XXV…

XXV

Perched on the wall,--hung with an old-world Chinese paper, figured with sprays of bamboo, pagodas, bridges, mandarins promenading under yellow umbrellas, and fair Celestials reclining on the banks of a meandering, bright blue stream--the German fly of Mr. Knewbit's envy would have reaped scant information from the conversation of the three men sitting at the dinner-table, for the reason that they conversed in English--perhaps for privacy's sake.

The apartment, not ordinarily used as a dining-room, possessed three sets of folding-doors, and beyond a sofa and twelve heavy chairs, upholstered with a Chinese brocade matching the paper, was scantily furnished. The table plate was solid and handsome. A pair of huge silver-gilt wine-coolers displayed a goodly array of champagne bottles, a cellar-basket with rows of horizontal wicker-nests contained claret, Burgundy, and Rhine wine. The second course was under discussion, but the servants, after placing the dishes on the table, had withdrawn. By a bell kept on a dumb-waiter at the host's elbow, bearing sauces, clean plates, spare glasses, bread of white and black, and other requisites, the attendants could be summoned at need.

The hostess's chair at the table-head was vacant. The two guests' places were laid on the right and left hand of the host. All three men were in uniform, two were well stricken in years; and Time had not left sufficient locks among them to furnish a wig-maker with material for covering a bald patch.

Also, they were men of whom the world had heard much already, and was, before the ending of the year, to hear a great deal more.

The tall, heavily-built man of sixty-seven, in the uniform of a General of Division, who sat upon the host's right hand, boasting a hair-tuft above either ear, a pair of shaggy eyebrows, and a bristling mustache dyed to savage blackness, any intelligent Berliner would have recognized as Von Roon, the Prussian Minister of War; while the mild-looking veteran of seventy who opposed him, displaying the crimson badge of the Great General Staff upon a plain dark close-buttoned military frock, with the ribbons of a dozen decorations showing in a narrow line on his left breast and the coveted Cross of the Red Eagle of the First Class hanging at the black regulation stock that clipped his unstarched linen collar, would have been claimed by the veriest street urchin as "Our Moltke!"

You saw in this hale, lean, stooping Staff Officer, who covered a scalp as bare as a new-born babe's with an obvious auburn wig, the first soldier of the day, the past-master in war-craft. His fine, transparent beaky profile, tight mouth, clear light eyes, set in a net of innumerable knowing little wrinkles, and the cross-hatching of tiny scarlet veins that made his hollow cheeks ruddy as Cornish apples, might have belonged to some aged, ascetic Cardinal, or venerable Professor of Science, rather than to Baron Helmuth Carl Bernhard von Moltke, General, Field-Marshal, and Chief of the Great General Staff of the Prussian Army; whose heraldic motto, Erst wagen dann wagen summarizes his strategical policy; whose conduct of the Danish War of '64 and the Austrian War of '66 had placed Prussia in the forefront as a military nation, under whose banner were soon to gather the Confederated German States.

Questioned as to the identity of the man at the head of the table, the long-limbed, heavily molded, powerfully built personage of five-and-fifty, attired in the undress-uniform of a Colonel of White Cuirassiers, and wearing the Order of Commander of the Red Eagle, the citizen would most likely have scowled, the street-boy spat forth some unsavory epithet, tacked on to a name that was destined to be inscribed upon the era in divers mediums, inclusive of marble and iron, brass and gold and silver; lead and fire; bright steel and red blood.

For this was the Minister to whom diplomats, Parliamentary orators, and political leader-writers referred when they mentioned Prussia; the accursed of Ultramontane, the abhorred of Socialists. Walking alone through the streets, as, indeed, he loved to do, his keen eye and huge physical strength had saved him, ere now, from the assassin's bullet or knife. And you could not look upon him without recognizing a Force, all-potent for good or all-dominant in evil, an enemy to be execrated or a leader to be adored.

The massive, high-domed head was scantily covered, save for a grayish lock or so above either temple, and a thin thatching behind the finely shaped, sagacious ears. The eyebrows were thick--of gray mixed with darkish brown; the luxuriant brown-gray mustache covering the large, mobile, sarcastic mouth, grew heavily as any trooper's. The short, straight nose was rounded at the end like the point of a broadsword. And in the indomitable, vital regard of the blue eyes, partly hidden under thick and level lids, you felt the master-mind, as they coldly considered some question of finance or diplomacy, or blazed challenge and defiance, scorn and irony. And in the sagging orbital pouches, as in the puffy jowl, you read the unmistakable signs of bygone orgies, deep potations, marvelous vital powers taxed to the utmost in the past pursuit of pleasure, as by present indefatigable, unsleeping labors with brain, voice, and pen in the service of Throne and State.

The table-talk dealt chiefly, at first, with culinary and gastronomical matters. Asparagus soup iced and a clear soup with vermicelli had preceded the course of fish, placed on the table by the servants, who had then been dismissed. A huge dish of Waldbach trout with green sauce and another, as capacious, of crayfish stewed in cream with mushrooms, vanished before a double onslaught on the part of the War Minister and the Chancellor, the Chief of the General Staff partaking sparingly, as was his wont.

Said his host, smiling and setting down an empty wine goblet:

"You eat nothing, Herr Baron Field-Marshal, whereas I, who come of a family of great eaters, and His Excellency, who boasts a similarly inherited capacity, have taken twice of each dish."

"Thanks, thanks, dear Count," said Moltke mildly, glancing downward at the well-marked hollow behind his middle buttons; "but I do not like to overload my stomach, particularly at my time of life."

"Being aware of Your Excellency's objection to dishes that are heavy," the Chancellor continued gravely, but still smiling, "I took pains to select a menu of light, easily digested things. What are three or four dozens of oysters at the commencement of a dinner?"

Von Roon agreed, in a hoarse bass, that set the chandelier-glasses vibrating:

"Or a few half-pound trout, or a helping or so of stewed crayfish? Mere nothings--to a strong digestion."

"Mine cannot be strong," the great strategist remarked modestly, "for I find that an over-plentiful meal oppresses the brain, and hinders steady thought."

Said the Chancellor, filling from a long-necked bottle one of the three large crystal goblets that served him as wine-glasses, emptying it at a draught and setting it down:

"Hah! Were that known in a certain high quarter at Paris, what a cargo of delicacies you would presently receive from the Maison Chevet!"

Von Roon's big voice came in:

"Was not Chevet the Parisian purveyor who supplied the banker-minister Lafitte with fish for a Dieppe dinner in the time of the French Monarchy?"

"So!" The Chancellor, holding his napkin delicately in both hands, dried the wine from his mustache, and added, turning his great, slightly bloodshot eyes upon the interrogator. "And who is now chief caterer for the Emperor Napoleon the Third." He added, glancing back at Moltke, and observing that his glass stood unemptied: "Since Your Excellency will not eat, let me recommend you the wine, which is of special quality. Not only Rüdesheim, but good Rüdesheim. Ha, ha, ha!"

The veteran's clear eyes became mere slits in the mass of puckered wrinkles. He pushed back his auburn peruke, showing his high-arched temples, and laughed, revealing gums as healthy as a child's, and still accommodating three or four staunch old grinders inclined at various angles, like ancient apple-tree stumps.

"Nu, nu! You are twitting me with my candor to Sultan Mahmoud in 1835; but what else could I say when Chosref Pasha intimated that His Sublimity required my opinion? Directly I tasted his wretched wine, I knew some rogue had sold him an inferior brand, and thus I told him honestly: 'It is Rüdesheim, Your Majesty, but it is not good Rüdesheim!' And with the first of the boxes of tobacco and cigarettes that came from Constantinople after my return to Germany, I received the message that the tutun was not only Turkish tutun, but good Turkish tutun." He drank off his wine, ending: "And so my nephews say it is, for I smoke neither cigarettes nor pipes."

"I smoke pipes," said the Chancellor, stretching a white, muscular hand toward the bell on the dumb-waiter, "when my doctor prohibits cigars." He added: "Pipes of all materials and descriptions--one sort excepted. I have no doubt Your Excellency could give it a name."

The War Minister, pondering, knotted his heavy tufted eyebrows, and presently blew out his cheeks as a man may when the jest baffles his wit. The Field-Marshal began to laugh, a gentle chuckle that began by agitating his lean abdomen, and shaking his bowed but vigorous shoulders before it widened his mouth into a slit curved gaily at the corners, and squeezed tears of merriment out of his puckered eyes.

"I'll wager half a pfennig I will name it at the first guess! You mean the Calumet of Peace!"

Von Roon barked out a laugh. The Chancellor nodded, smiling. Then two middle-aged, grave-looking male servants in plain black entered with the third course, and the faces of the diners underwent a curious change. They were more suave, and all expression seemed as though it had been wiped from them. Until, following on the heels of the servants (who brought the entrées), there appeared a colossal boarhound, dark tawny in color, with black pointings, short, rounded ears, massive chest, square muzzle, and red-rimmed eyes. Fixing these fierce orbs upon his master with an affection proved not altogether disinterested by the copious dribbling of his jaws, the great brute sat upright at his left hand, flogged the carpet with his heavy tail, and saluted the placing of the dishes on the table with three gruff barks.

"Aha, Tyras!"

"Hey, then, Tyras! So they have cut short your furlough, boy!"

"He would tell you, like that sergeant of infantry who was made postman of a country district after the war of '66, and at whom the illiterate population--who never got anything but bad news or dunning letters--used to shoot as a mild hint to keep away altogether, that all the days are field-days to him. Speaking as a dog with a master who walks when he does not ride, and must be waited for when he is neither riding nor walking."

The Chancellor, smiling, looked at the huge brute, which rose and laid its massive jowl entreatingly upon his chair-arm, and receiving no immediate return in caress, lobbed a heavy forepaw pettishly upon the tablecloth. A chased silver-gilt salt-cellar, in the shape of a Bavarian peasant-girl carrying two milk-pails, toppled, and might have fallen to the floor, but that the Field-Marshal caught it dexterously, though without being able to prevent the salt being spilt.

"No harm done. See!" He triumphantly set the milk-maid in her place again: "Only the salt is spilled upon the cloth!"

"Now, if Tyras were superstitious!" commented the host, as a servant hastened to repair the damage with the aid of a napkin and a porcelain dessert-plate, "he would be convinced that Madame Tyras and her sons were not doing as well as might be hoped."

"The bitch has pupped, then?" said Von Roon as a trio of corks exploded; and the servants, having carried round the dishes, placed them on the table, set an open bottle of champagne, dewy from the ice, and enveloped in a damask napkin, at the right of each diner, and noiselessly quitted the Chinese room.

As the door shut, the Chancellor continued, responding to Roon's question with a nod, and looking at the Chief of the Great General Staff:

"However, Tyras is not one of those nervous sires who rend heaven and earth with outcries if danger threatens one of their offspring. The Pomeranian breed are possibly less nervous than the strain at Sigmaringen. I think Prince Antony----"

Blurted out the Field-Marshal, bolting a mouthful of cutlet and crimsoning to the edges of his wig with sudden anger: "May the great devil fly away with that pompous old sheep's-head!"

"It was not without reason," said the Chancellor, without slackening in his onslaught upon an entrée of duckling stewed with olives, "that I arranged for us three to dine without the servants. Did I not foresee that the hot blood of the warlike youth would effervesce in some such expression as that I have just heard!"

Said the old man, still flushed, but laughing, and sipping at a bumper of dry Sillery:

"He is a sheep's-head, and a pompous one! He negotiates with Prim, as head of the Hohenzollern family, quite forgetting the King, it would appear! He is very well pleased--he thinks the place will suit his son capitally! He sends him on second thoughts to ask the King if he does not think so. Then when France hurries her Ambassador to Ems to inform the King, who has not said 'Ay' or 'Nay' in the matter, that she will not tolerate a Prince of Prussia on the Throne of Spain, he writes to the King saying that he is much impressed by the turn things are taking at Paris, and though he thinks he cannot in decency break off the affair, perhaps the King will do it for him! Meanwhile Prince Leopold, who is the chief person concerned--where withdrawal or acceptance is in question--has quitted Ems and gone where you please.... Not to his parents' country castle of Sigmaringen, but to the Tyrol.... Now why to the Tyrol? This marching and countermarching--with no definite purpose in it, makes my blood boil. Phew!"

And really the perspiration fairly bubbled from the pores of the old warrior, as he took off his auburn peruke and mopped his dripping head and face with a large white handkerchief.

The Chancellor, who had been discussing a second helping of the dish before him, laid down his knife and fork upon their silver-gilt supporters, unfastened a hook of his undress frock, and said, withdrawing a small roll of tissue papers and separating one thin penciled sheet from the rest:

"There is some reason for the Prince's agitation. This morning a telegram in cipher--of which this is a fair transcript--was dispatched from Sigmaringen to Olozaga, the Spanish Ambassador at Paris. It conveys the intimation that Prince Antony withdraws from the candidacy in the name of Prince Leopold. It was sent by the French Emperor's secret agent, a Roumanian named Straz."

He went on informing himself, with a quiet side-glance to right and left, of the effect his communication was producing:

"Perhaps you do not know Straz--a man with the profile and curls of one of M. Layard's man-god bulls of Nineveh, a living tool that might have been tempered in the workshop of an Alexander Borgia, or a Catherine de Medici----"

He stopped to fill one of his great crystal goblets from the champagne-bottle that stood beside him. Moltke, indifferent to the dishes that stood temptingly within reach, had been wiping the inside of his wig dry with his handkerchief. Now, oblivious of the wig, and crumpling it with the handkerchief into a ball, he was squeezing the ball between his narrow palms as he listened to the speaker. Von Roon, who had been busy upon some sweetbreads cooked in sour cream, paused in the act of helping himself again largely.

"So--so--this fellow--Straz----" The Chancellor stuttered now and then, and he did it here effectively--"This uns-scrupulous f-fellow of whom I am t-talking----" He drained the big glass to the dregs, wiped his mustache carefully, and began delicately unfolding more thin sheets of paper from the small but pregnant wad.

"Ah, yes, where was I? Th-this morning, the twelfth of July, the originals of these three telegrams, which are not in cipher, were sent from Sigmaringen by Prince Antony. The first, to Marshal Prim, at Madrid, withdraws his son from the candidacy. The second, to Olozaga, recapitulates the wording of this. The third, ostensibly addressed to the principal journals of Berlin and Germany, and to the German Submarine Telegraphic Agencies by order of Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern, abandons all pretensions to the Spanish scepter, and restores to Spain her freedom of initiative."

Von Roon bellowed like a nine-inch siege gun:

"What May-madness has the confounded old billy-goat?"

The Chief of the Great General Staff put on his wig, and said, folding his lean arms upon his sunken chest:

"How has he at Paris managed to frighten the old man?"

The Chancellor said, fixing his full, powerful eyes upon the light ones twinkling through their wise old puckers:

"The mission of M. Straz, privately sent, upon the advice of the Duke de Gramont, by the Emperor of France to Sigmaringen (while Count Benedetti repairs to the King of Prussia at Ems, and a third emissary, Bartholdi, is sent to menace President Zorilla at Madrid)--the mission of M. Straz is to terrify the Prince and Princess with threats of the assassination of one, if not both their sons."

Commented Moltke, shrugging a shoulder:

"To work on the woman, always--if there is one! ... Badinguet's tactics are not new--but they are effective beyond doubt."

"Knave!" came from Roon, in a blurt of indignation

"Says Straz to Prince Antony of Hohenzollern--I give you the exact words;--'Highness, His Imperial Majesty the Emperor authorizes me to inform you that a group of Roumanian conspirators are plotting against the life of your elder son, Prince Charles von Hohenzollern--now Charles of Roumania. The threads of this plot being centered in Paris, it is in the Emperor's power to sever them--he will do so if Prince Leopold withdraws from the candidature,--he will not seek to deter the conspirators, should the Prince prove obstinate. Reflect in addition that Prince Leopold, as King of Spain, will have to contend against the plots of Alfonsists and Carlists--as against the intrigues of Montpensier and other aspirants to Isabella's vacated throne. He will not be summoned to reign--he will be called to a disaster. Death will sit beside him, under the Royal canopy.'"

The reader's muscular white hands drew another crackling sheet from the little roll of papers. He went on:

"The mother of the two young men was present--as was intended--when Straz delivered this message from the Emperor. Naturally the Princess brought her batteries to work upon the Prince and her younger son, who, though it is not admitted, was actually present. She has wept, implored, prayed, fainted, argued for forty-eight hours----"

The Field-Marshal muttered:

"Poor soul!"

And with his wrinkled hand he rubbed a glistening drop from his cheek, that was not perspiration. Von Roon snorted like a dyed old war-horse:

"Meanwhile, the Imperial Ambassador, Count Benedetti, will be setting forth the object of his mission to the King!"

Said the Chancellor, letting the words come out softly and distinctly,--and one would have expected so huge a man to roar after the fashion of giants, rather than to speak in such mellifluous tones:

"His instructions run thus: 'Say to the King that we have no secret motive, that we do not seek a pretext for war--and that we only ask to reach an honorable solution of a difficulty that was not created by us.'"

"It is honorable, then," said Von Moltke in a tone of childlike wonder, "to threaten to murder that old woman's two sons?"

"Meanwhile," said the mellifluous, pleasant voice of the Chancellor, "the Emperor and Marshal le Bœuf have sent Staff-Colonel Gresley to Algiers with secret orders to MacMahon to embark those troops from Africa which are most available for service on the Continent, and to warn the most distant regiments to be at Algiers on the 18th. The Generals of his Artillery and Engineers have been dispatched upon a plain-clothes confidential visit of inspection to the fortresses of the North-East, all leave has been stopped, and the commanders of brigades have apprised the staffs of the mobilization offices to dispatch the orders of recall of the reserves. This was put into effect on the 8th. Upon the same day the order was given to bring the Infantry regiments up to War strength by the creation of their Fourth Battalions, and General Blondeau, of the Administrative Branch of the War Department, has been authorized to exceed his credit by the sum of a million francs." He ended, showing his small, regular teeth, as he smiled agreeably upon his hearers: "The Tuileries system of Secret Intelligence is certainly excellent, but I do not think we are so badly served!"

"Badly served!" echoed Roon. "One would say not!"

"You must be served by the great devil himself and all his devilkins, Otto, my dear fellow!" said the Chief of the Great General Staff, with a merry chuckle, "to have all this dished up to you before it is cold! Well, well! Thanks be to the good God--we are not so far behind these French as we might be! No, no! not at all so far behind! ..."

He said this musingly, his startlingly limpid eyes almost hidden by the wrinkles and puckers, his long, humorous upper lip drawn down and set firmly on the lower one, as he cupped his sharp chin in the palm of one wrinkled hand, nursing the elbow appertaining to it in the palm of-the other hand.

"'So far behind,' do you say?" growled Von Roon. "Sapperlot! I should call it a day's march and a half-day's march ahead!"

"It may be--it may be!" said the Field-Marshal placidly. "God grant that it prove so!"

"You are as pious as the King to-night," said the Chancellor, laughing heartily. "And your God is the God of Battles, we all know!"

"Yes, yes, the Friend Above does not forget this old fellow!" said the Field-Marshal simply. "The thousand-ton Krupp gun--whose acquaintance the Parisians made at the Exposition of 1867,--has been waiting ever since to make upon them an impression of a different kind! Like the gun, I have bided my time, as the Scotch say. Neither the cannon nor myself will last for ever, but to worry is folly! ... Heaven will not let us rust upon the shelf!"

"'Mensch ärgere Dich nicht' is a good proverb," said the Chancellor, "not only for Your Excellency! Chained to my study-table all yesterday and this morning,--horribly handicapped by the absence of my First Secretary Abeken, who is doing duty with the King at Ems.--listening to reports, receiving showers of telegrams, dictating replies in answer to the appeals or expostulations of Foreign Ministers--sending instructions to Ambassadors, and drinking Mühlbrunnen water,--which must not be taken when one is vexed or worried, if one wants it not to play the very devil in one's inside, I chewed the cud of that proverb, 'Man, do not vex thyself!' to keep myself from gnawing my tongue. That official international threat of Gramont, uttered in the session of the Corps Législatif of July 6th,--the filth hurled by the Paris Press--did not cost me a sleepless night. But that, after such insults, the King of Prussia should treat with Benedetti at Ems while the Prussian Foreign Minister remained at Varzin--stuck in my gizzard as though I had swallowed a prickle-burr. It was worse than Olmütz.... I saw nothing but resignation ahead of me!"

Von Roon agreed:

"To me also it seemed a slight not to the Foreign Minister alone--but to His Majesty's Government in your person."

The Field-Marshal added, his wrinkled face lengthening dourly:

"I may tell you--there being no ladies present!--the whole affair acted on me like unripe gooseberries, especially after reading that sentence in the Gaulois, written by a gamin with a finger to his nose...."

Von Boon thundered:

"'La Prusse cane!' Only say black-dose, rather than sour gooseberries, and there you have the effect of the words on me!"

Said the Chancellor, with a twinkle of humor:

"They wrought upon myself as an emetocatharsis. For, repudiating the slight, and simultaneously expelling from my system the last remains of compunction, I decided then and there to hurry off from Varzin to Ems for the purpose of urging upon His Majesty the urgent necessity for summoning the Reichstag. The words I meant to use kept drumming in my skull--We shall be traitors to ourselves if we do not accept this challenge. Without an instant's delay, we must mobilize!"

Said Roon:

"Why not, when we are prepared to take measures for the safety of the Rhenish provinces? We can put Saarbrück in a state of defense in twenty-four hours, and Mainz in less than forty-eight. Is it not so, Herr General Field-Marshal?"

Von Moltke's dry, level voice returned quietly:

"My plan of invasion was drawn up in 1868. All my arrangements are made, as I have said. When His Majesty--when the Chancellor of the Confederation and Your Excellency give the signal--I go home to my quarters on the first floor of the south-east wing of the Great General Staff Department, and dispatch a telegraphic message of three words..." He began to laugh, rubbing his hands together. "Then--you will see whether I am ready! All I ask is Opportunity--like Krupp's thousand-tonner gun!"

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XXVI

The Chancellor said, emptying another bumper of champagne:

"This morning the opportunity lay within grasp. So strongly convinced was I of this that as my phaeton passed through the village of Wussow, on the way to the station, 'War is Inevitable' seemed written on every house. The old clergyman stood before his parsonage door and greeted me with a hand-wave. My answer was the gesture of a thrust in carte and tierce. For me the three words: 'War is Declared' replaced the lettering of the advertisement posters on the walls of the stations the special rushed through. Yet, though I had notified His Majesty of the advisability of summoning me to his assistance, I received, even as I stepped out of the train at the Stettin Station, a vacillating telegram from him, enjoining delay." He added, laughing: "Together with a message in cipher from our Prussian Ambassador at Paris, informing me that it has been given forth from the tribune of the Corps Législatif that had not Prince Leopold retreated from the Spanish candidature, to prevent the war with which the Emperor threatens us--the Government of Napoleon III. would have extorted a letter of apology from the King."

Roon could not speak. Said Moltke:

"The Gallic cock crows loudly! Such a letter would nicely recoup France for the humiliation of Sadowa."

"Did France succeed in extorting it," retorted the Chancellor, "but she has got to get it first!"

The forehead of Roon was black as thundercloud. He unhooked his collar, and wiped his congested face. The Field-Marshal thrust his hand under his wig perplexedly, saying:

"That His Majesty should continue to treat with Benedetti after all these insults and outrages.... It passes my understanding, I am fain to confess!"

"The Count himself would have no difficulty in reading the riddle," said the Chancellor, shrugging. "He is--according to his own conviction--a diplomat of the first water, a statesman of infinite finesse and irresistible persuasions. Yet he did not coax us into the Emperor's trap in 1867. Speaking of that, I have in my pocket something that will presently jump out of it, a testimony in his own handwriting that he is not quite so clever a fellow as he thinks!"

"To-day," boomed Roon, "I met Prince Gortchakoff. We were riding in the Unter den Linden when he stopped. He spoke of the King's age--the merest allusion in reference to a site he pointed out as being suitable for a statue. His Majesty was to be represented holding a wreath of laurel with the dates of 1864 and 1866 upon it. While emblematical figures of Peace, and the Genius of the Domestic Hearth, were shown disarming him of his helmet and sword."

"A sneer thoroughly merited," said the Chancellor, "by these days of hesitation!" He added: "The Genius of the Domestic Hearth is for the moment at Coblenz. However, wifely expostulations can be conveyed by telegram. Her Majesty's cry is, 'Remember Jena and Tilsit and avoid war, even at the cost of national dishonor!' Should these entreaties of the Queen prevail, she will merit the reproof of Sir Walter Scott--I think it was Sir Walter Scott!--who addressed to his grayhound, Maida, who had torn up--unless I err?--the manuscript of a newly-completed novel. 'Poor thing! thou little knowest the injury thou hast done!'"

"Women are less reasonable," declared Von Boon, "than bitches, to my mind!"

"Nay, nay!" said the Field-Marshal with sudden anger. "Maida was not a bitch, and I cannot agree with you! Great and noble female characters have been, and exist now--not only in the pages of history-books. It may be that Her Majesty is prejudiced--her influence has not always been favorable to the adoption of measures I would have counseled. But she is high-minded!--a great lady, and truly devoted as a wife. And with this ring upon my finger"--he held up his wrinkled left hand and showed the narrow band of gold--"it would ill become me to sit still and hear women likened to the unreasoning beasts that perish, when for all I know my beloved wife Mary is standing by my side!"

He drank a sip of wine, and continued more mildly:

"The good God took her to Himself twelve years ago, in the fullness of life and strength and English beauty!--while I, more than thirty years her senior, hang yet upon the tree. On the top of the hill at Crusau is her tomb, where one day I shall lie beside her. But before that day"--the brave old eyes snapped fire, and he wrinkled up his ancient eagle-beak as though he savored the fumes already--"it may be that I shall smell powder again!"

"Let us drink to that!" said the Chancellor. As they filled their glasses there came a peculiar, scratching knock on the door.

"Come in, Bucher!" cried the host harshly, and the summons was answered by one of His Excellency's Privy Councillors of Legation, a little, stooping old gentleman, with a large hooked nose and a grizzled mustache and whiskers, who was dressed in a chocolate-colored, single-breasted frock-coat, tightly fastened with gilt buttons, and who wore a black satin stock, with the tongue of the buckle sticking up among the locks at the back of his neck, and baggy black cloth trousers ending in the feet of a Prussian Lifeguard, encased in huge and shapeless cloth boots; these moved him noiselessly to the elbow of the Chancellor, to whom he whispered, handing him a card, large and square, and unmistakably feminine:

"And so, as Madame was urgent ... Your Excellency knows what women are!"

"Thanks to some early studies in femininity, I am credited," said the Chancellor, "with knowing a great deal too much about the sex. Where have you put Madame?"

Bucher answered, raising himself on his toes to approach his lips to the large, well-shaped ear; for even seated, the Chancellor overtopped him:

"In the gracious Countess's little red damask back drawing-room."

"It is doubtful, my good Bucher, whether--did she know how she was honored--the gracious Countess would welcome her visitor."

"Alas! Your Excellency!" pleaded the Councillor, "but Her Excellency does not know!--and the room contains nothing valuable. Only a few family pictures--no china, silver, or bric-à-brac. Nothing that it would be any use to steal!"

"Come, come!" expostulated the Minister, his blue eyes alight with cynical amusement, "you must not speak of Madame as though she were a house-thief. Our good Bucher," he went on, turning jestingly to his table companions, "sees little difference between a person who picks brains for pay, and sells the pickings, and another person who picks locks and steals silver vases and cups. Rather a reflection on the Diplomatic Service, now I think of it!"

"Ach! Herr Gott!" said the Councillor in alarm, "I cast no reflection, Your Excellency knows it! Only the woman is of light reputation----"

"And may be light-fingered into the bargain. Possibly--" said the Chancellor, "and all the better if she be so! We will risk my wife's family portraits in her vicinity until after dinner. Have coffee and liqueurs sent to her, and beg her to wait a while." He added, "Let them put cigarettes on the tray--I have no doubt she smokes tobacco. And as the smell will have passed off before my wife and daughter return from Varzin, neither of the ladies will ever know of the desecration of the red damask back drawing-room."

And as Bucher shuffled out of the room to execute his errand, his Chief rang the bell for the third course.

"By the way, Excellency," said the War Minister, as the demure servants out of livery removed the empty dishes: "that Frenchwoman of poor Max Valverden's is driving about Berlin."

"So!" commented the host, turning an inscrutable face upon the Minister. "She must find it very warm, and insufferably dull."

"She consoled herself," said Roon, "not long after Count Max's suicide."

"There," burst out the Field-Marshal, "was an incomprehensible catastrophe! That young man--who was military attaché at our Embassy in Paris until the return of the Allied Armies of Great Britain and France from the Crimea in 1856; and in 1866, ten years later, joined my staff in Austria as third aide-de-camp--I cannot understand it--he must have been demented!"

He unbuttoned the frock-coat, showing an unstarched, but scrupulously clean white shirt and vest of white nankeen, and taking a little silver snuff-box from his waistcoat pocket, laid it down carefully upon the tablecloth as he said:

"In '56 he brought his mistress from Paris with him--he was infatuated with her spirit and beauty. They said she was the wife of an officer in Grandguerrier's Division, who had served throughout the whole of the War in the Crimea."

"A chef d'escadron of Mounted Chausseurs, who seems to have taken his wife's desertion philosophically," commented the Chancellor.

The Field-Marshal took a pinch of snuff, and gravely shook his head.

"Of that I know nothing, but there was no meeting. Max Valverden assured me, on his honor, that an opportunity for the challenge had been given. Otherwise the young Count could not have continued in our Prussian Army--one would naturally have been obliged to retire him." He sneezed and went on: "My personal acquaintance with Valverden began ten years later. He served me--excellently. One should always give due praise to the dead. But when he returned from Austria--then happened the tragedy, at Schönfeld in the Altenwald, where lies his patrimonial property, and where the lady waited. And--he shot himself, upon the very night of his return to her."

"Not," interposed the cool, level voice of the Chancellor, "not being expected until noon of the day following."

"Of that I know nothing," said Moltke, turning his ascetic hairless face full upon the speaker. "What I know is that an officer who faithfully served his country and whom I had recommended for distinction, at the earliest opportunity--died by his own hand! How the woman was left, I cannot tell you."

"Count Maximilian von Schön-Valverden had provided for Madame de Bayard when summoned upon active Service," said the Chancellor. "His family did not contest the will, and she is not badly off. Therefore," he added with a smile, "when she condescends to serve my Intelligence Department as a spy, you may suppose she does not do it too cheaply. I must refer to my perambulating ledger, Bucher, before I quote you the exact figures of the sum I am to hand her to-night. She is a true daughter of the horseleech, who cries 'Give, give, give!' incessantly. But all the same I am indebted to her for those remarkably interesting particulars concerning the Mission of M. de Straz to Prince Antony."

"So!" ejaculated Von Roon in astonishment. The Field-Marshal rubbed his chin and turned his clear eyes upon the speaker, who went on smilingly:

"M. de Straz is susceptible--a fatal fault in a conspirator. Madame is still seductive, with a figure like Circe, ropes of black silk hair, a skin of cream, though the roses are bought ones! and eyes the color--exactly the color of old, pale tawny port. Now, when you reflect that she is waiting in my wife's red boudoir to interview me in my next spare moment--do you fear for my hitherto unassailable virtue, or regard me as proof against such charms?"

"I never bet more," said Moltke, "than half a pfennig, and then only when I play cards with my niece."

"I will wager you proof," cried Roon, "for two hundred thalers!"

"I can hardly bet upon my own marital infidelity!" said the Chancellor, laughing, as a servant uncovered the dish newly placed before him. "Will Your Excellency take some of this?"

"This" was the savory pièce de resistance of the masculine banquet, a lamb of six weeks, roasted to a golden brown, basted with marrow, and surrounded with tiny cucumbers stuffed with seasoning.

Moltke accepted the offer with alacrity, indifferent to the charms of veal with tomatoes and aubergines. Von Roon, declining, hurled himself upon a fillet of beef jardinière, and hacked a huge steak from its surface as with a sword, rather than a carving-knife. The Chancellor, plying his gleaming weapons delicately, liberally supplied his guest and piled his own plate, saying as he launched himself upon its contents with unabated appetite:

"Confederations may disappoint us--Kings may deceive us--while our teeth and our digestions faithfully serve us, we can find some zest in life. When I retire, I shall cultivate vegetables, plant forest-trees, rear trout, breed cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry--drop my hereditary patronymic as I shed my titles of office and be known to all posterity as the Farmer of Varzin!"

The hall-bell had been heard to ring a moment previously. There was another scratching signal on the door, and Bucher appeared, manifestly excited and carrying a telegraphic dispatch.

"What now?" asked the Chancellor, finishing a mouthful.

"A telegram from Ems----" began the Councillor.

The imperious hand whipped it from between his pudgy fingers; the masterful voice demanded, as the envelope was rent open:

"The decipherer has not left?"

"Excellency, no!" twittered the Councillor, agitated by the portentous frown of his Chief, and by the grave faces of Moltke and Roon. The paper was thrust back to him with the curt order:

"Get this deciphered--do not delay!"

And as the Legation Councillor vanished, Bismarck said with a short laugh, bending his powerful regard on the gaunt, black stare of the War Minister:

"It is from the King, and will not please us. We may make up our minds beforehand to that. Yet I drink this glass to the honor of Prussia!" And filling his great bumper glass from a fresh bottle that had been placed at his elbow, he gulped down at least a pint of the creaming nectar of the Widow Clicquot, and his guests, in smaller measures, pledged the same toast. After that they sat in silence, the Chancellor alone continuing to eat with appetite--until the Councillor's big feet came shuffling back again.

"The copy, Excellency, 200 groups altogether," he began, "signed by the Herr Privy Councillor von Abeken, at His Majesty's command."

The papers he held were whipped away from him. The Chancellor read--and his countenance most grimly altered. His brows grew thunderous, trenches dug themselves along his forehead, caves appeared about his blazing eyes, and the pouches under them portentously bagged. The heavy mustache might shade the mouth and chin, but could not hide that they were changed to granite. He passed his firm hand over them and said, his incisive tones veiled with a curious hoarseness:

"Mr. Councillor of Legation, you will now leave us. When I ring the bell it summons you. Pray tell Dr. Busch that his services will be needed. Some articles must be written for the Press to-night."

He said, as the door closed behind Bucher, and the smile that accompanied the words was grim and cynical:

"Well, gentlemen, we have got our final slap in the face! The Press organs of the Ultramontane and the Democrats will call us by our nicknames to-morrow: 'Old Hellfire' and 'Death's Chess-Player' and 'The Pomeranian Ogre' and all the rest. But--I swear to you that no enemy of mine will ever despise me as I now despise myself!"

Roon and Moltke regarded him in silence. He went on speaking, still with that strange hoarseness:

"Some have called me the Iron Chancellor. I will tell you by what title Wilhelm the First of Prussia will go down to posterity. Men will speak of him as the Fluid King. It is written in the Scriptures,--all day the phrase has haunted me,--'Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel!'"

At a glance from the War Minister, Moltke rose up suddenly. His stooping scholar's body sprang upright as a lance. He said, and the words rang clear as steel on steel:

"Your Excellency, I deplore the necessity of imposing silence upon you. But the obligation of my military oath, and your own----"

He paused as the great figure of his host reared up at the head of the table. He saluted the Field-Marshal and said coldly:

"Herr General Field-Marshal, the rebuke is merited. Holding the King's commission as Colonel of White Cuirassiers of the Landwehr, I have spoken treasonably. Does your Excellency wish me to ring for my sword?"

Moltke's wrinkled face flashed into amusement, as the Chancellor imperturbably stretched his hand to the bell beside him. He said, laughing:

"Colonel Count von Bismarck-Schönhausen, I accept your apology. I will limit the period of your arrest to confinement to this room until conclusion of dinner, on condition that you read now this message from Ems."

The Chancellor saluted, and glancing at Roon, who was now standing, gloomy and downcast, "We look," he said, "like three mourners about a bier. It is, in fact, Prussia who lies dead upon the table. However, judge of the situation for yourselves."

And he read out the famous telegram handed in at Ems at three-thirty:

"_Count Benedetti spoke to me on the Promenade in order to demand from me finally, in a very important manner, that I should authorize him to telegraph at once to Paris that I bound myself for all future time never again to give my consent if the Hohenzollerns should renew their candidature. I refused at last somewhat sternly, as it is neither right nor possible to undertake engagements of this kind à tout jamais. Naturally I told him that I had received no news; and as he was earlier informed from Paris and Madrid than myself, he could clearly see that my Government once more had no hand in the matter._"

"Ei-ei!" broke in Moltke, "'Somewhat sternly' ... 'Naturally I told' ... 'Neither right nor possible,' and then 'no hand in the matter!' Do I hear the King--or have my ears played tricks on me?"

"Kreuzdonnerwetter!" exploded Roon. "Well might one ask 'Is this the master or the servant speaking?' But go on, go on, I pray your Excellency!"

The reader had transformed his face to an expressionless mask that might have been wrought in stone or metal. Now the tell-tale huskiness of fierce emotion cleared from his voice. He resumed:

"This closes His Majesty's personal communication. Herr Privy Councillor Abeken continues to the end."

Said Moltke: "Let us hear what little Abeken has got to say to you."

The cold, incisive voice recommenced reading:

"_His Majesty commands me to inform you, that he has since received a letter from the Prince. His Majesty, having told Count Benedetti that he was awaiting news from the Prince, has decided, upon the representation of Count Eulenburg and myself, not to receive Count Benedetti again, but only to let him be informed through an aide-de-camp that His Majesty has now received from the Prince confirmation of the news Benedetti has already received from Paris, and has nothing further to say to the Ambassador. His Majesty leaves it to Your Excellency whether Benedetti's fresh demand and its rejection should not be at once communicated both to our Ambassadors and to the Press representatives._"

The close of the Royal communication plopped into a pool of silence. The Chancellor coughed, and said with his characteristic stutter:

"The-the laxity and diffuseness of the verbiage of this dispatch l-lul-leave me in no doubt as to the favorable effect the Ems waters have already wrought upon the constitution of His Majesty!"

Roon barked his laugh. Moltke raised his thoughtful head from his breast and said laconically:

"It gives me the belly-ache to listen to such rubbish. Are we German men or German mice?"

The Chancellor shrugged and said:

"More than ever it is clear that my position is untenable. The King, under pressure of threats mingled with entreaties, has permitted himself to be heckled by the Emperor's Franco-Italian emissary. He ignores my urgent request that he should refer Benedetti to his Foreign Minister. Now, by the medium of an inferior official, he tells me that I may acquaint the representatives of the State and the Press--that nothing is settled and no definite end in view! What is settled is, that I resign!"

Von Roon called out harshly, striking a sinewy fist upon the table:

"Your Excellency will not leave your friends in this extremity?"

Moltke turned to him half whimsically, half pleadingly:

"For our sake, Otto, stick by the old wagon!"

The Chancellor said, with a sudden softening of the grim lines of his strong face, and of the eyes that had been fixed and expressionless:

"You talk, both of you, like two babes in the wood. As far as regards my personal influence to sway the King or control the feeling of the Reichstag--another hand may guide the State as well as this of mine. Yet, were it possible--having already the King's permission--to produce a somewhat concentrated version of this verbose telegram.... Has either of you a pencil?--mine has been mislaid.."

"Here, take mine!" said the Field-Marshal eagerly.

The Chancellor took the offered pencil with a brief nod of thanks, swept the silver-gilt milkmaid ruthlessly aside, and spreading the forms containing the Royal dispatch on the space she had occupied, pored over them for a moment, frowning heavily, before the red-chalk crayon began to play its part. Words were struck out--then whole sentences....

"Ah, ah!" said Moltke, beaming. "He has finished at last. Now let us hear what it sounds like with its mane cropped and its tail docked?"

"Reduced," said the Chancellor, lifting his great eyes from the red-crayoned papers, "without addition or alteration, the message might run thus..."

He read:

"After the news of the renunciation of the hereditary Prince of Hohenzollern had been officially communicated to the Imperial Government of France by the Royal Government in Spain, the French Ambassador at Ems further demanded of His Majesty the King that he would authorize him to telegraph to Paris that His Majesty the King bound himself for all future time never again to give his consent should the Princes of Hohenzollern renew their candidature."

"Good, very good!" growled Roon.

"That seems to me excellent!" said Moltke, twinkling.

The Chancellor finished:

"His Majesty the King thereupon decided not again to receive Benedetti, the French Ambassador, and sent the aide-de-camp on duty with the information that His Majesty had nothing further to say to him!"

"Bravo, bis!" roared Roon.

"Why," said Moltke, rubbing his hands delightedly, "now it has a different ring altogether. Before it sounded like a parley. Now it is a fanfare of defiance! Sentences like these are worthy of a King!"

"And there can be no accusations of falsification," said the Chancellor, bending his powerful regard upon his two colleagues. "The Bund Chancellor carries out what the Prussian monarch commands. He communicates this text by telegraph to all our Embassies and to the Press agencies. Is it his fault if its published words provoke the Gallic cock to show fight?"

"I understand," said the War Minister joyfully, "that we should be the party attacked first. And we shall be, and we shall win! Our God of old lives, and will not let us perish!"

"Has Your Excellency nothing to say to me?" asked the Chancellor, fixing his great eyes on the face of Moltke, now radiant with childlike happiness.

"Were I a poet," returned the joyous old artist in war, seizing the hand outstretched to him across the table, and wringing it between both his own, "I should crown you with a wreath of laurel inscribed 'Hail to thee, Guardian of Prussia's honor!' or something of that kind. Being what I am, I say that you are what my English nephews would call 'a trump!' As you said this morning when you quitted Varzin, 'War Is Inevitable!'" He added, hitting himself a resounding thump in the chest: "And if I may but live to lead our armies in such a war--then the devil may come directly we have conquered these Frenchmen and fetch away this crumbling old carcass!" He added, with a change to gravity: "I do not say my soul, for I am a decent Christian. Hey, look here, our dinner has got cold!"

It was true; the viands were stagnant in the dishes. The fillet sat in the center of a stagnant lake of congealed gravy; the roasted lamb, reduced by the onslaughts of the Chancellor to a partial skeleton, was covered with a frosting of rich white fat. He said, with a laugh that clattered against walls and ceiling like a discharge of musketry, and reaching for the bell that would summon Bucher:

"It does not matter; my cook has always a second menu ready in case of delays or accidents. While Bucher communicates to our Embassies and the European Press Agencies the concentrated essence of His Majesty's telegram--while hundreds of thousands of handbills are being printed that shall disseminate the text throughout Germany, and Busch writes the articles that shall put the needful complexion on this affair--we will order up the Moet and Chandon White Star--I am thirsty after so much talking!--and eat our dinner again!"

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XXVII

Ever since the King, returning from the baths of Ems, had been met at the railway-station by his Under-Secretary of State bearing France's declaration of war,--a huge, orderly crowd, compact of all classes and callings, had ceaselessly rolled through the streets of Berlin, chanting with its thousands of sturdy lungs "Heil dir im Siegerkranz" and the "Wacht am Rhein" until its patriotic fervor reached a state of ebullition only to be relieved by volleys of cheers.

Jammed in the solid mass of bodies blackening the Unter den Linden and packing the Opera-Platz to suffocation,--until the bronze equestrian statue of the Great Friedrich, opposing the eastern courtyard gateway of the small stuccoed Palace, reared above a tossing sea of heads,--P. C. Breagh tasted the raptures of emancipation from the mill-round, and drank in news at every pore.

For this was life in earnest.... With the red-hot cigar-end of a corpulent merchant burning the back of his neck, and the crook of a market woman's blue-cotton umbrella imperiling his left eye; while the sword-hilt of a gigantic Sergeant of Uhlans insinuated itself between his third and fourth ribs on the right side, and the huge flaxen chignon of a servant-girl, armed with a capacious market-basket crammed with meat, fish, and vegetables for family consumption, bobbed itself into his mouth whenever he opened that feature to cheer, or gasp for air, heavily burdened with the fumes of beer, schnaps, herring-salad, garlic, sauerkraut, and perspiring humanity, he was happier than ever he had been before.

The King, it was said, was holding a council with his Ministers and Generals in his study on the ground-floor of his Palace looking on the Opera-Platz. Presently His Majesty might be expected to come out.

The tall, elderly, white-whiskered officer in the undress uniform of the Prussian foot-guards--a blue tunic with red facings, silver buttons and epaulettes--had already appeared upon the balcony of a window overlooking the Linden, and touched his spiked helmet in response to the frenzied acclamations of his scarlet, perspiring subjects, whose staring eyes and open mouths a Berlin dust-storm was filling with peppery grit.

Presently the King had moved back into the room behind him, and returned with the Queen, a tall, thin, elegant lady in half-mourning, who was weeping; people said, because she hated the thought of war, and had besought her husband, on her knees, to truckle to the Napoleon at Paris, and thus avert hostilities.

When the royal couple had retired amid plaudits of a somewhat less enthusiastic kind, the people had demanded the Crown Prince; and the King had stepped out yet again with his hand on the shoulder of the heir-apparent, a tall and stalwart man of thirty-nine, with a clear red-and-white complexion, setting off his well-cut features, kindly blue eyes, and flowing beard of yellow-brown.

Unser Fritz!--his manly good looks and the Order of Merit shining on his general's uniform had provoked fresh outbursts of patriotic enthusiasm, in which the gray-powdered foliage of the overrated linden-trees, limply resting during a sudden lull of the dust-storm, had been wildly agitated, and the very street-lamps had rocked.

But when the King, turning to his heir, gave him his hand,--when the son, reverently bending, raised it to his lips, and the father with manifest emotion embraced him,--there had fallen a silence of sympathetic emotion.... Then the great martial figure had reared erect again and, stepping to the front of the balcony, had shouted to the people:

"Krieg! Mobil!"

"Mobilization!... War!..."

All the shouting that had gone before was no more than the squealing of a kindergarten compared with the mighty roar that greeted these two pregnant words! The scorching, dusty blue sky-dome, now tinged with sandy-pink sunset toward the Brandenburg Gate, seemed to quiver with the upward rush of it. And--not by accident--from the forest of flagstaffs mounted on the Palace, the Opera House, and the buildings contingent,--as down the whole length of the Linden to the Ministerial palaces of the Wilhelm Strasse,--the black-and-white Flag of Prussia and the Hohenzollern banner of white with the black eagle and the cross of the old Teuton Order, broke and fluttered on the sandy breeze.

The National Anthem broke out once more, and the war-song, "Ich bin ein Preusse." The King retired on his son's arm manifestly overcome with weariness. Still the vast crowd of heated faces, set with shining eyes, and holed with roaring mouths, persistently turned toward those ground-floor windows of the Palace. Something more yet! asked all the gaping mouths and staring eyes.

But the blinds of the monarch's study were pulled down, unmistakably signifying that all was over for the present.... The central valves of the great gilded Palace gates were now shut, leaving open only the smaller carriage-way, through which mounted aides and orderly officers conveying dispatches presently began to stream. The carriages of Ministers and other State officials followed these, while lesser personages, emerging from the exit left for pedestrians, began to hail cab-drivers from the stand of hackneys on the Linden side of the Opera House. Swearing, the frustrated Jehus of these vehicles laid about them with their whips in the endeavor to force their animals through the solid crowd....

A man went down under the hoofs of a wretched Rosinante. There were cries for "Police!" and spiked helmets appeared in the crowd. It surged and swayed.... The guardians of the law had drawn their cutlasses and were beating their fellow-children of the Fatherland upon their heads with the flat of these weapons, in the attempt to effect a junction between the cabs and those who wished to hire them. Thus the pressure on the flanks, ribs and breast-bone of P. C. Breagh became suffocating. Lifted from his feet, he was carried backward and forward by rushes, growing less certain of his own identity as the roaring in his ears became louder. Just as his eyelids dropped and he passed out of his own knowledge, a powerful hand caught him by the coat-collar, and a solid rampart of human flesh interposed between his lately-drifting body and the waves of the human sea that raged beyond.

Gulping, P. C. Breagh became aware that he was spread-eagled against the railings of the Palace courtyard facing the Unter den Linden, and that a big man in a loose black waterproof rain-cloak and broad-leaved black felt hat was holding to a railing on each side of him and warding off the rushes.

"Th-thanks! I'm tremendously obliged!..." he was beginning, when the swish of the cutlasses and the shrieking of the cutlassed drowned his voice. Yet another voice, masculine, resonant, and imperious, dominated all others; it cried:

"The King commands the police to sheath their swords!"

And upon the instant lull in the tumult that followed came another order:

"His Majesty has work to do for the Fatherland. Let the people disperse quietly to their homes!"

And the crowd, pacified and quieted, answered, "We will so!" in a crashing volley of Teutonic gutturals, and began to split up and move away in sections, singing "Heil dir im Siegerkranz" in sonorous unison. When through the Palace gates came a small and shabby brougham drawn by a venerable bay, and driven by an elderly coachman in gray-and-black livery, the sight of whose military cockade evoked another whirlwind of enthusiasm....

"Moltke! It is our Moltke!" men shouted to one another, and the old General, who sat alone in the carriage, the lean, stooping, septuagenarian in the spiked helmet, whose thin, ascetic face was rosy with suppressed excitement and whose pale blue eyes twinkled good-humoredly between their narrow lids at the seething ocean of humanity in which the shabby brougham labored, saluted in acknowledgment of the cheers.

"Moltke! Long live our Moltke! But where has Otto got to!" hiccuped an alcoholic seaman, clutching the ledge of the brougham window. He continued in the midst of a silence born of consternation: "What has become of the Big Pomeranian? We would have--hic!--carried him home shoulder-high for this week's--hic!--work he has done!"

Zealous hands dragged the presumptuous speaker back, as the venerable expert in war doffed his spiked helmet, and said, popping his auburn-wigged head out of the brougham window:

"Where Count Bismarck is needed there he will be, depend on it! Now, children, let me get back to my maps!"

"Tell us first how things are going in France yonder?" bellowed another Berliner, and the great Field-Marshal answered, pointing the jest with his keenest twinkle:

"You want to know how things are going there? Well, the wheat has suffered from the drought, but acorns and potatoes promise to be plentiful, and pumpkins will be big this year!"

And the crowd, splitting with laughter, made way for the brougham of the Chief of the General Staff, and the joke was sown broadcast over Germany before the end of half an hour. For were not Moltke's acorns the oblong, round-ended bullets of the Prussian needle-gun, as his potatoes were the shrapnel shell cast by the six-pounder steel breech-loaders designed by Krupp for the Prussian field-artillery, and the big pumpkins the seventeen-pound projectiles fired by the siege-guns of nine centimeters' bore? ...

The massive ribs that had acted as buffers between P. C. Breagh and the battering onslaughts of the crowd shook with laughter as the brougham moved on through a lane that continuously opened in the mass of bodies and closed when it had passed.... Then their owner settled the wide-leaved felt hat more firmly on his head, and said in well-bred, fluent English, turning his heavily-jowled face and powerful, fiery-blue eyes on P. C. Breagh, who was thanking him in his best German for his timely assistance:

"Do not thank me so effusively. I have a habit of sometimes saving a man's life! Yours happened to be in peril; there is no need to say more!"

The clear incisive tones had an inflection that was almost contemptuous, yet a smile, curving the heavy mustache, showed the small and well-preserved teeth it shadowed, as he added in his admirable English, fastening a button of the thin black waterproof cloak which had been disarranged in the recent struggle sufficiently to show that it covered some sort of military uniform:

"Save this,--that I happen to possess a son about your age, and should not care to lose him!"

And with this he was gone, leaving P. C. Breagh breathless with the greatness of the adventure that had befallen him. For the owner of the bulldog face with the fierce blue eyes blazing over their heavy orbital pouches, was the unpopular Minister who had been booed by the Ultramontane and Socialist students three years before, as the Berlin express-train passed through the station of Schwärz-Brettingen--the all-powerful Chancellor, who was meant when diplomats and Press leader-writers referred to "Prussia."

What did he on foot in those packed, roaring thoroughfares, where the assassin's dagger or revolver might play its part so safely? Perhaps, like the Third Napoleon, whose peacock bubble of Empire might now have reached the point of bursting, Count Bismarck believed in his fortunate star....

Ah! what was that round bright object lying on the pavement? P. C. Breagh, still dazed with the magnitude of the thing that had befallen him, stooped and picked, it up.

It was a medal of silver, with the Prussian Eagle enameled in red upon the obverse, and a name which left no doubt as to the identity of P. C. Breagh's rescuer. Upon, the reverse was the inscription: "Fur Rettung aus Gefahr"--"For Saving From Danger." With the date of the 24th June, 1842....

No doubt the Chancellor prized this, the decoration earned at twenty-four for saving his orderly-groom and another private from drowning, when serving as Landwehr cavalry officer with the Stargaard Regiment of Hussars. Well, he should have it back,--but into no hands but his would P. C. Breagh surrender it,--P. C. Breagh, who had been cast out with mockery from the editorial offices of one daily and two evening newspapers, when he had offered--at a rate of astounding cheapness,--to supply their columns with material drawn from the experiences of one who had never previously enjoyed an opportunity of seeing the thing called War.

One Editor had dealt with him drastically, pitching his card into the waste-paper basket, and saying, "No! Get out with you!" A second had whistled up a tube and called down a sub-editor, and said to him, "Look at this!" The third had preached a brief but pithy sermon on presumption and cocksureness, winding up with the intimation that if P. C. Breagh ever found himself at the seat of war and in possession of any experiences worth recording, he might submit them for consideration if he chose.

These men would never know it, but they were profoundly humiliated. At least one of them had lost a half-column, striking the note of personal adventure to the clink of shekels of fine gold. As for Mr. Knewbit ... P. C. Breagh could almost hear him chuckling--had only to shut his eyes to see the poker, sketching out headings on the Coram Street kitchen wall:

"ADVENTURE OF YOUNG ENGLISHMAN.

WAR CORRESPONDENT IN BERLIN.

CRUSHED BY THE CROWD.

RESCUED BY BISMARCK.

THE IRON HAND SAVES A LIFE!"

Meanwhile, the medal had to be returned to the hands of its owner, who must, P. C. Breagh was firm on that!--consent to receive it from the hands of the finder, if he wanted it back again. P. C. Breagh knew the Foreign Office, in the Wilhelm Strasse--the shabbiest residence in all that street of official palaces--with its high-pitched, red-tiled Mansard roof, its shabby gray stuccoed front (a main building with two short wings, pierced by twelve windows, and decorated with a sham-Hellenic frieze and shallow pilasters),--and its big, park-like garden stretching away behind.

So, clutching the precious token, P. C. Breagh plunged back into the crowd. It was dense, but no longer solid, and, still lustily singing, with intervals of cheering, it bore him down the Linden as far as the Brandenburg Gate.

There it split into three vociferating rivers of humanity. One of which streamed north-westward toward the offices of the Great General Staff, where Moltke, the ancient war-wizard, was busy over his maps! Another, desirous of refreshment, surged onward in the direction of the Thiergarten. The third flowed down the street of palaces, and with it went P. C. Breagh.

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XVIII

The Foreign Office knocker was a colossal funereal wreath, of sooty bronze laurel, that wakened hollow startling echoes in the tomb-like void of a grim stone vestibule.

The vestibule lay at the end of a glass-roofed passage. On the right was a window, behind the window gleamed an eye, belonging to the Chancery janitor who had manipulated the door-levers. The door banged behind P. C. Breagh, and his hope climbed a central flight of stairs, gray-white marble, with bronze balusters badly in need of cleaning. The staircase was covered with worn Turkey carpet, was lighted from above by a green and gold cupola, and guarded by two conventional figures of sphinxes, carved in shiny blackish stone.

All these details the eye of P. C. Breagh gleaned over the arm of the Chancellor's door-porter, a seven-foot East Prussian, who wore plain black official livery and carried no gold-headed staff, yet would have snubbed the Rector of the University of Schwärz-Brettingen had he presented himself in this unceremonious way.

"What does he want? The young man must know that His Excellency the Royal Chancellor of the North German Confederation is engaged upon State business--not to be approached by strangers having no appointments or credentials previously obtained. An introduction to His Excellency is indispensable. Where has the young man lived that he does not know that?"

To which the young man thus addressed could only reiterate that he deeply regretted the absence of a letter of introduction, and that his credentials could only be displayed to His Excellency himself.

"It is likely!" The porter's forehead corrugated with suspicion: "Thus is he approached by lunatics and dangerous persons, armed with crazy petitions or lethal weap----"

"Bosh!"

The English word made the porter leap in his square-toed, steel-buckled half-shoes. Recklessly P. C. Breagh went on:

"I'm neither a lunatic nor an assassin... It's just a case of Rettung aus Gefahr. Two lives saved in the year 1842, and another less than an hour ago.... Send that message to His Excellency, and he'll see me, I believe!"

"He believes!" ... snorted the porter indignantly.

A little, stooping, shabbily dressed old man in a chocolate-colored frock-coat with gilt buttons came shuffling across the vestibule carrying a handful of papers, telegrams they appeared to be. He had paused to listen to the latter part of the colloquy, holding his head on one side, as though the better to focus his sharp gray glance on the dusty, obtrusive young Englishman crowned with a sun-burnt Oxford straw hat, attired in a well-worn brown Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers and heather-mixture woolen stockings, and shod with stout, black, leather-laced, hob-nailed boots.

"He believes!" exclaimed the porter as though referring to the chocolate-coated old gentleman. "Will not the highly well-born Herr Legation-Councillor order that I summon Grams and Engelberg, and have this presumptuous person thrown into the street?"

"Softly, softly, my good Niederstedt!" advised the little chocolate-coated old gentleman. He added, shuffling forward in his immense black cloth boots over the slippery marble pavement of the vestibule: "It has occurred to me that an utterance of this young man's referred to an article that has been lost by His Excellency." He added, fixing his sharp, gray, jackdaw's eyes on the face of the young man: "Not valuable, but worth recovering--purely as a memento of the past!..."

Said Carolan bluntly:

"I did refer to such an article. In fact, I have it on me!"

A finger and thumb, stained with snuff, dipped into the Councillor's waistcoat pocket. He said, secretly conveying an order to the watchful porter with a twirl of one jackdaw-eye:

"For a couple of thalers," he displayed the coin, "a box of smokable cigars may be purchased in Berlin." He added, having cast for a bite, and missing the rise: "Four thalers secures a really excellent article!"

"Certainly," agreed P. C. Breagh.

"But for ten thalers," continued the old gentleman with forced enthusiasm, coaxingly beckoning P. C. Breagh to approach nearer, "one may smoke the choicest Havana brands. Give me the medal, fortunate young man, and take the money. Such a sum is not often picked up in the street!"

Said the young man, thus adjured, thrusting out his square chin obstinately:

"If His Excellency consents to receive me, I will personally return the medal to him. Be good enough to let him know as much."

"Unhappy young man! you realize not the greatness of your own presumption!" expostulated the old gentleman, lifting up his warty eyelids and puffing out his whiskered cheeks over his old-fashioned black satin stock. "Is the Chancellor of the Realm to be--and at a national crisis such as this?--at the beck and call of every English traveler?" He added with warmth: "For I know you to be of that nation, young man, though you speak German with some approach to facility. Hence! Trouble here no more, but give me that medal before you take your departure. Otherwise you will be forcibly relieved of it by the hands of those who are accustomed to deal with bumptious and obstinately-authority-defying persons of your description...."

He added, as the arms of P. C. Breagh were pinioned in an iron grip that clamped the elbows together behind the shoulder-blades, drew his arms down, and pinioned his wrists: "He, he, he! That was a capital stratagem of yours, my excellent Niederstedt! Really very smartly done!"

The grim, sable-clad porter, in whose huge hands P. C. Breagh vainly struggled, relaxed into a smile at the compliment. He said, as from different points two stalwart liveried attendants appeared, hastening to lend assistance:

"One has not served in the Prussian Guards for nothing. Once a soldier, always a soldier! Will the highly well-born Herr Legation-Councillor order Grams and Engelberg to hold this English pig-dog while I take His Excellency's medal out of the fellow's clothes?"

Snarled P. C. Breagh, livid with rage and glaring at the hostile faces like a young male tiger-cat:

"Add robbery to violence if you think well!--you are four to one--and in your own country. But as an English journalist I protest against the outrage.... And the British Ambassador shall take the matter up!"

There was an instant's pause of indecision, during which P. C. Breagh heard the opening of a door on the landing above. Then, with the rustle of silk, and the soft fall of footsteps traversing heavy carpets, a resonant voice called down the stair that led up between the basalt Sphinxes:

"Meanwhile, you will allow me to apologize for the too-excessive zeal of my servants. Do me the favor to come up here!"

The grip of the giant porter became flaccid as an infant's. The voice spoke again from the summit of the stair:

"Herr Legation-Councillor, will you kindly see Madame to her carriage? Au revoir, Madame, et bon voyage!"

A liquid voice responded:

"Au revoir, Monseigneur! At Paris--who knows!--before the Noël!"

She pulled down her veil, curtsied with demure elegance, and came softly rustling down in pale-hued, trailing silks and laces, one snow-white hand blazing with splendid emeralds lightly passing over the bronze baluster-rail, the other holding the ivory and jeweled stick of a dainty parasol.

"Madame!"

As by an afterthought he had called her. Midway in her descent the lady turned to look up at him. He said, bending his powerful eyes upon the face of sensuous loveliness:

"Pardon! but I believe--you are a native of France?"

The hint stung. She returned, with the stain of an angry blush darkening the roses purchased from Rimmel; and a hard line showing from the angle of each delicate nostril to the corner of the deep-cut, scarlet lips:

"Monseigneur is correct ... I am a Frenchwoman.... But the heart is free to choose its own country.... And--mine has learned to beat for the Fatherland!..."

So exquisite was the cadence with which the words were uttered, that P. C. Breagh heaved an involuntary sigh. The Legation-Councillor took snuff--it may have been his way of showing emotion. The huge porter sighed like a locomotive blowing off steam. His colleagues, who, like himself, stood waiting in rigid military attitudes, suffered no sympathy to appear in their wooden faces, yet may have felt the more. But the heavy mask of their master was divested of all expression.

"Even," said he, in his clear, resonant voice, "to the point of outdoing Agamemnon, King of Argos. For he--but doubtless you are familiar with the classic story!--merely sacrificed Iphigeneia on the altar of the virginal Artemis...." He added with a tone of intolerable irony: "It would have required fewer scruples and more toughness than Agamemnon possessed to have offered up an only daughter to Venus Libertina.... Only a woman of fashion would be capable of such infamy.... Pardon! but you have dropped your parasol!"

She had shuddered and winced as though his words had been vitriol,--dropped from above--corroding her delicate flesh.... The costly toy had fallen from her hand as the shudder had passed over her, and rolled down the stair, as she continued her descent. P. C. Breagh picked it up and handed it to her, as she set foot upon the lowest step of the staircase. She looked at him, and bent her head. And the beauty that had been hers a moment back was so strangely, bleakly altered, he could scarcely repress an exclamation of dismay.

Thus Circe might have stared, thought P. C. Breagh, when her feeding hogs leaped up as men frantic for vengeance. Thus Duessa, when the spotted image of her own vileness was reflected in the glassy shield of Truth.

The change in the boy's face stabbed Madame to consciousness. She caught at her mauve tulle veil, forgetful that it was already lowered, and tore it horizontally, so that her full white rounded chin emerged with fantastic effect, like the moon through a bank of storm-wrack. And then, with her head held high, she swept through the vestibule in a frou-frou of silks and a gale of perfume, and down the passage ending in the hall-door with the funereal knocker. The Legation-Councillor trotted after her. One of the servants followed him, and P. C. Breagh, mounting the staircase between the Sphinxes, reached the landing and the summit of his ambitions in a breath.

"Time is scarce!" said the man who was meant when Prime Ministers and political leader-writers referred to Prussia. "I have no more than five minutes to spare, but you shall have them. Come this way! So you are an English journalist! What paper do you represent, here in Berlin? Sit down and tell me in as few words as possible!"

They were in a small but lofty room on the first-floor, hung with green flock paper. It had a fireplace as well as a stove, and it was a study, yet it contained no bookcases, only a couple of shelved stands laden with pamphlets and papers of the official kind. The two high windows--open and unblinded, though the green-shaded reading-lamp upon the big carved mahogany writing-table was alight--looked across the extensive gardens reaching to the Königgratzer-Strasse. Beyond lay the Thiergarten, all black with masses of people under the sultry red-gold sunset of middle July.

Perhaps you can see--like Scaramouch and the Sultan in the Eastern story--P. C. Breagh, hot and dusty, flushed and rumpled, seated opposite the most formidable personage of the day. He who dictated to Kings and carried his Foreign Office trailing after him whenever he chose to go campaigning, stood upon the skin of a white lioness that served as hearthrug, and bit off the end of a huge cigar. He looked bulkier than ever, and the powerful modeling of his scant-haired temples, the splendid dome of the skull that housed the keenest intellect in Europe, the masterful regard of the great eyes, the sarcastic humor of the mouth shaded by the heavy mustache--traits and features reproduced so constantly in the illustrated newspapers of the period,--conveyed to Carolan the impression that a portrait moved and spoke.

He was attired, as usually represented, in a dark blue, braided military undress-frock, and trousers tightly strapped over boots with cavalry spurs. An Order hung at his collar. As he threw back his head in the act of lighting his cigar, P. C. Breagh recognized it--the Cross of a Commander of the Red Eagle. While on the left breast of the blue frock-coat was a small three-cornered rent in the cloth from which the lost medal had been somehow wrenched away....

The sight of that tear in the dark blue-faced cloth sent the blood racing to P. C. Breagh's forehead. He knew himself for a presumptuous young man. He plunged his hand into the pocket of the brown Norfolk jacket, and brought out the red-and-white enameled decoration, and said, awkwardly laying it upon the edge of the big writing-table, in the yellow radius thrown by the lighted lamp:

"I found this after Your Excellency had gone!"

"Hand it here!" said the heavy blue eyes imperiously. P. C. Breagh got up and obeyed. The Chancellor's long arm shot out, and the muscular white fingers whipped the medal from the palm that offered it. Its owner assured himself by a brief scrutiny that the token had sustained no injury, nodded, and re-pinned it on the breast of his frogged military frock-coat. When this was accomplished,--the small solution in the continuity of the cloth being covered by the decoration,--he said, taking the cigar from his mouth, and knocking off the long crisp ash upon the edge of the white earthenware stove:

"I should have been sorry to have lost that. But, while thanking you for having restored it, let me say that had my servants taken it from you by force majeure they would not have been robbing you,--though in law they might have been held guilty of a personal assault. Now as to your business. You have had one of your five minutes! You have just now said you are an English journalist. Does your business concern the War?"

P. C. Breagh stammered--for the heavy eyes that rested on him seemed to oppress him physically:

"To be frank with Your Excellency, I represent no newspaper. I have some slight experience as a journalist, that is all,--War Correspondence seems to me the highest branch of journalism,--and I want, naturally, to fit myself to practice it. Therefore, as no newspaper would employ me, I accepted a private commission given, out of good-nature, by a friend, who has helped me before. And--my first day in Berlin--I fell in with Your Excellency. I won't deny it seemed a hopeful augury!"

"For the future! ... I understand!" said the Chancellor, sending out a long cloud of cigar-smoke. "And in what way do you suggest that I should help you?"

He put the question so bluntly that P. C. Breagh, in the effort to answer, floundered and boggled. He had suddenly realized his own insect-like insignificance in the eyes that were so intolerably heavy in their regard. His own eyes sank to the neat, small, polished boots of the big man. who stood smoking upon the white lioness-skin. To the wearer of those boots he was merely a beetle who could be crushed by them. The slight ironical smile that altered the curve of the mustache said as much. But the Minister's tone was suave as he went on:

"I think I have grasped the mainspring of your reasoning. To begin with, you desire to accompany one of our armies on the campaign?"

"Yes--sir! Your Excellency, I should say!"

A lambent light of humor danced in the blue eyes that were bent on him. The faint ironic smile broadened into a laugh. The Chancellor took his cigar from his mouth, knocked off the ash, and said quite pleasantly:

"And deducting from this premise, I conjecture that--because I have been privileged to save you from being trampled to death under the feet of the mob upon the Linden, you naturally take it for granted that I would further your ambitions. Gratitude, one of your English authors has admirably defined as a lively sense of favors to come...."

P. C. Breagh, who had been for some time shrinking in his own estimation, suddenly saw himself in a newer, meaner light. His torturer went on in mellifluous English:

"I do not know that any classical German author has defined gratitude quite so cleverly. But we in Pomerania have a folk-story which may be new to you." He drew sharply at his cigar, then laid it glowing on the edge of the stove:

"You speak German quite passably, so I will tell it in our Pomeranian dialect. If this is not done, the dialogue lacks salt. Thus it goes: Wedig Knips, a peasant of Dalow, whose horses wanted watering, went one winter's day to break the ice that covered the drinking-hole.... 'Bless us! what have we here?' says he, when he finds a kerl called Peders, frozen in the ice, with his head down and his heels up. To make a long story short, he chops out Peders, takes him home, and sets him up to thaw before the fire.... 'Now, neighbor,' says he, 'go about your business!'--'How can I when my jerkin is wet and my breeches are full of muddy water?'--Says Wedig: 'Poor devil! I will give you my Sunday trows!'--'And a jerkin too, for you saved my life, you must remember!' ... Wedig scratches his head, but hands over a jerkin with the rest. 'Come, now be off!' says he. '"Off," with my under-pants and shirt all sopping! Do you want to kill me--now that you have saved my life?'--So Wedig pulls a wry face, but hands over the underclothes.... 'Put these on and be off, we are busy people in this house!' 'What,' says Peders, 'without paying me the value of the good duds spoiled in your stinking horsepond?'--'Must I pay?' ... 'Certainly, you have saved my life! Nobody asked you!--I had thrown myself in because I was tired of living. Now it is your bounden duty to make things tolerable for me!'--'How make things tolerable?'--'To begin with, I want a cottage to live in, and a plot of kail-ground to it, and a wee pickle furniture.'--'But I have only this cottage, and the bits of sticks you see!'--'Well, give me them! Didn't you save my life?' ... Wedig gets confused, sees no way out of it. 'The devil!' says he, 'this is a nice affair! However, take them, man!'--'I will take them,' says Peders, 'but you must give me the cart and plow, the cow and the two horses?'--'Himmelkreuzbombenelement! Have I got to give you all that because I saved your life?'--'Ay, undoubtedly!--and you must let me have your wife into the bargain. It's your bounden duty----' 'I know! because I saved your life! Shan't make such a mistake next time, you may be sure of that!'--'No, but you did, so to grumble is no use.'--'Thunder! my old girl will make a terrible squawking.'--'Not when you have explained how you saved my life!' ... Wedig scratches his head, rubs his chin, gets a bright idea.... 'Help me to explain to the wife, do you agree?'--'Ay, of course! What is it you want me to say to her?'--'Oh! say nothing. Only let me show her exactly how I got you out of the water-hole.'--'Willingly!'--'But to do that I must put you back just a minute!'--'Put me back?'--'Only for a minute.' 'Promise when I cry "Genug!" you'll take me out directly!'--'All right! Come along!' So Wedig takes Peders by the legs and sticks him back where he found him, driving his head well down into the mud at the bottom of the pond.... So--he never cried 'Genug!' and Wedig left him there....

The hard blue eyes that had been all alight with laughter, the heavily molded face that had unexpectedly proved itself capable of comic changes, the voice that, as the droll dialogue proceeded, had conveyed with slight, admirably restrained mimicry the complacent assurance of the knave and the dull bewilderment of the victim, changed, became the Minister's again. He said, in his smoothest tones:

"I cannot put you back into the crush of the crowd, because by an appeal to its loyal feelings and domestic instincts I was so fortunate as to disperse it. What I might do, of course, is to deliver you to the tender mercies of my servants, to whom,--when you brought back the medal,--you blustered about delivering it to me personally. This not-exactly-very-clever ruse would have failed--had I not happened to step upon the scene. Your English policy is often more fortunate than masterly.... Fortune certainly has favored you to-day. Not in the fulfillment of your ambition to accompany a Prussian Army to the field of action--that is a wish impossible to gratify. For we put up a general defense against the presence of any save the most highly accredited Correspondents, and the War Minister will only grant Legitimations to two or three. But in obtaining for an obscure paragraphist a special interview with the Prussian Minister for Foreign Affairs on the eve of a world-crisis, Fortune has certainly favored you. Go back now to your hotel and write your article; then telegraph to Fleet Street and make your own terms!"

"I'll be shot if I do!" choked out P. C. Breagh, flaming scarlet to his hair-roots. "And I thank Your Excellency for a lesson, and I beg to take my leave!"

"Why does he go? Why does he talk about a lesson?" asked the broad, cynical gaze that rested on him.

As though he had spoken aloud, P. C. Breagh answered:

"Because I set my personal advantage above common gratitude and honor. Your Excellency lost the medal in pulling me out of the scrimmage at the risk of your own life, and when I found the thing--I used it,--exactly as you say! True, you'd snubbed me when I'd tried to thank you! yet I did believe your having saved me might help me in some way.... But it would be better to cadge in the dustbins for a living, than make money out of information gained by trickery. And I apologize sincerely for having been such a cad!"

"'Cad' is the slang for vulgarian, is it not?" He added: "Yes, they inculcate a code of honor at the English public schools."

The voice grated. P. C. Breagh hated its owner. But he answered, looking squarely in the bulldog face that bent on him:

"They do, and I am sorry to have broken at least one of its articles. May I wish Your Excellency good afternoon!"

The speaker bowed, not clumsily, and turned to quit the room, when a ferocious growl behind him, and the scraping of heavy claws on slippery parquet pulled round his head. Savage, red-rimmed eyes challenged, and the bared gleaming fangs of a huge boarhound couched at length under a wrought-iron sofa at the west end of the longish room menaced the stranger's throat:

"Down, Tyras!" ordered the Minister harshly, and with a deep groan the heavy brute dropped its nose between its forepaws, and lay still, shaken by occasional rumbling growls.

"You see," said the Minister, laughing, "that I can afford to dispense with the services of detectives when this good servant is at hand. Come, sit down another moment.... I am really willing to help you.... You have not come so badly as you imagine out of the affair!"

"But I have said I will not write the article, and I am intruding on Your Excellency's privacy." The soul of P. C. Breagh yearned for the freedom of the streets. To be shut up in the study of the greatest of living Ministers,--set beak-to-beak with the man who was occupying the attention of Europe--the master-mind in statecraft, who used blunt truth as a weapon to beat down diplomatic falsehood, and comported himself amidst the striving parties of his national Parliament as a giant surrounded by dwarfs;--had seemed, previously, a thing to boast of--a dazzling feather in the cap of achievement. Now it was no triumph, but a torture. He writhed under those keen, amused, analytical glances, knowing himself worthy to be so despised.

"I have twenty minutes in which to refresh and rest, not having eaten or sat down since ten o'clock this morning. You have had ten--I will give you another five. Sit down again there!"

Tyras emitted another savage growl as though in support of his owner's authority, and P. C. Breagh, loathing his host even more intensely than he hated P. C. Breagh, obeyed the imperious hand that pointed to the chair he had vacated, and sat down, white-gilled now, and sick with longing to be out of this presence into which he had thrust himself--beyond the reach of the icy, contemptuous tones and the arrogant, domineering eyes.

The Chancellor had turned away to pull at one of the red woolen bell-ropes that hung on either side of the fire-place, shabby things, threadbare with use, like the Persian carpet that was trodden out in paths by the spurred feet of the man who stood for Prussia; worn like the leather cushions of the great wrought-iron sofa, under which the great man's faithful attendant couched, with one eye on the familiar face, and the other on the strange one that might mask an enemy.

Above the sofa, beneath a trophy of fencing-swords and masks, reigning over a rack supporting a number of red and white military undress-caps in all stages of wear, and another containing a collection of pipe-sticks and unmounted pipe-heads, hung the half-length oil-portrait of a beautiful girl in ball-dress. Below was a large-framed photograph of a noble-looking woman, with a mass of black braided hair framing a long, serious face, with grave dark eyes, thick straight nose, and full-curved, humorous lips recalling published engravings of the English author of "Adam Bede." Probably it was the Countess--that same Fräulein Johanna Puttkammer who had been hugged under the gaze of her assembled family. She looked strong, serene and courageous, fit--thought P. C. Breagh--to be the wife of a man destined by Fate and framed by nature to become a leader of men. Also, she looked like a woman who could love with old-world, elemental, forceful passion. She had bestowed such love upon this man--who had begun life as a roaring, hard-drinking young Pomeranian squire, well worthy of the sobriquet of "Mad Bismarck," bestowed upon him by his native county.

She had sifted the gold out of the sand.... She had never openly displayed her influence.... All the same it had been there, guiding, sustaining, controlling.... He had written to her, years after, when he had begun in earnest to be a power in politics.... "You see what you have made me! What should I have done without you?"

Arrogant, harsh, domineering, merciless, as his enemies had reason to term him, there must be something noble in the man who had written like that. He was said to be a kind, if not over-indulgent, father to his two big sons, even then serving as private soldiers in a well-known regiment of Dragoon Guards, and to be worshiped by his daughter, a feminine copy of himself, if that oil-portrait were anything like....

"Have you taken any food to-day?..."

The interrogation brought P. C. Breagh's head round. A servant must have appeared, and gone, and come again in answer to the bell-summons. For on a clear corner of an étagère otherwise piled with official papers and pamphlets, stood a tray, bearing glasses and a vast crystal jug of creaming golden-hued nectar with miniature icebergs floating on the surface; and several dishes of rolls, split, profusely buttered, and lined with something savory, the sight and scent of which awoke tender yearnings within....

"No!--I thought not. Drink this and eat some of these sandwiches. I myself have fasted longer than is agreeable!"

And a huge goblet of the ice-cold creaming nectar was handed to P. C. Breagh, who immediately realized that his tongue and palate were dry as the sun-baked asphalt of the Linden.

"Prosit!" said his host, and drained his glass, adding, as the guest duly responded according to the classic formula and drank: "You are University-bred, I see! What Alma Mater had the preference? Schwärz-Brettingen! ... Ah, they thought very badly of me there about the time of the Luxembourg Garrison Question. Nearly all the little foxes barked at me as I passed through. However, we are now reconciled, and more than a thousand of the students have applied to serve as volunteers in this war,--there's an item of interest for your paper!--though you have Quixotically determined, you say, not to make use of any information that I may be enabled to offer you. All Quixotism is weakness, in my estimation; a man, according to my code, should pursue his advantage where he finds it irrespective of ethical laws or religious prejudice. Now eat some of these stuffed rolls. Here are caviar, smoked goose-breast, Westphalian ham and liver-sausage. You see I set you an example!--and a would-be campaigner should be able to sleep soundly under any and all conditions; and eat whenever anything eatable is obtainable, with unflinching appetite!"

The savory rolls were vanishing under the speaker's repeated attacks, and the golden tide in the great crystal decanter was sinking visibly. He said, lifting and holding it so that between the light of the green-shaded table-lamp and the red glow of sunset pouring through the unblinded western windows, the liquid in it shone ruby and emerald....

"Come, let me fill your glass again, and then I shall send you about your business. Absolved, you understand, from that ridiculous vow of yours--and with a magic talisman to enable you to use your eyes."

The steady hand set down the now emptied jug, and took from the red marble mantelshelf a small and perfectly-finished pair of field-glasses, covered in black Russia leather and mounted in ivory. An inlaid silver shield bore a monogram, "O. v. B.-S.," and a date.

"You can shoot with a pistol?--Good!--then I should advise you to buy one, if possible. A revolver of the American Colt's invention--six-barreled--a feature which increases weight in proportion as it adds to effectiveness--would be useful. Indeed, I carry one myself! One day they will turn out such things with one barrel--but we must wait for that, I am afraid. Here is the case belonging to the glasses, with a strap to sling it round your shoulders--and one thing more I will give you--though I am less certain about its ultimate usefulness!"

The writing-table stood in the middle of the room. He moved to it with one of his long, heavy strides, sat down--dipped quill in ink--and penned a few lines rapidly, glancing at the sunburned, freckled face as though to refresh his memory--holding up an imperious baud for silence when the recipient of the field-glasses seemed about to protest against the value of the gift.

"Your nationality?--'British.' Name, 'Patrick Carolan Breagh--pronounced "Brack." Your height?--Be very accurate. One half-inch too much or too little might bring you into trouble of a serious kind. 'Five feet nine' ... you promise to be taller. Your age ... twenty-three last January.... Shoulders broad, good muscular development. Your hair ... Reddish, is it not? ... You have gray eyes with what the French would call taches of yellow in them. Complexion fresh, considerably freckled. Nose short and straight, ears small, teeth white and regular. Chin square and with a cleft--weaklings have not such chins!..."

He added a brief sentence to the hastily scrawled description, signed and blotted it, rose and came to P. C. Breagh and thrust it in his hand.

"Do not thank me! It is my passing whim to help you--regard it in that light. As to this pass, safe-conduct or whatever one may call it--it may forward you or hinder you.... Potztausend! I am a mere officer of Cuirassiers of the Landwehr--General by courtesy--not Generalissimo! ... You, Bucher! ... What is there wanted now?..."

For a scratch on the door-panel had been succeeded by the flurried entrance of the little Councillor of Legation, breathing hard, and red in the face. He gabbled in Spanish:

"Pardon, Your Excellency, that I enter without knocking. But His Highness the Crown Prince is coming upstairs!..."

And almost in the same instant, as Tyras uttered a deep "wuff" of friendly greeting, the open doorway was filled by the stateliest and most martial figure in Europe, and a pleasant, manly voice said:

"Not finding you in your official quarters below-stairs, I ventured, my dear Count Bismarck, to follow you to your private study. It is a question of whether Le Sourd delivered the war-gauntlet from Paris, or---- Pardon! I had no idea that you were not alone!"

The tall, broad-chested, golden-bearded Viking in the undress uniform of the First Regiment of Guards touched his cap in acknowledgment of P. C. Breagh's respectful salutation. Then, as in obedience to a glance from the Minister, the lean claws of the little Councillor closed upon P. C. Breagh's arm, and he was plucked from the room, the Prince asked, glancing after the queer couple:

"May one ask who your young friend is?" and got answer:

"It is only an English schoolboy, Your Royal Highness,--who thirsts to try his hand at War-correspondence--having had a few articles printed in some London rag. And this being so, he applies to me, who am the least leisured person in His Majesty's dominions---for a moment of my spare time!..."

"It is annoying, my dear Count," answered the mellow-voiced Viking, "but cannot your people keep such troublesome persons outside?"

The Minister returned, laughing:

"He caught me on my doorstep,--as the polecat waylaid the badger!--and as he brought back a decoration I had lost, and which he, luckily for himself, had found!--I could not refuse him a minute's interview. But with regard to Your Royal Highness's question of an instant since--Le Sourd, the French Chargé d'Affaires, placed the Emperor's declaration of war in my hands about an hour after the opening of Council in the Palace to-day."

Said the Prince:

"Unhappy man! driven to risk the loss of an Empire that he may continue to rule a nation of enemies. One can hardly doubt the issue--yet at what cost of lives shall we not purchase victory!"

Bismarck said in harsh, metallic tones, bending his brows upon the Prince, who all the world knew loved peace, and loathed the thought of the red months of strife that were approaching:

"Your Royal Highness is aware that I look upon this war as necessary, and that I should not have returned to Varzin without giving in my resignation to His Majesty had the issue been other than what it is.... As for this weak-backed Napoleon, this Pierrot stuffed with bran,--who is kept in an upright attitude only by the slaps I deal him on one cheek and the buffets the Monarchists and the Revolutionists lend him on the other!--it will be better for him to meet his end by a bullet or a sword-thrust on the banks of the Rhine, than to be blown to pieces by some bomb in the streets of Paris, or to die of apoplexy in the bedroom of some nymph of the theater-coulisses!"

He drew himself to his full height and, folding his powerful arms upon his breast, said, looking full at the Prince, who had declined a seat and who was standing near the window, his hair and beard glowing golden-red in the full rays of the setting sun:

"Your Royal Highness speaks of the effusion of blood. I am of those who have drawn the sword in the service of their King and country. I do not regard war from the point of view of the man who stops at home. More than this! ... His Majesty is not the only father who has a son serving in our Army.... I have two. Herbert and Bill...."

A pale purplish tint suffused his heavy face and crept to the summit of his rugged forehead. His fierce blue eyes dimmed. He said, in slightly muffled tones:

"I am not given to pompous phrases. Yet if German unity can only be brought about by a great national war waged against our near-hand enemy--our old, cunning, sleepless foe--I hail that war, even though it leave me without posterity! If the gulf that divides the Northern and Southern sections of the Fatherland can be better bridged by my boys' dead bodies ... I would give them as freely as I would give my own!"

A spasm twisted his under-jaw. He said, laughing in his stern way:

"Three long-legged Bismarcks should equal one eighteen-foot-seven plank. And I speak not only for myself. My wife would echo me."

Said the Prince in his cordial way:

"My mother has a great admiration for Her Excellency. My wife, too, speaks of her as a woman of antique nobility of mind." He continued, with a smile that curved the bold, frank mouth under the glittering mustache into lines of exceeding pleasantness: "And her personal solicitude for Your Excellency pleases my father much!"

The heavy face that opposed him lost its dogged, set expression. The Minister broke into a hearty laugh.

"So! I have been waiting to hear somewhat of that voluble telegram of hers to Abeken: 'Pray ask the King not to bother Count Bismarck about State matters just now, when he is taking Carlsbad waters for the gout!'

"Ha, ha!" The Prince joined gaily in the laughter. "The Councillor was working with the King and myself, when he received that wire. It came with a sheaf of others--he read it aloud without a change of expression..... Then you should have seen his face ... a study for a comedian...."

The Minister said, still smiling:

"My wife pours many confidences of the domestic sort into Abeken's bosom. She said to him during the Constitutional Conflict of '66 ... 'Bismarck cares really nothing at all about these stupid political matters. A cabbage well grown, or a fir-tree well planted, means more to him than the Indemnity Bill.' Yet when the Bill passed she was all-triumphant. And to-day she remarked to me: 'War is horrible to me on principle. But it would be equally horrible to me if you said to me to-morrow: "All is over!--we do not fight!..."' I made her angry by telling her that one might parody in application to the mental attitude of her sex the lines of the English Poet Laureate, and say:

"Her reason rooted in unreason stood."

"When our German women become too highly educated," said the fair-haired giant, "love will take wing for a land where the culture of the feminine intellect is still unpopular. We males hold our supremacy on the very insecure tenure of a carefully inculcated belief that, being men, we must be wise!"

Said the Minister:

"There is a Pomeranian proverb bearing on that question. 'In the house where a strip of green hide hangs handy, the wife will never know better than her old man!'"

"Unless she happened to be the stronger of the two, bodily as well as mentally, dear Count," the Prince rejoined; "in which case the husband would be well advised to accept the inferior place. For against brute-strength and brains combined, there is no remedy but patience."

Bismarck retorted:

"Possibly--but what if the muscular brute with the brains possesses a share of patience also? There is nothing like knowing how to wait--I assure Your Royal Highness!"

The Prince looked at the great figure topped by the stolid bulldog face, and recalled something that the English Princess, his wife, had said to him that day:

"This fearful struggle will set the coping-stone upon that man's colossal labors and ambitions!"

But he was all grave, gracious cordiality as they passed from the lighter vein of talk to serious questions, though, as he took leave of the Minister at the hall-door and stepped into his waiting carriage, he said to himself mournfully:

"Alix was right. He has what he has waited and schemed for. To light this international conflagration he would have ventured down to fetch a burning brand from the nethermost Hell. And what oceans of blood will be poured out before the fire may be extinguished--none knows but God alone!"

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XXIX

Von Moltke, the ancient war-wizard, went home from the Council-Extraordinary to his private quarters at the offices of the Great General Staff. He dispatched the three-word telegram, and the vast machine began to work....

All had been ready for two years. Nothing was left to finish at the last moment. Not a speck of rust marred shaft or spindle or bearing, not a drop of oil was clogged in any slot.

Days back, the Heads of Departments had been recalled by a brief telegram from the Chief who knew how to be taciturn in seven languages. Now, while in Berlin, as in every other city and town of Prussia Proper and her Eleven Provinces, palaces, mansions, restaurants and cafés, beer-gardens and schnaps-cellars blazed with gas and resounded with the clinking of glasses, and people sat late into the grilling July night discussing and rediscussing that special supplement of the North German Gazette--which was being distributed gratuitously by hundreds of thousands,--predicting the next move of the Man of Iron, and the latest ruse of the Man of Paris,--consuming tons of sausage, caviar, pickled salmon, herrings in salad, and potted tunny, with strawberries and other fruits and sweet dishes, all washed down by floods of cooling beer, or iced Moselle and champagne--the numberless huge barracks and other military establishments displayed another kind of activity.

Here no outbursts of patriotic song and festivity checked the rapid, organized, methodical scurry of warlike preparation. Soldiers ran about like busy ants, purposeful and unblundering. Long trains of Army Service carts and wagons streamed in at divers lofty gates, to emerge at others after the briefest interval, heavily laden with Army stores, Army baggage, War material of all kinds. Night and day, huge Government factories and foundries dithered and roared, filling up newly made vacuums in those huge magazines and storehouses which must always be kept full. In the gloomy dominions of the Iron King, Herr Krupp, that stout-loined Teuton who begat great guns instead of tall sons, and had them godfathered by Prussian Royalty--what forests of tall chimneys belched forth smoke, canopying begrimed and prosperous Westphalian towns, populated by innumerable swarthy toilers in the gigantic iron and steel foundries! At Essen, where mountains of coal kiss the sooty skies, and heavy locomotives ceaselessly grind over networks of shining steel rails, dragging strings of trucks, containing yet more fuel for the ever-hungry furnaces,--within an impregnable rampart of solid masonry,--he dwelt in a Babylonian palace. The panting of innumerable steam-power engines, the banging, moaning, crashing, groaning, and grinding of forges, lathes, and planing-machines; cutting, shaping, boring, and polishing machines; with the beating of sixty-two steam-hammers, of all weights up to that of fifty tons, which cost £100,000 to manufacture, sounded like a cannon whenever it was used, and was kept working without pause, so as not to lose a fraction of the interest of the capital sunk in it--made his concert by day, and by night served for his serenade and lullaby. He made laws for the control of his grimy subjects, this Briareus of ten thousand hands--and enforced them by the aid of his own police and magistrates. With orders in course of execution for Turkey, China, Egypt, Russia, and Spain, he was yet able to deliver eighty cannon per week to the different artillery depots of his Fatherland. His steel, tempered by his secret process, the new ore being brought him from his Spanish mines by his own fleet of transports, surpassed even Bessemer's. Yet he was not a conceited or purse-proud man. By the chief entrance of the biggest of all his factories stood the little soot-blackened forge where forty years before young Krupp had labored with his father and a couple of workmen. Small wonder the powerful Iron King had honor from his over-lord.

Conceive next the well-ordered bustle at the headquarters of the different Army Corps, when the withered finger of the Warlock pressed upon the button, and the spark of electricity leaped along a thousand wires, carrying with it the vitalizing word.... Moltke's methods were then fire-new, and made the world sit up.

You might have seen the Reserve men of the Twelve Provinces--whose summons for assembly lay ready in the Landwehr office of every city, town, village, or hamlet--streaming in at the district depots, bringing each Line regiment up to war-strength (nearly double its numbers in time of peace). Mobilization was no foreign word to them, for once a year, after Schmidt, the field-laborer, had done getting in the harvest, and when Schultz, the bank-clerk, and Kunz, the chemist's assistant, had got their annual autumn holiday, Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz were accustomed to perform a series of carefully rehearsed physical exercises ending in maneuvers, and a safe if inglorious return to the domestic hearth.

Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz were only remarkable by their unlikeness to each other--Schmidt being the brown, uncouth, and unshaven husband of a stout wife and numerous tow-headed babes. Schultz was more recently married to a young lady remotely connected on the maternal side with a family possessing the right to inscribe the aristocratic prefix "von" before its surname. The couple lived frugally on Herr Schultz's salary of thirty pounds a year, somewhere upon the outskirts of the select quarter of the country town (some four miles distant from Schmidt's native village)--while Kunz, the graduate of a University, and author of a text-book of Analytical Chemistry, sold impartially to both, squills, rhubarb-tincture, and porous plasters over the counter of his employer's shop.

Served by the Burgomaster's clerk, or a wooden-faced orderly-corporal, with the compelling bit of paper, Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz, having taken farewell embraces of their nearest and dearest, would sling over their shoulders canvas wallets containing a lump of sausage, a shirt or so, a huge chunk of bread, white or black, with a bottle containing wine or schnaps, and stowing next their skins leather purses containing a few coins, and a parchment volume resembling the English soldier's "small book," would hasten by rail or road in the direction of their regimental rendezvous, toward which bourne the Reserve contingent of other towns, villages, and hamlets would also betake themselves, until the roads were blackened with their tramping bodies and the trains would be packed chock-full. Arrived at Headquarters, batch after batch,--subsequently to a brief but exhaustive medical overhauling--would be dispatched to the arsenal, where attaching themselves to a tremendous queue of other Schmidts, Schultzes, and Kunzes, they would mark time in double-file outside a vast, grim, barn-like structure, until the moment arrived for entering; when with well-accustomed quickness, each would find his way to a certain hook or group of hooks, surmounted with his regimental number, from which depended a certain familiar uniform, with accoutrements and weapons equally well known.

Picture innumerable alleys formed by these dangling uniforms, radiating away to the point of distance,--and suppose Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz equipped in something answering to the twinkling of a Teutonic eye.

In--supposing Schmidt, Schultz, or Kunz to belong to the Infantry--a pair of dark gray unmentionables, red-corded down the side-seams, and a pair of mid-leg-high boots, very roomy and strong. Inside the boots were no stockings, tallowed linen bands being bound about the legs and feet. A single-breasted tunic of dark blue cloth with red facings followed, and a flat forage-cap of blue cloth with a red band, or a glazed black leather helmet with a brazen Prussian eagle front-plate and a brass spike-top. With the addition of a zinc label, slung round the neck, and bearing a man's name, number, company, and regiment, an overcoat made into a sausage and tied together at the ends, a canvas haversack, glass leather-covered canteen, a pipeclayed waistbelt with two cartridge-boxes of black leather, and a knapsack of calf-skin tanned with the hair, stretched upon a wooden frame, and slung by two pipe-clayed straps hooked to the waistbelt in front and then passing over the shoulders. Two shorter straps, going under the armpits, would be fastened to the knapsack, which had a receptacle for a packet of twenty cartridges at either end of it. Within, suppose the usual soldier's kit, with spoon, knife, fork, comb, and shaving-glass; and on top imagine a galvanized iron pot, holding about three quarts, with a tight-fitting cover which became, at need, a frying-pan. Arm with a strong waistbelt-sword about fifteen inches long, an unburnished needle-gun heavily grease-coated, and Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz, having hung their civilian garments on the hooks that erst supported the martial panoply, tugged at a final buckle-strap, wheeled and passed out, transformed, by yet another door.

Always the three had known that an hour would come when these familiar exercises would not end with half-a-dozen exceedingly strenuous field-days, and a return,--on the part of Schmidt and Schultz,--to the arms of their respective wives. Schmidt, on whose breast shone the war-medal of '66, and who must now be addressed as "Herr Sergeant" by his social superiors, seemed not to mind at all, though he swore at his boots, quite unjustly, for pinching. But the bank-clerk's espousals were too recent, and his first experience of paternity too near at hand, for any display of hardihood, while Herr Kunz was but newly betrothed to the apothecary's daughter Mina, and could not forget how the tears had rolled out of her large blue eyes at the prospect of parting with her beloved Carl.

Therefore, although the mouths of the trio were, when not professionally shut, busily engaged in bellowing "Die Wacht am Rhein," "Ich bin ein Preusse," and other patriotic songs, or sending up deafening "Hochs" for the King, the Crown Prince, Prince Friedrich Karl, "Our Moltke," and another public personage recently very much elevated in the popular esteem,--the mental visions of at least two of them were occupied with prophetic visions in which blue-eyed sweethearts pined and faded away out of grief for absent betrotheds, and young wives wept over empty cradles until they too expired, with faltering messages of love for the husband so far distant on their dying lips....

"Sapperlot! What in thunder are you gaping at, you gimpel, you?" a rough, loud voice would shout, and a terrific thump from the hard and heavy hand of Sergeant Schmidt would visit the shoulders of Private Schultz, or Kunz. Who thus addressed would jerk out:

"Oh, nothing, nothing, Herr Sergeant, truly nothing at all!" and receive from their recently despised inferior the rude counsel to look alive and keep cheery:

"For this will be a war worth fighting in, mark you! The Man on the Seine has played the part of the Evil Neighbor too long. France and Prussia have got to come to clapperclaws--there's no help for it! The soup is cooked, so let us eat it. He is the luckiest who gets the spoon in first!"

You may suppose precisely similar scenes and dialogues occurring in the experience of Kraus, Klaus, and Klein, who, having served their time with the active Army and passed from the Reserve into the Landwehr, were now fetched out with the First Call, not only to replace the garrisons of Saxony, Prague, Pardubitz, and all the other fortified points on the lines of communication, but to guard and patrol those lines of road and railway over which the three marching armies were to receive supplies of food, ammunition, clothing, stores, and medicine; and maintain telegraphic communication with Berlin. Meanwhile Grein, Schwartz, and Braun, men of riper years, stiffer joints, and older experiences, remained at home; waiting the hour when, Death having thinned the ranks of the fighters in the forefront of the battle, the Second Call should sound. When these hardy veteran battalions, formed into divisions of the same numerical strength as those of the regular Army, would roll over the frontiers, to fill up the bloody gaps left by the scythe of the Red Mower, and play their part in the vast, chaotic, multi-tableauxed drama of War.

Prussia contributed some 652,294 actors of small parts to the said drama, not counting the leading men, stars of the war-theater, who supported the heavier roles. And Bavaria, Würtemburg, and Baden contributed their contingents, bringing up the strength of the cast to 780,923 performers. The equine actors numbered 213,159.

The vast machine worked wonderfully. It is interesting to know that the German Staff maps of France showed recently made roads which in July, 1870, had not been marked upon any map issued by the Imperial War Office at Paris, and that within three days from that three-word signal-wire of Moltke's, military trains full of men, guns, horses, ammunition, and proviant, began to run at the rate of forty per day, from north, east, and south, toward the narrow frontier between Strasbourg and Luxembourg.

"For God and Fatherland!" and "Watch well the Rhine!" said the miniature banners carried by thousands of people. You could see them fluttering from crowded roofs and packed windows, and variegating the sidewalks of thoroughfares below, as regiment after regiment marched to the station, in shining rivers of pickelhaubes and bayonets, or Dragoon helmets, Hussar busbies, and Uhlan schapkas, flowing between upheaped banks of waving women and cheering men.

Speedily, in response to communications addressed by the Crown Prince to the South German sovereigns, notifying these potentates of his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of their armies, came replies expressing satisfaction of different shades and qualities. The Grand Duke of Baden's bubbled with joy, and expressed the determination of his troops to gain their Royal Commander's confidence by fidelity and bravery. The King of Würtemburg rejoiced likewise, but in cooler terms, "in our German affair" being brought to a head at last; and was anxious to have the opportunity of saluting the heir of Prussia. The King of Bavaria telegraphed "Very happy. Many thanks your Royal Highness's attention!" A message which conveyed no more warmth than was felt.

His telegram of martial support, addressed at the outset of affairs to Onkel Wilhelm, had seemed quite genuine. Had not Count Bismarck quite a sheaf of documents, more or less compelling, signed in the youthful monarch's scrawling hand? King Ludwig had ordered immediate mobilization of the dark green and light blue uniforms--expended millions of gulden in variegated lamps, public fountains of white beer and red wine, bands, Royal Command Opera performances, patriotic set-pieces in fireworks (representing the tutelary genii of Prussia and Bavaria, cuirassed and armed, upholding the standards of black-and-white and blue-and-white), joined in the "Wacht am Rhein" as though he liked the tune (which he abhorred), and certainly enjoyed the tumultuous plaudits with which his subjects greeted their monarch's first and last appearance in the character of a man of action.

But instead of riding away at the head of the South German Army, Nephew Ludwig sent an excuse to Onkel Wilhelm--one has heard a gumboil named as occasion of the disability--and Cousin Fritz was dispatched to take over chief command.

Prince Luitpold of Bavaria accompanied the First Army Headquarter Staff. Alas, the appointment but served to inflame the gumboil of the jealous King,--the accounts that were daily to reach him of the prowess of his martial cousin of Prussia worked like poison in his blood. He drew the hood of his mantle of dreams more closely over his head to shut out those fanfares of triumph, those "Hochs!" and cheerings, and plunged more deeply into the solitudes of his forests and mountain-caves. Blood and iron were his bugbears, and yet they might have been his tonics too. They might have staved off the black hound of Destiny, already baying at his heels, and saved him from vicious decadence, ultimate madness, and a strange and sordid end.

And yet, how did his chivalrous cousin die, at the meridian of robust manhood, under the newly imposed weight of an Imperial Crown? Not the swift, soldierly death that is given by the bullet of a chassepot--the projectile from a mitrailleuse--the flying fragment of an exploding shrapnel-shell--but a straw-death, a bed-death such as angry seers and cursing Valkyrs of Scandinavian legend foretold as the speedy punishment of warriors who had broken faith and tarnished by false oaths the brightness of their honor.

But no shadow of the grim fate that was to befall him darkened those brave blue eyes at this period. Laboring night and day at the mobilization of his Third Army, in concert with his Chief of Staff, Von Blumenthal, he was buoyantly happy, despite his hatred of the shedding of blood and his undisguised compassion for the conjectured plight of the Man on the Seine.

With whom Britannia at first expressed a sympathy not at all restrained or guarded, and for the success of whose arms she was openly eager, until, toward the close of this momentous month of July, 1870, the text of a brief but pithy diplomatic document, penned in precise and elegant French, and dated a few years previously--made its appearance in the columns of the Times.

The movements of the opposing forces camped on the banks of the Meuse and the Saar lost interest for the public eye in perusal of this rough memorandum of a proposed treaty between the Third Napoleon and the King of Prussia, scrawled in Count Benedetti's flowing Italian hand.

Since the spring of '67 it had been hidden away in a snug corner of Bismarck's dispatch-box, waiting to jump out. You recall the terms of the thing--one of many overt attempts to seize a coveted prize. The Empire of France was to recognize the acquisitions made by Prussia in the war of 1866 with Austria. Prussia was to aid Napoleon III. to buy from Holland the debatable Duchy of Luxembourg. The Emperor was to shed the luster of his smile and the ægis of his approval upon Federal Union between the North German Parliament and the South German States--the separate sovereignty of each State remaining. In return, Prussia was to abet the Bonaparte in the military occupation and subsequent absorption of the Kingdom of Belgium. And in furtherance of these laudable ends, an alliance, offensive and defensive, against any Power, insular or otherwise, was to be compact between the great gilt eagle of the Third Empire and the black-plumaged bird across the frontier.

Britons, with inconveniently good memories, perusing this draft, recalled the existence of a treaty existing between France, England, and Prussia, mutually binding these Powers to protect the neutrality of Belgium, and drew reflections damaging to the betrayer and the betrayed. French diplomatists asserted that the project had been drawn up by Benedetti at Bismarck's dictation. Why preserve so explosive a document, they argued, if it was never to be drawn out and supplied with detonators in the shape of signatures? Later on M. Rouher's boxes of official papers, found at his château of Cercay, gave up the original draft-treaty annotated in the Emperor's handwriting.

For it was his nature, may God pardon him! to be false and specious, ungrateful and an oath-breaker. He must always repay great services with great wrongs. Thus in the red year 1870, England, who in '54 had poured out blood and treasure lavishly to aid him, receiving this plain proof of treachery, stood sorrowfully back and saw him rush upon his fate. Sick and desperate, madly hurling his magnificent Army hither and thither upon the arena, a Generalissimo out-generaled before the War was a week old.

He had made France his mistress and his slave, and now her fetters were to be hacked apart by the merciless sword of the invader. Through losses, privations, and humiliations; through an ordeal of suffering unparalleled in the world's history; through an orgy of vice and an era of infidelity; through fresh oceans of blood shed from the veins of her bravest; she was to pass before she found herself and GOD again.

Meanwhile, North, East, South and West, prevailed a great swarming scurry of military preparation, the tunes of the "Wacht am Rhein" and "Heil dir im Siegeskranz" clashing with "Partant pour la Syrie" and the "Marseillaise"; and the solemn strains of masses rising up together with Lutheran litanies, as two great nations strove to convince Divine Omnipotence that Codlin deserved to whip, and not Short.

Strange! that Christian men, who frankly confess themselves to be sinners, worms, and dust-grains before the supreme Majesty of the Creator, should be so prone to offer Him advice.

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XXX

The lovely lady whose lace parasol P. C. Breagh had picked up at the bottom of the Prussian Chancellor's staircase was driven, by the tipsy-faced Jehu of a debilitated hack-cab, to a semi-fashionable hotel situated in a graveled courtyard facing toward the Linden. The bureau-manager looked out of his glass-case as she swept her rustling draperies over the dusty Brussels carpets of the vestibule, and muttered to the pale-faced ledger-clerk at his side:

"A representative from the firm of Müller and Stettig, Charlotten-Strasse, has called three times to see the lady in Suite 35. With a jewelry account for payment, promised and deferred."

The clerk assented with a nod of the double-barreled order, and reaching an envelope from a numbered pigeon-hole offered it for the inspection of his superior.

"Baroness von Valverden," sniffed the bureau-manager, and in his turn reached a squat red Almanach de Gotha from the top of a pile of ledgers, and ruffled the leaves with an industrious thumb.

"It is as I thought--there is no Baroness von Valverden. Baron Ernst von Schön-Valverden is a minor and a bachelor, private in the --th Regiment of Potsdam Infantry of the Guard. This must be the Frenchwoman I have heard of as mixed up in the scandal connected with the death of Baron Maximilian at Schönfeld in the Altenwald some years ago. He left Madame a lapful of thalers--I suppose she has played skat with the money. Not that that matters if the hook-nosed, long-haired Slav she has got with her upstairs has the cash to settle with us! But if not----"

The manager's tone was ominous. The clerk scratched his nose with the feather-end of his pen, and said admiringly:

"If not, the Herr Bureau-Director will give orders to detain their valises and trunks?"

The bureau-manager smiled, and said, jerking his chin at another envelope reposing in the numbered pigeon-hole:

"Send that up at once and let them know we will stand no nonsense. Keep Müller and Stettig's back for the present. Understand?"

And the clerk nodded again, and whistled down a tube, and evoked from regions below a brass-buttoned, gilt-braided functionary, to whom he entrusted the missive indicated, which bore the monogram of the hotel-company, and indeed contained their bill.

It was handed to Madame by the brass-buttoned functionary just as she reached the ante-room of her second-floor suite of apartments. She took it from the salver, and said without looking at it:

"Presently!"

The functionary gave a peremptory verbal message. She repeated:

"Presently, sir, presently.... At this moment I am exceedingly fatigued!"

The brass-buttoned functionary begged to remind the gracious lady of similar excuses previously received by the management. At this she turned upon him the battery of her magnificent eyes. Always economical of her forces, she had removed her torn tulle veil during the cab-drive, and with a delicate powder-puff drawn from a jeweled case dependant from her golden châtelaine, removed from her lovely face all traces of emotion. Only a spiteful woman would have called her thirty-five.... And the functionary was a man, despite his brass buttons and gilt braiding. When she smiled, he caved in, bowed, and left her. But he did not forget to leave the bill.

She had it in her hand as she entered the drawing-room of the suite of apartments, one of those impossibly shaped, fantastically-uncomfortable salons, possessing a multiplicity of doors and windows, upholstered with rose-satin and crusted with ormolu, such as are only seen in foreign hotels and upon the stage. Despite the sultry heat of the July weather the windows were shut, their Venetian blinds lowered, and their thick lace curtains drawn over these. And in a rose-colored arm-chair with twisted golden legs and arms and an absurd back-ornament like an Apollonian lyre, huddled a dark, hawk-featured, powerfully built man of something less than forty, wrapped in a short, wide coat lined, cuffed, and collared with black Astrakhan; wearing a traveling-cap similarly lined, and presenting the appearance of one who suffers from a cold of the snuffly, catarrhal kind.

He sneezed as Madame surged across the threshold, and would have told her to shut the door, only that she divined his intention and forestalled him, throwing her parasol upon a sofa and sinking into a chair as ridiculous as his own. Yet when her wealth of pale-hued draperies poured over it, and the ripe outlines of her voluptuous form concealed its crudities of design and coloring, it could be forgiven for being in bad taste.

She looked in silence at the traveling-cap, not at its sulky wearer, until, conscious of her sustained regard, he raised his hand to his head. In haste then, as though she dreaded the shock of his purposeful abstention from the customary courtesy, she said:

"Do not take it off! Pray keep it on!"

"Thanks!" He uttered the word laconically, drooping his immense, black-lashed eyelids over his fierce and staring eyes. They, too, were black, with the white, hard glitter of polished jet; black also were the great curved eyebrows, the coarse and shining hair that fell to his shoulders, the parted mustache, and the wedge-shaped beard that depended from his boldly curved chin. Rippling in small, regular waves, suggestive of the labor of a primitive sculptor's chisel, the inky chevelure of this man with the cold,--taken in conjunction with his large, aquiline nose, deep chest, fleshy torso, and thick muscular limbs, reproduced the type of an ancient Assyrian warrior, as represented in some carved and painted wall-frieze of Nineveh or Babylon, marching in a triumphant procession of Shalmaneser or Sennacherib. Even the conical head-dress was reproduced by the modern cap with ear-pieces, and turned-up border; and the deep yellowish-white of the alabaster in which the ancient sculptor wrought his bas-relief was reproduced in thick, smooth, unblemished skin.

Handsome as he undoubtedly was in his exotic, Oriental style, even in spite of influenza, Madame contemplated him with ill-concealed distaste. To a woman who loves, what matters the temporary thickening of the beloved object's profile, even when accompanied by attacks of sneezing and a running at the nose and eyes? She can wait the day when his voice will clear, and his leading feature will regain its former beauty. That is, as long as she continues to love.

The passion of this man and this woman had in its brief time burned high and fiercely. So does a fire of paper or straw. Now Passion lay dying, and Satiety and Weariness were the only watchers by the death-bed. Every twenty-four hours that passed over the heads of the couple brought nearer the hour when these would give place to Hatred and Dislike. And meanwhile both were infinitely hipped.

"Every window.... Every curtain.... Must we, then, asphyxiate?..." At the end of her patience, she made an angry gesture as though to loosen the ribbon of mauve velvet that held a diamond locket at the base of her round white throat, bit her full lip--and let her hand drop idly into her silken lap again.

Her companion stretched out a pair of muscular, but shortish legs, encased in dark green trousers with braided side-stripes, and looked with interest at his patent boots. Then he answered, speaking with a drawling, nasal accent:

"Unless M. de Bismarck has supplied you with the means of averting a singularly-unpleasant catastrophe, it may be that the answer to your question should be 'Yes'!"

She understood that he questioned, and said, drooping her proud, languorous eyes under the hard black stare of his:

"You would be wiser to speak in a lowered tone, when you refer to--that personage. One does not trifle with him--here or elsewhere!"

"The Pomeranian bear," said her companion, pouting a slightly swollen lip, and dabbing gingerly at his reddened nostrils with a voluminous cambric handkerchief exhaling the heavy perfume of opoponax, "has claws and fangs. Also a hug, in which friends of mine have stifled. But they were men and you are an enchanting woman!" He removed his cap and bowed; resuming: "Besides you went to M. le Ministre with a trump in your hand--a little Queen of Diamonds, fresh as a rosebud. Have you played her, may I ask?"

He got up, pocketing his handkerchief, came over to her and stood beside her, in the upright attitude which called attention to the disproportion between his huge torso and his too-short legs. He held his furred cap upon his hip with one hand, and with the other stroked his waved wedge-beard. The rasping sound made by his heavily-ringed fingers as they passed through the thick, crisp hairs irritated her to anguish. Yet not so long ago it had thrilled her to sensuous ecstasy.

"I played the girl--and I have lost!" Almost against her will a cry broke from her. "My God! what things he said to me! My God! what humiliations we women endure for men!"

"I had imagined, my Adelaide," said he of the Assyrian hair and profile, showing in a smile a double row of teeth so perfect that they struck the imagination as being carved out of two solid curves of ivory--"that you were playing for your own advantage--even when you played my game. Did M. le Comte mention me at any point of the interview?"

She started at the unexpected question. Her voice shook a little in the reply.

"He said that he had heard--that M. de Straz had lately visited Berlin. That his agents would tell him. Of course!"

"He said nothing of--a flying visit of mine to Sigmaringen?"

She answered hastily:

"I think not. No! I am quite certain he did not."

"No?"

Straz sniffed and whipped out his handkerchief, grumbling:

"Yet the purport of my mission to that South German crow's-nest was known to him--here in Berlin--I can prove it!--by nightfall of the day I interviewed the Prince." He added, trumpeting in his handkerchief, "Of course, M. Bismarck has spies everywhere. But all the same it was quick work!"

Her face was immovable. No guilty flush stained its smooth ivory surface. Only the lines about her scarlet mouth sharpened, that was all.

Straz went on, peevishly, strolling to the fireplace, and leaning an elbow on the corner of the mantelshelf.

"I suppose they call that princely hospitality--to send a man who has traveled night and day, and is decanted out of a crazy railway-station droschke at the door of their confounded Stammschloss at five o'clock in the morning--to an inn!"

She said in a velvet tone of amorous insinuation, and with a glance of sleepy fire:

"To an inn where Love lay waiting!..."

"Truly," he admitted, "but how were they to know that you were there? What possible connection could have been imagined between two chance travelers--I--arriving from Paris--you coming from Berlin? Besides--to send me to a summer tavern on the banks of the Danube!--when they have two hundred bedrooms at the Schloss! If that is princely hospitality, I tell you that I spit upon it! I grind it under the heel of my boot!"

Her nostrils dilated with disgust as he demonstrated by spitting on the hearthrug. She said, meeting his angry black stare with eyes that were of the color of tawny wine:

"The Prince cannot have regretted his omission to accommodate you with an apartment, when the Emperor's message was made known to him!"

He demanded:

"Am I a hired bravo? Pardieu! your words suggest it. Were either of the old man's sons in danger personally, from me? Not at all! I but repeated a lesson--gave a warning as it had been given.... But I understand--you have been chagrined by the nature of your reception from the Federal Chancellor!"

She returned, now flushed and breathing deeply:

"It is true. I suffocate at the recollection. Give me time to breathe!"

She rose. Straz said, going over to her, taking both her hands, kissing them and replacing her in her chair:

"Compose yourself. Let me understand the attitude M. le Ministre is taking. I need not remind you that not until I had learned from you that, through the lamented Count Valverden, you were sufficiently acquainted with M. de Bismarck to obtain an interview, did I suggest that you should seek one. Well, you did, and it has taken place. You told him of the little episode I witnessed in January--on the day of the funeral of Victor Noir at Neuilly. Monseigneur the Prince Imperial was riding with his governor and escort--the Avenue of the Champs Elysées was blocked by troops. A charming girl threw M. Lulu a bunch of violets--made a little scene of loyalty and enthusiasm in contrast with the unamiable attitude of the crowd assembled. An equerry dismounted and gave the flowers to Monseigneur. He carried them with him as he galloped toward the Bois de Boulogne. Nothing of importance in that, perhaps, had he not afterward sent for the equerry who had picked up the flowers, and said to him, blushing, 'Pray tell me who was she?' So skilled a master of phrases as M. de Bismarck could hardly have undervalued the question from the heir to an Empire, taken in combination with the blush. Or discounted the importance of the fact that, later, when the equerry brought him the information that the charming unknown was the daughter and only child of a certain gallant Colonel commanding the 777th Regiment of Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard--at that moment quartered at Versailles,--Monseigneur said, with another blush as ingenuous as the first, 'I am glad she is the daughter of so brave a soldier! Possibly I may meet her one of these days.' Being told that her baptismal name was 'Juliette' he blushed once more, and wrote it down,--together with Mademoiselle's surname and address,--in a little memorandum-book he habitually carries.... And there, my exquisite Adelaide--if your narrative style did credit to my teaching, the interest of M. de Bismarck should have been engaged."

She lowered her chin and drooped her somber eyelids, and said with curling lips:

"It was. He took out his watch, and told me: 'I can hear you for three minutes longer! Has the Prince Imperial--with the disinterested assistance of those about him, altered that possibility into a certainty?' I explained to him then that nothing further had come of the rencontre,--though measures had been taken to preserve Monseigneur's interest from dying for lack of excitement, bouquets of violets being sent to him at regular intervals, with a slip of paper attached to the stems, upon which had been written in an unformed, girlish hand--'From one who prays for the Hope of France!'

"And then?..."

"Then M. de Bismarck spoke, keeping his thumb all the time on the watch-dial: 'So! The girl plays the part of an ingenue for the present! Will she keep these airs of candor and innocence when she has got her claws on that poor stripling? And do you suggest that the Prussian Secret Service should supply her with funds for the carrying out of her design, whatever it may be? Are we to lay our heads together, like the Brethren in the libretto of Mehul's opera "Joseph," and sing in chorus: This is the heir. Come, let us kill him!'"

"Even Beelzebub," said Straz, "can quote from Scripture when it suits him. I suppose you were annoyed, and showed it--which was an error of judgment on your part!"

"I rose up," said she, and suited the action to the word, "with indignation, assuring M. de Bismarck that his suspicions were unjust. That the young girl mentioned was of ancient family and irreproachable morals, convent-bred and highly educated. And that I, myself, being her nearest living relative of her own sex, was able to vouch for the fact. I added that the interest displayed in her by Monseigneur the Prince--who until that moment had never been known to look at a woman--led me to conceive that by aid of a few deft hints, a little discreet encouragement--another distant glimpse--a meeting accidentally brought about in some retired spot favorable to the revival of first impressions, an influence might be brought to bear upon the Imperial boy which might develop his mind and mold his character. Somehow in my agitation the name of Juliette de Bayard escaped me. 'De Bayard,' exclaimed M. de Bismarck. 'So! You are her mother!' Great Heaven!--the intolerable tone in which he uttered the words! Only the most abandoned of her sex could have supported the insulting irony of the look accompanying them. Choking, I took my leave.... He accompanied me to the staircase, with a false appearance of courtesy. As I turned to descend, he hurled the last insult of all! Nicolas, do not ask me to repeat the sentences!--and yet, I must have them written in another memory.... He twitted me with my nationality before his secretary and servants. He likened me to a mythological character with an unpronounceable name.... He said only a modern mother would be infamous enough to devote her only daughter to Venus Something-Or-Other.... Next to my husband, I detest that man!"

Straz had been pulling at his moist red underlip as she raved out her story in a frenzy of rage and resentment, intensified by the necessity of speaking in a lowered tone. Now he dragged the feature out as though it had been made of india-rubber, let it snap back, and said, shrugging his bull's shoulders and getting up:

"You are a woman and he is--Bismarck! He does not for the moment want the wares you desire to sell him. It is unlike him--the diplomat who could encourage M. Benedetti to lay before him the Emperor's projet de traité in writing--and lock it away for use at a future opportunity--not to be willing to secure an advantage--placed before him with clearness and skill--in the newly awakened fancy of a schoolboy who, if he lives, will be an Emperor--for a charming and innocent young girl!" He pronounced these words as though they were smeared with something sweet and luscious, licking his lips gently, and rolling his dead black eyes in sensual enjoyment. "As regards your husband, he has certainly not replied to the letter of your solicitors, but why do you hate the unlucky man?"

"Do you ask?" Adelaide demanded, with glittering eyes and heaving bosom. "Did he not refuse to divorce me? Should I not have legally borne the title of Baroness von Valverden if his sentimental prejudices had not blocked the way?"

Straz pulled his waved beard, and said, delicately separating a strand of it from the rest, and keeping it between his thick white fingers:

"Sentimental, why sentimental? Do you not even give him credit for sufficient spirit to resent being made ridiculous? The desire to be revenged--you will not even allow him that?"

She bit her scarlet underlip and answered, breathing quickly:

"He was too good, too high-minded--too chivalrous--oh! 'tis ridiculous, I admit!" for Straz commenced to titter silently, screwing up the corners of his eyes and shaking his shoulders, as he sat with his thick, short arms folded on his chest. "An idea to make you hug yourself as you are doing. But true, nevertheless! He would have said--at this distance of time I can still hear him preaching: 'I will avenge the injury to my honor when I am confronted with my enemy. I will not revenge myself upon the woman who deserted me for him!'"

The words came, not in her own voice. Straz left off sniggering. He said to himself, considering her through narrowed lids:

"Those were De Bayard's actual words. I wonder, since she has neither seen nor heard from him since she left him, how it is she knew that they were spoken? Some obliging mutual friend may have repeated them. Or she read them in some letter of his, written to Count Valverden. That is quite possible. But the question is, whether she would detest him so bitterly if her passion for him were absolutely extinguished. She is even jealous when one speaks of their daughter, whom he worships.... I will play her on this string--it may be useful, who knows?"

Aloud he said:

"Detest your husband, dear friend, if it affords you entertainment. Probably he deserves it, though women I have met who knew him vowed him un crème d'homme, worthy of the name he bears." He smiled in his beard, hearing her foot tap upon the shining parquet, and went on. "Men have praised his gallantry and his disinterestedness----"

"'Disinterestedness!'" she mocked. "Truly--to the point of fanaticism he is disinterested. Have we not to thank that characteristic for the ruin of our plans?"

Said Straz:

"A little more subtlety upon the part of your solicitors, and you might have found M. le Colonel less obstinately inclined to discourage the idea of a reconciliation. To have entrusted a portrait to the hands of the lawyers would have been an excellent move. Once convinced that the thirteen or fourteen years that have elapsed since you--parted--have increased rather than diminished the beauty that once he worshiped--and I fancy De Bayard would have accepted your terms!"

He sniggered, and waited as the violet shadows about her brilliant eyes deepened, and she breathed more quickly. Then he went on:

"They were generous--I allude to the conditions. Ninety men out of a hundred would have accepted them. For what has De Bayard to condone that others have not winked at? You were a mere girl, weary of separation from a husband who doubtless consoled himself after his own fashion, for his detention in the Crimea. Bored to desperation--condemned to spend your days in the care of a child, and in listening to the imbecile grumblings of a sick old devotee,--point out to me the woman, young, beautiful, brilliant, and ambitious--who would not--in your place--have done precisely as you did?"

She threw her head a little backward, bringing into prominence the superb modeling of her columnar throat and the heavy lines of the lower jaw. Her wine-colored eyes considered him between their narrowed lids. She savored his words, silently, with palpitating nostrils, and rippling movements of the muscles of her tightly closed lips. And the qualities of treachery and cruelty, mingling in her strange character with sensuality, and pride, and recklessness, were written upon her beauty as plainly as they are stamped upon the individuality of a tigress, or a poisonous snake.

"You speak of weariness ... of boredom..." She spoke between her teeth, accentuating the vowels and prolonging the sibilants: "Nicolas, it was hellish--that ménage at Auteuil!..." She clenched the white hand that rested on the chair-arm and continued, looking with burning eyes through Straz into the past.

"That woman--my husband's mother, with her parade of devotion for the absent. With her ceaseless repetition of 'my son,' 'my son's child,' and 'my son's wife!' ... Grand Dieu!--how she enraged me! How she made me hate--hate--hate them!--yes! all three.... Perhaps myself also, most bitterly of all!"

"We have a curious proverb in my country," commented Straz, with his snigger: "'I draw water from a well that has no bottom when I tell my gossip of the faults of my mother-in-law!'"

She said, with undisguised scorn:

"I am not a collector of curios from your country!"

"Ah, but wait! Hear the rest of it!" said Straz, dexterously embroidering on the original: "'But when my mother-in-law wishes to acquaint my husband with my good qualities, she will write them with the plume from a gnat's head, on the paper that wrapped a butterfly's egg, when she has bought her ink at the shop where they sell none!'"

Adelaide continued, ignoring the labored witticism:

"In the letter of farewell that I wrote to De Bayard I said 'Your mother will console you, I have no doubt!' ... How often I have imagined I could hear her talking to him.... He would weep on her knees, like a schoolboy. She would lead him to look at the child, asleep in its cot by the side of her bed, and tell him, 'Do not fear! She will not be like her mother! She will grow up candid and discreet and virtuous!' Everything that Adelaide was not, you understand.... Ha, ha, ha! Absurd old creature! Were she not dead, I should detest her still!"

Straz mentally commented: "The daughter has inherited the hatred, unless I am mistaken." Aloud he said:

"The prophecy, if made, has not been fulfilled, my Adelaide.... Mademoiselle, if inferior to her mother in splendor and beauty, certainly has been dowered with her elegance and charm." He bunched the fingers of his right hand, kissed them, and launched the kiss, conjecturally, in the direction of Paris. "A pocket edition of Psyche before that little affair with Cupid! A rare jewel! A chic type, give you my word!"

The daintily shod foot had beaten time, as Straz enlarged upon the theme of Juliette's perfections, to what might have been the tune of a tarantella: now it ceased. She laughed in the Roumanian's face, and cried, still laughing:

"A child! ... A schoolgirl--who has seen no more of the world than the pearl in the oyster! All this is too funny--give you my word!"

Said Straz, lolling his head against the chair-back and licking his red lips cattishly:

"Ah, but when the pearl-diver opened the oyster, he said: 'Here is a gem worth a Kingdom, or an Empire, when it shall be polished and properly set!'"

"'Or an Empire!'"

She echoed the three words, throwing her head back in imitation of Straz's attitude, and looking at him with languid provocation. Then she yawned, showing her perfect teeth and the tip of a rosy tongue, and remarked with an air of boredom:

"My friend, whether your pearl be worth an Empire or a cabbage-plot, your chance of proving its value is forever forfeited, thanks to the obstinacy of M. de Bayard."

Said Straz:

"Our plan would have been easier to carry out,--had M. de Bayard been more--complaisant."

She rose up, her beautiful face livid and gray under its artificial roses. Her eyebrows writhed like little live snakes, her eyes burned like wind-blown torches. She spoke, looking past her confederate in the chair, and with a voice he barely recognized:

"His mother must have prayed her Saints for this," she said, "that I should always fail in the moment when triumph seemed most sure. Max Valverden would have married me--it is absolutely certain!--had not Fate sent him back on leave from the Staff in Austria but a couple of hours too soon. Weak, sentimental Max! always threatening extreme measures. Who would have believed him capable of carrying out that menace so often reiterated! But this I know. Had he confronted me with what his letter termed 'the unmistakable proofs of my appalling treachery,' I would have convinced him even against the testimony of his own ears and eyes. But De Bayard--but my husband!----"

She had forgotten Straz; she saw nothing but her own frustrated ambitions, the dead body of the man whose suicide had robbed her of a title, and the living husband whose stern rejection of her overtures had left her forever outside the social pale....

"Do I not know the man he is! With another it would have been so easy. He would have granted an interview,--I would have been suppliant and humble--I would have told my tale in such a voice! ... You were away.... I was young and inexperienced.... I foolishly yielded to the persuasions of another.... Once I had let Valverden kiss me I felt myself smirched for ever. I fled with him because I dared not meet your eyes!"

Straz sniggered. She went on, not hearing him....

"He would have taken me to his heart again. Once reinstated there I would have regained the entrée to Society. For a woman who has lived within the pale--even if she finds it better fun outside--it is hideous to be déclassée. A few triumphs,--a little intriguing--and I should have been received at Court.... For the Emperor is above all a man of the world; and the Empress loves to surround herself with beautiful and witty women. With gifts, talents, charm like mine, I should have carried all before me!--I should have reigned--I should have drunk the wine of Success from a goblet of diamond."

"Without doubt," agreed Straz, "had M. le Colonel consented to receive you. Yet I contend, his refusal is a hopeful sign, if it means that he is afraid."

She winced as though he had thrust a knife in her side, and cried out:

"Afraid! You do not know him.... No!--I tell you, that it is to him as though I had never existed.... Did we meet, he would look me in the face--pass me by without the twitch of a muscle--without the flicker of a glance.... But you have shown me how I may reach his heart--and one day I shall thrust my hand into his breast and tear it out and trample on it.... It is she--my daughter--who will accomplish this!..."

Said Straz, pushing back his chair, getting up and blowing his nose loudly:

"Then the sooner we exchange these avenues of dusty lime-trees, choked with crowds of bellowing Teutons, for the boulevards of Paris, the better. We shall, of course, be forced to return by a détour via Brussels--the Rhine Valley railways being reserved for the transport of troops. Passports can be had on application to the usual authorities. The only insuperable obstacle to our departure is--the bill!"

Madame came back to consciousness of sordid things as the Roumanian ostentatiously turned out his trouser-pockets.

"You are at an impasse for lack of funds?" she asked him.

"Upon my life, my soul!" Straz smilingly assured her, "I am at present without a radish! A sum of two thalers negotiable currency constitutes my stock of cash. Although, as I have told you, I carry secreted on my person an order for"--he tapped his bosom--"ten thousand francs payable from the Secret Funds of the Imperial Government. This I tried to cash before I left Paris----" He measured off an infinitesimal quantity of finger-nail and displayed it to her. "Do you think I got a franc from anyone? No!--you know better! The Emperor's methods are understood too well. And thus it is that the disinclination of M. de Bismarck to finance our plan for the union of two young and ingenuous lovers has hit me in the midriff. A thousand curses on his niggardliness!"

As though prompted by some recollection of Adelaide's previous display of tragic passion, he scowled portentously, spat at the fireplace, then began to strut about, vaporing and waving his ringed, hairy-backed hands.

"Penniless.... What damnable absurdity! The Emissary of a Potentate! The Bearer of the Bowstring--with Life or Death in my hand. For lack of cash I travel second-class to that accursed South German Principality--I stoop to put up at a third-rate inn. My Mission performed, I yield to the promptings of my ardent nature. In the company of her who reigns sultana of my soul,--who for my sake has shared the discomforts of that abominable caravanserai--I return to the barbarous capital of the Hohenzollerns--I risk my person in the streets of Berlin. Had my brain been cooler--had your image glowed less seductively before my mental vision"--he rolled his black eyes amorously and laid a thick ringed hand upon his breast--"it may be that I should not have accompanied you,--that I might have hurried back express to Paris--presented myself to my Imperial master--and reaped the golden prize!"

"Say rather," responded Madame, in a tone not untinged with acrimony, "that as the result of your unsuccessful endeavor to enlist the interest of M. de Bismarck in that charming plan to unite two ingenuous young people--you are placed in a position that is not without unpleasant possibilities. My beaux yeux are less to blame than your ambition 'to kill,' as the English say, 'two birds with one stone!' You----"

"Say 'we,' not 'you,' my divine Adelaide," corrected Straz, with tender insistence, "for if not in actuality husband and wife, we are thus inscribed upon the bureau-register. 'One in sorrow, one in joy,' to quote a poet of my nation. I wish you were acquainted with the verses of Stepan Mieciwycz. They would afford you exquisite delight."

"Possibly," said Madame, with an ominous hardening of the facial muscles, and a whiteness about the lips. "What does not afford me delight is that these brigands downstairs have threatened to seize our luggage if their claim is not satisfied within an hour."

"Sapristi!" commented the Roumanian. "A beautiful imbroglio! And--as I have no luggage--beyond a traveling valise," he added with a gentle snigger, "your trunks, bonnet-boxes, imperials, traveling-bags, and so forth--must become the prey of the management. It grieves me to the soul that you should suffer this denudation at the hands of these coarse Germans. But what I cannot prevent, I can but deplore!"

"And if," she said in a vibrating voice of anger, "these coarse Germans should lay hands upon your person, for the purpose of ascertaining for themselves the state of your purse! ... What then?"

"What then?" Straz's cynical composure broke up. "Istenem!--Istenem! Nothing could be more dangerous! My letter of instructions from M. de Gramont, annotated in the Emperor's own hand! The official letter, of introduction from the Minister to Prince Antony--the copies of those three telegrams His Highness sent from Sigmaringen--the order on the Privy Purse--all concealed in a silk belt I am in the habit of wearing--these Prussians will find the papers should they search me to the skin. Then I, with my wife----" He italicized the sentences.

"One in sorrow as in joy, I think you said!" interpolated Madame, bitterly.

"We should be arrested--dragged before official interrogators!--imprisoned!--Oh! do not imagine I am laying on the colors too thickly. Is it incredible that M. de Bismarck might welcome an opportunity--pending the result of this war--to turn the key on us?"

"Why on us?" demanded Adelaide. "Do I wear a silken belt containing incriminating letters? Orders on the Secret Funds ... copies of Hohenzollern telegrams?"

Straz looked at her, and his black stare hardened suspiciously. The swift Oriental blood that pigmented his eyes and skin, and fed the luxuriant growth of hair upon him, leaped in the dark to the conclusion that he had been betrayed. He said, smiling, and speaking with a lisp, a trick of his that boded ill, had she but known it:

"Not to my knowledge.... I have never searched while you were sleeping,--or spiced the draught that made the sleep profound."

"My thanks," she said, keeping her countenance magnificently, "for the glass of mulled Burgundy I gave you when you returned from the Schloss. You were suffering from chill--you shivered and burned alternately.... Like a woman, I did what I could--and you are ungrateful, like all other men."

"My soul," simpered Straz, "I adore you madly. But like every other man, I am a son of Adam, and you are a daughter of Madame Eve. And a little snake hisses in my ear whenever I am not looking at you: 'She would be truer to her sex if she were false!'"

"Nicolas! This is too much! No, no, I beg of you to let me leave you!"

Adelaide had put her hand to her heart, given him a look in which passionate tenderness seemed to strive with wounded pride, quitted her chair, and hurried, the Roumanian hot upon her heels, to the door communicating with the boudoir. Detained by his feverish grasp upon her hand, prisoned by the muscular arm about her waist, she could only reiterate her desire for freedom. Straz asseverated:

"Yes! when you have forgiven me! Pardon, beloved Adelaide! Life of my life, you know we Slavs are naturally suspicious--it is always in our blood!"

He thrust his face to hers, amorously ogling. The slight thickening of the consonants, due to catarrh, made his passionate speech sound grotesquely ridiculous. The approach of his mouth, the contact of his breath, reminded the fastidious Adelaide that such colds could be transferred. So she smiled dazzlingly upon him, and gently freed herself from his enfolding tentacles, leaning her softly-tinted cheek downwards to the shoulder her own overtopped.

"You are pardoned, my beloved one! But think with me how this bill may be settled! What if you really should be in danger in this place!"

He shrugged hopelessly, and ejaculated:

"Sapristi! I can conceive it possible.... But--hampered by the lack of money, what are we to do?"

She said with a start, as if suddenly enlightened:

"Dearest, I have some jewels.... Think nothing of the sacrifice! ... Will it not be made for him who is more to me than all?..."

"Angel! ... Now I know, indeed, that Adelaide is true to me! Pardon thy slave, who dared to deem otherwise!"

Straz devoured her hand with kisses, became more enterprising as she grew, or seemed to grow, more yielding. But she put him from her, suffering her bright glance to linger on him amorously, saying in tones of liquid sweetness, with a bewitching accent of rebuke:

"Be good now! I am tired, and must positively dine in my room to-night. My maid will bring you in a few moments a case containing--what I mentioned just now. Late as it is, shops are still open ... there is a firm of jewelers--Müller and Stettig in the Charlotten-Strasse, who will buy such things for ready money.... It should bring sufficient to supply us with funds for a long time.... Poor Valverden paid eighteen thousand thalers for it!" She added as Straz licked his lips appreciatively: "It is a star of emeralds and brilliants you have often seen me wear."

"Thou art my star! O incomparable Adelaide!"

She pushed him from her, yet oozing with impassioned admiration. She gently shut the boudoir-door--and noiselessly shot the bolt. Then her face changed, and all her disgust for Straz, his cheap compliments--his slovenliness--his arrogance and self-satisfaction, his impecuniousness and his cold in the head, was written on her face and expressed by every movement of her body. She ran across the boudoir, abandoning her air of languor, burst into the bedroom beyond, and aroused a dozing maid.

"Wake up, Mariette! Find me--it is in the red morocco jewel-case in the brown leather imperial--the diamond star with emerald points!"

While the woman rummaged, the mistress swiftly reviewed the situation. The cold, clear brain that dwelt behind that velvet mask of sensuous beauty had formulated a plan for getting rid of the Slav.

He would be an enemy dangerous as a rattlesnake, she told herself. But--trap your rattlesnake, and he cannot bite. On the other hand, his subtle capacity for intrigue--his swift Oriental cunning--even his masculine strength,--made of him a useful ally, even when he had no more secrets for a clever woman to ferret out and sell.

For the brief telegram in cipher, dispatched by Madame to a studiously unsuspicious address in Berlin before nightfall of the day of the arrival in Sigmaringen--with the later-sent copies of Gramont's letters--the formal introduction which had secured the Agent from the Tuileries an audience of Prince Antony, and the four pages of secret instructions margined with the Emperor's annotations, had brought in a handsome sum of money, thanks to the potency of mulled Burgundy heavily dosed with laudanum. Adelaide had known a moment of deadly terror when the Slav's black eyes had looked at her with that sinister stare of suspicion, and his conjectures had leaped in the dark, so very near the actual verity. She felt no desire to encounter that look again.

So she pondered, fingering the bulky roll of Prussian banknotes paid her by Privy Councillor Bucher a few days previously,--how she might best get rid of Straz without another scene. His Oriental cunning, his childish vanity, his petulance and sensuality, his colossal greed of money and money's worth, blinded her to the ruthlessness and ferocity of his tigerish nature, and provoked her to brave a risk far greater than she guessed.

She would get rid of him--play the game he had devised, without him; and win, in spite of cold water thrown by M. de Bismarck. The trap he had planned to catch the son of the Emperor should yet be set successfully. Was not the intended bait of living maiden's flesh her own?

She felt no pity for the innocence of the girl, or for the inexperience of the stripling. She was curious to know how--under given circumstances--they would comport themselves; she was eager to bring to terms the Minister who had contemptuously rejected her proposal--she thirsted above all for revenge upon the husband she had wronged.

Straz stood in the way, therefore Straz must be swept aside. His mission to Prince Antony performed, the Napoleon would have no more use for the instrument. Perhaps that order on the Privy Purse would never be paid?

She arrived at this conclusion as the maid brought the red morocco jewel-case. She unlocked it with a key she wore in a bracelet, and drew out a shagreen-covered box containing the vaunted ornament. It had not been given her by her dead lover; the story of the thousands spent on it was no more reliable than the doubleted emeralds, and the thin central star of diamonds set flush with the gold setting of the toy.

But it looked well; and Straz was no good judge of jewels, and she had not paid Müller and Stettig the moderate sum demanded as its price. The merchants had been rude enough to dun her, and when Straz should appear and tender the article for sale to them, the manager would summon a policeman, and the Roumanian would be detained. He would refer to herself, but long before a representative of the firm could appear to interrogate her, she would have paid the hotel-bill and departed, leaving the price of the trinket in the hands of the management. Flaws in the plan, no doubt, but on the whole it was workable. She rose, took the star from the case stamped with the too-revealing names of Müller and Stettig, glanced in the mirror, left the bedroom and swept through the boudoir.

"Nicolas!" she whispered, unbolting the door noiselessly, and opening it a little way.

"My Peri, I am here!" snuffled the impassioned Roumanian.

She opened the door a little further, and thrust out a white palm cradling the glittering gewgaw. He pounced on it, leaving a kiss instead.

"Remember, Müller and Stettig, 85 Charlotten Strasse. Fly!"

"Sultana, I depart upon the wings of Love, to return like the bee to the rose, laden with golden pollen."

"Your wings, unlucky bee, will be clipped by a policeman," Madame said inwardly, as the drawing-room door shut and the Slav's footsteps crossed the little ante-room. There was a murmur of voices, that of Straz raised as if in surprise or interrogation. Probably the gilt-buttoned functionary had been lying in wait for him with the hotel-bill. She listened a moment, heard no more, and went back, saying to her attendant:

"Pack everything. We leave at once for Brussels."

The maid said, with peculiar demureness:

"And Monsieur, Madame?"

Her mistress told her:

"Monsieur has gone to call upon his bankers."

The maid responded with even greater demureness:

"Madame should know that in her absence Monsieur endeavored----"

Madame said hastily:

"Pay no heed. These are customs common in Roumania!"

The woman continued, bridling with all the scorn Lesbia's waiting-maid feels for the penniless gallant:

"Monsieur endeavored to borrow of me ten thalers...."

Madame shrugged and bade her:

"Go on with your packing! Monsieur does not accompany us!"

And without the exchange of another word the mistress and maid understood each other perfectly. The impecunious Straz was to be jettisoned for the lightening of the ship.

Meanwhile, Fate willed the Slav should encounter on the threshold of the ante-room the emissary of Messrs. Müller and Stettig, who had called for the third time to demand payment of the bill. This being offered for his inspection as the responsible male of the party, threw unexpected light on the intentions of Adelaide.

"Sixteen hundred thalers," he murmured. "Reasonable, too--most reasonable! I have seen Madame wearing the ornament, and admired it very much. Yes, if you desire it, I will speak to the lady. It is doubtless mere forgetfulness that has deferred the settlement of your claim. Wait here!"

He unwound a knitted silk scarf that was folded round his bull-neck. He turned down the collar of his Astrakhan-lined coat, and went back with noiseless steps. The door of the boudoir was ajar. He satisfied himself that Adelaide was in the bedroom beyond it. He stepped in, glanced about him, formulating his plan, then locked the boudoir-door, put the key in his pocket, crossed the room, and knocked upon the door of the bedroom, swiftly stepping aside, so that the door--which opened outward,--should conceal him from those within.

"Who is it knocks? Open and see!" he heard Madame command her maid within the bedroom. The maid appeared, crossed the boudoir, found the door fast, and returned to tell her mistress. But then she found the door of the bedroom she had quitted was bolted on the other side. There was no sound within, but a kind of rustling, and once or twice a footstep on the carpet. So, with the patience of her caste, the maid sat down upon a sofa until it should please her lady to undo the bedroom-door.

Her lady was incommoded by the grip of Straz's thick hairy hands upon her windpipe. He freed one in a moment--and then Adelaide was being blinded by the folds of a silken scarf.... Long, wide, and elastic, it served the Roumanian's purpose admirably. Perhaps it had been useful in that particular way before. And as he rolled and twisted it, he whispered sniggeringly in the little pearl-white ear that jutted from between the crimson swathings, almost as though it had been purposely left free:

"So, my Sultana!--so,--you would betray me!..."

Enveloped, she stammered through the silken meshes some barely intelligible sentences. The folds tightened chokingly--and the words died in a gasp.

"Mercy!... Forgive!..."

"Surely, my proud Sultana," said the thickish voice with the catarrhal snuffle in it. "What will men not pardon to beauty such as yours!"

She moaned and strove to tear away the smooth bands that were suffocating her. He whipped a velvet ribbon from the toilet-table, brought down her hands, and bound them behind her back. That little shell-shaped ear was purplish by this time. At the point of losing consciousness, she felt him softly groping for the treasure hidden in her bosom--she heard the crackling of the roll of notes withdrawn.

"Do not...!" she tried to say, but no sound came from her but a groaning; and through the roaring of her blood she heard him answer back:

"Do not rob you! would you plead, my peerless Adelaide? Far from it. I merely take from you what is my own! For--there was the taste of opium in my mouth when I awakened in Love's embraces. And conviction, stronger than proof, convinces me that I have been sold. Else why this store of honey in the breast of the Queen of the garden, while the black bee was sent roaming to gather store elsewhere? Eh, eh! I think I could manage to guess at the reason why I was to have been detained by those jewelers on suspicion of theft! My Sultana would have vanished, leaving no address behind her.... Istenem! but the emerald star would have served your purpose well!"

There was a silence. Rings of fire, stars of emerald whirled before Adelaide's blinded vision.

"Do not be afraid, my Queen, I am not going to murder you!" chuckled the thick voice in the little swollen blackening ear. "Only to spoil your beauty a little--nothing more terrible. Your eyes will be less clear, your skin less dazzlingly unblemished, after this experience. You will never again look in your mirror without remembering me!"

Rocking and swaying, ready to fall, she was only kept upright by the arm of Straz about her body. She felt him free that arm, shifting her weight against his great chest, and as she lay blind and helpless there, his snigger vibrated through her horribly. Then--the smooth, slippery folds of the silk scarf tightened murderously, stopping all breath, shutting out consciousness. Whelmed in an abyss of Nothingness, she felt and knew no more....

"Madame is a little unwell," said Straz, who regained the ante-chamber by the way of a dressing-room communicating with Madame's bedroom. "She will call on Messrs. Müller and Stettig to-morrow, and settle their account. Meanwhile"--for the representative of the firm was beginning to expostulate--"she returns the emerald-pointed star with her regrets." He added smilingly as the relieved employé gratefully pocketed the trinket: "Ladies are not business-like in these little matters of money. But Heaven, who inspired in man the desire to see them well-dressed, has conferred on him the privilege of paying their bills."

He accompanied the jeweler's foreman down to the vestibule, chatting agreeably. He carried no valise, so was allowed to pass out with the man. Keeping one thick, hairy-backed hand thrust down into a pocket of his Astrakhan-furbished shooting-jacket, close-clutched upon the solid roll of Prussian banknotes, reft from that smooth and perfumed hiding-place.

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XXXI

"The Crown Prince," wrote P. C. Breagh, "and the Red Prince--as people nickname Friedrich Karl of Prussia, in virtue of his partiality for the crimson uniform of his regiment, the Ziethen Hussars,--have departed amidst scenes of overwhelming enthusiasm, to take over the respective commands of the Third and Second Army Corps. On July 31st, at half-past-five noon, the very day on which I pen these lines, the aged Sovereign drove in an open landau drawn by two superb black Hungarian horses to join his Ministers and his Chief of the Great Staff at the station, where waited the special train destined to convey the venerable Commander-in-Chief of the Field Armies of Germany to the immediate Seat of War."

There was a jolt, the pencil bucked furiously, and the writer's skull came smartly into contact with the uncushioned seat-back of the gray-painted, semi-partitioned railway transport-car, in which, with some forty blue-uniformed infantrymen of the Prussian Guard, P. C. Breagh was being hurried toward the Rhine frontier, in a din so comprehensive that you could only make your neighbor hear by putting your mouth to his ear and bawling, and in an atmosphere so thick with dust and smells, of varied degrees of intensity and picturesqueness, that you drew it into your lungs in gulps and exhaled it with sensible effort.

The partly-glazed windows did not let down, bars began where the glass left off, and therefore the N.C.O.'s of the eighth of a company appropriated to themselves the corner-seats. Sandwiched between two large and heated warriors, with his unstrapped knapsack on his knee, and his elbows jammed immovably against his lower ribs, P. C. Breagh abandoned the impulse to rub his bump, and continued to write, using the old straw hat which crowned the knapsack as a support for a notebook.

"The Queen," he went on, "who was evidently laboring under the influence of emotion, accompanied His Majesty. A thunderstorm coruscated and detonated overhead as the Royal salute of guns crashed out, and King Wilhelm's subjects greeted him with round upon round of enthusiastic 'Hoch's.' The object of their acclamations kept continually smoothing his heavy white mustache with the right, ungloved hand, between the salutes with which he acknowledged the plaudits of his people--a characteristic gesture of the veteran monarch when..."

The pencil faltered. "Under the influence of emotion" could not be used again, because it had already done duty for the Queen, whose eyes, poor lady! had been red with crying. P. C. Breagh knocked off to sharpen his pencil and read over what he had set down. "Coruscated and detonated" pleased him, though to have said that the thunderstorm had growled and blazed would have been a good deal nearer the mark. And "characteristic gesture" was loftier language than "familiar trick" or "habit." Mr. Knewbit would have snorted at it, it was true, but this was not one of Mr. Knewbit's stipulated-for letters, "describing in a style readable by plain, ordinary, everyday people, what you've seen and heard, and felt, and smelled."

Still, one could not hope to please everybody--and this was a descriptive article--not a chatty news-letter. When complete, it would be forwarded to the Editor of a Leading Daily, with the brief intimation that more like it might be had--at a price. That it would draw commissions, P. C. Breagh believed implicitly. There was a stately stodginess about the style that could not fail to impress. So he continued as "Die Wacht am Rhein" broke out once more; and the deep bass notes emitted by his burly right-hand neighbor tickled his ribs and made him goosefleshy.

"The aged monarch seemed weary, it appeared to me."

"Ach, ach! but the old man looks tired!" people in the front had holloaed to one another. All the week-end one had seen the King bowling up, and down, and round-about Berlin in his little one-horse carriage, with a single, mounted orderly-officer in attendance; giving out colors, addressing the regiments, conversing in short, soldierly sentences with the field-officers in command.

"Baron von Moltke, Chief of the Great General Staff," went on the pencil, "the War-Minister General von Roon, and the Federal Chancellor and Minister-President General Count von Bismarck-Schönhausen, with the personnel of the Great Headquarters Staff and the mobilized Foreign Office, received His Majesty at the railway-station, tastefully adorned with black-and-white bunting, carpeted with red, and garlanded with roses, said to be the favorite floral emblem of the septuagenarian potentate...."

It could not be denied by P. C. Breagh,--the painfully hammered-out paragraphs smacked of the sample supplied by Mr. Knewbit for avoidance. "Sham technicality and sentimental slumgullion," he seemed to hear that rigorous critic saying, so loudly and in such a pouncing manner, that P. C. Breagh hurriedly scratched out the sentence about the floral emblems, though "septuagenarian potentate" must be reserved for use later, as offering a refreshing change from "aged King" and "veteran" or "venerable monarch." "Hoary-headed Ruler" would come in usefully by-and-by....

Bump--bump--jolt, ker-link-ker-lank ker-lunk! ...

The two powerful engines, pulling a train-load of fully two-thirds of a regiment at fullest war-strength, were slowing up at a station: ... A roar of voices kept continually at crescendo hailed the arrival. Another roar, mixed with fragments of patriotic song, replied. The platform presented a sea of heads of both sexes, backed by an imposing array of shelves, decorated with foliage, dangling lamps and national bunting; surmounted by a bust of the King between busts of Moltke and Bismarck, and literally groaning under piles of sausages, loaves, cheeses, oleaginous packages of sandwiches and pastry--rows of gilt and silver-foiled wine-bottles, and then more rows....

Barrels of genuine Berlin beer, adorned with the Hohenzollern colors, stood hospitably ready to replenish glasses and mugs. Filled with the amber nectar, trays of these, suspended from the shoulders of stalwart youths, wearing Red Cross arm-badges, and white-muslin-draped maidens adorned with crimson sashes, waited to quench the thirst of Prussia's soldier sons. And taking in the condition of things at a glance, said one of the two N.C.O.'s in charge of the party:

"Himmeldonnerwetter! ... Lads, there seems no help for it. We have got to tuck in again!"

And simultaneously with the bass response: "At your service, Herr Sergeant!" and almost before the slow-going locomotives stopped, panting Samaritans hurled themselves upon the carriages, and arms ending in hands proffering packages of comestibles and tobacco, bottles of beer or frothing glasses, or packets of cigars, were thrust in between the window-bars, until every man's jaws were busy, and every man's hands were laden.... Until even the modestly retiring P. C. Breagh had been compelled to accept a mighty hunk of iced plum-cake and a giant package of liver-sandwiches, and forced to empty a foaming beaker of brown Bavarian.

"Why not, why not, when they have plenty for everyone?" hiccoughed a stalwart private, who had emptied many mugs: "Won't every fellow of the regiment find his double-pint waiting him, when the next train comes up?"

There was plenty for everyone. Not only the troop-train that would follow this, containing the odd thousand rank-and-file and the rest of the regimental officers, would find the "cool blonde" and the "dark brunette," the savory snack and the soothing weed, as ready for the alleviation of possible requirements as they had been at every halting-place--the City of Hanover severely excepted--since the huge send-off at Berlin on the afternoon of the previous day.

Every class contributed to the refreshment of the soldiers. Wealthy brewers sent drayloads of barrels, rich aristocrats gave wines from their cellars. The bakers bestowed bread, the pork-butchers contributed hams and sausages, the tobacconists cigars and pipe-tobacco. While the cook baked cakes with her perquisites of lard and dripping: and the servant-maid took from her scant savings for the purchase of a gross of match-boxes, to distribute at the station when the military trains came in.

Poor was the wight who could be liberal in nothing. And thus thought the little old woman when she cooked her dozen ginger-snaps.

She was a tiny little monkey-faced old peasant, in a frilled white mutch, jaded red shawl, blue apron and brown-striped drugget petticoat; and she stood quite alone in a clear space left upon the platform of a little country station, as the eager philanthropists about her crowded to lavish hospitality on the inmates of the incoming train. As the pastry and the cakes, the coffee, beer, and spirits flowed in at the windows and down the throats of the wearers of the blue, white-faced Guard uniforms, this little old woman made no effort to offer her ginger-snaps, which were ranged in three rows of four on a dingy white cloth in a little broken basket, and were palpably melting under the rays of an ardent July sun.

Her timidity and her feebleness had kept her back, but when the Colonel in command issued the order to entrain, and the officers who had clanked in pairs up and down the platform, good-humoredly answering the questions of old ladies, and gallantly returning the admiring glances of young ones, accepting a leaf-full of fruit here, or a glass of Rhine wine or a cigarette there,--began to take their places,--she mustered courage to hold up her basket to a dandy young subaltern and murmur: "Please to take!"

Next moment--the dandy could not have meant it,--but as he pushed away the extended basket, and swung round upon his heel, his silver sword-knot caught in the frayed cloth or broken wicker-work, and down went the basket, and the snaps were spilt upon the ground....

"Thou dear God!" the little old woman cried in anguish. "Ach--ach! the good, the delicious ginger-snaps! ... Who now will eat them? Ach!--Ach!"

And up to her poor eyes went her blue apron. It was a terrible tragedy to her. Some people pitied her. Others were heartless enough to laugh after the fashion of the blond, red-lipped officer--and to laugh once more at the summary fashion of his setting-down.

For a terrible, rasping voice said, speaking behind the dandy subaltern, and full four inches above the level of his ear:

"Under-Lieutenant Fahle will remedy the damage done by his carelessness before he resumes his place in the train!"

Thus the train waited while the offender, blood-red with rage and confusion, picked up the sticky brown cakes with his snowily gloved fingers, and replaced them in the broken basket, amidst the little old woman's humble apologies, and entreaties that the gracious gentleman would not trouble himself. When the Colonel, owner of the rasping voice above referred to, in conjunction with a bushy scarlet beard and bristling mustaches, a stately height of six feet four inches, a regulation waist, and three rows of decorations, performed an act of bravery for which he deserved another medal still. For, selecting the snap that looked cleanest, this dauntless warrior gravely took it between his thumb and finger, bit a piece out, and declared it excellent. Then, amidst the rapturous plaudits of the onlookers, he solemnly saluted the twittering old lady, and swung himself loftily back into his carriage, thundering out once more the order:

"Entrain!"

Conceive the banging of doors, the bumping and clanking, the cheers and the tears da capo, and the curtseys the little old woman dropped, one after another, almost faster than one could count. Suppose the train moving slowly on, and a tricksy spirit inspiring a wag among the rank-and-file aboard, to shout to her:

"Hey there, Mother Ginger-snaps! give us one before we go!"

Twenty voices took up the cry, and blue cloth-covered arms were thrust out between the carriage window-bars. Hands waggled, soliciting the sugary boon. And the little old woman, torn between the desire to give and the impossibility of giving,--danced like a hen on a hot griddle, until a giant porter, compassionating her plight, snatched her up like a large doll, and ran with her beside the moving carriages, holding her out at arm's length, as she upheld her basket, until all the ginger-snaps were gone.

Instinctively as P. C. Breagh had felt that the cumbrous grandiloquence of his descriptive article would be snorted at by Mr. Knewbit, so he knew that the little incident of the ginger-snaps would afford his patron delight. Therefore he tucked it away in a safe pigeon-hole of his memory, with a description of the rough, gay-painted, crowded wooden box he sat in, odoriferous with its conglomeration of smells, based on the combined stenches of tallow and perspiring humanity, laced with the sharp sour of malt, and mercifully tempered with the fumes of strong tobacco.

Piff! The hot, cinder-flavored draughts that raced in over the glazed half-windows were powerless to freshen or dilute the atmosphere. Yet among the varied types of men who, their heavy knapsacks disposed in iron racks above them, sat packed as close as sardines on the narrow benches, were not a few, who, judging by the mute evidence of their well-groomed skins and carefully kept finger-nails, their finer hair and more clearly modeled features, belonged to Germany's upper class.

Shriek! The train plunged into a cutting ending in a tunnel of sheer blackness. Bursting, with another shriek, into the light of day, she raced for a while neck-and-neck with a cavalry-train. They were Red Dragoon Guards and White Cuirassiers of the Great Headquarters Staff, and they exchanged cheers and sharp, staccato shouts of "Hurrah, Preussen!" with the infantry of the Guard, as the latter were hurried by.

Nothing was left to Chance. All was deadly, methodical accuracy. The keen, clear brain under Moltke's wig controlled the speed of every train upon the six Rhine and Moselle railways over which the Army of United Germany was rolling to inundate France.

Trains, trains, trains!

Trains of trucks, laden with gabions woven of split beech-saplings, with oaken lascines and bales of empty earth-bags. Commissariat trains of wagons packed with sheep and cattle, and the ubiquitous pig of the Fatherland. Coffee-and-sugar trains, trains of pea-sausage and the rock-hard brown biscuit wherewith "Our Moltke" fed his soldier men. Trains of spare arms, clothing, trenching-tools and cooking-utensils; trains of cartridges, gunpowder, blasting-powder, solid shot, shrapnel, and the big projectiles destined for the siege-guns; with trains upon trains close-packed with the men who were to use these things,--took precedence or gave it, because the withered finger beckoned or waved....

"Our Moltke," so mild and affable and courteous, truly, when the Genius that possessed thee spread his steely wings and soared, thou wert a very terrible old man, or so it seems to me.

The descriptive article laid by, you found P. C. Breagh, in the interests of Mr. Knewbit, studying his fellow-travelers. The weak-eyed, spectacled young soldier on his left-hand, whose fingers were burned and yellow-stained, as though their owner had dabbled in chemical experiments, and who had remained mute as a fish throughout the journey, only opening his mouth to eat or drink, or reply to a remark addressed to him by a non-commissioned officer, was reading the "Iliad" of Homer in the original, from a little parchment-bound, Amsterdam-printed Elzevir edition, that he seemed to cherish as the apple of one of his short-sighted eyes.... A handsome young bugler in the next compartment had a well-thumbed copy of "The Pickwick Papers." The huge tanned Guardsman on his right, whose broad breast displayed the medals of 1866 and of the Schleswig-Holstein campaign, and whose powerful bass notes had reverberated through the diaphragm of his neighbor when he sang, was chatting with a younger comrade who sat opposite. Holding the well-greased unburnished needle-gun between their solid thighs--to hang the silver-spiked Guard's helmet on the muzzle seemed a popular way of disposing of the headpiece--they exchanged experiences in a genial roar, subdued to a growl at confidential passages.

"Grete came to the Barracks to bid me God-speed.... There were a few tears--dried when I promised to bring her a wedding-gift from Paris. Thou seest, she is going to turn over a new leaf, and get married to a waiter at a Sommer-garten--a club-footed man who is not called upon to serve--being on the Exempt List."

They guffawed at the picture of the happy bridegroom. Said the senior, wiping his overflowing eyes with a hand as brown and broad as an undersized flitch of bacon:

"I looked up 'Mina in the Landsberger-Strasse. She could not meet me, as her old woman had a betrothal-party for one of her daughters. A young student from a Conservatoire, in a tail-coat three sizes too small for him, and a pair of linen cuffs as big as starched table-napkins, was the victim served up. I saw him as 'Mina carried in the spiced wine and rum-punch, and a longer pair of lantern-jaws I never saw. But when they sat down to table, and I took another peep through the door-crack, I promise you those jaws of his were grinding away like steam!"

"Nu, but the punch?" asked the other Guardsman.

"Sapperlot!--do you suppose I went without my whack of it?--and 'Mina's eyes as red as preserved cherries with crying about my going to the War? I had had a mug of the good stuff, and a bottle of something or other!--gilt paper on the neck of it--nothing at all but fizzle inside. Then I settled down to a jug of cool beer and the breast of a turkey, while 'Mina was waiting on the parlor-folks. Heard her step coming along the passage--thought I'd play the fool with her a bit--so I turned the kitchen-gas low and hid behind the door. In she comes!--I'd got my arms round her and kissed her--a regular juicy smack or two, before--by the yell she gave!--I knew it wasn't 'Mina at all...."

"Potzblitz! who was it, then?"

"Who but the old woman? But for the thumping size of the waist I'd squeezed, and the taste of violet-powder in my mouth, I might have thought I'd got hold of one of the young Fräuleins. 'Help, murder, thieves!' cried she. 'How dare you insult a respectable mother of a family! Give your name, you rogue, or I'll have in the police!'--'Don't do that,' says I. 'I'm only 'Mina's brother--dropped in to take leave before going to the War!'--'A fine brother!' says she. 'Do brothers hug their sisters in that bearish way? Be off with you quick march! and think yourself lucky to escape so easily!'..." He wound up: "But if she had reported me to the Herr Oberst Leutnant, nothing much would have come of it. He'd have said: 'Was sol Ich!--but we're off to the War!'"

A sentence or so more, and the conversation resolved itself into strong tobacco-smoke. Twilight was fading into dusk. Dortmund--Elberfeld--Düsseldorf had paid tribute of beers, cheers, and tears to the defenders of German Unity, the most inveterate songsters and conversationalists were getting sleepy, and it would be midnight before the troop-train, traveling, like the others that followed it, at a speed strictly calculated to permit of the somewhat slower transit of six supplementary trains bearing the King and his Great Headquarter Staff--could reach Cologne.

The lamps, adding the flavor of hot kerosene to the conglomeration of odors--had been lighted at Düsseldorf. The tobacco-reek had grown so dense that below their band of yellow light was a sharply defined band of opaque blue fog, in which medium colors were neutralized to monochrome, and outlines of sleeping, or chatting, or card-playing, or reading soldiers blurred into vagueness, wavered, and were blotted out for P. C. Breagh in a sudden doze.

He wakened at a late hour, to the iron measure clanked and ground and beaten out by couplings and brakes, wheels and axles. Snores of all kinds--from the shrill clarionet-note of the spectacled student of Homer to the deep 'cello-bass of the Guardsman who had hugged 'Mina's mistress in mistake for his sweetheart--resounded on all sides; the tobacco-fog had somewhat thinned.

Finding it possible to move, because his burly neighbor was soundly sleeping, pillowed upon the body of the man upon his right hand, P. C. Breagh yawned--recovered his knapsack, which had slipped from his knees to a floor which in point of cleanliness left much to be desired, removed from it with a fragment of newspaper the worst impurities it had contracted by contact, threw the newspaper out of the nearest window and, in the performance of this act, caught a not unfriendly eye.

Its owner, a huge young man, who, occupying a place on the end of the same seat, had been hitherto screened by the body of the huger private who had kissed not wisely, said, and in English of the Oxford brand:

"You find our men lacking in good manners? Yet there is much spitting on the part of English soldiers, when they are standing at ease, or off duty. I have myself observed this."

"Then you know England?" P. C. Breagh interrogated, and the private, who was very tall, very blond, very broad-shouldered, straight-featured, blue-eyed, and small-waisted, answered:

"Pretty well. I have a relative who married a lady who is your countrywoman. I have been the guest of her family at their London house. You speak our language, for I have heard you. And with a North Prussian accent, by the way."

P. C. Breagh returned:

"I spent three years at Schwärz-Brettingen. With the sole result that I can make myself understood by Germans who don't speak English. And that I owe to my landlady."

Said the Guardsman, yawning and smiling:

"My father sent me to Oxford. Three terms have yielded this result,--that I can converse with Englishmen who know German. Thanks to a charming young lady, a niece of the relative I spoke of just now, who was so good as to read the poems of Tennyson with me. 'The Princess,' 'In Memoriam,' and 'Maud,' were her chief favorites--I preferred his epics founded on the Arthurian legend. Though my charming English cousin was often vexed with me for saying that our Wagner's verse-drama of the Nibelungen-Ring possessed far truer inspiration, and that 'Die Walküre' and 'Tristan' would have been finer than anything Tennyson has ever written,--had they existed simply as poems, and never been wedded to music at all. At that the young English lady was angry; she said things to me in her indignation which were terrible; but she forgave me, because I was compelled to leave the University and return to Germany to put in my term of service as a private, before I present myself as a candidate for an officer's silver sword-knot in the usual course of things. You are, perhaps, acquainted with our German methods of qualifying for a Commission? Bismarck has two sons serving as troopers with the 1st Dragoon Guards; whereas a private of Ours is a nephew of Moltke's, and two or three others are cadets of princely families--representatives of what your countrymen would call the 'aristocracy of Germany.' Perhaps one or two of them will find that silver sword-knot they are looking for--across the frontier, somewhere between the Rhine and the Moselle!..."

"When do you think there will be fighting?"

Inexpressibly P. C. Breagh yearned to know when and where the dance was expected to begin. But his eagerness seemed to freeze the loquacious Guardsman, whose blue eyes narrowed, whose smile stiffened, whose smooth voice instantly diverted the current of the talk to other things:

"Were you at the Gala Performance at the Opera, the night before last? Delphine Zucca could hardly sing; her husband, young Baron von Bladen, of the Jastrow Hussars, has been appointed first galloper on the Staff of General Manteuffel, Chief of the First Corps, First Army. So the Zucca is naturally inconsolable, as they've only been married a month. But Elise Hahn-Tieck, as the Genius of United Germany, in a corslet of gilt chain-mail, and a helmet crested with oak-boughs, with a green Rhine meandering over her white muslin robe, was tremendous when she came down to the center of the stage to sing 'Die Wacht am Rhein,'---carrying our East Prussian Flag and the banner of the Hohenzollern, and followed by other operatic actresses in character as the Auxiliary States. Sapperlot! When she drew her sword, she was tremendous! And when she fell upon her knees, the big chandelier in the auditorium jumped. She sang the part of Gretchen last season, and looked not much over thirty. Make-up, because, you know, she has a grandson who is a junior-lieutenant in the Duke of Coburg's Regiment of White Cuirassiers, and must be sixty if she's a day. Prime donne are like wines, no good till they've arrived at a ripe old age. Though I could introduce you to a little girl of eighteen or so, just now doing a song-and-dance at the Schützen-Strasse Tingel-Tangel, who has a voice that pleases me better than the warblings of any of the highly paid Opera House nightingales. And what a figure! round and tempting and seductive. And such arms, and--Sapperlot!--what a pair of legs!"

Thus prattled the twenty-year-old sprig of German aristocracy, to the other youngster, his senior in years if his junior in knowledge of the world. He went on in his Oxford English:

"Not that I'm inclined to ruin myself for women, though I must say a good many pretty ones have been uncommonly kind to me. That sort of thing runs in my family, though! and I ought to be obliged to my Cousin Max for dying a bachelor. Killed himself in '66 about a mistress who was playing the double game. A regular French adventuress, diabolically handsome, who eloped with him when he was attaché of our Prussian Embassy at Paris in '57, and has a husband living, they say. Colossal impudence--actually passes herself off as my cousin's widow, in society of a certain sort. So, out of the desire to deal Madame Venus a slap in the face, I got a comrade who knew her, to introduce me at a festive supper-party.... Said he: 'Countess von Schön-Valverden, permit me to present my most intimate friend,' and reels off my name. Would you believe it, the woman never turned a hair. It was I who got flustered when she stared me in the face. Colossal coolness--I can hear her now, lisping: 'The Herr Count is doubtless a relative of my poor, dear Maximilian! Even had he not borne the name, I should have been struck by his resemblance to my beloved lost one.' And then I got out, not half as cleverly as I had planned it: 'And even had you borne the name that is your own, Madame, I should have been shot through the heart by the beauty that has already proved fatal to one member of my family!'" He added, "I laid an emphasis on those four words, 'shot through the heart,' because my unlucky cousin actually met his death after that fashion.... Will you have a cigar of mine? They are better than the weeds our patriotic friends have bestowed on us."

P. C. Breagh accepted a smooth light-hued Havana from the offered case, asking with interest, due to the lurid flare of tragedy in the background of the other's lively chatter: "And the lady of the Venusberg--how did she take your reference to her past?"

The Guardsman, cigar in mouth, stopped in the act of striking a fusee-match to answer: "She took it--as a woman of Madame de Bayard's stamp might be expected to. With a sangfroid that one could only admire somewhat less than her superb skin and hair, her shape of a goddess and her marvelous eyes--almost the color of Brazilian tourmaline." He sent out a spiral of fragrant brownish-blue smoke and added: "Had I actually stood four years ago in the shoes which I have legally inherited, I'll be hanged if I'd have shot myself and left her to my rival. For the other was at Schönfeld--actually in the house, you must know!--when Cousin Max came home on leave. Hence the tragedy at three o'clock in the morning. Such a depressing hour to commit suicide. Now, had it been after supper..."

He shrugged, and sent out another spiral of cigar-smoke, and, perceiving that his whilom listener heard no longer, ceased to talk.

The while P. C. Breagh plunged into a brown-study by the chance utterance of a stranger's name, and unblushingly abandoning the effort to remain true to his gigantic type-ideal, hung fondly over the mentally evoked image of an Infanta in miniature.

Where was Juliette de Bayard now? Had the outbreak of war hastened or delayed her marriage with the happy master of swordsmanship? And--worshiping her father as Monica had said she did--how had she borne the parting from him?

She would be very calm.... P. C. Breagh pictured the little face drawn and pinched with misery; saw the sapphire eyes dimmed with tears unshed, imagined the slender throat convulsed with sobs that were kept resolutely back, heard the silver-flute voice saying:

"My father has honored me with his confidence as long as I can remember, sir!" and, "See you--I will be trusted absolutely, or I will not be trusted at all!"

Strange that his elfin queen--his carved ivory Princess--should bear the same name as the woman the Guardsman had gossiped of--the beautiful, evil creature with the eyes like Brazilian tourmalines. And, what particular color in Brazilian tourmalines might have been intended? Some were purple, others pink, and yet others reddish-brown. The woman who had dropped her parasol on the staircase at the Chancellor's had had eyes of tawny wine-color. With the remembrance, came back the perfume shaken from her rustling silks and laces, and the languid echo of her caressing voice.

Drowsiness came next, and then oblivion, in heavy slumber. And, as the unconscious form of P. C. Breagh lapsed this way and that, and his chin burrowed deeper into his bosom, the Sergeant who occupied the corner-seat facing the sleeper,--shading his eyes from the lamplight with a broad brown hand that wore a thick silver wedding ring upon the little finger, lowered the hand, and, leaning forward, stared in the young man's unconscious face, with small, suspicious, unwinking eyes. Now the eyes looked round so sharply, that every waking man in the compartment, save the blue-eyed patron of the Tingel-Tangel girl, found it necessary to assume the appearance of slumber, and the Sergeant's voice said hoarsely:

"Private von Valverden!"

"At your service, Herr Sergeant."

"Private von Valverden, is this one, then, an Englishman?"

"Undoubtedly, Herr Sergeant!"

"Gut!" said the Sergeant. "But what is his calling? Is he of the newspaper-offices that he sits and scribbles so?"

"That question I cannot answer, Herr Sergeant, but if he be on the staff of any paper, he cannot accompany us without a Legitimation, and a letter from someone in authority."

The Sergeant sucked in his bearded lips, and rolled his sharp little eyes more suspiciously than ever. Valverden went on:

"Doubtless he has them--I saw him show a paper to the Halt Commandant at Berlin, and the Herr Colonel himself spoke to him and told him he might travel as far as Bingen by this train. And I happen to know that four London newspaper correspondents have been accredited by the King upon the instance of Count Bismarck; one being appointed to accompany the Crown Prince, another being permitted to accompany the Second Army, while two are attached to the Great Headquarter Staff."

The Sergeant said, glancing at the unconscious slumberer:

"Gut, gut! but is this fellow one of them?"

"If he be not, Herr Sergeant, he will get no farther than Bingen, for doubtless the Commandant there will be on the lookout for persons whose credentials are not of the best."

The Sergeant shook his head vigorously, wrinkling up his full-bearded countenance suspiciously:

"And suppose the Commandant is not on the lookout, Private von Valverden? See you, I have had my suspicions since yesterday, and I tell you..."

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XXXII

Every waking ear in the neighborhood, and there were now a good many, pricked with curiosity as the Sergeant half-rose, and, inclining his inflamed countenance and bearded lips toward the ear of his selected confidant, continued in a hoarse rumbling undertone:

"Two of those verdammte English newspaper-scribblers that have got on the blind side of Their Excellencies and His Majesty the Commander-in-Chief were at the station at Berlin picking up information the very day we entrained. Well do I know that paunchy little one with the big beard, who has, they say, as many Orders as a Field-Marshal, and who will venture to thrust himself upon Our Moltke in his study, and accost His Excellency Count Bismarck upon the very doorsteps of the Reichstag itself. They got off three trains ahead of us, paying for men and horses and trucks, to Cologne; and if this fellow were not a knave, would he not have gone with them? Ach, ja! It would have been so! But they did not even know him, though he pretended to touch his cap to them.... I tell you he turned as red as beetroot when they passed him without a glance. Nu, nu! he is an unlicensed meddler, if not a French spy, speaking English. Do they not teach it at their Lycées? And he has got on the blind side of the Commandant at Berlin and the Herr Colonel. But I, Sergeant Schmidt, have my weather-eye open, and it sticks in my gizzard that our so-glorious Moltke, let alone His Majesty, should with so much civility these quill-driving vagabonds encourage; when they say the French Emperor has given orders that, should the like of them about the heels of his Army Corps be caught sniffing, they are to be shot."

"Possibly the Napoleon has more deficiencies to be ashamed of than we have, Herr Sergeant!"

Taking a deep breath, the Sergeant blew himself out to the utmost of his capacity and bellowed:

"Himmeldonnerwetter! are you going to insinuate in my presence that the Prussian Army has anything at all to be ashamed of? Now you've waked this rascal with your racket, maybe you'll sit on his head while I go through his pockets. Here, Braun and Kleiss, catch hold of his arms and legs!"

Waking in the chiaroscuro of the smoke-filled, lamplit troop-carriage to find himself in the brawny grip of the aforesaid Braun and Kleiss, P. C. Breagh fought for freedom, yelling as one possessed, and lashing out with all his might. In the heat of the scrimmage that followed, as a muscular arm in a coarse blue sleeve came round his neck from behind and choked him into silence, somebody said in his ear:

"Keep still ... not hurt you! Only going ... search!"

And before he had rallied his wits sufficiently to realize that the warning was in English, a pair of extra-sized hands had deftly emptied the pockets of the old brown Norfolk jacket, relieved him of the cherished binoculars, a brand-new revolver, and a purse and letter-case that had been hidden in his bosom next the skin. Then, a soiled newspaper having been spread upon the carriage-bench and the pieces of conviction arranged upon it, Sergeant Schmidt, surrounded by an audience of admiring inferiors, commenced to interrogate their owner:

"What is this?" He held up the well-used briar-root. "A pipe, and yet it might be used to conceal dispatches or tracings. A pistol also. On the principle of the French mitraille, with many barrels. Prisoner, answer! Where did you get this?"

Returned P. C. Breagh, scarlet and breathing shortly:

"I bought it in Berlin from a pawnbroker in the Landsberger-strasse. By what right..."

Someone behind hacked him on the ankle, driving home the axiom that silence was wisdom, and he subsided, boiling within, as the Colt, a nearly brand-new six-barreled weapon, seen and purchased, together with its box of three hundred cartridges, for seven of P. C. Breagh's cherished sovereigns, was laid by, while the Sergeant, breathing stertorously, examined the contents of the purse. He snorted, letting the bright coins run through his greedy fingers like yellow water:

"Nine pieces of gold. French coins, too, or call me a sheepshead!"

"At your service, Herr Sergeant," put in the smooth, well-bred voice of Valverden, following on the ominous murmur that had greeted the Sergeant's announcement; "the money is as English as this revolver is American. Prove the first for yourself. When has the French Emperor figured in a woman's hair and corsage?"

A guffaw went up. P. C. Breagh, recognizing the voice which had spoken from behind him, realized that here was a friend in need. But an attempt at speech on his part was frustrated by an ominous tightening of the muscular arm that had previously half-strangled him. The Sergeant, his fiery pot-zeal rather damped by frequent set-backs, snapped-to the purse and said, keeping it tucked in one capacious palm, as he shook out the contents of the letter-case:

"So! He is cunning, like many another of his kidney. Yet it may be here is proof sufficient to show him a rogue! Who here reads French?"

"I do, Herr Sergeant." Once again the well-bred voice of Valverden. The Sergeant grunted surlily:

"There is another here ... Private Kunz!"

The spectacled soldier who read Homer in the original, and who had been violently displaced when the muscular Braun and the athletic Kleiss had obeyed the order to pinion the suspected one, shot bolt upright in his distant corner, saluted and said in a meek voice:

"At your service, Herr Sergeant!"

"Private Kunz, canst thou read French?"

"Zu befehl, Herr Sergeant!" The spectacled private added as the Sergeant passed him over the contents of the letter-case: "But these letters are not in French. Two are in English, and one is in German."

The Sergeant scowled and thundered:

"Thou art an ass!"

"At your service, Herr Sergeant," mildly agreed the spectacled soldier, "but Private Count von Schön-Valverden, who understands the French and English languages, will corroborate my statement if you will kindly refer to him."

"'Kindly refer.' ... 'Corroborate my statement.' ..." The Sergeant, purple in the gills, and with bolting eyes, loosened his collar-hook before he launched into profanity: "Potzblitz! Never did I meet with language to equal thine. What wert thou as a civilian before thou didst enter the Army?"

"Graduate of the University of Würzburg, Herr Sergeant," faltered the spectacled Guardsman, "and Privat-docent in Chemistry and Philosophy. Occupying the post of assistant to Herr Weber, Dispensing Chemist, of Strahlsund, near Stettin."

"Sehrgut, Private Kunz," said the Sergeant, conscious of the grins lurking behind the respectful faces about him. "Tell us plainly, and without lying or skipping, what are these papers the fellow has got on him? Put him back on the seat, Braun and Kleiss, and sit on either side, each taking a wing. Now, Kunz, do thou begin!"

And the little sheaf that had been transferred from the horny clutches of the Sergeant, to the yellow-stained sensitive-looking fingers of the chemist's assistant, was subjected to the scrutiny of the weak eyes behind his large round spectacles, as sleepy-looking Westphalian villages of cottages with tall tiled roofs, grouped about squat, low-spired churches; and leagues of rye and barley, almost ready for the sickle, streamed by the half-glazed windows, all black in shadow and white in the clear, pure radiance of August's crescent moon.

Item, a worn letter in English handwriting of the legal kind, dated in the January previous, and directed to P. C. Breagh, Esq., Care of Frau Busch, Jaeger-strasse, Schwärz-Brettingen. Item, a passport issued some ten days previously, to the same person on application at the London Foreign Office, on disbursement of the sum of Two Shillings, and authorizing him, on payment of the proper dues and at his own risk, to proceed via Ostend to Berlin. Item, another passport, procured as a last resource--granting the said P. C. Breagh permission on the part of the Berlin Foreign Office, and as a strictly non-combatant British subject, to transfer himself, via Belgium and Luxembourg, to French territory. Lastly, a half-sheet of tough Chancellory note-paper, covered with the large, closely-set, vigorous handwriting of the man who was meant when newspaper-editors and politicians, diplomats and monarchs, guttersnipes and generals, talked of Prussia. What would happen when that came under the spectacles of the ex-chemist's assistant? P. C. Breagh thirsted to know.

What happened was, that the Sergeant, rendered impatient by delay on the part of the spectacled one, grabbed at the documents and dropped them on the unclean floor. The half-sheet of Chancellory note was picked up by Valverden. He gave it one glance and said, smoothly and with an indefinable change in the tone of the voice that P. C. Breagh had thought so friendly:

"I would put this paper back with the rest and return them to their owner, Herr Sergeant, and prosecute no further inquiries, if I were you."

"Nu? ... Was? I cannot read the crabbed stuff that is written and printed on the other papers," grunted the Sergeant. "But this seems wholesome German.... What says it, then? Tell us, you, since that gimpel in glasses can make nothing of it, for all his brag."

Valverden obeyed and read:

"The bearer of this is an Englishman, named Patrick Carolan Breagh, speaking German with a slight accent. Height five feet nine inches, age 23. Hair reddish and curling, complexion fresh, much freckled. Short, straight nose, gray eyes with dots of yellow, chin square, slightly cleft. Further his desire to proceed with our troops, if possible. I can personally vouch for his honesty and good faith.

"BERLIN, "July, 1870."

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