the stick and giving it to him, said, with a formidable bending of the brows:

“You came here, not out of filial duty, but upon some private affair or other. Spit it out, and have done!--I have no time to waste.”

Hector obeyed.

“I have spent my mother’s dowry as you always hoped I should. Chiefly upon gratifications--pleasures--luxuries, that I once pretended to despise. I have acquired the taste for these things. That ought to gratify you. With the money I have wasted, many prejudices and convictions that you found objectionable in past days have been scattered to the winds. If you are still disposed to give, I am very willing to take. I have no more to say!”

Seldom has an appeal for pecuniary aid been preferred less ingratiatingly. The Marshal glared and champed for several moments before he could reply:

“I do not doubt you are willing, sir.... ’Credieu! Do you suppose I have not seen this coming?--though the insolence of your approach goes beyond anything that I could have conceived.... I have my informants, understand!... I am aware of your infernal folly, your crazy infatuation.... As for that de Roux woman who leads you by the nose, she is a jade who will land you in the gutter, and a harlot into the bargain. Do you hear?”

The bellowed “Do you hear?” was followed by a shower of curses. When these imprecations had ceased to rattle among the trophies of arms and bronzes, and bring down sprinklings of dust from the gilded cornices, Hector said imperturbably:

“My father may insult my mistress with impunity. I cannot call him out----!”

The Marshal took the opening.

“If you did, and sat down on your tail--sacred name of a blue pig!--with the notion of sticking me in the gizzard, as you did de Moulny Younger when you were boys--allow me to tell you--you would find yourself skewered and trussed in double-quick time!”

Never before in Hector’s hearing had the Marshal made reference to that old sore subject of the false step and the broken foil. He made a flourishing pass with one of the ebony-handled crutches, slipped on the polished marble pavement, and would have fallen but for the strong red hand of Marie Bathilde’s son.

Hector put the old man into the hall porter’s capacious chair, picked up his great curly-brimmed hat--the hat worn by Deans at the present moment--brushed it on his sleeve and handed it back again. He felt a good deal like Sganarelle before Don Juan, the case being reversed, and the homilist the elder libertine.

Meanwhile the gouty old soldier fulminated oaths, and hurled reproaches of a nature to make listening Asmodeus smile. He was scandalized at the life his son was leading. Sacred name of a pipe! A thousand thunders! He shook his clenched hand, as he demanded of Hector if he really supposed there was no Deity Who demanded an account from evil livers, and no Hell where sinners burned?

“For priests are rogues and knaves and liars, but there is such a place, for all that! And you--living in open adultery--for you there will be Hell!”

Said Dunoisse, cool and smiling, standing before his irate parent:

“I am a better theologian than you are. Hell is for the finally impenitent, I have always been instructed; and I am invariably scrupulous to repent before I sin. If it will afford you any particular gratification, I will undertake to perform a special act of contrition,” he looked at his watch, “punctually at the hour of twelve, to-night.”

“You are going to her to-night?” snarled the Marshal, adding: “Tell her from me that she deceives a blackguard for the sake of a booby. For one you are, by the thunder of Heaven! who soil yourself and spoil yourself for such a drab as she!”

“What can you expect,” said Hector, with the same cool offensiveness, “but that your son should follow in your footsteps? I am, as you have said, living with the wife of another man in open adultery. You were bolder, and more daring, who with your master had discrowned kings and humiliated Emperors. You did not hesitate, at the pricking of your desire, to ravish the Spouse of God.”

“Your mother is a Saint!” cried the old Marshal, purple and gnashing with furious indignation. “Do not dare to mention her in the same breath with that--that----”

And the coarse old man plumped out an epithet of the barrack-room, full-flavored, double-barreled, of which Henriette, had she heard it, would have died.

“There is no need to tell me to honor my mother,” said the son. “She is sacred in my eyes. But do not venture to speak to me of Him Whom you have dishonored. I have thought ever since I was a boy that it would be better for me and for you if He did not exist. For the fact of my being is an insult to Him. I am a clod of earth flung in His face by your sacrilegious hand!”

He had often dreamed of speaking such words as these, face to face with his father. Now they poured from him, thick and fast. But pity checked them in mid-torrent, at the sight of the working mouth and nodding head, and trembling hands of unreverend, ignoble age.

The old man capitulated even as the young one relented. He got out, between spasms of wheezing, in quite a conciliatory snarl:

“Well,--well! What if you have spent your mother’s dowry! there is more where that came from. You are my legitimate heir,--and for me, I had rather you were a prodigal than a prig. And blood-horses and Indian shawls, wines, jewelry and cigars and bonnets,--wagers on the Turf and bets on cards, are unavoidable expenses.... I do not wish you to be a niggard. Only it seems to me that with your opportunities you might have invested well. Steel Rails and Zinc, those are the things to put money on. This will be the Age of traveling behind boilers and housing under roofs of metal. Ugh--ugh! Ough, c’r’r--’aah!”

He stopped to have a bout of coughing and hawking, and resumed:

“Do not suppose I blame you for having been extravagant. Though it seems to me you have managed badly. This Bonaparte is one who takes with one hand and gives with the other--is bled or bleeds. He has never tapped my veins yet, nor shall for any hint of his. But I suspect he has had money of you. That woman of yours--never mind! I will not name her, the cockatrice!--but I have had it hinted to me that she is an agent in his pay. And he pays women with compliments and promises--he has probably promised to create her a peeress in her own right when he is Emperor.... Her Grace the Duchess of Trundlemop--that is the title she will get.”

Seeing Hector scowl forbiddingly at these unwelcome references, the Marshal made haste to conciliate.

“You have paid through the nose to get de Roux decanted to Algeria. You have been sweetly choused. One must live and learn. See!--I will strike a bargain with you. Do not you be stiffnecked any longer with regard to that question of the von Widinitz Succession, and I will unbutton my pockets.... You shall have money--plenty of money! All that you need to make a splash. I suppose you know that there are millions of thalers waiting to drop into your pockets once the Council of the Germanic Confederation shall confirm your right to the Crown Feudatory.... You will stand upon that right--it is patent and undeniable. And I will have the throne from under the Regent Luitpold in return for that lump of beryl the rogue once robbed from me!”

Absurd, formidable, gross old monster. Was the ravished crystal really the fulcrum of the lever with which the Marshal strove to upset a State? World-changes have been brought about by quarrels springing from causes even more trivial? The price of Luitpold’s blood-pudding had remained for thirty-seven years an undigested morsel in the Marshal’s system. It rankled in him to his dying day.

Though his gouty feet were tottering on the downward slope, his mental faculties were as clear as ever. He watched his son from under his bushy eyebrows as the young man gnawed his lip and drew patterns with his cane on the tesselated pavement of the hall. Hector had uttered sounding reproaches, arrayed himself on the side of Heaven a moment previously. The merry devil who laughs over human contradictions and mortal frailties, must have chuckled as he listened to the terms of the bargain now arranged between the father and the son.

Money. For the sake of the golden mortar without which the House of Hopes that Jack builds must inevitably tumble to ruin, Dunoisse reluctantly consented to become the puppet of an ambition he had scorned. The instrument of a desire for vengeance that had never ceased to rowel the old war-horse’s rheumatic sides.

“So! It is understood, then, after all this fanfaronade of high-mindedness. You will meet my Bavarian agents, Köhler and von Steyregg--and you will be compliant and civil to them, do you understand?”

He lashed himself into one of his sudden rages, the gouty old lion, and roared:

“For my Marie’s son shall not be slighted--kicked aside into a corner while that knave Luitpold holds the Regency of Widinitz from the Bund. I will give him a colic for the one his pudding gave me! And I will have no more accusations and reproaches!--I will not permit you who are my son to taunt me with your own begetting, and throw your mother’s Veil of Profession, in a manner, at my head.”

He rapped his stick upon the pavement. He was strangely moved, and his chin was twitching, though his fierce black eyes were hard and dry.

“You have said that I stole my wife from God, and it is true; though I do not know that it is very decent in you to twit me with it. And do you suppose I have not smarted for the sin I committed? I tell you I have shed tears of blood!”

A harsh sound came from his throat: he swallowed and blinked and went on talking:

“Listen to me, you who are more my son than Marie’s, though you tell me that you hold her memory sacred, and denounce me as the plunderer of Christ? When her youngest child, your sister, died, Marie saw in that the beginning of Heaven’s vengeance: the price that must be paid, the punishment that must be borne. And she prayed and wept--what tears!--and gave me no peace until she had wrung from me my promise that she should go back to her Convent if the Chapter would receive her.... I am an old tactician--I gave the pledge in the full belief that never would they open their doors.... And when she brought me the Prioress’s letter, it was as though a spent cannon-ball had hit me on the headpiece. Then I had an idea. The dowry of three hundred thousand silver thalers. What the Church had once got her claws on I knew she would never let go.... So I blustered and raved and swore to Marie.... ‘The dowry, or I keep my wife!’”

His pendulous cheeks and chin shook as he wagged his head at Hector.

“Do you suppose I wanted the accursed dross? No! by the thunder of Heaven! I was greedy of something else. The woman--my wife--who lay in my arms and sighed, and kissed me, and wept....”

His voice cracked. He said:

“Do you think she did not know the truth? You shall never make me believe she did not. Even while I bragged and blustered about a lawsuit--even when my notary wrote a letter, I had fears and quakings of the heart. When no answer came from the Mother Prioress, I rubbed my hands and congratulated myself. Thrice-accursed fool who thought to outwit God----”

He rummaged for his snuffbox, tapped it wrong way up, opened it in this position, spilt all its store of snuff, swore, and pitched it across the hall.

“He is the King of strategists--the Marshal of Napoleon’s Grand Army, compared with Him, was a blind beetle. The Prioress’s answer came: ‘We concede you this money,’ said the letter, ‘as the price of a soul.’ Enclosed was a draft on the Bank of Bavaria. That night Marie left me. Without even a kiss of farewell, she who had been my wife for nine years, and borne me a boy and a girl.... Imagine if the money did not weigh on me like the dead horse I lay under all through the night of Austerlitz, with the bone of my broken leg sticking through my boot! Conceive if it did not smell to me of beeswax candles, brown serge habits, incense and pauper’s pallets! Pshaw! Peugh! Piff!”

He blew his old nose and swore a little, and then went on:

“I did not send back the three hundred thousand thalers. True! they were so much dirt in my eyes.... But cash is cash, and to part with it would not have brought my Marie back again. I let the stuff lie and breed at my bank. I would have raked the kennels for crusts rather than touch it. Not that I have ever needed money. The old brigand of the Grand Army has known how to keep what he had gained. Though I have lived up to my income....drank, gambled, amused myself with women! What matter the women? Did Marie suppose I should spend my time in stringing daisy-chains when she had gone away?”

He laughed in his formidable, ogreish way, and said, still laughing:

“She knew me better, depend upon it. Though, mind you, I had been true to Marie. But a wife who is a nun is a dead wife. I was a widower--the boy motherless.... And He up above us had another score to make off me!... When the boy--Death of my soul!”

He struck one of his crutches on the marble pavement with such force that the stick broke.

“A day came when you looked at me with my own eyes shining out of Marie’s face, and said: ‘I have heard the story. The terms upon which you let my mother resume the Veil were vile!’ Impudent young cockerel! Was it to be supposed that I should try to justify myself in the eyes of a stripling? A man to whom the Emperor used to say: ‘Well, Dunoisse, let us have your opinion on such and such a plan?’ So I laughed at you for a nincompoop--boasted of the pail of milk I had drawn from the Black Cow, saying to myself: ‘All right! He is Marie’s son, that boy! When he is a man grown, I will give him that accursed money, smelling of candles and incense, and he will give it back to the nuns.’ And when time was ripe I transferred the whole lump to your name at Rothschild’s. You made virtuous scruples about taking it, but you never restored it whence it came!... Now you have showed your breed--you have poured it into the lap of a light woman. And you come to me and own that, and ask for more to pitch after it!” He rapped out a huge oath. “Am I not justified in thinking you more my son than Marie’s? Have I not the right to say I am disappointed in you?”

His voice was a mere croak. He went on, with his fierce, bloodshot eyes fixed on vacancy:

“Do you suppose I did not love your mother--have never longed for her--have ever forgotten her? I use her chocolate-set every morning.... Her Indian shawl is the coverlet of my bed. When I have the gout in my eyes I tie a scarf she used to wear over them, like a bandage. There is virtue in things that have been used by a Saint.”

He added:

“For a Saint she is ... and though, as you say I stole my joy in her from Heaven--do you suppose, for one moment, a woman like that is going to let me be damned? She will wear her knees to the bone first; and so I tell you!... Was it not for the sake of my soul she went back to her cell at the Carmel? At the Day of Judgment one voice will be heard that pleads for old Achille Dunoisse.”

One scanty teardrop hung on his inflamed and reddened underlid.

“But Saint or none, she loved me, like twenty women, by Heaven! And if she says she repents of that, again, by Heaven!--she lies!”

The solitary tear fell on his discolored hand. He shook it off, angrily. Somewhere in the middle of that gross bundle of contradictions, absurdities, appetites, vices, resentments, hatreds, calling itself Achille Dunoisse--there beat and bled a suffering human heart. And the distance that separated the father and the son was bridged by a moment of sympathy and understanding. And a pang of envy pierced it through....

* * * * *

For the supreme jewel that Fate can bestow upon mortal, is the love that will even yield up the Beloved for Love’s sake. To this gross old man, his sire, had been given what would never fall to the younger Dunoisse.

By the radiance of this great passion of Marie Bathilde’s, her son saw himself in like case with some penniless student in a Paris garret, crouching, upon a night of Arctic cold, over a fire of paper and straw. When the small fierce flame of Henriette’s slight sensuous fancy should have sunk down into creeping ashes under the starved hands spread above it, what would be left to live for? His heart was sick within him as he went away.

He returned to Madame de Roux with the news that his application to the Marshal had succeeded. She threw her arms about him, in a transport of joy.

“Ah then, so you really love me?” the poor dupe asked, putting the most fatal of all questions. For it sets the interrogated he or she wondering, “Do I?” and hastens the inevitable end.

“How can you doubt it?” she queried, hiding an almost imperceptible yawn behind her tiny fingers. “Did I not send away Eugène for you?”

She passed by gentle degrees to a question possessing much more interest. The amount to be placed upon the books at Rothschild’s to the credit of the Marshal’s son.

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XLV

So thickly did the deposit of golden plums lie at the bottom of the pie-dish--so handsomely did the Marshal keep his given word, that at the suggestion of Henriette, Hector did some more shopping at the vast comprehensive mart of the Élysée. General de Roux, puffing a cheroot and sweltering in his cane chair at the Military Club of Algiers, was to read in the official Gazette of the Army--a special copy, thoughtfully forwarded by an anonymous friend--that his late Assistant-Adjutant had received yet further promotion. That the Cross of the Legion of Honor had been conferred upon him by the Prince-President, with his appointment as extra aide-de-camp of the Staff of the Élysée.

Thenceforwards at Reviews, Inspections, and other public functions, you saw the keen dark face shaded by the plumed cocked hat of a Lieutenant-Colonel--the slender active figure set off by a brilliant uniform, as mounted on Djelma, or some animal even more beautiful and spirited, the lover of Henriette brought up the rear of the showy cavalcade of Marshals, Generals, foreign envoys, aides-de-camp and Staff officers, galloping at the flying heels of the spirited English charger ridden by Monseigneur.

What could the heart of man want more? At State dinners at the Élysée, shooting-parties at Fontainebleau, hunts at Compiègne, balls at the Tuileries, Colonel Hector Dunoisse cut a gallant figure. His intrigue with Madame de Roux became a recognized liaison. Monseigneur was so kind--the world was so charitable. Nobody dreamed of censuring, or even looking askew.

In the galaxy of beautiful women that glittered about that rising planet of Monseigneur’s, Henriette shone prominently. Many men’s eyes were fixed in longing on that throbbing, radiant star. The man on whom its rays were shed knew himself envied. Secure in possession of what others keenly desired, he believed himself happy at last.

Happiest when, with that little hand of Henriette’s upon his arm, in some crush of gold-laced uniforms, diplomatic dress-coats, silks, satins, flowers, feathers and diamonds, he would encounter a tall, bulky, officially-attired figure topped with a heavy, ugly, distinguished face; and meet the cold, repellent, cynical stare of de Moulny’s hard blue eyes.

The eyes would meet Redskin’s, the head would move slightly, responding to Dunoisse’s own chilly, perfunctory salutation. Once or twice they had been near neighbors at the dinner-table.... What of that? In civilized society one eats with one’s enemy. Only the nomad of the desert and the savage of the jungle refuse to break bread with those they hold in suspicion or hate. And it is easy to forget a great injustice done you, by a friend you have ceased to care for; and to forgive a wrong wrought by a man off whom you have doubly scored.

For de Moulny had been paid his money, had not Henriette said so? Besides, she had never exchanged a word with him alone since that night of the fusillade.

She assured Dunoisse of this; and that their intercourse when they met was limited to the briefest utterances compatible with common civility. Then, no matter for de Moulny, now Representative for the Department of Moulny upon Upper Drame, and Secretary-Chancellor at the Ministry of the Interior. Success was his, though the woman he had desired had given her favors to another. Without the bliss that he had vainly coveted, let de Moulny go upon his way....

Dunoisse believed that Henriette loved him, as he her, with passion and fidelity. He asked nothing better of Fate than that he should be permitted to pass through life with those fairy fingers twined about his own. But sometimes when her beautiful hair was shed upon his breast and her lustrous eyes looked into his, and her lovely lips gave back his kisses, the thought of the strange face that might be lurking behind those beautiful, beloved, familiar features would strike him cold with dread.

He thrust it from him, that conjectured image, but always it hovered in the background of his mind. By the blood-red December dawn that followed on the crime of the coup d’État another glimpse of the Medusa visage was to be vouchsafed him. The day was not yet when it should be revealed in all its terror, and strike the man to stone.

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XLVI

France had not taken kindly to the notion of a plebiscite. The good city of Paris had had an indigestion of proclamations--was beginning to suspect the motives of her leading citizen. And the capital roared and buzzed like a beehive of angry bees.

He needed very much to be Dictator for ten years at least, the little man with the lank, drab hair, arrayed in the uniform of a General, adorned with the red cordon and the jeweled Grand Cross and Star of the Legion of Honor, who sat, upon this night of November, 1851, in a velvet armchair before the blazing wood-fire in his small private cabinet upon the ground-floor, with the tips of his spurred, wonderfully polished little boots upon the bar of a sumptuous, palatial fender of solid silver-gilt. Twelve millions of francs per annum for nearly four years had left him deep in debt and horribly embarrassed. When he should drive out of the courtyard of the Elysée at the expiration of his tenure of office, the gaping jaws of a debtor’s prison were ready to engulf him. He knew that very well.

And he waited, on the horns of a dilemma, with the son of his mother, who secretly detested him; and Fleury, now his senior aide-de-camp, and St. Arnaud, his War Minister, a lean, gaunt, dyed and painted personage who had once been an actor at a suburban theater, who had served in the Foreign Legion as a private soldier, who had seen much service, won promotion, and had now been recalled from Algeria by his friend. For the purpose of showing Parisians how warfare is conducted by civilized forces against Kabyles and Arabs and Moors.

Money, money!

As the neat white fingers of France’s First Citizen twisted comic figures out of paper, taken from a little inlaid table beside him where writing-materials were, his brain was busy with this vexing question of how to get more cash. Hundreds of millions of francs had been expended during his tenure of office. The china, pictures and other Art treasure of the Crown had been converted into bullion. The diamonds of the Crown and the Crown forests had become gold in the crucible of the auction-room. And--presto! the vast sums thus realized had vanished--nobody could exactly indicate how or whither--it was a puzzle to baffle Houdin. Nor could anyone point out the winners of the chief prizes advertized in the Lottery of the Golden Ingots, which had, with much tootling of official trumpets and banging of official drums, been drawn some days before.

Money!...

There was a reception upon this particular evening: the little Palace and its courtyard blazed with gas. A double line of carriages rolled ceaselessly in and out of high gilded gates, their twinkling lamps reflected in the cuirasses of the guard-of-honor. A steady stream of fire-worshipers, anxious to prostrate their foreheads in the dust before their god and luminary, rolled up the imposing flight of red-carpeted doorsteps and through the gilded vestibule to the small reception-rooms. Stars and Orders were not plentiful; Ambassadors were conspicuous by their absence: the Minister for the United States being the only exception to this rule. But lovely women were present; the whole galaxy of the Élysée scintillated in the heavens, and there were plenty of young attachés of Legation and clerks of the Diplomatic Corps. And silks and satins, feathers and diamonds, flaunted by gorgeous cocodettes of the fashionable world, mingled there with cotton-backed velvet, paste jewelry and cheap book-muslin; and gold-laced uniforms twinkling with decorations, jostled the black coat with the tricolor rosette, whose wearer had tramped in from Montrouge or Menilmontant to save a ’bus fare, and had stowed his overcoat and goloshes with the shawls and overshoes and umbrellas of his women-kind away behind the pedestal of some vestibule-bronze or group of statuary, to avoid the fee that must otherwise be paid to one of the large, stately footmen in the Presidential livery, in return for a wooden counter and the assumption of responsibility for these discarded coverings.

* * * * *

It was nearly midnight, and yet the sun had not risen; the magnificent band of the --th Hussars, stationed in the splendid gilt ballroom where the Prince-President had as a child witnessed the second abdication of the Emperor Napoleon, had not yet crashed into Partant Pour La Syrie. It had been given out that Monseigneur was delayed by the non-arrival of dispatches, detained by urgent affairs of State. Detectives, mingling with the throng of guests in the reception-rooms, kept their ears open for unfavorable comments: their eyes skinned for the possible interception of significant glances. Of which, had they but chosen to step outside the courtyard-gates, they might have gathered store.

For to be plain, Paris was in a state of ferment and disruption. Disaffection prevailed. Insurrection was rising to its old high-water mark. And the cries were: “Down with Bonaparte! Long live the Republic! Long live Law! Long live the Constitution! Down with the Army, the paid tool of the President who wants to be Emperor in spite of all his oaths!” And the ganglion of narrow streets that made the center of the city’s nervous system were being rapidly blocked by barricades built higher than before....

What wonder if at this juncture the crying need of Monseigneur for money opened a Gargantuan mouth for the bottle. Without money at this juncture, the contemplated masterstroke of policy must fall as harmlessly as a blow from Harlequin’s lathen sword.

Money, money, money!...

And there were twenty-five millions of francs, belonging to the Orleans Princes, lying in the Bank of France, which by a Presidential Decree, countersigned by the Home Secretary Count de Morny, might be profitably sequestrated. And, contained in a series of great painted and emblazoned deed-boxes, occupying a row of shelves in the strong-room at the Ministry of the Interior, were the title-deeds to estates of the value of three hundred thousand millions more, vested in the hands of mere Trustees; who might argue and protest, but could, if it proved necessary, be gagged. And de Morny had just threatened to resign the Home Secretaryship if Monseigneur persisted in his intention of laying violent hands on these unconsidered trifles--an exhibition of obstinacy both ill-timed and in bad taste.

“Who the devil, my dear fellow,” he asked, “will bid for cities, forests, palaces and villages, even if you put these up to auction at reasonable prices, when the titles to these properties must remain--to put it delicately--uncertain? A new Government may arise which suffers from the excess of scruples. In that case the estates will be returned to those whose property they are.”

De Morny, with his insufferable air of superiority, and the grand manner which indubitably belonged to him, lounged against the mantelshelf and looked down on Monseigneur. St. Arnaud, his long, lank form arrayed in the uniform of a Marshal, encrusted with bullion and blazing with decorations, lay on a sofa, sucking at the jeweled mouthpiece of a chibuk. De Fleury puffed out his cheeks as he blew cigarette-smoke into the fluffy, puzzled face of a gray Persian kitten that had climbed upon the shelf of an ivory cabinet loaded with costly china, and spat as he teased it with the plumes of his cocked hat.

“Who will buy? The answer is cut and dried. No one! And this appropriation--as a first flight of the Imperial eagle--will make you infernally unpopular; not to warn you of this would be,” said de Moray, “a laches upon my part. Every petty shopkeeper who has two thousand francs in the savings-bank--every peasant who has a little plot of land, will say to himself: ‘This fellow sticks at nothing. Poor devil though I am, I may be the next to be plundered.’ If you carry out this project of yours, it will not be with my assistance. I will help you take an Empire very willingly, but not to plunder a strong-box.”

He looked at his watch, bowed with his easy grace, and went out. The man who was his brother, and envied him, following the tall departing figure with eyes of sickly hate.

“M. de Morny follows the cynical advice that is given in the Gospel of St. Luke,” he said with a bitter sneer. “He would keep on bowing-terms with the Princes of the House of Orleans, so that, should I fail, they may receive him into their favor. His is the principle of hedge and trim. Well, we know his breaking-point! In the event of his kicking over the traces,” he spoke the words in English, a familiar language to Persigny and de Fleury, “there is another upon whom I can depend.”

And he exchanged a look of intelligence with Persigny, his shadow. For the ex-sergeant-quartermaster of dragoons would not fail him, he knew, upon a point of honor or at a pinch of conscience. Persigny was without these inconvenient things.

Meanwhile the door flew open again to re-admit de Morny, who insisted that the night grew old; that the reception-rooms were crowded to suffocation; that the long-delayed appearance of the President had provoked unfavorable comparisons, and created a bad impression; that he must come without delay.

“Let them wait!” he said, with a dull flash of ill-humor, in answer to the expostulations of Persigny. “Who are they, that they should not be kept waiting? Whom have we? A damnable rabble of bankers, stockbrokers, judges, generals, senators, Representatives and their wives and mistresses.... You know very well that what the English would call the ‘best people’ are those who do not come....”

Which was true. The private secretaries of the aged Duchesse de Veillecour, of the Faubourg St. Honoré, and of the venerable Marquis de l’Autretemps, being invariably instructed to return M. Bonaparte’s card of invitation, with the intimation that their respective employers had not the honor of knowing the gentleman who had sent it,--or with no intimation at all....

“Let them wait!” he said again. “Am I not waiting? For this message from Walewski--for this ultimatum of my Lord Walmerston--for this establishment of the submarine electric telegraph between England and France. That gutta-percha covered wire stretching between the cave under the South Foreland at Dover and the cliff station at Cape Grisnez is the jugular vein of my whole system of policy. Had it not broken twice, should I not have prepared Paris with my proclamations--should I not have struck the blow?”

He stuck out his chin as he rolled his head upon the cushioned back of his armchair and stared at the painted ceiling, and went on in his droning voice:

“That is, if I had had money--sufficient funds at my disposal. That a man like me should want money at such a moment proves that the Devil is a fool.”

St. Arnaud turned his long emaciated body and sagacious grayhound-face towards the speaker. The sofa creaked beneath his weight, and one of his gold spurs, catching in the costly brocade cover, tore it with a little ugly, sickening sound. He said, stroking the dyed tuft upon his chin with a gaunt pale hand glittering with rings of price:

“Monseigneur, pray do the personage you mention better justice. He really has served you better than you think!”

He had. The steam-packet Goliath of Dover, towing the ancient cable-hulk Blazer, the latter rolling fearfully, with a direfully seasick crew, and a hold containing but a few hundred yards or so of the twenty-seven miles of cable which had been smoothly paid out over the Channel sea-floor, had dropped her anchors off Cape Grisnez an hour before sunset; and the end of the wire-bound rope on which so much depended having been landed at the village of Sangatte, distant some three miles or so from Calais, communication had been established with the operators in the cave under the South Foreland lighthouse at Dover. And a gun had been fired from the Castle; and telegrams announcing the fact had been sent by the Chief Magistrate of Dover to the Queen and the Prince Consort, the Duke of Wellington, the King of Prussia, and a few other important personages. And the Mayor had then despatched a message of congratulation to the French Prince-President, which was being transmitted to Paris by means of Ampère’s coil and needle, and the under-ground wire that followed the track of the Great Northern Railway Line.

But meanwhile a courier from the Embassy of France in Belgrave Square, London, chilled and hoarse from rapid traveling in the wintry weather, had arrived with the letter from Walewski. And when the neat white hands for which it was destined had snatched the envelope from the sumptuous golden salver upon which it was respectfully presented by the President’s second aide-de-camp, its contents proved discouraging, to say the least.

Count Walewski had pleaded his relative’s cause with eloquence. The enclosure would prove with what result.

A check for two thousand pounds, enfolded in a sheet scrawled with a brief intimation in my Lord Walmerston’s stiff, characteristic handwriting, that no more of the stuff was to be had.

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XLVII

“How like the man! The icy, phlegmatic islander! Two thousand pounds! A nothing! A bagatelle!”

The little gentleman removed his polished boots from the chased silver-gilt fender. He was strongly tempted to throw the check into the fire. But money is money, and he restrained himself. He folded the oblong slip of pink paper stamped with the magic name of Coutts and slipped it into his pocket note-case, gnawing, as was his wont, at the ends of his heavy brown mustache and breathing through his nose. He got up and looked upon his merry men with an ugly, livid smile, and said, still smiling:

“So be it! We take my Lord’s charity and we repay it. Without doubt--it shall be repaid by-and-by--with other debts owed by me to England. Her grudging shelter, her insulting tolerance, her heavy, insolent, insular contempt.”

Something in the speaker’s short thick throat rattled oddly. His eyes, that were usually like the faded negatives of eyes, glittered with a dull, retrospective hate. The white hand shook as it stroked the brown chin-tuft, and a grayish shiny sweat stood upon his face.

“I am to be upheld and supported by Great Britain if I accomplish miracles--but I am to accomplish them unaided. Two thousand pounds! We are infinitely indebted to my Lord Walmerston’s generosity!”

St. Arnaud, who had got off the sofa, remarked with a full-flavored oath:

“It is rating the Army cheap, by----!”

De Morny said, shrugging one shoulder and toying with his watch-chain:

“Two regiments of Russian Guards made an Empress of the Grand Duchess Catherine. Will not a couple of brigades do your little job for you? For my life, I cannot see why not?”

The tallow-candle-locked little man on the hearthrug retorted as he warmed himself:

“Catherine only strangled her husband Peter. I have the Assembly to throttle--a very different thing. To carry out my plan successfully I must subsidize the whole Army--cram the pockets of every officer according to his grade--with thousand-franc billets--descend upon the rank-and-file in a shower of wine and gold.”

De Fleury agreed.

“Sapristi! it is as plain as a pikestaff. Those attempts of Strasbourg and Boulogne failed because enough drink--sufficient money--was not lavished upon the soldiers. This time there will have to be enough of both.”

“Has it ever occurred to you,” said de Morny, still in the tongue of barbarous Britain, as he dried the wet ink carefully, and glanced towards St. Arnaud, whose sallow face betrayed suspicion and growing ill-humor, at the continuance of this dialogue that he could not understand, “that, like Herr Frankenstein of the German legend, you may create out of the Army a monster that will one day prove dangerous to you?”

Persigny and de Fleury exchanged a glance unseen by their master. He said, throwing the half-finished cigarette upon the hearth:

“Frankenstein killed his monster when he found it inconvenient. That was a mistake; such a brute-force is always of use. He should have bled the creature into weakness and submission. Then he could have kept it until wanted in a cage.”

“A sublime idea,” said de Morny, with the shadow of a grin upon his well-bred, dissipated countenance. “But permit me to suggest that if you attempt to act upon it, you will find your work cut out.”

“You have a biting vein of humor,” said Monseigneur, turning his blinking regard upon the speaker. “Pursue it if it pleases you--it does not disturb me. I belong to the race of the lymphatics--the Imperturbables, whom nothing annoys.”

Though he boasted, his quickened breathing betokened some degree of disturbance. His white hand was not steady as he took a handful of cigarettes from a jeweled box that stood upon the mantelshelf, selected one, and tossed the remainder of the handful into the maw of the red-hot fire, that swallowed the little paper tubes at a gulp. But his tone was mellifluous as he added, striking a match:

“Pray do not speak English so much.... M. de St. Arnaud is not familiar with the language.”

“His vocabulary being limited to ‘Goddam!’ ‘All right!’ and ‘How-do-you-do?’--phrases sufficient to equip a second-class actor for the part of stage Englishman in a vaudeville, but not,” said de Morny, still in the prohibited tongue, and smiling pleasantly at the lanky figure in the gorgeous uniform topped by the made-up face with the dyed mustaches and the hyacinthine locks that were false in patches--“not to guide the War Minister of a great Continental Power through the rocks and shoals of diplomatic conferences with representatives of other Powers. One will not fail to remember M. de St. Arnaud’s limitations. It will be well, my brother, if you will also. As for this decree, it may be necessary, but the moment is not ripe for it. It will do you injury, take my word for that!”

“My brother,” though inwardly nauseated by the unwelcome counsel, took it smilingly. He assumed his favorite pose, borrowed from the great Napoleon, his short right leg advanced, his chin turned at an acute angle, his left hand thrust behind the broad red ribbon, a finger hitched between two buttons of his tight-waisted general’s coat, and said with his most pompous air:

“M. de Morny, in answer to your objections to my proposed course of policy, I reply by dictating a Proclamation addressed by the President of the Republic to the French People. Be good enough to take your seat at the writing-table.”

De Morny obeyed. Monseigneur cleared his throat, and reeled off:

“Our country is upon the horns of a dilemma, in the throes of a crisis of the gravest. As her sworn protector, guardian and defender, I take the step necessary to her rescue and salvation--I withdraw from the Bank twenty-five millions of francs wrung from her veins by the masters who have betrayed her--I apply them as golden ointment to stanch her bleeding wounds.”

Said de Morny, with imperturbable gravity, speaking in the English language, as he selected a sheet of paper and dipped his pen in the ink:

“Article I. will provide that hereafter stealing is no robbery. Article II. should ordain that henceforth it is not murder to kill!”

The coldly-spoken words dropped one by one into a silence of consternation. St. Arnaud sat up; de Fleury dropped his cocked hat upon the carpet. Persigny grew pale underneath his rouge. Monseigneur alone maintained his urbane coolness, looking down his nose as he stroked his heavy brown mustache with the well-kept hand that, with all its feminine beauty, was so pitiless. Thus his blinking glance was arrested by the letter on the hearthrug. And a postscript that he had overlooked now caught his eye. He stooped, lifted the letter, and read, written in Walewski’s fine Italian script:

“Walmerston is cooling; there is no doubt about the change in him. Better strike whilst the iron is hot, or decide to abandon the idea.”

“And risk all ... or give up all. Very well, my friend!” he said, apostrophising the absent writer as though he could hear him, “I will risk all. I wait for nothing but the cable now.”

Even as he said the words the privileged elderly aide-de-camp entered with the thin blue envelope that held the cablegram. He tore it open, and read:

“Town--Dover--congratulates--Prince-President--on--establishment-- submarine--telegraphic--communication--between--France--and--England. William--John--Tomlinson.--Mayor.”

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XLVIII

It was given to William John Tomlinson to rouse the venomous reptile that lay hidden in this man out of his wintry torpor. A bitter oath broke from him as he read the message. He tore the flimsy scrawled paper and the blue envelope into a dozen pieces, and scrunched them in his small neat hand before he threw the lump of paper on the Persian hearthrug, and spat upon it with another oath, and ground it under his spurred heel.

Not one of those about him had ever seen him so moved. De Morny lifted his eyebrows in C, de Fleury and Persigny looked at each other in consternation, St. Arnaud’s jaw dropped; he gulped, staring at his master with bulging eyes, as Monseigneur strove before them, in the strange emotion that possessed him, wrestling with something that plucked at his muscles and jerked his limbs, and contorted his heavy features, and wrenched the ugly jaw that the drooping mustache and the thick chin-tuft tried to hide, to the right and left as though the man had been a figure of wood and wires worked by some devil at play.

“The Mayor,...” he croaked, after a dumb struggle for speech. “The Chief Magistrate of Dover congratulates the Chief Magistrate of Paris. Damnably amusing!... Good!--very good!”

His laugh was a snapping bark, like the sound made by a dog in rabies. He went on, heedless of the faces gathered about him, speaking, not to them, but to that other hidden self of his; the being who dwelt behind the dough-colored mask, and looked through the narrow eye-slits, guessed at, but never before seen:

“You comprehend, Madame of England and that sausage of Saxe-Coburg Saalfeld, her Consort, think it beneath their exalted dignity to bandy courtesies with me.... Me, the out-at-elbows refugee, the shady character--the needy Prince-Pretender--admitted upon sufferance to West of London Clubs; exhibited as a curiosity in the drawing-rooms of English Society--stared at as some cow-worshiping jewel-hung Hindu Rajah, or raw-meat-eating Abyssinian King.” He clenched his pretty hand and went on, carried away by the tide of bitter memories:

“One day, when I visited the Zoological Garden in their Regent’s Park, I saw something that I shall not forget. A great hooded snake of the cobra species--they called it a hamadryad--had just been brought up from the East India Docks. When he found himself a prisoner in his iron-framed, plate-glass cage, he reared himself up in magnificent fury. His forked tongue quivered between his frothing jaws; he vibrated, poised upon his lower coils; struck again and again--and did nothing but bruise himself. Something that he could not break--a barrier adamantine and invisible, lay between him and the staring human faces he so hated. The clear jets of deadly venom that he spurted in his efforts to reach them trickled harmlessly down the glass....”

He went on:

“I saw myself at Ham when I looked at that creature in its loneliness and impotence, surrounded by the keepers who jeered and mocked.... Death in its fangs and death in its heart, and that barrier of glass between.... There were workmen with tools among those who stared at him. One shattering blow of a pick, and he would have been free--that living Terror, to kill, and kill, and kill!...”

He looked about him, and said, with his affected mildness:

“The pick-blow that cracks the glass of my cage will be the coup d’État, but not until I am Emperor of France will the barrier be done away with.... Do you know what Queen Victoria once said of me to Lady Stratclyffe? ‘My dear, let me beg of you not to mention M. Bonaparte before Albert. He considers him hardly a person to be spoken of--not at all a person to know! And yet how can one deny him some measure of respect and consideration--as a near relative of Napoleon the Great.’”

He had another struggle with his rending devil, and said, when he had found his speech again:

“‘Great!’ Was he so great, that man for whose sake Victoria would accord me ‘respect and consideration’? True, he humbled Emperors, browbeat and bullied Kings.... He kicked the board of Europe, and armies were jumbled in confusion. His screaming eagles carried panic, and terror, and devastation as far as the Pyramids. The East bowed her jeweled forehead in the dust before him--a nation of beef-fed islanders put him to the rout!”

His eyes, wide open now and glazed, looked upon the men who listened, unseeing as the eyes of a somnambulist. He said in that voice that was a croak:

“And he died, the prisoner and slave of England. Before I die, England shall be mine!”

* * * * *

Perhaps he fancied that he detected a faint, supercilious sneer upon the face of de Morny. For he turned upon the Count, and said, narrowing his eyelids, and smiling in a menacing way:

“You, my brother, take this assertion as a piece of boasting. Well, I am content that you should regard it so. Members of Christ’s family held in contempt His powers of prophecy. Nevertheless, Jerusalem fell, and the Temple was leveled with the dust.”

“By my faith!” said de Morny, shrugging his thin wide shoulders. “A parallel that!”

“A parallel, as you say,” returned Monseigneur, who had made the astonishing comparison with the coolest effrontery. “Now, if you will give me pen, ink, and paper, I will write the answer to this letter from Belgrave Square.”

They supplied him with these things, and he wrote, in his pointed spidery hand, stooping over the desk of an inlaid ivory escritoire--a dainty thing whose drawers and pigeon-holes had contained the political correspondence of Queen Marie Antoinette and the love-letters of amorous Josephine:

“Tell my Lord that I carry out my programme. Upon the morning of the second of December, at a quarter-past six punctually, I strike the decisive blow.”

He signed the sheet with his initials, folded and slipped it in an envelope, and motioned to de Morny to prepare the wax to receive his signet. While the red drops were falling on the paper, like gouts of thick blood, he said, with his smile:

“It may be that this second of December will prove to be my eighteenth Brumaire.”

And when Persigny inquired to which of the official messengers the letter should be entrusted for conveyance to London, he replied:

“To none of them. An aide-de-camp will attract less notice. And he must be a mere junior, an unimportant person whom nobody will be likely to follow or molest.”

An ugly salacious humor curved his pasty cheeks and twitched at his nostrils as he went on:

“Suppose we send Dunoisse? Madame de Roux adores him, but there are occasions upon which she would find it more convenient to adore him from a distance. One can easily comprehend that!”

He added, as his merry men roared with laughter:

“It is decided, then. Colonel Dunoisse shall be our messenger. Pray touch the bell, M. de St. Arnaud.”

A moment later the band of the --th Hussars crashed magnificently into the opening bars of “Partant Pour La Syrie,” and Monseigneur, imperturbable and gracious as ever, was smiling on the “damnable rabble” crowding to bask in the rays of their midnight-risen sun. And beyond the big gilded gates of the little palace Paris buzzed and roared like an angry beehive into which some mischief-loving urchin has poked a stick.

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XLIX

The egg of the coup d’État was hatched as the train that carried Monseigneur’s secret messenger rushed over the iron rails that sped it to the sea.

We know his programme, masterly in detail, devilish in its crushing, paralyzing, merciless completeness. The posting of notices at every street corner, in every public square, on every tree of the boulevards, proclaiming that crowds would thenceforth be dispersed by military force, Without Warning; the distribution of troops; the disposition of batteries; the arrests of the Representatives, the publication of the Decree dissolving the Assembly; the seizure of the Ministry of the Interior; the closure of the High Courts of Justice--a symbolical gagging and blinding of the Law. And Paris, rising early on that red December morning, turned out under the chilly skies to read her death-sentence, ignorant of its true nature; and to wonder at the military spectacle provided for her eyes.

For the five brigades of Carrelet’s Division, cavalry and infantry, extended in échelon from the Rue de la Paix to the Faubourg Poissonière. Each brigade with its artillery, numbering seventeen thousand Pretorians, give additional regiments, with a reserve of sixty thousand men, being held in readiness to use cannon, saber, pistol, and bayonet upon the bodies of their fellow-countrymen and women, that France might be saved, according to Monseigneur.

The First Regiment of Lancers, to their eternal dishonor, opened the ball. Amidst cries of “Long live the Republic!” “Down with Louis Bonaparte, traitor to the people!” they charged the crowd. Men, women, and children were ruthlessly cut down: and then, from the Gymnase Theater to the Bains Chinois, took place the Great Battue.

Killing is thirsty work. Wine flowed down the soldiers’ throats in rivers, as the blood of their victims rolled down the Paris gutters. And as the slayers flagged they were stimulated to fresh exertions. Food, drink, and cigars were lavished upon them. Rolls of gold were broken and shared among them like sticks of chocolate. Women were promised them by-and-by. Long after the soldiers were too drunk to stand upright they went on killing--an instance of devotion which brought tears of sensibility to the eyes of Monseigneur.

* * * * *

It was late, and raining heavily, when the Folkestone train clanked into Waterloo Station. The yellow gaslights were reflected in the numerous puddles on the slippery wooden platform; in the shiny peaks of porters’ caps, and in the dripping oilskins of cabmen. A red-nosed Jehu, suffering from almost total extinction of the voice, undertook to convey Dunoisse to Belgrave Square, the haggard beast attached to the leaky vehicle accomplishing the journey in a series of stumbles, slides, and collapses.

“Vy does the ’orse fall down?” indignantly repeated the husky driver, to whom Dunoisse, on alighting for the second time to assist the prostrate steed to rise, had addressed this question. “Vy, becos’ he can’t stand hup, nor no more could you, my topping codger, after twenty hours on the job.”

He drove his fare to the address given without further casualty, pocketed Dunoisse’s liberal fare without any perceptible emotion, and, warning an advancing hall-porter to be careful, for he had brought him “something wallyble,” jerked and prodded his drooping beast into some faint show of vitality, and rattled and jingled away.

The windows of the Embassy blazed with lights, music thrilled and throbbed upon the ear, a double line of waiting carriages extended along the railings of the Square garden,--late arrivals were even now being set down in the shelter of the awning that protected the crimson-carpeted doorsteps from the sooty downpour; police were on duty in unusual force, and the six tall cuirassiers of the Embassy were dwarfed into insignificance by a British guard of honor, betokening the presence of Royalty; stately, splendid Household Cavalrymen, whose gold-laced scarlet blue velvet facings, gleaming steel cuirasses, and silver, white-plumed helmets lined the flower-decked vestibule, and struck savage splendid chords of color amidst the decorations of the marble staircase, where Gloire de Dijon roses and yellow chrysanthemums were massed and mingled with the trailing foliage of smilax, and the tall green plumes of ferns.

The Tricolor was barely in evidence. The Imperial colors of green and gold, displayed in the floral decorations, predominated in the draperies that hung below the carved and gilded cornices, and beneath the pillared archways that led to the dining and reception rooms. The full-length portrait of the Prince-President that hung over the sculptured marble fireplace had a canopy of emerald velvet spangled with fleurons, and upheld by eagles perched on laurel-wreathed spears. And above the head of the portrait, slender gilded tubes formed the letter N, and above the initial, concealed by a garland of trailing rose-boughs, lurked another more significant device....

Thus much evidence of preparation at the Embassy for some event of profound importance was evident to the bearer of the letter from the Élysée, before the steward of the chambers, a stately gold-chained personage in discreet black, accosted the stranger, and at the sight of a signet bearing a familiar coat-of-arms, conducted him in haste to an apartment on the rear of the ground-floor, reserved for similar arrivals; set sandwiches, cold game, and champagne-cup before him; indicated a dressing-room adjoining where the stains of travel might be removed; and disappeared, to return before the rage of hunger had been half-appeased, ushering in a handsome personage in a brilliant Hussar uniform, who greeted Dunoisse as an acquaintance, and shook him warmly by the hand.

“There has been a great dinner this evening,” explained this personage, who held the post of First Military Attaché to France’s Embassy. “The entire Corps Diplomatique accredited to the Court of St. James’s, to meet the Duke of Bambridge and Lord Walmerston. His Royal Highness will be leaving directly; those Life Guards in the square and in the vestibule are his escort of honor. Magnificent men, are they not? But less active dismounted than our own Heavy Cavalry. Are you sufficiently refreshed? You will take nothing more? You are positive? Then be good enough to come with me.”

And they returned to the hall, to commence the ascent of the great staircase, as a steady, continuous stream of well-bred, well-dressed people began to flow downwards in the direction of the refreshment-buffets. The slender, supple figure of the stranger, attired in plain, close-fitting mufti black, relieved only by the red rosette at the left lapel, closely following its brilliant guide, attracted many curious glances as it passed.

“The women wear magnificent jewels, and are handsome, are they not?” commented the Hussar. “These English skins of cream and roses, these thick, straight profiles, these rounded contours, these fine eyes, lacking expression and fire, but still magnificent, these superb chevelures would atone to most men for their lack of grace and verve. But to me, my dear fellow--word of honor! the little finger of a chic Parisienne is worth the whole of Belgravia. Pray, how is Madame de Roux? Heavens! how her presence would eclipse a roomful of British beauties! They tell me”--possibly the speaker was not guileless of a dash of malice--“de Roux is exerting himself to get transferred to a Home command. For me, I find that natural. Don’t you?”

And the attaché, whose loquacious vivacity could not hide the excitement and suspense under which he was laboring, and which were palpably shared by every official encountered on the way upstairs, paused at a curtained archway at the end of a short corridor on the second floor, and said, lifting the velvet drapery that Dunoisse might pass within:

“This is His Excellency’s library. Wait a moment, and I am instructed to say that he will join you here. Excuse me that I am compelled to leave you now!”

The curtain fell heavily, blotting out the handsome martial figure. Dunoisse moved forwards, and found himself in the middle of an octagonally-shaped library, furnished in the somber, sumptuous style of the Empire. Bronze bookcases, surmounted by crowned eagles holding wreaths of bay and laurel in their beaks, lined the walls, bronze-colored velvet curtains draped the windows, the walnut furniture was upholstered in bronze leather; the needed note of color being supplied by the superb Persian rugs that covered the polished walnut parquet, the single gorgeous amaryllis that bloomed in a tub of Nankin ware upon an inlaid ivory stool, and the brilliant trophies of Eastern arms that gleamed from the upper walls and covered the ceiling. A glowing fire of billets burned on the bronze dogs of the fireplace. Above the carved walnut mantelshelf, where groups of wax tapers burned in silver candelabra, hung a fine replica from the brush of David, of the painter’s imposing, heroic, impossible portrait of Napoleon crossing the Alps. And Dunoisse, sinking down with a sigh of relief amongst the cushions of a capacious armchair and stretching his chilled feet towards the cheerful hearth-glow, remembered with a faint amusement how violent an outburst of indignation this picture invariably provoked from the Marshal; who with many oaths would denounce the long dead-and-buried painter as an ass and a jackanapes, incapable of imagining the conqueror of the Simplon as anything but a barley-sugar soldier, or of representing upon canvas the true spirit of War.

“He rode a mule, did my General, and left his charger to his bâtmen. The flaps of his cocked hat were turned to keep the snow out of his neck and ears; he tied them down with a peasant-wench’s red woolen shawl, and wrapped himself in an old gray cloak lined with skins of lambs. Death of my life! the road to glory is not paved with sugar-plums and rose-leaves.... A fellow who looked one way and spurred his beast another as the fool is doing in that accursed picture would have found himself at the bottom of an ice-gulf before he could say ‘Crac!’”

There was something in the Marshal’s roughly blocked-out word-sketch that warmed the heart and stirred the blood as the classical equestrian figure of the David portrait failed to do. Dunoisse, even in his childish days, had recognized this. He was looking at the picture between half-closed eyelids; and the spirited charger had begun to shrink into a mule, and the red woolen shawl of homely truth had covered up the laced cocked hat of ornamental fiction, when the imperative summons of a door-bell pealed through the house, and was succeeded by a sudden lull in the Babel of general conversation.

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L

Dunoisse, roused by the unmistakable double ring of a telegraphic messenger, started to his feet. The undelivered letter in his breast seemed to burn there like red-hot iron. His keen ears pricked themselves for what he knew must come, if this were as he suspected, a cable from Paris.

He stepped towards the door, put aside the velvet draperies of the portière, and turned the handle. He emerged upon the landing, where a few persons were gathered, conferring eagerly in undertones. He moved to the balustrade of the great well-staircase, and looked down into the flower-decked, brilliantly illuminated hall, to find it packed with a solid mass of heads of both sexes, all ages, and every shade of color. Bald craniums of venerable diplomats nodded beside the more amply thatched heads of middle-age politicians or the hyacinthine curls of juvenile Guardsmen; tiaras of diamonds crowning snow-white or chestnut, sable or golden locks, blazed and coruscated, wreaths of flowers twined in Beauty’s tresses made a garden for the eye. And all these heads, it seemed to Dunoisse, were turned towards the full-length portrait of Monseigneur, attired in the uniform of a General of the French Army, smiling with his imperturbable amiability above the marble fireplace.

For what were they all waiting? Leaning over the balustrade above, Dunoisse could see that a small round ventilator in the wall immediately above the picture, and hidden from the persons assembled in the hall below by the bespangled canopy, was open. Through the aperture came a hand holding a lighted taper; and in another moment, with a faint hissing sound, the initial N and an Imperial crown above it leaped into lines of vivid wavering flame.

Babel broke loose then. Questions, ejaculations, comments, explanations, congratulations, in half-a-dozen European languages, crossed and recrossed in the air like bursting squibs. And seeing officials and attachés of the Embassy beset by eager questions; and conscious that curious glances from below were raking his own dark, unfamiliar features, Dunoisse, as a wave of excited humanity began to roll up the grand staircase, retreated to the library, knowing that the coup d’État was an accomplished fact.

He had left the library empty, but he found it occupied. A lady and a gentleman had entered by a door at the more distant end. The lady’s back was towards Dunoisse. Her male companion, a tall and handsome man of barely middle age, wearing the gold-embroidered uniform of the diplomatic corps with grace and distinction, said to her, in the act of quitting the room:

“Wait here. I will go and order the carriage, but the crush is so great that some delay is unavoidable. Mary shall come and keep you company. By that small private staircase communicating with the dining-room she can join you quite quietly and unobserved. No one will be likely to disturb you. M. Walewski will not be able to escape from the congratulations of his circle for a considerable interval, and Madame Walewski is engaged with the Duke.”

The speaker withdrew by the more distant door, softly closing it behind him. And Dunoisse stood still in the shadow of a massive writing-table, flung by the light of fire and candle upon the heavy velvet curtain behind him, uncertain whether to remain or to retreat. One moment more; and then, as the tall, slender, white-robed figure of the lady turned and moved towards him across the richly hued Oriental carpets, a memory, faint as a whiff of sweetness from some jar of ancient pot-pourri, wakened in him, quickening as she drew nearer into fragrance fresh and as living as that exhaled by the bouquet of pure white roses clustering in their glossy dark green leaves, that she carried in her slight gloved hand; and by their fellow-blossoms, drooping in the graceful fashion of the day, amidst the heavy shining coils of her rippling gold-brown hair.

* * * * *

For it was Ada Merling.

* * * * *

He drew noiselessly back into the shadow, looking at her intently. A dress of costly fabric, frost-flowers of Alençon lace wrought upon cloudy tulle, billowed and floated about her slender, rounded form. Glimpses of shimmering sea-blue showed through the exquisite folds. The moony glimmer of great pearls, and the cold white fire of diamonds crowned her rich hair and clasped her fair throat, circled her slight wrists, and heaved on her white bosom. Jewels and laces could not add to her beauty in the eyes of those who loved her. To Dunoisse the revelation of the loveliness that had been gowned in Quaker gray, crowned with the frilled cap of the nurse, and uniformed with the bibbed apron, came with a shock that took his breath away.

She had not seen him, standing by the curtain. She evidently believed herself alone when she dropped her fan and bouquet on a divan, as though their inconsiderable burden had oppressed her, and moved towards the fireplace. She looked steadfastly at the replica of the David portrait of the Great Napoleon that hung above. Her name was upon Dunoisse’s lips, when the sound of the unforgotten voice of melody arrested it. She spoke; and her words were addressed, not to the living man who heard, but to the deaf, unheeding dead.

“Oh, you with the inscrutable pale face and the cold, hard, pitiless eyes! who point forwards ceaselessly,” she said, “scourging your dying soldiers along the road of Death with the whip of your remorseless, merciless will, do you know what he has done, and is doing?--the man who bears your name, and would, if he could, revive the withered glories of your Empire by dipping them in a bath of human blood.... Do you hear the shrieks, and groans, and prayers for mercy? Do you see the red tide running in the streets of Paris? Do you see the people butchered at the police-bureau and guard-houses? And seeing, do you own the slayer as a son of your House?... I cannot believe that you and he have anything in common.... You were a magnificent despot, a royal tiger, but this man is----”

“Mademoiselle!” broke from Dunoisse, as with a most painfully-embarrassing consciousness upon him that his unsuspected presence should in decency have been made known to her ere now, he moved from the shadow of the doorway.

“Who is it?”

She turned her face to him, and it was pale and agitated, and there were tragic violet circles round the great brilliant blue-gray eyes. They recognized Dunoisse, and she held out her hand in the frank way that he remembered, and he took it in his own.

“Monsieur Dunoisse!... Colonel Dunoisse I should say now, should I not?”

“I thank you,” he said, “for not completely forgetting me; otherwise, I hardly know how I should have recalled myself to you.”

“Why so? You have not changed,” she answered, looking in the dark keen face. And then, as the light of fire and candles showed the fine lines graven about its eyes and mouth, and the sprinkling of gray hairs upon the high, finely modeled temples, she added: “And yet I think you have.”

“Time is only kind to beautiful women!” Dunoisse responded, paying her the implied compliment with the gallantry that had become habitual. But she answered with a contraction of the brows:

“Time would be kind if this December day, that dawned upon the betrayal of the French Republic, and set upon the massacre and slaughter of her citizens, could be wiped from the calendar forever.”

Tears sprang to her eyes and fell, and her bosom heaved under the jewels that sparkled on its whiteness.

“One should never consent to act against one’s own innate convictions, even to gratify the dearest living friends,” she said. “My mother, the kindest and most unselfish of women, has never ceased to regard my chosen work as a kind of voluntary martyrdom; my duties at the Home, absorbing and delightful as they are, as irksome and unpleasant. ‘If Ada would go out into Society sometimes,’ she says constantly, ‘it would be more natural!’ And so, to please the dear one--who has been, and still is, very ill, and whom I have been nursing--I accepted their Excellencies’ invitation, left her sick-bed, put on my fallals and trinkets--and came here with Mr. and Mrs. Bertham to-night--to join, although I did not know it, in celebrating the perpetration of a crime, and hailing as a great and memorable stroke of statecraft a deed of infamy.”

The letter in Dunoisse’s breast became an oppressive burden. His eyes fell under hers. She pursued, with a deepening, intensifying expression and tone of horror and repulsion.

“For that the banquet in which I shared to-night was intended to celebrate this day that has seen the triumph of bad faith and mean deceit, and hideous treachery, over generous confidence and open trust, can be doubted by no one!... And while we ate and drank, and laughed and chatted, sitting at the table of his plenipotentiary, what horrors were taking place in Paris! what crimes were being committed against Law, against Honor, against Humanity, against God!...”

Her voice broke. Innumerable little shining points of moisture started into sight upon her broad, pure forehead, and in the shadow of the silken waves upon her blue-veined temples, and about her pale, quivering lips. She said, lifting her lace handkerchief and wiping the moisture away:

“I speak thus to you, who are an officer of the Army of France; who hold a post of confidence--or so I have been given to understand--on the Prince’s Military Staff. It may be that you prize Success above Integrity, that the result of the coup d’État will justify in your eyes the measures that have been taken to carry it out. But, knowing what I know of you--having heard from that dear lady,--who is now, I earnestly believe, crowned in a more glorious life than that of earth, with the reward of her pure faith and simple virtues,--the story of your renunciation of great fortune and high prospects for the sake of principle and honor--I cannot believe this. If it were so, you would be changed, not only in outward appearance, but in mind, and heart, and soul.”

She added, with an almost wistful smile:

“And I do not wish to find you so. I prefer, when it is possible, to keep my ideals intact.”

“Miss Merling,” returned Dunoisse, “I break no bond of secrecy in saying to you that the coup d’État has long been expected, both by the enemies and the friends of Monseigneur the Prince-President. But although the most minute preparations have been made to insure perfection in the military operations and the proceedings of the police; the friends most depended on by His Highness--the agents most necessary to the execution of his plan--have had no knowledge of what was to be their share in the programme until the moment for action arrived. The Prince, M. de Morny, M. de St. Arnaud, M. de Persigny, Colonel de Fleury, and M. de Maupas, alone shared the secret. And they have kept it well!”

“Too well!” she said, and her arched brows drew into straight lines of condemnation over the severity of her clear gaze. “One would have prayed for less perfection! The plot has been a masterpiece of cool Machiavellian treachery, devised with extraordinary genius, and carried out with consummate skill. It is hinted that Lord Walmerston approves and encourages, if he has not aided and abetted.”.... A shudder rippled through her slight body. “Oh, I knew him subtle as Odysseus,” she said, with starting tears of indignation--“but I never believed him guileful; never imagined that he could justify God-defying, cold-blooded murder as a means to an end. If this indeed be so, those who have termed him England’s typical and representative Englishman”--the tone was of keen, cutting sarcasm--“must find him another description. Hell’s typical and representative devil”--Dunoisse started as the fierce condemnatory sentence rang through the room--“is he whom you call master! The jailer who has turned the key upon the freedom of the people of France!”

“Miss Merling, the ways of Government and Rule are bestrewn with obstacles and beset with pearls,” returned Dunoisse, “and Expediency demands many moral sacrifices on the part of those who sit on the coach-boxes of the world. As a man of honor”--the well-used word fell lightly from his lips as he slightly shrugged his shoulders--“I deplore that they should be necessary! But in the years that have passed since it was my privilege to meet you, I have learned to swim with the stream; to take Life as I find it; and not to ask a greater excess of nobility and virtue from my neighbors than I possess in myself.”

His slight momentary embarrassment had passed away. He had recovered his customary ease and sangfroid, and the acquired manner of his world, self-confident, almost insolent in its cool assurance, lent its meretricious charm to the handsome face and upright gallant figure as he faced her smiling, the ruddy firelight enhancing the brilliancy of his black eyes and the ruddy swarthiness of hue that distinguished him, his supple, well-shaped hand toying with a fine waxed end of the neat black mustache.

“Nothing, Mademoiselle,” he went on, “would distress me more profoundly than to think that credit was given me for opinions I have long learned to regard as prejudiced and crude, and a course of conduct subsequent experience has proved to have been so mistaken that I have long since endeavored to correct its errors by adopting an opposite policy. I----”

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LI

He ceased, for a sudden burning wave of color flooded her to the temples. Her white throat and bosom were tinged with the red stain.

He bit his lip in chagrin, seeing her recoil from him. Fair women were not wont to turn their eyes from Dunoisse. He began, in much less confident tones, to exonerate himself:

“In the world of to-day, Mademoiselle, especially the world of Paris, one is compelled to abandon high ideals of life and forsake the more rigid standards of conduct. One is forced....”

She looked at him full, and the scathing, merciless contempt in her great eyes both froze and scorched him. He stammered, bungled, broke down. The clear voice said with a cutting edge of irony:

“The boy of whom my dear old friend, Miss Caroline Smithwick, spoke with so much affection; the young man of whom she was so proud, was not to be ‘compelled’ or ‘forced’ to turn from the path of truth and honor by any stress of circumstances. You have changed very much, Colonel Dunoisse, since you visited her in Cavendish Street! Good-night to you, and good-by!”

The tall, white-robed figure was sweeping to the door, when it stopped, and turned, and came back again. She said, with almost a pleading look:

“But I cannot leave you so, remembering how true and kind you were to her. My fault is to be over hasty in judgment, I fear.” She added: “There must be many excuses that you could make for yourself, and are too proud and too reserved to offer.... Especially to one who has no claim upon your confidence; so let us part friends, even though we never meet as friends again!”

He took the white, firm hand she held out. He had thought her insular and prejudiced, narrow-minded and intolerant. Some magic in her touch wrought a change in him. He said in a far different tone:

“That I have sinned against your ideals of character and principle is my punishment. Tell me--Miss Merling--if I had been the kind of man you thought me--if I had come back to Cavendish Street and sought your friendship--would it have been denied?”

“No!” she said, looking in his face with beautiful candor. “For I saw much to admire and to respect in you--as you were in days gone by.”

“The world dubbed me, very plainly--a fool for being what I was in those days,” returned Dunoisse, with a slight deprecatory lift of shoulders and eyebrows. “And frankly, Mademoiselle, I had not the courage requisite to go against the world.”

“If you were a fool, you were God’s fool,” she answered him, “and such folly is superior to the wisdom of the sages. Now, good-by, Colonel Dunoisse.”

And, with a slight inclination of the head, she withdrew her hand and moved away, as the farther door of the library opened, admitting Madame Walewski, her homeliness painfully accentuated by her dazzling dress of gold brocade and famous parure of Brazilian emeralds; and another lady, dark-haired, sweet-faced, and of middle height, dressed in half-mourning, towards whom Ada Merling hurried, saying in a tremulous whisper as she caught the outstretched hand:

“Oh, Mary, come!....”

And then the three ladies were gone, retreating by that farther door into unknown, conjectural regions; and the velvet curtain lifted and dropped behind Dunoisse, and he turned, instinctively drawing the Prince’s letter from his breast, to meet the radiant blue eyes and graceful, cordial greeting of Count Walewski, and to be presented to the Ambassador’s companion, Lord Walmerston....

You saw the all-powerful Foreign Minister as a hale, vigorous, elderly gentleman, displaying a star, and the broad red ribbon and oval gold badge of a Civil G.C.B., and the befrogged and gold-laced swallow-tail of official ceremony rather awkwardly, upon a heavy-shouldered, somewhat clumsy figure, though the black silk stockings showed well-made legs, and gold-buckled, patent-leather shoes set off the small, neat feet.

Little enough remained at this period of the dandified elegance that had won repute at Almack’s in 1820, and the grace that had made him famous in the waltz. The weather-beaten face, surrounded by pepper-and-salt hair and whiskers, the square-ended, sagacious nose and flexible, curving lips, might have belonged to a shrewd, humorous, Northern farmer rather than a brilliant statesman; while the jerky manner, the odd gesticulations that accompanied the hesitating, drawling speech, made the stranger to whom it was addressed ask himself in wonder whether this could really be the great orator, the dazzling politician, the famous diplomat who had steered England’s ship of State through so many troubled foreign seas? until the keen, dark, glittering eyes met and held his own; and under the merciless, piercing scrutiny of their regard the querist ceased to question, and the critic found himself appraised, weighed, judged, and valued by a mind without its parallel in the science of reading men.

One phrase employed by him was to linger in Dunoisse’s memory. He said, as Walewski handed him the letter from the Élysée, and he wiped his tortoiseshell-rimmed eyeglasses to read:

“You herald the event after its occurrence, Colonel.”

And a moment later, folding up the sheet and returning it:

“His Imperial Highness certainly owes less to a fortuitous concourse of atoms than to his own ability, energy, and tact.” He added with emphasis: “This is an immense act; its importance can hardly be overestimated. For my part, I officially recognize it, and shall adhere to my determination to support it.”

Then, as Walewski, flushed with a triumph he could hardly control, murmured a gracefully-worded, low-toned entreaty, he responded:

“Ah! I understand. You wish me to write a line to His Imperial Highness, recapitulating what I have just said, to be conveyed with your own loyal congratulations by his messenger?...”

Walewski, unable to trust himself to speak, bowed assent. Perhaps the hand that held the tortoiseshell-rimmed eyeglasses knew a moment of unsteadiness as its owner’s swift brain balanced the question of risks. Then, with characteristic boldness, my lord took the leap.

“Certainly, my dear Count--certainly. I see no objection at all!”

And, with a slight jerky nod of dismissal for Dunoisse, accompanied by a not unkindly glance of the hard, powerful, dark brown eyes, the stooping figure of England’s great Foreign Minister moved forwards to the writing-table and penned the single, brief, emphatic line of approval, that burned the writer’s boats and brought about the downfall from which he was to rise, with popularity enhanced and power redoubled, within the space of a year.

* * * * *

An hour or so of fevered sleep in a luxurious bedroom, ringing with the clatter of late cabs and early milk-carts upon London paving-stones, and Dunoisse was on the iron road again. As he leaned back, with folded arms, in the first-class compartment that had no other passenger, his imagination followed Ada Merling back to the Hospice in Cavendish Street. But it was to a house in Park Lane that swiftly-trotting hoofs and rapidly-rolling wheels had carried her when she had left the Embassy on the night before.

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LII

An elderly servant in plain clothes had admitted her. The man’s face bore traces of watching and anxiety. And at the stair-foot waited the matronly woman who bore the quaint name of Husnuggle, and the first glance at her quivering lips and reddened, swollen eyelids told the daughter that all was not well in the sick-room.

The shadow of Death brooded over the great canopied bed in the luxurious chamber, where a face that was the pallid wraith of Ada’s own lay low amidst the lace-trimmed pillows; its pinched and wasted beauty framed in the dainty little muslin cap that covered the still luxuriant and glossy hair.

A nurse from the Hospice rose up from her seat near the bed-foot, made her report in a few low-toned sentences, and was dismissed to take her needed rest, as a tiny china clock upon the mantelshelf struck one. And as her daughter bent above the sick woman and kissed the fair, unwrinkled forehead between the bands of gray-brown, the sunken eyes opened widely, and the weak voice said:

“You have come back!... Is it very late?... The time has seemed long!...”

“Dear mother, I should never have left you had you not wished it so. Have you been lonely in the midst of all the pain?”

“I have been thinking!...” said the toneless voice.

“Of me, dear mother?”

“Chiefly of you, my own.”

She wished to be raised a little on her pillows, and the daughter’s skilled hands tenderly performed this office, and put nourishment between the pale lips. You saw Ada, moving to and fro in her filmy, trailing laces and flashing jewels, between the glimmer of the silver night-lamp and the oblong patches of gray dawn that showed between the window-curtains, like some fair ministering spirit of pity and love.... And the feeble voice resumed after an interval:

“It is you who will be lonely, child, when I am gone. Then you may think more favorably of--of the course that others follow, and welcome those natural ties, my Ada, that make the happiness of life.”

Ada answered, putting up a hand to hide her tears:

“When you are with God I shall be lonely, dearest, but not sorrowful, knowing you in His safe keeping. As for marriage, urge it upon me no more, my mother! For something tells me that these natural ties you speak of, sweet and pleasant as they are, are not destined for me.”

“Why not? You would make a noble wife and mother, Ada. You are young, and cultivated, and beautiful, and have so many other gifts and graces, that, were you possessed of no worldly advantages, my child, you might still expect to make what Society calls an advantageous match....”

“Mother--my mother!--let us forget the world and Society!... To-night I have heard both applaud a God-defying crime as a stroke of exquisite diplomacy, and exalt a murderer as the saviour of his country, and their plaudits ring in my ears yet.... And I have seen the change--the base, corroding, ugly change!--they can wreak upon a nature that was--how short a time ago!--brave, and chivalrous, and simple; and a character that was honorable, upright, and sincere. I have a quarrel with Society and the world, mother; let them go by! And speak to me of marriage no more, in the little time we yet may have on earth together. For without love--such love as God has created, and blessed, and sanctioned between men and women--such love as you and my father knew!--I will never take on me the name of wife, or be the mother of any man’s children. Do not be vexed, dear mother!” she begged, in sweet, entreating tones.

“My daughter,” the dying woman said, “I am only grieved for you.... For I have fancied--if, indeed, it was fancy?--that your heart was not quite free; that your imagination had been touched, your thoughts attracted, Ada, by someone of different religion, language, and nationality, met and known abroad. Someone, the recollection of whom--forgive me if I am wrong, dearest!--has made you indifferent to the good qualities of Englishmen of your own rank and social standing, cold to their merits and blind to their attractions----”

“Mother, are you not talking too much? Will you not try to sleep?”

“My dear, I have but little time left for talk, and in a very few hours my sleep will know no earthly waking. Answer my question now!”

Ada Merling laid down the thin, frail hand that she had clasped, rose up, and went to the window, moved the blind, adjusted the curtain, went a step or two about the room, and having, possibly, controlled some emotion that had threatened to master her, resumed her seat beside the pillow and took the feeble hand again, saying:

“Mother, there can be no concealment between us!... I have allowed myself to think too constantly of a man whom I met not quite three years ago; and who appeared to be, morally and mentally, as he undoubtedly is physically, as superior to the common run of men as Hector must have seemed, compared with the other sons of Priam; or the young David, set amongst the warrior-chiefs of Saul; or Kossuth, placed side by side with the man who rules in France to-day.” She added rather hurriedly, as the mother would have spoken: “Remember that I only said ‘appeared.’ For I was doomed to know the pain of disillusion, and witness the breaking of the idol I had made for myself.... I shall be better for the lesson, painful though it has been! And so, let us speak of this no more! Even to you it has been difficult to confess my absurdity. Now, will you not try to rest?”

“Presently ... presently! Tell me more!--I should have known of this sooner! If any misunderstanding has arisen between you and one who loves you--and who could fail to love you?--it might have been cleared away by the exercise of a little tact--a measure of discrimination. But you, Ada--you to be despised and slighted! You, to give your love to one who makes no return!... The thought is incredible ... it bewilders and astounds me. Perhaps I err through excess of pride in you, but I cannot take this in!”

“Listen to me, dear, and you will understand more clearly....”

The face of the speaker was set to the desperate effort. Unseen by the dim eyes of the listener, the pang of self-revelation contracted and wrung it; the anguish of the confession blanched it to a deadly white.

“This is not a question of being appreciated or not appreciated, valued or undervalued. Your daughter, of whom you are so proud, threw away her heart unasked; and on the strength of a single meeting, built up the flimsy fabric of her house of dreams. To-night I met the man again, and the charm was broken. I saw him, not as I had imagined him to be, but as he is! Not the young Bayard of my belief, but the beau chevalier of Paris salons; not as the man of unstained honor and high ideals, but as the attaché of the Elysée, the servant of its unprincipled master--the open lover of Madame de Roux.”

She hid her face, but her shoulders shook with weeping, and little streams of bright tears trickled between the slender white jeweled fingers, and were lost amidst the snowy laces of her dress.

“Again, I say that I cannot conceive it!” the mother faltered. “The man was hardly known to you?...”

“I had heard him glowingly described and fondly praised by one who loved him....”

“He is a foreigner?... A Frenchman?... A Roman Catholic?...”

“He is a Bavarian Swiss by birth; French by naturalization and education, and a Catholic, without doubt.”

“And had he asked you, you would have left us all to follow him?”

“Mother, you did the like at my father’s call!”

“Our parents approved!”

“If they had not, would you have abandoned him?”

“I cannot reply; it is for you to answer me.... Would you, had this man loved and sought you in marriage, have changed your religion and embraced his?”

“Mother, you ask a question I need not answer. He did not love me ... he never sought me.... Were our paths, that lie so far apart, to cross now ... did he ask of me that which I might once have gladly given, I should deny it, knowing him to be unworthy of the gift.”

“Ada, I must have your answer! Would you have deserted the faith of your Protestant forefathers?”

“It may be, mother, that I should have returned to the faith in which their fathers lived and died. Remember, we Merlings were Catholic before the Reformation.”

“Those were dark days for England. A purer light has shown the path to a better world since then.”

“Dear one,” the sweet voice pleaded, “we have never thought alike upon this matter.”

“To my bitter, secret sorrow,” the mother answered, “I have long known that we did not; or say, since you returned from your course of study in the Paris hospitals I have seen it, and guessed at the reason of the change! For you have lived with Roman Catholic nuns in convents, Ada, and have listened to their specious arguments. Snares may have been set--may Heaven pardon me if I judge wrongly!--to lure the English heiress into the nets of Rome.”

“No, no, dear mother! there were no arguments, no efforts. The Sisters treated me with the kindest courtesy, while they seemed to shun, rather than to desire, to discuss the difference of creed. I gathered at the most that I was pitied for having missed a great good, a signal blessing, an unspeakable privilege; that had fallen to their more happy lot. And when I have seen the Sisters’ faces as they came from their early, daily Communion, and when I have seen the little children--the tiniest creatures--fed with the Bread of Life, in which I might not share----”

She broke off. The sick woman said reproachfully:

“Had you not the privileges of your own reformed faith? Could you not have attended the monthly Communion at some French Protestant church, to your spiritual profit and refreshment?”

“Without doubt,” was the reply, “if I had needed nothing more than these.”

“Then.... You bewilder me, Ada! What can you find lacking in the services of your Church?”

She said, slowly and thoughtfully:

“What?... I have thought and reflected much upon this question, and I have decided that the coldness and narrowness that have chilled my soul, and the aching sense of something being wanting, arise from the lack of belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, and in the deliberate, purposeful absence of love, and honor, and worship towards His Mother----”

She was interrupted by an outcry of feeble vehemence.

“You horrify me, Ada. Worship towards a created being!... A sinful vessel of common human clay!”

She rose and said, standing beside the pillow, with the light of dawn upon her hair:

“Mother, there is profanation in the thought that the vessel chosen by its Maker for that tremendous service could be anything but immaculately, divinely spotless.... Can pure water be drawn from an impure well? or good fruit, to quote the words of her Divine Son, be gathered from a tree that is evil? How could the Mother from whose flesh was formed the sinless Body of the Redeemer, be capable of sin? My God-given reason tells me it is impossible! And--can I ever forget that the Heart that poured forth its Blood upon the Cross was filled from the veins of Mary, when there is not a single Gospel that does not tell me so?”

There was no answer from the pale lips. She said with energy:

“How can we pay her too much reverence, accord her a devotion too profound, to whom Archangels bend the knee and the Son of God accorded filial obedience? Being perfect Man, He is a perfect Son; the desire of such a Son must be to see His Mother honored. From a child I felt the incomparable beauty, the resistless charm, of that Divine Maternity.... I used to steal away alone to think of It. I used to say to myself, seeing you dressed for some dinner or ball, in all your laces and jewels, ‘My earthly mother is beautiful, but my heavenly Mother is far, far more fair!’ and I loved to imagine myself as a little child at Nazareth who had fallen down and lay crying with pain beside the well from whence she nightly drew her pitcher of fresh water, and whom she gathered in her arms and comforted. If love of the Mother of Jesus were prayer, surely I prayed to her then!”

Still there was no response. She sighed and resumed her seat beside the pillow; and said, stooping and touching with her lips the waxen hand:

“I ought to tell you that I wished and tried, to put many questions to the Sisters. But they had pledged their word to discuss with me no question of religious faith, and they were adamant--not at all to my delight. ‘But I am a heretic,’ I said to Sister Édouard-Antoine. ‘Am I not worth the effort to convince and enlighten?’ She said: ‘My dear, when Our Lord wishes to enlighten and convince you, He will do it from within, not from without!’ Now I have told you all there is to tell--nothing is kept back--no shadow lies between us. Are you not content with me now?”

“I shall know peace,” said the relentless voice from the pillow, “only when I have your promise--a pledge that, once given, I know my Ada will keep. Say to me: ‘Mother, I will never become a Romanist, or marry any man who holds the Catholic faith!’ That pledge once given will be kept by you, I know...!”

In her very feebleness lay the strength that was not to be gainsaid or resisted. Her daughter’s tears fell as she whispered in the dying ear:

“Dear little mother, when you have crossed the deep, swift river that separates Time from Eternity, and the Veil has fallen behind you, you will be so wise, so wise!... Not one of the kings, and priests, and prophets who lived of old, will have been so wise as you. Think, dearest and gentlest!--if, by the light that shines upon you then, you were to see that the ancient Faith is the true Faith and the Mother Church the One Church ... would you not grieve to know your Ada shut off from peace--deprived of the true and only Bread of Life--fettered and shackled, body and soul, by an irrevocable vow?... Would you not--”

Her voice broke and faltered. But the pale head upon the pillow made the negative sign, and she went on:

“Will not you--who have submitted yourself so meekly to the will of Almighty God in accepting this cup of death that He now offers you--leave the issue of affairs--in faith that He will do all for the best--to Him? and forbear to exact this promise, which my heart tells me will bring me sorrow and pain!”

* * * * *

In vain her pleading. The tongue that was already stiffening uttered one inexorable word.

“No!”

“Oh, then I promise, mother!” she cried through bursting tears. “And may God forgive me if I promise wrongly, seeing how much I love you, dearest dear!”

* * * * *

Ah me! the dying!--how pitiless they are! What heavy fetters their feebleness can rivet on our limbs, what galling yokes their parting wishes have power to lay upon our aching necks! How they stretch us on the rack with their strengthless hands; ruthlessly seize the levers, turn the jolting wheel; and wring from us, with tears of blood, and groanings of the flesh and of the spirit, the pledge we most shrink to give! and pass content, knowing we dare not break the promise given to one upon whom the grave is about to close.

“Promise me, my son,” I heard the worn-out drudge of a London insurance office say to his boy of twelve years, grasping the small warm hand in his, that was gaunt and cold, and damp with the sweat of death--“promise me that when I lie beside your mother in the cemetery you will never fail to visit our grave each Sunday; and lay upon it of the flowers that are in season, the freshest and best, as you have seen and helped me to do ever since she died! Promise me that weeds shall never grow above her resting-place; that dust and soil shall never smirch the stone we placed above her; and see that the fee to the man who mows the grass be regularly paid. Do not fail me in this, my little son!”

Little son, with wide blue eyes fixed in awe and terror upon the whitening stare of impending dissolution, sobbed out the asked-for promise, and the bankrupt died content.

He knew that on the day following the shabby funeral that was to swallow up the last remaining five-pound note of his miserable savings, his penniless child was to be taken by his sole living relative--a struggling tradesman resident in a remote London suburb--to help the uncle in his business as a tobacconist and newsvendor, clean the shop windows, carry out the papers, perform odd offices in the household, and generally fulfill the duties of an unpaid errand-boy, yet he died content!

No realization of the crushing weight of responsibility laid on those thin, childish shoulders; no thought of the desperate, fruitless effort to be made, Sunday after Sunday, to keep the extorted pledge, marred the moribund’s happy complacency in the undertaking given. Almost with his final breath he whispered something about the flowers in season, and the tidy gravestone, and the weeds that were never to be allowed to grow....

“Promise me, swear to me!” pants the departing wife to the man who has been faithful to his marriage-vow, but has realized every day since the glamour of the honeymoon faded, that his union with this woman has been a terrible mistake. “Let me go hence contented in the knowledge that you will never marry again, dear! I could not bear to think of you happy in the arms of another woman. Say, now, that it shall never be!”

She is thinking of one special woman as she feebly turns the thumbscrew, and forces her victim to open his jaws to take in the iron choke-pear of the prohibitive vow. He has not the courage or the inhumanity to resist her. Nay! it is impious to refuse to grant the wish of one about to die. So he yields, and she departs; and he goes lonely and unmated for all the days that are his upon earth.

And perhaps it may be the bitter punishment of those who have exacted from us these cruel promises; that, with eyes from which the films of earth have been purged for evermore, they may be fated to see them kept.

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LIII

It was a calm, bright day, that third of December, with a mild, sweet westerly wind blowing between a blue, waveless sea and a blue, cloudless sky. So warm and genial the weather, that sandwich-board-men parading the streets of Folkestone behind blue-and-red double-crown bills announcing that Performances would be given at the Town Hall of that Thrilling Melodrama, “The Warlock of the Glen,” by Miss Arabella Smallsopp, of the Principal London Theaters, and a Full Company of Specially Engaged Artists, For Three Nights Only,--were fain to lean against the outer walls of public-houses--thus nefariously concealing from the public eye the colored pictorial representations of Miss Smallsopp in the rôle of the persecuted Countess--Mr. Montague Barnstormer as the usurping Laird, and Master Pilkington as the infant Adalbert--and hide their streaming faces in pots of frothing beer.

And so, over the salty, creaking, tarry-smelling gangway to the deck of the Boulogne packet Britannia. A jovial Irish priest, a pair of prim English spinsters in green veils, their lapdogs and their maid, their manservant and their courier; with Dunoisse and a honeymooning couple, made up the list of the Britannia’s after-cabin passengers. The bride was my Aunt Julietta; Fate would have it so.

For the impression created three brief years before upon the susceptible maiden fancy of my Aunt by the very ingratiating manners and handsome personality of a young foreign gentleman, by chance encountered in a railway-train, had faded; to be replaced by the highly-colored image of a large, loud, heavily-built, sturdily-limbed young man, holding the commission of a junior Captain in Her Majesty’s 444th Irish Regiment of Foot; a well-known fighting corps, distinguished in the annals of the British Army by the significant sobriquet of the “Rathkeale Ragamuffins.”

You saw in Captain Golightly M’Creedy the eldest of fourteen children, begotten of an ancient warrior of Peninsular fame, a certain Lieutenant-General M’Creedy of Creedystown, County Cork, who had served twenty years in the 444th, had left three fingers and half a sword-hilt upon the field of Talavera, and wore a silver plate at the top of his skull, to testify to his having been cut down by a sergeant of French Light Infantry during the Battle of Barrosa, when in the act of capturing an eagle from the foe.

Having thus performed his duty by his country, the veteran thought, and with some reason, that his country owed something to him; and commissions for his sons Golightly, Thaddeus, and Considine being obtained by the paternal interest, these three young gentlemen--as innocent of polite education and technical information as the hairy “lepping” colts they hunted, and the half-bred pointers they shot over--were pitched into the General’s old regiment, and left to sink or swim.

Goliath, Thady, and young Con, after some rasping experiences, mastered the small amount of professional knowledge that was held in those days to be indispensable to the status of an officer and a gentleman. Indeed, by the time the Rathkeale Ragamuffins, with flying colors, banging of drums, and blaring of brazen instruments, marched into the provincial garrison town of Dullingstoke, in the genteeler suburbs of which stood the family mansion of my grandparents, Captain Goliath M’Creedy had attained some degree of reputation in his regiment as a smart officer and a show man.

You saw him at this era as a strapping young Celt of thirty, with thick sandy whiskers and a thicker brogue, who could top the regulation three bottles of port with a jorum or so of whisky-punch; walk home to his quarters while men of weaker head were being conveyed to theirs in wheelbarrows; and consume vast quantities of bacon and eggs, washed down by bitter ale, at breakfast, when hardened seniors were calling for green apples and glasses of gin, and pallid juniors nibbled captain’s biscuits as they quenched their red-hot coppers with soda-water. But what did my Aunt Julietta see in him, I should like to know?

Why did not her gentle affections rather twine about the Captain’s younger brother, Lieutenant Thady, who sang Irish ballads with the sweetest of tenor voices, played juvenile leading parts in private theatricals, and won regimental steeplechases on his leggy Irish thoroughbred, to the admiration of the gentler sex and the envy of the males? Or Ensign Con, who had the biggest blue eyes and the smallest waist you can imagine; wrote poetry which was understood to be of home manufacture, in feminine albums--painted groups of impossible flowers and marvelous landscapes upon fans and fire-screens--waltzed like an angel, and was generally admitted to be a ladies’ man.

Why should my gentle Aunt adore Captain Goliath, who gambled, and swore horribly when he lost; who loved strong liquors, to the detriment of his figure and complexion; who had fought duels and perforated with pistol-bullets the bodies of two gentlemen who had impugned his honor; who kept fighting-cocks in his quarters, and the steel spurs wherewith he armed these feathered warriors for the combat in a neat leather pocket-case; who would consume raw beefsteaks, bend pokers, and lift ponies for wagers, and win them; and spend the money in carousing with his friends; and who had once--oh, hideous thought!--backed himself to kill three rats with his teeth against the Major’s bull-terrier bitch Fury, and accounted for the rodents with half-a-minute out of five to spare?...

In the lifetime of my grandfather, thrice Mayor of Dullingstoke, a peppery old sea-dog, who had settled down as far from his professional element as possible,--had amassed a considerable fortune in the tanning-trade, and had made it the business of his later years to keep his large family of daughters single--no young men were ever admitted within his doors. It is on record that no sooner had the sable border of woe upon the edge of my widowed grandmother’s notepaper narrowed to the quarter-inch significant of tempered sorrow than--each of my aunts having inherited a nice little landed property under the paternal will--in addition to a snug sum, comfortably invested in Three Per Cent. Consols--the bachelor officers of the “Rathkeale Ragamuffins” began to buzz like hungry wasps about the six fair honey-pots that adorned my grandmother’s tea-table.

Ordinarily of a frugal mind, she is said to have been lavish in her expenditure of plum-cake, home-made jams, preserved ginger, and best Souchong upon these festal occasions, accounting for her prodigality to a female friend in these words:

“I grudge nothing, Georgiana, that helps to get rid of the girls!”

Honest Captain Goliath, introduced at the ladies’ tea-table by Lieutenant Thady--who had a knack at making acquaintances which the clumsier Captain did not possess, was at first attracted by the showier charms of my Aunt Marietta, which, you will perhaps remember?--were of the lofty, aquiline, disdainful kind. He stared at the young lady a good deal, and tugged his sandy whiskers, and breathed hard, as he paid her clumsy compliments, punctuated with “Egad!” and “By Jove!” He was rather at a loss when his long legs were inserted under my grandmother’s polished mahogany. He liked the rich plum-cake, but tea was a beverage abhorred of his manly soul.

“Women’s slops,” the young officer mentally termed the infusion beloved of the sex, as he took three lumps of sugar, and stirred the boiling liquid so clumsily with a fiddle-headed silver teaspoon that--splash!--he overset the cup.... My Aunts Harrietta and Emmelina, who were timid, screamed aloud.... My Aunts Elisabetta and Claribella, who were sitting upon either side of Lieutenant Thady, tittered, being giddily inclined.

My Aunt Marietta, who was wearing a sweet new pink barége, suffered the complete ruin of a beflounced side-breadth, and, it must be owned, took the unlucky incident with a very bad grace; even permitting herself to utter the word “Clumsy,” and toss her head in contempt of the crimson Captain’s profuse if incoherently expressed regrets. While my Aunt Julietta, in whose lap the agitated sweep of the young man’s elbow had deposited a plate of bread-and-butter, butter side down--bade him “Never mind!” in so soft a tone of kindness, accompanying the words with a glance so bright and gentle, that the utterance and the look bowled Goliath over as completely as the elder Philistine, his namesake, was, cycles of centuries ago, by the brook-stone hurled from the young David’s sling.

“Indeed and indeed, Miss Juley,” the Captain stuttered, “with all the good-will in the worruld a man can do no more than apologize, that has had the bad luck to do damage to a young lady’s dress. And though you’re so kind and amiable as to make no very great shakes of it, begad! I see your own elegant gown is spoilt entirely by the clumsy divvle--begging your pardon for the word!--that would walk from here to London--supposing you’d accept it!--to get you a purtier gown!”

The Captain dropped a glove in the hall when he went away. It had his initials marked inside in great big sprawling characters; but even without the inky “G. M’C.” my Aunt Julietta would have known to whom it belonged....

Ah! in what a pure, sweet hiding-place it was lying, that clumsy hand-cover of dogskin,--while the Captain was routing in the litter of bills, and writs, and dunning-letters that strewed the table in his quarters, and cursing at his soldier-servant for losing his things. And he came to tea yet again, and one of his extra-sized feet accidentally touched, beneath the shelter of the well-spread board, a little foot in a velvet sandal-slipper; and She blushed like an armful of roses, and He crimsoned to the parting of his sandy curls. And thenceforwards the Captain’s wooing proceeded smoothly enough, save for a few manifestations of jealousy on the part of Lieutenant Thady, who was inclined to resent the appropriation of my Aunt Julietta’s smiles.

“For I inthrojuiced you--and you’d heard me say the black-eyed wan was the natest pacer of the sthring--and you’ve cut me out with her--so you have!--and begad! the thing’s joocedly unfair!”

Upon which Captain Goliath extracted a shilling from his waistcoat-pocket, and suggested that the goddess of Chance be called in to decide the issue.

“I’m wit’ you!” said the Lieutenant, with alacrity. “And the best two out of three takes Black Eyes!”

“Done!” agreed his senior, rubbing the edge of his coin carelessly with a stout, muscular thumb. “And the loser will have his pick of the five girrls that’s left. He’ll not have a pin to choose between them in the way of fortune, for the old man left them share and share alike; but the fella that gets the high-nosed wan”--in these disrespectful terms the Captain alluded to my Aunt Marietta--“will have a vixen, take my word for it! Call, now! Heads or tails?--shame or honor?”

Lieutenant Thady called “Tails,” and Captain Goliath spun, and the Lieutenant lost the toss three times running, unaware that the astute Captain carried a double-headed shilling for contingencies of this kind.

A few days later, with the consent of my grandmother--now beginning to realize that the sacrifice of her best plum-cake and Souchong had not been all in vain--the Captain drove my Aunt Julietta out in the family chaise. That drive was, at the outset, a painful experience for Browney, the younger of the stout, elderly carriage pair, who was attached to the vehicle. Never had such pace been got out of him before. Never had such scientific handling of the reins, such artistic touches of the whip, been known to the experience of that respectable cob. But it is on record that he returned home at his own pace, with an engaged couple behind him; and that when my Aunt Julietta was assisted to descend by the hand of the brave and gallant man, to whom, as she wrote to her confidential friend, the daughter of Sir Wackton Tackton, “I have plighted the fondest vow that a woman’s lips may breathe,” she went to the sedate animal’s head and thanked him for the happiest day in all her maiden life, and kissed him on the nose.

Thus Captain Goliath M’Creedy and my Aunt Julietta became definitely betrothed. And the Lieutenant, after some hesitation between blue eyes and brown, arch, coquettish ringlets and Grecian coils, “plumped,” as he afterwards said, for my Aunt Elisabetta.

And Ensign Con, being ordered by his seniors to choose a bride of three-hundred a year pin-money from amongst my grandmother’s remaining daughters, wrote her a note in his best round-hand, soliciting an interview upon a “mater of importanse very near my hart”; and upon the receipt of an elegant billet naming a fitting hour, set out, attired in his best; curled, pomatumed, gloved, and booted beyond anything you can imagine, to conquer Fate.

Perhaps the brain behind those cerulean orbs of my Uncle Con’s was of rather soft consistency. Or it may be that the sight of my grandmother sitting in her best parlor, arrayed in her stiffest black silk gown--endued with her most imposing widow’s cap and weepers--waiting, with folded mittens, to hear that yet another of the pound-cakes cast upon the waters had not been sacrificed in vain--was calculated to make havoc of stronger wits and daunt a stouter courage. Suffice it to say that, having started out from barracks with the firm intention of returning as a man definitely engaged--preferably to my Aunt Emmelina rather than to my Aunt Claribella (young ladies between whose respective persons Con had hesitated, uncertain as the proverbial donkey between the bundles of hay)--the Ensign tottered back to quarters, a blighted being, engaged to my Aunt Marietta, whose Roman profile and haughty manners had from the first stricken terror to the young man’s soul.

He must have made wild work with his wooing, unlucky Con! for my grandmother subsequently confided to her bosom friend, Georgiana, that at one moment her firm conviction had been that the young man, with a maturity of taste and judgment rare in one so young, was proposing marriage to herself. In vain Con’s fraternal counselors advised him to go back, explain that he had got the wrong girl, and change her! Con could not muster the pluck! And so my Aunt Emmelina, who had loved the handsome young booby, never married; and Con was a henpecked husband to the ending of his days.

There was a triple wedding, so that one breakfast and one cake might do duty for three brides, a flying visit to London to do the lions; and now you saw my Aunt Julietta, a wife of two days, starting on her honeymoon-trip to Boulogne with the idol of her soul. Be sure that she recognized the deposed idol in their handsome fellow-traveler; that my aunt’s fresh English face had completely faded from Dunoisse’s memory may be guessed.

But the natural chagrin of my Aunt at this discovery was to give place to pangs of a less romantic kind. She had studied French fashions in the illuminating pages of the Ladies’ Mentor, had mastered the French language sufficiently to spell out a “Moral Tale” of Marmontel, or a page of Lamartine, or even a verse of Victor Hugo; and had compounded French dishes from English recipes. But she had never previously crossed the restless strip of Channel that divides her native isle of Britain from the shores of Gallia. And in those days nobody had ever heard of a real gentlewoman who was not very seriously incommoded, if not absolutely indisposed, at sea.

Conceive, then, my Aunt Julietta upon this smoothest of crossings, being dreadfully prostrated by the malady of the wave. Imagine her flattening her bridal bonnet--a sweet thing in drawn peach-blossom satin, with a wreath of orange-blooms inside the brim--into a cocked hat against the stalwart shoulder of her martial lord, as she reiterated agitated entreaties to be taken immediately on shore--picture her subsiding, in all the elegance of her flounced plaid poplin--a charming thing in large checks of pink, brown, and bottle-green--and her mantle of beaver-trimmed casimir, into a mere wisp of seasick humanity, distinguishable afterwards as a moaning bundle of shawls--prone upon a red plush sofa in a saloon cabin--ministered to by a stewardess with brandy-and-water and smelling-salts.

While the Britannia’s other first-class passengers gathered for the one o’clock dinner about the long table in the adjoining saloon, whence the clashing of knives and forks and the robust savors of the leg of boiled mutton with caper sauce, turnips, and potatoes--the porter and ale that washed these down; the apple-pudding that followed, and the Dutch cheese that came in with the materials for gin-hot and whisky-toddy--penetrated to the sufferer, moaning on the other side of the dividing partition of painted planks.

You may imagine that the bridegroom--placed upon the right hand of the Britannia’s commander at the head of the board, made tremendous havoc among the eatables; disposed of pewter after pewter of foaming ale; hobnobbed with the more jovial of the male passengers in bumpers of whisky-toddy; cracked broad jokes, and roared at them loudest of all; and capped the skipper’s thrilling recital of how, in 1830, when First Officer, and on his way to join his steamer at Southampton, he had nearly been pressed for service in the Royal Navy, and had, armed solely with a carpet-bag, containing a log-book and some heavy nautical instruments, done battle with and escaped from the clutches of a gang of crimps and man-catchers;--by relating, with much circumstantial detail, and to the breathless interest of his auditors, the story of how he, Captain Goliath M’Creedy, had backed himself to kill “tree rass” with his “teet” in emulation of the Adjutant’s “ould turrabred bull-bitch Fury,” and had “shuk the squale” out of the last remaining victim thirty seconds under the five minutes. “To the chune of ten guineas and six dozen of the foinust clarrut that ever a gentleman put down his troat!”

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LIV

There were not lacking signs by the wayside, as Dunoisse was whirled along the iron road to Paris, of the bloody drama that had begun upon the previous morning, and was being played to the bitter end.

Troops and bodies of police lined the platforms of the railway-stations. Pale faces, downcast looks, and mourning attire distinguished those members of the public whom business or necessity compelled to travel at this perilous time. Glimpses of towns or villages, seen as the train rushed over bridges or in and out of stations, showed closed shops and jealously shut-up houses, many of them with bullet-pocked walls and shattered windows; more police and soldiers patroling the otherwise deserted thoroughfare; and agents in blouses, with rolls of paper, ladders, brushes, and paste-pots, posting the proclamations of Monseigneur upon walls, or trees, or hoardings, or wherever these had not already broken out like pale leprous sores. And upon many country roads significant-looking black vans, surrounded by Dragoons or Municipal Guards, and drawn by muddy, sweat-drenched post-horses, traveled at high speed, followed by open laudaus containing lounging, cigar-smoking Commissaries of Police. And in the roaring, cinder-flavored blackness of tunnels, or in the cold glare of chalky, open cuttings, huge locomotives would flash and thunder past, whirling yet other prison-vans, placed upon trucks, guarded by soldiers or mobilized gendarmerie, and packed with Representatives, Judges, Editors, Chiefs of secret societies, public leaders, and popular orators, to destinations unknown. And as the dusk day-brow sank over the red wintry sunset, the roll of musketry and the thunder of cannon, answered by the dropping, irregular fire from seventy-and-seven barricades, betokened that the train was nearing Paris; and then--the flaring gaslights of the Northern Station were reflected in the polished surfaces of steel or brazen helmets and gleaming blades of sabers; and winked and twinkled from shako-badges and musket-barrels, and the thirsty points of bayonets that had drunk the life-blood of harmless women, and innocent children, and decent, law-abiding men.

Paris had never seemed to Dunoisse so crowded and so empty as when, on foot--for no public conveyance was obtainable--he returned to his rooms in the Rue du Bac. Entire regiments of cavalry, riding at a foot’s pace in close column, flowed in slow, resistless rivers of flesh and steel, along the boulevards. And brigades, with their batteries of artillery, were drawn up in the great squares and public places, waiting the signal to roll down and overwhelm any organized attempt at resistance, under cataclysms of disciplined force.

No street but had its silent menace of cannon posted at the mouth of it, waiting, in case Liberty and Equality should lift their heads up from the blood-smeared asphalte, to decapitate them with a discharge of grape. But no head was lifted, and no Red Flag was raised; the iron heel of the Friend of Labor and the Lover of Humanity bore with such paralyzing, crushing weight upon the necks of men.

Save for curt words of command, the jingling of bridles, and the snorting of wearied horses, the silence in this city of shot-riddled walls and splintered windows was like a heavy hand upon the public mouth. Street-lamps were few--nearly all had been shattered by bullets--but when dusk had given place to darkness, the immense bivouac-fires of the troops reddened the lowering sky, and Paris might have been Tophet, she so reeked of smoke and furnace-heat. And by that lurid glare in the heavens dark, furtive shapes might have been seen hurrying by in the shadow of walls and hoardings, that were spies of the police, or agents of the National Printing-Office, charged with the posting of yet more proclamations; or Revolutionists speeding to join their comrades on the barricades, and share with them the last crust, and the few remaining cartridges, before drinking with them of the strong black wine that brims the cup of Death. Or they were men and women crazed with anxiety, or frantic with grief; dragging by the hand pale, frightened children, as they went to search for missing friends or relatives at that universal Lost Property Office, the Cemetery of Montmartre; crying with that dumb voice of anguish that echoes in the chambers of the desolate heart, and which the most stringent decrees of Monseigneur were powerless to silence.

“Oh, my father!... Oh, my mother!... Alas! my husband! lover! sister! brother! friend!... Am I despairing--searching by the flickering light of the tallow candle in the broken lantern, or the uncertain match-flare, amongst all these ghastly unburied heads of staring corpses, starting like monstrous fungi from the trodden, bloody soil of this consecrated place of murder--to find the face beloved?...”

More corpses, and yet more, were being made, to the echoing roll of the drums in the Champ de Mars, and piled in carts under the scared eye of the pale, sickened moon, and rattled away to Golgotha.

* * * * *

Turning the corner of one of the narrower thoroughfares, where a single unbroken oil-lamp made a little island of yellow light upon the murkiness, Dunoisse came upon two persons who were, for a wonder, conversing so earnestly that neither paid attention to the light, quick, even footstep drawing near. Said one of the couple, a bloused, shaggy-headed man of the artisan type, whose lantern-jawed, sallow face was lighted from below with rather demoniacal effect, by the flare of the match he had struck and sheltered between his hollowed hands, for the kindling of his short, blackened pipe:

“They made no resistance--they were butchered like sheep.... That was at midday, on the boulevard opposite the Café Vachette. Before dark, when I passed that way, the bodies were lying piled up anyhow.... The blood still smoked as it ran down the kennels--my shoes were wet with it, and the bottoms of my trousers. See for yourself the state they are in!”

He held up a foot, supporting himself with a hand against the wall behind him. His companion, a shorter, stouter figure, whose back was towards Dunoisse, stooped to look, and said in an astonished tone, as he straightened himself again:

“There seems no end to the killing, sacred name of a pig! One wonders how many they have polished off?”

The first man rejoined:

“No newspaper estimates will be published. Nor will there be any official list of killed, you may depend upon that!”

The shorter man put in, jerking his thumb towards the dusky sky that was smeared in long streaks with the red reflections of the bivouac-fires:

“Unless He up there has kept one!...”

The first man said, throwing down his burnt-out match-end on the muddy pavement:

“Fool! Do you still believe in Him when this Napoleon says He is a friend of his--when the cemeteries are stuffed with corpses, and the beds in the hospitals of St. Louis and of the Val de Grace are full of wounded men and women?” He added: “General Magnan went there in full fig with all his staff to visit them to-day.... It is like the public executioner calling to know how the guillotined are feeling without their heads!...”

The stout man cackled at this; and Dunoisse, perhaps for the sake of lingering a little in the neighborhood of one who found it possible to be merry under the circumstances, paused, and drew out his cigar-case, and said, addressing himself to the mechanic with the pipe:

“Monsieur, have the goodness to oblige me with a light!”

The haggard workman answered, tossing him a grimy matchbox:

“Here, take the last! If it does not strike, your coup d’État is a failure--you must turn out of the Élysée.”

The reckless daring of the speaker, in combination with the alcohol-taint upon his reeking breath, proved him to be drunk. His sober companion, glancing over his shoulder, and mentally pronouncing Dunoisse to be no spy or police-agent, said, as he looked back at his companion:

“They kept up the ball at the palace last night with a vengeance!... Champagne flowed in rivers; I had it from François.”

The sallow, taller man laughed in an ugly way, and said, spitting on the pavement:

“And women were to be had for the asking. Such women!...”

Envy and scorn were strangely mingled in his tone as he said, again spitting:

“Such women! Not only stunners like Kate Harvey and that red-haired, blue-eyed wench they call Cora Pearl, that drives the team of mouse-gray ponies in the Bois, and curses and swears like a trooper; but real aristocrats, like the Marquise de Baillay and Madame de Kars, playing the prostitute for political ends--you twig? There was one whose name I do not know--an ivory-skinned creature, with ropes of black hair and eyes like emeralds.... She was half-naked and covered with jewels.... The Secretary-Chancellor of the Ministry of the Interior received a warning--that was at four o’clock in the morning, when they were still supping.... Word came to him that the Ministry was to be seized ... he rose from the table, saying that his place was in the office of his Department.... And she put her arms round him before them all.... She kissed him full upon the mouth, and said ‘Stay!!”

“And he stayed?” asked the stout man eagerly.

“By my faith, my friend!” rejoined the tall man, “he did as you or I should have done in his place, you may be sure!”

The echo of the speaker’s ugly laugh was in Dunoisse’s ears as he passed on, and the image of the black-haired, cream-skinned woman whose kiss had stifled the voice of conscience upon the lips of the Government official rose up in resistless witchery before his mental vision; and would not be banished or exorcised by any means he knew....

So like!--so like!... Thus would Henriette have tempted and triumphed, provided that Hector Dunoisse had not been absolute master of her heart, and supposing that to tempt and triumph had been to serve that idol of hers, the Empire.... He drove away the thought, but it returned, bringing yet another bat-winged, taunting demon, who reminded him in a shrill, thin, piercing whisper that de Moulny was Secretary-Chancellor of the Ministry of the Interior....

To suspect ... oh, base! Did not Dunoisse know--had not Madame de Roux assured him over and over that intercourse between herself and Alain was limited to the merest, slightest civilities that may be exchanged between acquaintances? Had she not pledged her word--had she not kept her vow? Anger, and shame, and horror at his own disloyalty burned in Dunoisse like some corrosive poison; killing the wholesome appetite for food, banishing weariness and the desire for rest. And thus, reaching his rooms in the Rue du Bac, and dismissing to bed the sleepy valet who had waited up for him, Dunoisse bathed and changed, and instead of lying down, went out, haggard, and hot-eyed, and headachy, into the soldier-ridden streets again, in the clear, pale, frosty sunshine of the December morning; barely feeling the slippery asphalte pavement underneath his feet; hardly cognizant of faces and shapes that passed him; answering mechanically when challenged by sentries or stopped by patrols, and hastening on again, driven--though he would have died rather than own it--by the demon that had been conjured up by the tall, grimy, sneering workman who had chatted with his mate on the previous night, at the street-corner....

* * * * *

His destination was the Rue de Sèvres, for Madame de Roux still retained her apartments in the outer buildings of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, where cloistered Princesses once gave instruction in housekeeping, deportment, and diplomacy to the daughters of the noblest families of France, and stars of the Comédie Française drilled the youthful performers in the dramas of “Esther” and the ballets of “Orpheus and Eurydice.”

The Abbaye has nearly all been swept away; the last wheelbarrowful of rubbish has been carted from the cat-haunted desert where once the stately chapel stood: they have built upon the lovely gardens where Marie de Rochechouart, beautiful, pure, and saintly, once walked with Hélène Massalska clinging to her arm. But at this date the gardens, though sadly curtailed, were still beautiful.... Nowhere in all Paris were such chestnuts and acacias, such lilacs, and laburnums, and hawthorns to be found. The branches of the loftier trees--leafless, and bare, and wintry now--seemed to Dunoisse to nod and beckon pleasantly over the high iron-spiked walls and great grilled gates that shut in the stately pile of ancient masonry.

And with the sight of these familiar things his mood changed.... His demon quitted him,--he knew infinite relief of mind when the portress, a buxom peasant of Auvergne, roused from her morning slumbers by the Colonel’s ring at the gate-bell, at length made her appearance; apologizing with volubility for her nightcap; for the red woolen shawl and short, striped petticoat, bundled on over a lengthier garment of dubious whiteness; and the stout, bare feet thrust into the baggy list slippers that completed her disarray.... And Dunoisse greeted her pleasantly, responding in gallant vein to her profuse excuses, failing to notice the sharp glances with which she scanned him; unobservant of the avid curiosity that her verbosity would have concealed, while his wearied eyes drank in the scene about him; the blackbird, and thrush, and robin-haunted shrubberies of frosted laurels, and myrtles, and veronicas glimpsed through the arched carriage-way, piercing the more modern right wing of the ancient building: the beds starring the rimy grass-plat in the center of the great courtyard, gay with such flowers as the rigorous season admitted: clumps of mauve, and pink-and-white Japanese anemones; hardy red chrysanthemums; frost-nipped bachelor’s buttons; and even a pinched, belated dahlia here and there....

Here at least no grisly shadow of the Élysée brooded, or it seemed so to Dunoisse. Into this quiet haven the blue official documents, the brass-bound shakos, and clanking swords of Military Authority had not intruded, bringing disorder, confusion, and terror in their train.... Lead, and Steel, and Fire--that trio of malignant forces--obedient to the potent nod of Monseigneur, had swept past the Abbaye, without pausing to exact their toll of human life. And the robin’s breast, burning like a crimson star amidst the rich dark foliage of a yew-tree, the short, sweet, sudden song of the bird seemed to answer, “Happily, yes!” And the wintry yellow sunshine drew a pleasant smell from the chilled blossoms, and the wood-smoke of the portress’s crackling, newly-lighted fire came fragrantly to the nostrils of the returned traveler, as he passed under the portico of the stately block of building where were the apartments rented by Madame de Roux, and rang the ground-floor bell.

The thought of seeing Henriette again absorbed and dominated him completely. And yet, even to his slight passing observation, the servant who answered the door seemed flustered and embarrassed. The man opened his mouth to speak, shut it hurriedly, and awkwardly drew back to let the Colonel pass in. But a moment later, as Dunoisse’s eager footsteps were hurrying in the direction of the gray boudoir, he arrested them by saying:

“Pardon, Monsieur the Colonel! but Madame is not at home!...”

“Indeed? Madame went out early?”

Thus interrogated, the man showed confusion. He explained, after some floundering, that Madame had gone out, and had not yet returned.

“Not yet returned?...” Dunoisse repeated.

It seemed to him that the servant must be absurdly mistaken; for in the inner breast-pocket of his coat, just above his heart, nestled a little note, penned in violet ink, in Henriette’s clear, delicate, characteristic handwriting. It had lain upon the vestibule-table in the Rue du Bac. He had read it and kissed it, and known assuagement of his burning torture for ten minutes, ere the twin-demons of jealousy and suspicion had swooped down on him again. It said, under the date of the day of his departure from Paris:

“DEAREST,

“Take care of yourself upon that horrible railroad. I have been miserable all day, thinking about you. It is now six o’clock. My head aches. I am denied to all visitors--I have refused all invitations. I am going to dine early and betake myself to bed.--Another day--one more night of loneliness, and then--may my Hector’s guardian spirit guide him back in safety to his fond

’RIETTE.”

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LV

Dunoisse, with a deadly sickness at the heart, drew out the little lying letter and re-read it, and turned a bleak sharp face upon the nervous servant, and asked, with a glance of the black eyes that made him wince and flush:

“Madame went out--yesterday evening--alone?”

Shame pierced him. To be reduced to questioning a servant was abominable. But he waited for the answer. It came:

“Madame was summoned, a few hours after Monsieur the Colonel’s departure.... A carriage was sent to fetch her. The carriage came from the Élysée.”

The words fell upon Dunoisse with the cold, heavy shock of a douche of salt water, literally taking away his breath. Could it be? Had she left home upon the eve of Monseigneur’s masterstroke? Was it possible that a night, and a day, and yet another night, had passed, and found her still absent? He told himself, poor wretch, all conscious of his self-deceit, that there had been some mistake ... that one of the little girls at Bagnéres must have been taken ill ... that the mother had been sent for.... Knowing in his soul that the Henriettes never risk their beauty in the neighborhood of possible infection, he pretended to believe this lie.

He turned from the servant, and went through the empty, close-blinded reception-rooms, stumbling at the pattern of garlands on the carpet as though they had been thorny ropes set to trip him up. And he went into the gray boudoir where he had fallen captive to that luring beauty, and the stately portrait of the beautiful wicked Abbess, daughter of the evil Regent, seemed to smile at him in jeering triumph from its station on the wall.

He drew up a blind, and there were the familiar gardens bathing in the clear, cold December sunshine. He threw up a sash, letting in fresh air, and the smell of thawing earth, and the chaste, pungent fragrance of the chrysanthemums. As he leaned against the carved and painted shutter the Abbaye clock struck eight, and all the other clocks in Paris responded, one after the other, and then--his heart leaped, for there came the opening and shutting of the hall-door, and the sound of silken draperies sweeping over velvet carpets. A light footstep crossed the threshold.... He wheeled, and was face to face with Henriette....

* * * * *

She was in all the splendor of full dinner-dress, and her lovely person blazed and scintillated with magnificent jewels. Many of the costly gems she wore had been given her by Dunoisse, but others, costlier still, were new to him.... Her rich black hair hung in dishevelled curls--the pitiless sunlight showed her beautiful eyes deep sunk in violet caves of weariness. The berthe of costly lace that edged her corsage was torn, revealing charms that even Fashion decrees should be hidden.... There was a fierce red mark upon her rounded throat, and another on one white breast....

The picture was burned in upon the brain of the man who saw, as a corrosive acid might have bitten it on copper. He opened his dry mouth to speak, but no words issued thence. She said, dropping her sable-lined mantle upon the floor, dragging at one of her bracelets that obstinately refused to be unfastened:

“So--you have returned!... Then you have not been to the Rue du Bac?”

“I went,” he said, showing her the little treacherous sheet--“and found your letter there....”

A rush of angry blood changed her from white to crimson. The mark on her throat vanished, and then, as the fierce tide receded, stood out once more in burning, guilty red. She tore off the bracelet, and tossed it down, and said, lifting her white arms to release her little head from the weight of the diamond coronet:

“The Prince-President sent!... It was a command. How could I disobey?”

Dunoisse answered her in tones she had never before heard from him:

“The Prince-President should know that the droit du seigneur went out with the Monarchy. It is not an institution that the Republic of France will wish to see revived during His Highness’s tenure of the Dictatorship.... I will explain this to His Highness without delay!”

Her beautiful eyes blazed rebellion, and her bosom tossed the red mark up and down tumultuously. She cried:

“Are you mad? What right have you to demand explanations, or to give them, pray?”

“What right?” Dunoisse echoed, looking at her incredulously. “Do you ask by what right I say that you shall not be degraded by the contact of persons who are infamous--used as a bait to lure golden fish into the net of Presidential intrigue?--poisoned and contaminated by the atmosphere in which nothing that is pure can exist, and everything that is vile----”

“Ah, ah!” she said, interrupting him; “you talk in riddles and parables. Be plain with me, I beg of you! Or--permit me to be so with you!”

She sank down upon a divan with her knees apart, and said, thrusting her clasped hands down between them, joined together at the wrists as though they were fettered:

“Listen to me!... You are not my husband!... I advise you to remember it!... It will save trouble in the long-run--it will be better for yourself and for me if you will do this!”

Dunoisse returned, in tones that cut like ice-splinters:

“I have not the honor to be your husband, it is true! But as long as the relations which have hitherto existed between us continue, I forbid you to go alone to the suppers at the Élysée! As for that accursed banquet of the night before last----”

He broke off, for something in her face appalled him. She stamped her little foot and cried:

“Great Heavens! Am I a young girl, all blushes and book-muslin? And you--what are you? A soldier? Not a bit of it! My dear old fellow, you are a prude!”

She rose up, with eyes that shot lightnings, though her mouth was smiling, and pointed to the baleful picture that hung above the fireplace, that was full of dead ashes, like her unhappy victim’s heart.

“Look at Madame there!... Does not she seem as though she laughed at you? You, who would drive Propriety and pleasure in double harness--who expect a woman like me--who have drunk with you the bowl of Life--who have given you myself, with all my secrets and pleasures--to behave as a young girl who goes into Society, with her eyes bandaged, and her ears stopped up with cotton-wool. You are not very reasonable, Monsieur!”

She had taken the diamond circlet from her hair, and dropped it on the divan. Now she thrust her white fingers into the heavy masses of her curls, and lifted them up from either temple. Her long eyes gleamed like green topaz from between the narrowed eyelids. And to the man who was the bondslave of her body she seemed like some fair, malignant spirit of the storm, about to rise and fly, borne on those silken, sable wings....

“I ...” he began stammeringly. “You----”

He broke off. For it rushed upon him suddenly in blinding, scorching certainty that she, and no other, was the night-haired, ivory-white wanton who had kissed de Moulny on the mouth and bidden him stay. The impulse to leap upon her and wring from her confession, and with it full revelation of all that had passed, and in what secret bower of lust and luxury the intervening time had been spent, nearly overcame him. But he fought it back. For full knowledge must mean severance, and----“O God!” the poor wretch cried in the depths of his tortured heart; “I cannot live without her, however vile she prove!”

It was strangely, horribly true. He had never been so completely dominated by Henriette in the days when he still believed the angel’s wing to be folded beneath her draperies. He drank her beauty in with thirsty eyes, and thirsted the more he drank; and was, to his unutterable shame and degradation, stung to yet sharper torments of desire, because of those red marks made by a rival’s furious kisses--and did not dare, poor, pusillanimous, miserable wretch! to say: “You have betrayed me! Who is the man whose brand you bear upon your bosom. You shall tell me!--even though I know!...”

As she went on talking, spreading out her hair, pressing the points of her fingers into the velvety, supple skin above her temples:

“You idiot! can one drive Propriety and Pleasure in double harness? Your mother could answer that question--that Carmelite coquette who deserted her convent for the world, and went back to the convent when she was weary of the racket. Not that I wish to insult your mother. Quite the contrary. She did as it pleased her, and I also.... Ouf! ... how my head aches!... What an hour you have chosen for a scene of reproaches and recriminations!... Still, an explanation clears the air.... Now I am going to bed, for I am ‘regularly done up,’ as the Prince says.” She phrased the English words with exaggerated elaboration, rolling the gutturals, and making a distracting mouth over them. “But for the future we shall understand each other better, shall we not, Monsieur?”

“I thought,” he faltered--“I believed!...” and could go no further. She retorted, stretching as gracefully as a leopardess, smiling with a touch of roguery, her rosy tongue peeping from between her teeth of pearl:

“You thought me an angel, who am nothing but a woman. What! would an angel have fired that shot at the Foreign Ministry?” She shrugged her white shoulders. “What! and let you bear the whole affair upon your shoulders for fear lest the Red Republicans should take a stiletto-vengeance? And pay you in kisses and the rest as I have done?”

“It was no mere sordid bargain!... You loved me!” Dunoisse cried out in misery. “You gave me yourself for love, not for fear or gain!”

“Oh! as for that,” said Henriette, with a cynical inflection, “I loved you, and I love you uncommonly well to-day. But your love is not to deprive me of my liberty--that must be understood!... There, there, my poor dear boy!...”

He had sunk down upon the gray velvet divan, looking so wan and haggard, and yet so handsome in his despair and wretchedness, that her shallow heart was stirred to pity, and she went swiftly to his side. He threw an arm about her, drew her to him, and said, looking up at her with wistful entreaty, and speaking in tones that had suddenly become pitiful and childlike:

“Dearest Henriette, I will do everything you ask me--everything!... You shall not have one single wish ungratified! Only do not go to the Palace without me, I beg of you, Henriette!”

He told himself that she was yielding, pressed her to him, and hid his burning forehead and aching eyes against her. It was a symbolical action, that willful blinding, presaging what was to come.... She knelt down before him, wound her soft white arms about him, and drew his head to rest upon her bosom, so that his cheek rested on the flaming mark that so short a time back had said to him in red letters, “She is false to you!” She said, holding him closer, blinding and drugging him with her breath, her contact, her voice:

“Well, then, very well! Henriette is never unkind or cruel.... It shall be as you choose. Only do not thwart me or upbraid me, Hector dearest. I am of Spanish blood--you should remember it!... How hot your forehead is! Have you, too, a headache? That is from traveling all night. How I hate those jolting railway-carriages! Fais dodo, poor boy!”

She rocked him upon her breast, smiling to see the rigid lines of mental anguish relax and smooth out under her caresses. And as she rocked, she sang in a velvety cooing voice a little witch-rhyme of Catalonia, meaning everything or nothing, just as the hearer happened to be a Catholic or a Calvinist ... a horrible little rhyme, dealing with a cat and the cupboard of the Archbishop, set to a soothing lullaby....

Hushaby!--Honor, and Principle, and Religion. Sleep, sleep well! rocked on the bosom of Desire.

* * * * *

If Ada Merling had seen Dunoisse at that moment, shorn of his strength, willfully blind to his degradation, lying in the arms that had already bound and delivered him to the Philistine, she would have blessed the hour that brought her disillusion; instead of looking back upon it sorrowfully, and writing, in the locked journal of her thoughts and impressions, that was kept in a secret of her writing-table:

“There is no teacher like Experience. By suffering and humiliation we gain sympathy for the sore and despised; and acquire insight through our own short-sightedness. How often in the old home-days at Wraye, when one of the village women has wound up some sorrowful story of human passion and human error with: ‘She fell in love wi’ him at sight, d’ye see? have I not interjected, quite seriously and sincerely: ‘Oh! but why?’ And found myself smiling when the answer would be: ‘Nay, now, Miss Ada, however can I tell, when her didn’t know herself, poor soul?’”

“Oh me!... I shall never laugh again over such stories. Is that my gain or my loss?”

A space, a blotted line, and then came, in the flowing, finely-pointed handwriting:

“It must be to my gain.... That I, who am habitually reserved, who have been reared in refinement and exclusiveness, should have known a weakness such as this, shall be of use to me and for the help of others. When I am tempted to approve my own judgment as sounder, esteem my own standards of morality and conduct as purer and loftier than those of my sister-women, let me for my soul’s health--let me remember that the man to whom, in the first moment of our meeting, my heart went out--and whose name, indifferent to me as he must have been, I could never, for long afterwards, hear without emotion--is worldly, cynical, sensual, and dishonorable; deeply entangled in a shameful intrigue; bound to the interests of the Power that is the plague-sore and the curse and the ruin of his adopted country; perhaps involved in its plots--stained with its guilt of treachery and bloodshed....”

At the bottom of the page came:

“Perhaps I wrong him?... It may be that I judge him unjustly, that he has been shamefully slandered--and that he is--really is--what once he seemed. Grant it, Thou God! Who hast the knowledge of all hearts, and by Thy grace canst purify the unclean and make the evil good, and change base things to noble! And if it be Thy Will that I am never to know the sweetness of earthly love, give me to know what love may be in Heaven!”

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LVI

The Marshal, having plumped out with golden blood the depleted veins of Hector’s account at Rothschild’s, exacted his pound of flesh in the matter of the Claim of Succession. Köhler and von Steyregg, those birds of ill omen, shortly presented themselves at the Rue du Bac, bearing the elder Dunoisse’s letter of introduction, addressed to “His Serene Highness the Hereditary Prince of Widinitz,” and bearing three immense splashes of scarlet sealing-wax, impressed with the writer’s own pretentious coat of arms....

* * * * *

Two such men, these agents, capacious vessels of clay, into which the Marshal’s gold was continually ladled....

Köhler styled himself an Attorney and Commissioner of Oaths of Prague. One felt sure wherever his offices were, that the business of the money-lenders flowed across the threshold. You saw him as a small, pale, scrupulously-attired, flaxen-haired man, with sharp, shallow brown eyes. Three or four bristling yellow hairs at the outer angles of the upper lip served him as a mustache--one thought of a white rat when one looked at him. Von Steyregg was a vast, pachydermatous personality, whose body was up-borne on short legs, shaped like balusters, and clad in the tightest of checked pantaloons. His venerable black frock-coat had grown green through long service--the copper of the buttons peeped through the frayed cloth. His swag-belly rolled under an immense nankeen waistcoat--over the voluminous folds of a soiled muslin cravat depended his triple row of saddlebag chins, his moist, sagging mouth betokened a love of good cheer, the hue of his nose--an organ of the squashed-strawberry type one so seldom meets with at this era--testified to its owner’s appreciation of potent liquors. Huge shapeless ears, pale purple-and-brown speckled, jutted like jug-handles from his high-peaked head, whose bald and shiny summit rose, lonely as an Alp, from a forest of flaming red hair. His little gray eyes were latticed with red veins. From one of them distilled a perpetual tear, destined to become a haunting bugbear to his employer’s son.

Von Steyregg, who swore in a dozen languages with equal facility and incorrectness, claimed to be a Magyar of noble family. His dog’s eared visiting card dubbed him Baron. On occasions of ceremony, an extraordinary star in tarnished metal, suspended from a soiled watered-silk ribbon of red, green, and an indistinguishable shade, which may once have been white, dignified his vast expanse of snuff-stained shirt-front. Though its owner declared this ornament to be the Order of St. Emmerich, bestowed by that saintly Prince upon a paternal ancestor, the reader may suspect it to have been originally a stage-property. Steyregg having failed in theatrical management at Vienna, Pesth, and elsewhere; and being, when full of wine--and it took an immense quantity of that liquor to fill him--prodigal of reminiscences of the coulisses, pungent and racy; related with the Rabelaisian garniture of nods, winks, leers, and oaths of the most picturesque and highly-flavored kind.

Both men invariably addressed Dunoisse as “Highness” or “Your Serene Highness.” They maintained a scrupulous parade of deference and respect in their dealings with their victim--they retreated backwards from his presence--to Madame de Roux they almost prostrated themselves--kotowing profoundly as the Ministers of the Fifteenth Louis, before the dainty jeweled shoe-buckles of the Pompadour....

Of the mad tarantula-dance through which this precious pair of showmen presently jerked their puppet,--of the kennel of obloquy and shame through which they dragged him with his companion,--the writer, confessing to some degree of parental tenderness for the hero of the story, designs to tell as briefly as may be.

According to Köhler and von Steyregg, the Regent Luitpold, having obtained from the King of Bavaria permission, confirmed by the approval of the Bund, to secularize several wealthy monasteries within the principality of Widinitz, was in worse odor with his Catholic subjects than ever before. Not only had several large communities of religious been reduced to penury and rendered homeless; but certain influential farmers, tenants of these, had been ejected from their homesteads, and divers peasants, having espoused the cause of the monks with less worldly wisdom than goodwill, had been turned out of their cottages, or had them pulled down over their heads. Disaffection was spreading, discontent prevailed. The iron was hot, said von Steyregg and Köhler, for the striking of a blow in the interests of the son of Princess Marie-Bathilde.

You may imagine how eloquently the Marshal’s agents dwelt upon the enormities of Luitpold; you can conceive how they advanced their plan, and pressed its various points upon the passive victim. Wreaths of verbal blossoms covered up its spotted ugliness. Was it not a beautiful and edifying notion, asked von Steyregg, that the Heir-aspirant to the feudal throne of Widinitz should take part in the great annual festival of mid-August, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin--at which season the Lutheran Regent--loathing the smell of incense and the chanting of Litanies as another personage is reputed to abominate holy water--yet not daring to provoke his Catholic liegemen to the point of open rebellion by prohibiting the procession--invariably absented himself from his capital, or shut himself up in the Schloss. The suggestion of so open a bid for popularity Dunoisse at first scouted. But the whole plan had a spice of adventure that charmed and excited Madame.... Paris would be intolerable in August--a delicious month to travel in. Henriette had never seen Bavaria--she longed to breathe the air of its romantic pine-forests, and gaze upon its sunset-flushed snow-peaks. For two pins she would make one of the expedition, she vowed.

And Dunoisse, being keenly aware that, although no suppers would be given at the Elysée during the red-hot months of autumn, there would be fêtes at the Tuileries and at St. Cloud, and shooting parties at Compiègne and Fontainebleau, was extremely willing to gratify the desire of his fair friend....

Indeed, when von Steyregg and Köhler hinted that the Marshal would not welcome the addition of a petticoat to the party, the Colonel manifested for the first time in their experience, energy and decision.

“My father may please or not please,” he said to them. “I do not go without Madame de Roux!”

The Marshal received the information with a fearful outburst of profanity.

“He is not to be moved, Monseigneur!” said Köhler.

“Excellency,” put in von Steyregg, “the Prince, your son, is a chip of the old block. Without the petticoat he will not budge, I pledge you the word of a Magyar nobleman!” He shook his bald and flaming head, and shook off the tear that as usual hung pendulous from the weeping eyelid, as he added:

“And the lady is a highly attractive person!”

“We shall split on the rock of her attractive person!” said the Marshal with a detonating oath. And so it ultimately proved.

* * * * *

Neither then, nor long afterwards, when the scar of the appalling fiasco had partially healed, could Dunoisse rid himself of the impression that the expedition had been of the type of adventure that is wrought of the stuff of dreams.

In the highlands of South Bavaria, sheltered by the skirts of the Alps, lay the Principality of Widinitz, a mountainous district cloaked with beech-woods and pine-forests, jeweled by turquoise lakes, and valleys like hollowed emeralds, kept green in the fiercest heats by the mountain-torrents and glacier-rivers and streams of melted snow....

That August journey was one of unclouded pleasure. The handsome officer and the lovely lady in the luxurious dark green traveling-chariot, that was lined with pale green satin and drawn by three powerful grays, were taken by the hosts and hostesses of the picturesque, vine-draped and rose-covered posting-inns where they slept, or halted to change horses, to be a honeymooning couple. One may imagine how the princely coronet that gleamed above the coat-of-arms emblazoned on the door-panels of the green chariot (a touch of von Steyregg’s) and engraved upon the silver plating of the harness (a happy inspiration of Köhler’s) swelled the totals of the bills. As for the Marshal’s agents, sharing with the Colonel’s valet and Madame’s maid the big brown landau that lumbered at the heels of four stout beasts in the wheel-tracks of the green chariot, they were supposed to be the major-domo and the chaplain of the distinguished pair.

Köhler traveled light in the matter of baggage. A battered hat-box and a venerable portmanteau contained his indispensable necessaries of the road. An old campaigner in the field of fortune, von Steyregg’s coat-tails invariably did duty as his carpet-bags and valises. Upturned, these well-stuffed receptacles served as cushions, upon which the Baron lolled magnificently, patronizing the subservient valet and the blushing maid who secretly admired large, overbearing men with flamboyant hair. True, von Steyregg’s hyacinthine locks left off long before they reached the summit of his cranium, but you cannot have everything, thought the maid.

“We are not real,” Henriette would say to her lover. “We are two sweethearts out of some fairy-tale of M. Anthony de Hamilton or Madame d’Aulnoy.... That old woman in the red cloak is not a wood-gathering peasant, but a witch; that black face peeping at us through the bushes does not belong to a charcoal-burner or a lignite-miner, but to some spiteful gnome or kobold.... You are the Prince of the Enchanted City in the Sleeping Forest. And I am your Princess, my dear!”

Dunoisse sighed, knowing that whether he were a Prince or not would depend upon the disposition of the liegemen of Widinitz; upon the goodwill of His Majesty the King of Bavaria; upon the approval of the Diet of the Germanic Confederation, and the clinching decision of the Special Tribunal known as the Austrägal Court. And that, even if these powers were unanimous in confirming the claim of Succession made by the son of Marie-Bathilde, the question of Henriette’s ever becoming the legal partner of the throne, which in that event would be his, opened up another vista of possibilities, amongst which Divorce loomed large ... whilst Death, his black robe discreetly draped about his grisly anatomy, hovered unobtrusively in the background.

Nom d’un petit bonhomme! If de Roux should die, that regrettable loss to the Army of France would be, it seemed to Dunoisse, the way out of the tangled labyrinth of difficulties and anxieties.

His eyes avoided Henriette’s, lest she should read his thought in them. But hers were raised to the rosy snow-peaks that lifted above the dark, shaggy green of the pine-forests, her sensitive nostrils quivered, her lips were parted as she drank the fragrant air.

How crystal-pure she seemed.... And yet it was but seeming.... A picture, shown upon the background of a murky Paris street-corner, by the flare of a smoky lamp, rose up in Dunoisse’s memory; and the ugly, haunting laugh of the tall, sardonic workman who had chatted with a comrade on that unforgettable night of the return from London, sounded in his ears. And when Henriette asked, turning to him with the tenderest solicitude in her lovely face:

“Why do you shiver, dearest? Are you cold?” her lover answered, with forced gayety:

“A footstep must have passed over the place where my grave is to be made. You know the old saying?”

“Quite well,” she told him, adding with an exquisite inflection of tenderness. “But it would be ‘our’ grave, Hector.... For I could not live without you, you know that very well! Dearest, why do you start?”

For the muscles of the shoulder against which she leaned, had given a sudden jerk, and the man’s head had pivoted from her abruptly, as though pulled by a wire.

“Did I start?” he asked, looking back at her rather vaguely. “If so, it was because I fancied--not for the first time--that I heard someone laugh in there!...”

He pointed to the covert of pine-scrub, larch, yellow-berried mountain-ash, and tall brake-fern that edged the forest road, and went climbing with them still when the slower oaks and beeches were outstripped and left behind. It was Henriette’s turn to shiver now. Hector was so strange--so very strange--she told herself, at times!...

Another man, much less handsome, not half so sweet-tempered, amiable, devoted, and clever, would have made a pleasanter companion upon these wild, rugged mountain-roads.... His blue eyes would have had a provoking challenge always, for those of his friend.... Cynical jests, sharp witticisms, would have alternated with daring compliments, bold hints, and subtle allusions, upon his projecting, fleshy lips. Yet de Moulny, a year or so back, had been a submissive, humble lover. In those days he had yielded to and been ruled by the will of Henriette. In these days, delicacy and shyness no longer characterized his wooing. He demanded, exacted, extorted favors that others had obtained by service and suit, and sighs.... She said to herself, as a mysterious smile hovered about the exquisite lips, and the long, dark lashes swept the cheeks that no sun, however ardent, might kiss to russet, that Alain was no fool! He had found out that what women liked best in a man was hardihood, and assurance touched with brutality. He had learned the secret of success with the sex.

Now, Hector....

When a Henriette begins to compare her lover, to his disadvantage, with other men, she has already wearied of him. His day is over and past.

Thenceafter, nearer and ever nearer, draws the fatal crisis. No fresh turning in the beaten road they travel together, but may lead to a definite parting of the ways.

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LVII

So the company of adventurers traveled through the new, strange, lovely country, feasting and making merry, spending the Marshal’s money royally; and of such queer warp is the cloth of Human Nature woven, the grotesque homage of Köhler and von Steyregg ceased to be quite intolerable in the estimation of Dunoisse.

When the inns and posting-houses began to display the arms of the von Widinitz, the coroneted casque argent, with its panache surmounted by the heron, overt, sable, Köhler, being nimbler of the pair, leaped out of the brown landau, climbed the steps of the green chariot, and offered homage to the pretender to the feudal dignities.

“Now your Serene Highness is upon your own territory,” said he, and would have grabbed Dunoisse’s hand to kiss, but that its owner put it in his pocket. Von Steyregg was standing up in the vehicle that followed, waving a huge, dingy silk handkerchief, and shedding tears of loyal enthusiasm from both eyes.

“How Monsieur the Baron loves His Serene Highness!” said Henriette’s maid to her mistress at hairbrushing time that night. “Fancy, Madame, he rocked him in his arms as an infant, and taught him to ride his little horse. Monseigneur would go nowhere without his good M. von Steyregg, who plunged into a boiling torrent (into which Monseigneur’s nurse had accidentally dropped him) and saved him at the risk of life. It is incredible, such devotion! It makes one weep to hear Monsieur the Baron talk!”

And the maid made good her words with a snuffle or two; and the mistress even wept a little in sympathy. Tears came at call to those beautiful eyes of Henriette’s.

Thus, daily drawing nearer to the scene of destined humiliation and well-earned disgrace, the green chariot and the brown landau rolled on, until at high noon upon the Vigil of the Assumption, after a three hours’ drive through ancient oak and beech-forests, when a hundred unseen church-bells were tripling the Angelus, the gray walls and gates of the towers of Widinitz rose before the travelers, venerable in their setting of ivy only less ancient, whose rugged stems grew thick as the body of a man.

It was a city in a forest, with the tops of more trees waving over the ivied walls of it. Oak and beech followed the chariot and the landau to the drawbridge, fell back as the vehicles crunched over the gravel-covered timbers, started up under the gateway, and marched with them through the streets that were bordered with runnels of clear water. Signs of preparation for the morrow’s solemnities were not lacking. Men leading donkeys burdened with panniers of white or reddish-colored sand, were distributing this medium in astonishing patterns over the principal thoroughfares. Others, who followed, were strewing them with pine-branches and the glossy leaves of laurel and bay. Lamps, as yet unlighted, twinkled among the boughs. Venetian masts of the Bavarian colors supported garlands of many-colored streamers. The Market Place was a blaze of color, with temporary altars erected at the opening of every street. And nearly every householder, with his family and servants, was engaged in decorating his dwelling with carpets, bunting, and wreaths. Said von Steyregg, as he tumbled out of the brown landau, and ran with servile hurry and flapping coat-tails, to open the door of the green chariot when it finally stopped under the sign of “The Three Crown” inn: “One would think, Highness, that the news of your intended visit had reached Widinitz before you.” His tear hung trembling upon his eyelid as, with an egregious affectation of respect and reverence, he assisted his principal to descend.

“It is in honor of Our Lady’s Feast to-morrow, all that you see,” explained the landlord, a short man in claret-colored kersey knee-breeches, blue yarn stockings, snowy shirt-sleeves, and spotless apron, who had come out to receive the strange guests. He possessed a suite of private rooms, worthy of persons of such distinction. He pointed out one or two of the lions of Widinitz before he ushered them in--the Schloss, a square building of red granite with pepper-box towers, topping a green hill that breasted up upon the northern side of the Market-Place. Another steeper hill rose upon the southern side of the great white square that was spangled with silver, dancing fountains; and the towers and roofs and steeples of the city proper covered this like a fungus-growth. The ancient Gothic pile of the Cathedral crowned the summit; the smaller, fortress-like building adjoining, the host pointed out as the Archbishop’s Palace, an episcopal habitation, reared on the foundations of what had been a Roman camp.

“Sprung, your Excellencies, or our most learned Professors lie,” explained the voluble landlord, “from the ruins of a temple where the Old Slavonians used to sacrifice white cocks and new mead to Svantovid, their god of War. God or no god, the gentleman had a sufficiently queer name, as your Excellencies will agree; and as to white cocks, the broth of one is--according to the old nurse-women of our principality--a certain remedy for tetters. Heathen they were that drank sickly mead in preference to sound wine!--but thanks be to Heaven and St. Procopius, who converted them, we that are come down from those old sinners know better to-day; and the vineyards of the Wid yield a liquor that has no equal in Bavaria.”

And the landlord proudly pointed to a third hill that cropped up westwards; at the foot of which eminence a jade-green trout-river, spanned by three bridges of white marble, rushed foaming between rocky banks that were covered with vines, laden now with the glowing purple clusters from which an excellent red wine was made by the vine-growers of the principality.

Flasks of this sterling vintage figured upon the guest-table of the Inn of “The Three Crowns,” when the newly-arrived travelers sat down to dine, the occupants of the green chariot being served in their private apartment: the Marshal’s agents, for humility or for the sake of freer elbow-play than is licensed by strict good manners, preferring to eat at the common ordinary, spread in the coffee-room, together with Madame’s maid and the Colonel’s man.

Here, down both sides of a long table, were ranged perhaps a score of decent citizens of the sterner sex, indicating the nature of their several professions, trades, and occupations, in the fashion of their attire, as was the custom then; and engaged in discussing what, for the ninety-nine per cent. of Catholics among the company, was the single meal of the fasting-day.

Judge, then, how frigidly received by the faithful were Steyregg’s Gargantuan praises of the fish, flesh, fowl, and pastry which were set before himself and his partner, and of which both ate copiously, washing down their meal with plentiful libations of the juice of the local vine.

The pickled sturgeon with mushrooms and cucumbers, to which Madame’s tirewoman discreetly restricted herself, proved a mere whet to the gross Baron’s huge appetite. Half a ham and the greater moiety of a pasty of eggs and capons, hurled to the ravening wolf concealed behind his dingy shirt-bosom, left him with a niche quite available for tartlets, and a chink remaining for cream-cheese.

He said at length, piling a block of this delicacy on a rusk, bolting the mouthful, and sending a generous draught of the strong red wine hissing on the heels of it:

“Now, having fed, I may say my Nunc Dimittis. After such a meal”--he produced and proceeded to use a battered silver toothpick--“I feel myself the equal of Prince, Regent, or Archbishop, I care not which!”

A clean-shaven, fresh-faced, gray-haired citizen, clad in a long-tailed coat and buckled knee-breeches of speckless gray-blue broadcloth, with a starched and snowy shirt-frill jutting from his bosom and rasping his triple chin, looked up from his dish of fricasseed eggs at this boast of von Steyregg’s and said, a trifle sourly:

“The late Prince, sir, being with the departed, presumably has done with eating and drinking, although our Regent, being of the Lutheran persuasion, is at liberty to feed as freely upon the Vigil of the Assumption, as upon all other prescribed fasting-days.... But of his Lordship, the Archbishop, I dare to say that like any other respectable religious, he is, with his clergy, in strict retreat at this moment; and if anything beyond pulse--or dry bread and water--have passed his lips to-day, I will undertake to eat this book of mine!”

He indicated, amidst some tokens of amusement manifested by other abstainers at the table, a Missal that was propped up against the cruet at his side; then wiped his lips, threw off a glass of water, whisked the napkin-end from the bosom of his spotless waistcoat, and beckoned the waiter, asking what was to pay? The man named fifty pfennigs, the client threw down a mark and asked for change. But before the base metal could be transferred from apron-pouch to pocket, von Steyregg, completely deserted by his guardian Angel, tipped the wink to Köhler--who was diligently cramming plum-pie with whipped cream--and rose up, stretching out an immense protesting, mottled hand. His tear hung in his eye, his strawberry nose and flabby mouth quivered with emotion:

“Take up that coin, sir, I beg of you! Nothing is to pay, for you, or any other citizen of Widinitz who occupies a chair at this board together with my companion and myself on this auspicious day. You have told me that your Prince is no more; I say to you that, being dead, he cries from the tomb--‘Resurgam!’ For in an heir of his blood and name he shall live again; the youthful phœnix but waits the signal to emerge full-fledged from the parental pyre of flaming spices.... What? Do you doubt! O! man of tepid faith, I will prove it you! His Serene Highness is, at this moment, with Her Excellency, deigning to partake of refreshment in the private room overhead!”

“Wie? Was?” ejaculated the tradesman, staring at von Steyregg with bulging eyes, as the big fist banged the table, and the cutlery and glasses danced about, while the fifty pfennigs change leaped from the plate held by the startled servitor, and ran into a corner and hid as cleverly as little coins can. “Ach so!” the astonished man added, bringing down his eyebrows with some difficulty. “What you tell us is very surprising, if it be true!”

“And all tales are not true!” put in the oracular barber, who had been polishing off a plate of pickled sturgeon; while von Steyregg held forth.

“Decidedly,” added a bookbinder, who was lingering over a bowl of cabbage-soup and black bread, “one is wise not to believe everything one hears.”

“My friends, I state the fact, upon the honor of a Magyar nobleman!” von Steyregg asseverated. He appealed to Köhler, who replied: “Undoubtedly,” and went on munching, looking sharply this way and that out of his round brown twinkling rat’s eyes. “You hear the eloquent testimony of my associate,” the self-styled Baron went on. “You see these highly-respectable persons,” he pointed with a flourish to the abashed valet and the blushing maid, “who in their varying capacities have the honor to serve His Serene Highness the Prince-Aspirant of Widinitz,--traveling incognito under the style and cognomen of Colonel von Widinitz-Dunoisse,--and the noble and lovely lady”--a cough momentarily checked the flood of the Steyreggian eloquence, and then it rolled turbidly on again--“whom I mentioned just now. They are here, as I have said, partaking, after the fatigues of their journey, of marinaded trout, ragout of veal, salmi of grouse, and quelquechoses. Your privileged eyes will behold them presently, when they descend to distinguish your boulevards and promenades by taking the air upon them.... To-morrow, when the Procession of the Feast takes place--in preparation for which anniversary your streets are even now being strewn with pine-branches and oak-leaves, your public and private buildings adorned with banners and hung with lamps--your maidens are twining garlands, your infants of both sexes learning hymns--to-morrow all Widinitz will behold its hereditary Sovereign participating in the solemnity; and draw, I trust, parallel between Gothic intolerance--I name no names!--and noble, princely piety! Excuse me, my good sirs,” the Baron added, and ostentatiously wiped his lachrymose eye, “I am not easily moved to emotion, but the inward chords cannot but respond to the conception of a spectacle so poignant and so memorable. You must pardon me this single tear!”

A murmur of ambiguous meaning traveled round the table. The plump tradesman whom von Steyregg had first addressed pushed back his chair and rose, picked up his Missal, tucked it under his arm, took his soft felt hat and thick, tasseled walking-cane from the waiter’s hands; and then said, turning to the Magyar nobleman:

“Würdig Herr, you have paid for my dinner, and I am bound to be civil to you. But this is a Catholic State all said and done; the Lutherans are the peppercorns sprinkled through the salad, and if any other man than you had told me that this gentleman could take part in Our Lady’s Procession, having filled his belly full of fish, flesh, and fowl upon the Eve of the Feast, I should have called him a liar! knowing that no person is permitted to take part in the solemnity who is not in a state of grace. By that is understood fasting, or at least abstinence, upon the Vigil, with confession, absolution, penance duly discharged, and Communion crowning all; added, a proper spirit of devotion to the most chaste Mother of God, Who, let me tell you! is honored in this State. I might add that the recommendation of a priest is usually required, and here in Widinitz the sanction of his Lordship the Archbishop. But perhaps your principal has a dispensation which releases him from these trifling obligations?”

Teeth showed, or bits of German boxwood strung on silver wires; or gums that lacked even these substitutes, in the faces that were set about the table. The Pagan Steyregg, flustered by wine and confused by theological terminology, rushed upon his fate. Of course, he declared, his principal had a dispensation and Madame also.... Every member of the party was furnished with the requisite in case of need.... It was not customary for persons moving in exalted social spheres to travel without, he begged leave to inform the company. Whose entertainment was to be charged, he emphatically insisted, upon His Serene Highness’s bill.

The table was vacated, the room emptied without any special demonstration of gratitude on the part of those who had participated in His Highness’s bounty. The guests dispersed, to tell their wives or housekeepers, or to forget to do so, not one remaining save the portly citizen with the finely-starched shirt-frill. He said, once safely outside the coffee-room door, pausing to offer his snuff-box to the landlord, whom he encountered on his way from the cellar, bearing a flask of Benedictine and a bottle of special Kirschwasser:

“You have queer guests upstairs, or I have been listening to a lunatic within there!”

The speaker, dusting the pungent brown powder from a first finger and thumb, pointed the indicatory digit in the direction of the coffee-room. The landlord said, holding the Kirsch between his eye and the light:

“Heretics, who come to witness our procession of The Assumption as they might visit a theater-play. Well! one can only pray for their conversion, and charge their impiety among the extras on the bill.”

His expression portended a total of appalling magnitude. He added:

“They give the surnames of von Widinitz-Dunoisse. He does, that is! And we have learned enough since His late Serene Highness was gathered to his fathers to know what rascally impudence tacks the two together.”

The citizen said, putting away his snuff-box, and flicking some of the brown grains from his shirt-frill:

“His secretary, steward, pimp, or parasite--whatever the bigger of the two rogues in there”--he signed with his chin towards the coffee-room--“may be to your man upstairs, styles him the Prince-Aspirant, Serene Highness, and what-not. One would say, to hear the braggart, that this son of Napoleon’s old marauder had the King of Bavaria, the Federative Council, and the General Assembly at his back!” He added: “As for the lady who accompanies him, she is styled Excellency. One can only hope she is his wife?”

“Meinherr, not so. Upon this point I may pronounce authoritatively.” The landlord of “The Three Crowns” looked extremely wise. “Married Her Excellency may be; that is extremely probable!... But it is not to the fellow who will pay for this!”

“Ach, ach!” ejaculated the sleek citizen, shaking his scandalized head, “this is truly deplorable!” He added, knowing an instant’s doubt of the intuition of the innkeeper: “But how are you sure? May you not mistake?”

“Because,” said the host, whose chatter and round vacant face had beguiled Henriette into believing him a simple child of Nature, “because the Herr Colonel (who for all his fine figure and good looks is a mere Duselfritz), because the Colonel--when Madame holds up her little finger--obeys without questioning--that is why I am sure! The legal partner of a man’s bosom may nag or cajole him; she does not issue orders or commands. It is the mistress, not the wife, who gives herself such masterful airs. Again, my Frau tells me that Madame’s nightcaps are of real Valenciennes, with little moss-rosebuds set inside the frills; and, says my dear one--no respectable married woman would, for a mere husband, thus bedeck----”

“Prut--prut! it would be well, my good friend,” interrupted the respectable tradesman hastily, “to remember that this is a peculiarly solemn season, and----”

But the host went pounding on:

“Moreover, all the gold plate of Madame’s dressing-case is engraved ‘H. de R----.’ But to my mind the thing that convinces most is that the Herr Colonel (who is a Quatschkopf as well as a Duselfritz) should let her order up this from the cellar just to taste!”--the speaker lovingly blew a cobweb from the fat neck of the Kirsch bottle--“though Kirsch of fifty years old is four thalers the bottle, and he has said to her how he hates the stuff! Would any husband, even of a week or so, tolerate such prodigality in a wife?”

“Nu, nu!” said the portly citizen, completely convinced. “What should be done,” he cried in great agitation, “to rid the town of such a scandal? Think! My wits are upside down!”

He wrung his hands. The innkeeper, that simple child of Nature, rubbed his nose with the knuckle of his thumb, and said:

“What if you, Meinherr, who supply the Palace with groceries and are so highly respected, should drop a hint to his Lordship in writing? Retreat or no retreat, I’ll bet you a flask of my best the Archbishop takes measures, and promptly, too! Here, as it chances, is my cook’s errand-boy with his basket. Look you, I will put a new-caught trout from the Wid inside it, and your bit of paper under that. The Father Economus will be sure to spy it; the rest we may confidently leave to Heaven!”

* * * * *

Meanwhile the Marshal’s agents, having fed largely and drunk to correspond, rang the bell, summoned the innkeeper, and issued orders. Then von Steyregg mounted to the private room, scratched the door after the manner of the confidential attendants of royal personages, and appeared, contorted with bows, before the Colonel and Madame, hoping that the entertainment set before them had not been utterly unworthy of personages so exalted! “It is not, Your Serene Highness, as though you were at your own Schloss over yonder,” he said, spreading his thick hands and shrugging his big shoulders. “Ere long let us hope that Destiny and Your Serene Highness’s lucky star will restore you to your own! Meanwhile, I have ordered a barouche, with four outriders, being the best equipage the establishment can furnish. It is but fitting that Your Highness should utilize the earliest opportunity following your arrival to make a Royal Progress--I would say, a little tour of inspection--embracing the chief objects of interest in the town.”

Dunoisse, inwardly sickened by this prospect, made objections, but Henriette overruled them all. That idea of a Royal Progress was pleasantly titillating. The Eve in her snatched at the apple tendered by the serpent von Steyregg. The barouche came lumbering to the front door before the dispute ended in Madame’s favor; she glided away to “make herself beautiful,” leaving a mollifying glance and smile behind with her vanquished opponent. So, petulantly fuming, Dunoisse made ready to accompany her, mentally thanking Heaven that the Staff uniform of ceremony (in which the Baron suggested his victim should array himself) had been left behind in the Rue de Bac.

If the four stout, long-maned, and amply-tailed nags attached to the barouche had not proved pink-eyed and cream-colored; if the vehicle itself had not been so conspicuously yellow; if the blue-and-scarlet livery of the coachman and the brace of badly-matching footmen, who hung to the back-straps and occupied the board behind, had been less tawdry and belaced with grease; if the red-nosed elderly outriders had not been so obviously bemused with potent liquor, and their beasts less spavined, broken-kneed and cracked in wind, that so-called progress through the capital of his ancestors’ hereditary principality might have proved less intolerable to the unlucky scion of their race. But with Köhler and von Steyregg on the front seat, both bare-headed and bare-toothed, oozing with respect and deference, the Baron’s bosom heaving with loyal enthusiasm beneath the metal starfish previously described; some luckless subject of mediæval justice newly flayed, and paraded upon the hangman’s cart for the popular obloquy, might have felt as raw and smarting as did Dunoisse.

A straggling cortège of beggars, spectacle-hunters, servant-maids in their high crimped caps and silver breast-chains, loafers and idlers of both sexes accompanied the yellow barouche. Vocal dogs and an Italian organ-grinder with a pair of monkeys brought up the rear of this motley following. Every now and then von Steyregg would plunge his hand into a stout linen bag, which he nursed upon his knees, and scatter small change among these gentry. You may imagine this largesse received with yells, cheers, and scrambling. Black eyes and gory noses were distributed at each fresh shower.

The Town Hall and the Museum, occupying an entire side of the Market Place, the Church of the Pied Friars, and the Tower of the Clock with its life-sized brazen woman spinning at the top of the weathercock, occupied but passing notice from the distinguished visitors. The yellow barouche, with its huzzaing tail of ragamuffins, breasted the State Street, while the holiday strollers that thronged the sidewalks stood still to stare, and heads were projected from upper windows. And reaching the Cathedral Square that crowned the hilltop, the noble party alighted at the west porch of the stately building and passed in.

Not for years had Dunoisse set foot across the threshold of the House of God; the cult of devotion and worship, the high belief in glorious things unseen, the fulfillment of the obligations of the Catholic faith, had long ceased to be indispensable or even necessary to the man; he looked back upon the piety and fervor of his boyhood with a wonder that was largely mingled with contempt. Now, as he mechanically dipped two fingers in the miniature font that was supported by a sculptured shield bearing the casque with the panache, surmounted by the sable heron of Widinitz, made the Sign of the Cross, and bent the knee before the solemn splendors of the High Altar--gleaming upon the vision from the distant end of the huge echoing nave--he glanced at Henriette in wonder at the contained and modest reverence of her demeanor; and, seeing her sink down gracefully amidst her whispering flounces and bow her lovely head as though in adoration, felt the muscles of his lips twitch with the ironical desire to smile.

“Wonderful!” he thought, more nearly approaching to a critical analysis of her than he had ever permitted himself. “Whether she believes or not, she never dispenses with the outward observance of religion! She is an enigma, a problem to baffle Œdipus! One would say she and not the son of my mother had Carmel in the blood!”

For how strangely amorous license and devotional fervor commingled in the nature of this woman, who should know better than this man....

How often, waking in the perfumed, darkened chamber from the deep, dreamless slumber that falls on the indulged and satiate senses, had not Dunoisse found himself alone, and realized, with a creeping chill of awe mingled with repugnance, that she was kneeling, a white-robed figure veiled in shadowy hair, before the ivory Crucifix that hung above the prie-dieu, praying....

Ah! with what abandonment of sighs and sobs, and tears!... Ere she would rise, traverse the velvet carpet silently as some pale moonray, and glide, mysteriously smiling, into her lover’s arms.

“Why should I not pray?” she had said to him once. “After all, Christ died for sinners, and I am a sinner.... And even devils believe, they say. It is only men who deny!”

Dunoisse had long joined the ranks of the deniers. He had determined that for him yonder shining, jeweled tabernacle should thenceforth house no Unspeakable Mystery, shelter no Heavenly Guest. Nothing beyond an amiable superstition, an innocent, exquisite myth, embodying a profound religious truth for two hundred and sixty millions of Christians; modified or rejected by the Lutheran, Reformed, and Presbyterian Churches; ignored by Confucianist, Taoist, and Buddhist, abhorred by the Hindu, the Mohammedan, and the Jew, should henceforth be enshrined there. He had come to the conclusion that it was better so.

The light of faith had been quenched in the man’s heart by his own deliberate act of will. He had said to his soul, unwitting that he had thus spoken:

“If I believed, could I continue to live as I am doing, storing up sharp retribution, dreadful expiation, inconceivable anguish for the world to come? Not so! Therefore I will forget such words as Death and Judgment. For these poignant, embittered, passing joys, I am content to barter the hope of eternal bliss.”

And yet, upon those rare occasions when, as now, Dunoisse found himself in the House of his Maker, the still air, fragrant with the incense of the most recent Sacrifice, oppressed him, and the very silence seemed eloquent as a voice of Divine reproach....

For you may slough your skin of State-patronized, easy-going Protestantism as easily as you can change your political convictions, and presently, with Modern Buddhism, or Spiritualism, or Platonism, Christian Science, Agnosticism, Mormonism, or Hedonism, be covered and clad anew, but Catholicism penetrates the bones, and permeates the very marrow. You cannot pluck that forth; it is rooted in the fibers of the soul.

* * * * *

Dunoisse followed his Fate up the great echoing nave of the Cathedral, ushered by the gyrating von Steyregg. Penitents of both sexes, waiting their turn in lengthy rows outside the occupied confessionals, glanced up from their beads, as, in a whisper that rattled amidst the carved rafters of the lofty roof, the agent announced:

“Here lie Your Serene Highness’s illustrious forefathers!” And ostentatiously dried his sympathetic tear with a vast flapping handkerchief of Isabella hue.

Certainly the sacred fane was populous with departed von Widinitz, from Albertus I., First of the Line, and his spouse, the chaste Philippina; to Ludovicus, the latest departed, whose Bathildis had predeceased him by a generation or two.

You saw them represented from life-size to the quarter-bust, in brass, bronze, lead, marble, porphyry, granite, alabaster--every conceivable medium known to sepulchral Art. And to Dunoisse’s peculiar torment, those tricksy sprites, von Steyregg and Köhler, united in discovering between the cast or sculptured countenances of these worthies and the moody visage of their harassed descendant resemblances of the striking kind. To hear the knaves appeal to one another--warrant, justify, and approve the claim of a thirteenth-century nose to its modern reproduction--to witness them scouring aisles or rummaging chapels in full cry after a chin, or mouth, or ear, or forehead; to see them run the elusive feature from metal or stone to living earth; and congratulate one another on the fortunate issue of the chase; would have provoked a smile on the countenance of a Trappist. Their sacrifice laughed even whilst he writhed.

The ceremony of leaving cards upon the Archbishop of Widinitz followed. A trap-mouthed, blue-shaven ecclesiastic of the humbler sort, who wore a bunch of keys at the girdle of his well-darned cassock, opened the oaken, iron-studded door, and took the proffered oblongs of pasteboard without enthusiasm, intimating that His Lordship did not receive strangers upon days of solemn retreat. With this janitor von Steyregg parleyed vainly, maintaining a brisk exchange of arguments at the top of the Palace doorsteps, whilst his principals waited at the bottom in the yellow barouche.

A sportive Fate at this juncture breaks the thread of the narrative with a Pantomime Interlude. For as, more in sorrow than in anger at the obstinacy of the janitor, the Baron shook off his tear upon the inhospitable threshold, and turned upon his heel--a little white-headed, berry-brown urchin--a bare-legged messenger, arrayed in a tattered shirt and the upper half of a pair of adult breeches, carrying a reed-basket in which reposed a fine, fat, silvery trout, newly-caught and tempting,--dived between the legs that so strikingly resembled balusters, and dodged into the Palace with a flourish of dirty heels.

If a portly Magyar of noble rank, in the act of rolling down a steepish flight of limestone steps, could possibly be regarded as a mirth-provoking object, one might be tempted to smile as von Steyregg, recording each revolution upon his person with grievous bumps and bruises, performed the horizontal descent. Henriette screamed, Köhler beat his bosom, the tag-rag and bobtail roared with glee, while Dunoisse, compelled to share in their amusement despite the sickness at his heart, jumped out of the carriage and picked up the groaning Baron, restored him his battered curly-brimmed hat, the comb, hairbrush, and piece of soap which had escaped from his coat-tails in the course of transit, thrust him into the vehicle, and bade the coachman return to “The Three Crowns.”

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LVIII

What the Father Economus said when he found the grocer’s billet under the red-spotted trout we may not hear. How the Archbishop received the warning must be equally a matter of conjecture. Hasten on to the smarting conclusion of the Day of Disgrace that dawned so fairly, that shone so brightly, that promised such a harvest to those who failed to mark how upon the southwest horizon huge formless ramparts of blue black cumuli were steadily building, while faint mutterings of distant thunder presaged the breaking of the storm....

The four adventurers had supped together upon the best the inn could furnish. Now, seated at ease about the relics of the banquet, in the dining-room of the private suite occupied by His Serene Highness and Her Excellency, they discussed the Plan of Campaign. Fragrant vapors of choicest Habanas enhaloed them, by permission of Her Excellency, who held between her exquisite lips a Turkish cigarette. And as they smoked and talked, the contents of a capacious China Bowl of Maraschino Punch (compounded by Köhler, who was a clever hand at such delicious chemistry) sank lower, inch by inch....

You may picture Steyregg, revived by much food and a great deal of liquor; his cuts and scratches plastered with diachylum, the Alpine summit of his bald occiput adorned by a compassionate chambermaid with patches of brown-paper steeped in vinegar, retained in place by a linen bandage of turban-shape, reading from a folio sheet of coarsely printed rag-paper, blackened with ancient Gothic capitals (and filched from where it had fluttered, held by a pin, upon one of the notice-boards exposed in the porch of the Cathedral), the Programme for the following day.

“We begin,” he boomed, after much preliminary throat-scraping, “by Your Serene Highness’s permission--if the Herr Attorney-Oath-Commissioner will snuff the candles I shall be able to see better!--we begin with Deputations from the various Trades-bands and Companies of Handi-craftsmen carrying banners.... Follow....”

The gross man expanded his chest, and rolled out:

“The Charity-Children of both sexes, the boys carrying green branches, the girls bouquets of flowers. Succeed....

“Confraternities of Sodalists, male and female, headed by Persons on Horseback in Roman and Silesian costumes, representing St. Lawrence with his gridiron and St. Hyacinth with his ax.

“A triumphal Car, with a Tableau of St. Helena in Roman Imperial Habit, instructing St. Macarius, Bishop of Jerusalem, where to Dig for the Relic of the True Cross....

“The Four Mendicant Orders of Religious of both sexes, with tapers.

“The Boys of the Dominican Orphanage bearing tapers.

“The Girls of the Carmelite School strewing flowers.

“The Image of Our Lady of the Assumption, attended by Sisters of the Order of the Immaculate Heart.”

Dunoisse started in his chair. A burning heat raced through him, and yet he shivered, oppressed by a deadly sickness of the soul.

“The Secular Clergy,” read von Steyregg, and cleared his throat. “The Archbishop and Chapter. The Sacred Canopy, borne by six Noble Officers of the Garrison in Full Uniform.”...

Dunoisse, with an ashen face, rose up at the foot of the table.... It had been revealed to him as by a lightning-flash, over what a bottomless abyss he hung.... Henriette appeared to notice nothing.... von Steyregg pursued:

“In this unhappy document, Madame, I have suggested an alteration. As here provided, the Mayor and Corporation, the Garrison--in uniform of review--with the towns-people, peasants, children, and beggars were to have brought up the rear of the procession. But my amendment (forwarded in writing to the Archbishop, since that prelate has rudely closed his doors against us), is, that His Lordship and the Chapter should be followed by--grant but a moment!--I will set it down....”

He sucked a black-lead pencil, scrawled on the wide margin of the official programme, and read as he scrawled:

“His Serene Highness, Hector-Marie-Aymont, Prince-Aspirant of Widinitz, carrying a taper, and attended by the Wohlgeboren Herr Attorney-and-Oath-Commissioner Ottilus Köhler, and the Hochwohlgeboren Herr Baron, Rodobald Siegfridus Theodore von Steyregg, Knight of the Most Pious Order of Saint Emmerich.” He added, blowing like a seal, and mopping his great moist countenance with a crumpled table-napkin:

“Take the word of a Magyar nobleman, Your Serenity, that taper of yours will have cooked the Regent Luitpold’s goose for him, all being said and done!”

But His Serene Highness, who had dropped heavily back into the chair, was leaning upon his folded arms, staring with an air of deep abstraction at the polished surface of the dessert-covered mahogany, and might have heard or not.

“Dull dog that you are, my Prince!” said von Steyregg mentally, “this charming Eve of yours is worth a million of you. Were she Princess-Aspirant of this phlegmatic State, it would be a hop, skip and jump into the saddle. With you, had you not a Steyregg at your elbow--Ps’sst!--the whole adventure would fizzle off like a damp squib--I would bet my head on it! Now, what picture you are gaping at--with your eyes fixed and your jaw dropping--I would give this glass of punch to know.”

He tossed it off with a flourish and a wink at his rat-faced confederate. The flourish, the wink, were lost upon Dunoisse.

* * * * *

For as a hanging man may see, in the last struggles of asphyxia, the dreadful details of the crime that led to his execution limned in lifelike action and color on the swirling fire-shot blackness, so rose before the mental vision of the son of Marie-Bathilde a picture of the Cathedral, with the great procession of the morrow--headed by the white-robed bearer of the Crucifix, amidst wafts of incense and intoned Litanies, rolling down the nave of the Cathedral and out through its west door upon the streets.

Ah! was Henriette deaf, that she did not hear the chanting voices, and the slow, measured tread of the lay folk, and religious, and the pattering footsteps of the children, as, with reverent demeanor and hushed, rapt faces they moved before or followed the image of the Mother of God?

Did she not see the Canopy of wrought cloth-of-gold, adorned with tassels of pearls, fringed with innumerable little golden bells that tinkled as its bearers bore it onwards? Was she blind to the Figure that stumbled along in its shelter, robed in white linen, bloodstained and torn and dusty, bending almost double under a Cross of roughly-shaped timbers, and wearing a Crown of Thorns?...

The haggard black eyes sought hers in desperate interrogation. But Henriette was dreamily playing with a silver fruit-knife as she listened to von Steyregg. Her own eyes were hidden under their long lashes; her face told no tale, as the intolerable voice of the agent trumpeted:

“As regards a favorable answer from this arrogant prelate, Your Excellency, I will guarantee it within the hour--or two--having, in His Serene Highness’s name, as his business-representative, undertaken that compliance with his desires will be made profitable in the pecuniary sense by a donation of One Thousand Thalers to the Restoration Fund of the Cathedral. Ahem!”

He winked his left eye, which the sliding turban threatened to extinguish, folded up the official programme and threw it on the table, saying:

“This reading dries the throat consumedly. With Her Highness’s--I mean with Madame’s permission, I will take another drop of punch!”

He filled a bumper and proposed a toast: “To the Success of The Adventure!”

Köhler drank the sentiment with enthusiasm. Henriette sipped, smiling at her moody lover, who pushed his glass away. And a resonant, cultured voice said from the doorway:

“Permit me to beg pardon of the company for having entered unannounced!”

The heads of the adventurers turned as by a single impulse. The landlord, who had knocked unheard, and ushered in a stranger under cover of the toast-drinking, was seen to be posed, in an attitude of rigid respect, beyond the threshold. The person who had spoken, a short priest with singularly bright gray eyes shining out of a pale, thin-featured face;--who was wrapped, despite the sultry heat of August, in a voluminous and shabby black cloak, and did not seem at all embarrassed,--was standing just within the door.

He said, and the great volume of his voice seemed to fill the room and flow outwards through the French windows that opened upon a stone balcony overhanging the Market Place:

“May it be understood that I am here as the mouthpiece of the Archbishop of Widinitz?... May I presume that I shall be patiently listened to?... I will be as brief as is compatible with clearness. Pray remain seated, all of you. No, sir, I am obliged!...”

For Henriette had risen languidly and curtsied deeply. Von Steyregg had hoisted himself to those baluster-shaped legs of his. Köhler had got up with his mouth full of almonds and raisins: and Dunoisse, with the polished grace that distinguished him, was offering the little priest his chair.

The ecclesiastic scanned the dark, handsome face and the soldierly, muscular, supple figure with a degree of kindliness. He said, as he waved the offered seat away:

“What I have to say, Colonel Dunoisse, will be best said standing. Your intention to visit this town was not previously notified to the Archbishop. He was not consulted in the matter of your intentions and views. Otherwise you might have been spared the commission of a grievous error, which cannot but create antagonism, prejudice, and contempt in the minds of those whom you would most desire to ingratiate----”

He broke off, for von Steyregg smote upon the table, and bellowed, while the decanters and glasses jingled, peaches hopped from the center dish, and the thumper’s turban fell off and rolled under the board:

“‘Contempt,’ sir, is not a word to be used in connection with His Serene Highness. I, Rodobald von Steyregg, Baron and Knight of the Sublime Order of St. Emmerich, protest against its use!”

Having protested, Steyregg dived for his turban, replaced it on his head, and snorted defiance. The small pale priest regarded him with a faint, lurking smile, and said calmly:

“Sir, the Archbishop received a letter from you this evening. I am charged with the answer to the document herewith.”

He turned to Dunoisse and continued:

“Colonel Dunoisse, the fact of your near alliance by blood with the reigning House of Widinitz is incontestable and undeniable. Did not the Salic law obtain in this principality, upon you would undoubtedly devolve the Hereditary Crown.”

His great voice seemed to be a palpable presence in the room. While he spoke, not by any means at the full pitch of it, the wires of a spinet that stood against the wall vibrated audibly; and the crystal pendants on the chandeliers and mantel-vases tinkled with a gentle musical sound. While another sound, of which Dunoisse had been faintly conscious for some time, and which might have been the muttering of distant thunder; or the humming of innumerable bees; or the purring of a cat of Brobdingnagian proportions, was stilled as though the unknown forces that combined to cause it had caught an echo of the powerful tones, and held their peace to listen.

As the priest went on:

“Undoubtedly, but the fundamental law as it stands strictly excludes the female line and the males derived from it. And were it possible to change this law, even at the eleventh hour, I am deputed to say to you that the procedure would be strenuously opposed by the person who would in that event stand as the direct dynastic successor to the hereditary authority!”

“My mother!”

Dunoisse, through whom the words had darted with a shock and thrill resembling the discharge from an electric battery, thrust from him the chair on which he had hitherto indifferently leaned, and turned upon the speaker a face that had suddenly grown sharp and pinched, saying in a voice that was curiously flat and toneless:

“You are in communication with my mother, sir? You have been deputed by her to say this to me?”

The priest bowed assent, and continued calmly:

“For, though it be true that the Almighty, in His Infinite wisdom, has chastened us Catholics of Widinitz by placing over us a sovereign of the Reformed Faith; and, though we cannot but deplore the rigor with which the Regent has treated certain communities of religious hitherto resident in the principality; we are bound to own that in other respects we have been treated with clemency and justice. In addition, the domestic life of our Regent is free from scandal....”

Dunoisse’s ears burned like fire. The little priest’s great voice went on:

“We recognize in His Serene Highness a chaste spouse, a wise father, a prudent governor. How ill-advised should we be to prefer to a ruler such as this a bad Catholic, an individual whose personal history affords a lamentable example of ungoverned passions; who, dead to all sense of shame, blazons his infamy before the eyes of the conscientious and the decent----”

Dunoisse interrupted, saying with stiff lips:

“May I take it that these personalities are leveled at myself?”

The little priest returned, with extraordinarily quiet dignity:

“The rebuke, Colonel Dunoisse, is meant for you. I do not deal in personalities.”

He added, in a voice that sent keen, icy thrills coursing down the spines of his listeners:

“The Archbishop replies to the proposal contained in your agent’s letter emphatically in the negative. He says to you, Colonel Dunoisse, with the voice that speaks to you now: ‘You have offered us a price in money for the privilege of participating in the morrows procession. You have not scrupled to present yourself as a partaker in the solemnities of our Blessed Lady’s Festival. You shrink not at the thought of approaching Him Who is borne beneath the Sacred Canopy, unconfessed, unabsolved--in a state of deadly sin. Shameless, unabashed, you would display yourself to the scandal of Christ’s servants, accompanied by the partner of your lamentable errors--with your acknowledged mistress, the unfaithful wife of another, flaunting by your side!”

Henriette, pale as death, leaped up from her seat as a woman might who had swallowed some deadly alkaloid. Dumbly, as though the poison veritably stiffened her muscles, she writhed, fighting for speech--wrenching at the velvet ribbon that confined her swelling throat.

“You!--you!--you hear these insults?” she at last stammered, pointing a quivering hand at Dunoisse, whom the words seemed to have deprived of the powers of speech and motion. “Are you deaf, sir, that such things are spoken, and you stand there silent as one of those statues in the Cathedral? Are you dumb or paralyzed that you do not order this man to leave my presence? Cannot you see,” she raved, “that this is no messenger from the Archbishop? Some fanatical priest,--some presumptuous secretary,--has dared--has----! Just Heaven!--if my husband had been here, he would have thrown the creature from the room!”

But Dunoisse remained speechless and frozen, under the fiery torrent of her upbraidings. It was von Steyregg who, in absence of any demonstration from his principal, seized his opportunity to be effective and picturesque. He strode haughtily to the door, and, opening it, turned with majesty to the intruder, trumpeting:

“With your person, sir, respecting your cloth as I abhor your sentiments, I will not soil my fingers. But unless you instantly remove yourself from these apartments, private to His Serene Highness and Her Excellency, I will--I will ring for the landlord and have you carried out and put upon the street!”

“That could hardly be,” said the little gray priest mildly, “for I am the Archbishop of Widinitz....”

He showed one lean finger outside the folds of the shabby cloak. Upon the digit a great sapphire gleamed darkly.... And a silence of unspeakable consternation fell upon the conspirators, that was suddenly broken by a half-brick, deftly thrown, that crashed through a pane of one of the French windows, shivered a crystal chandelier full of twinkling wax-lights that hung above the supper-table; and plopped into the punch-bowl, dispersing shivers of Oriental ware and gouts of fragrant liquor into every corner of the room....

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