LVII…

LVII

Following the devious route of narrow paths by which the peasant had guided them, P. C. Breagh made his way back to the battle-ground between the Bois de Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont.

Prussian spade-parties had made good progress during the three hours of his absence. Part of the field had been cleared, long parallel trenches dug at twelve-foot intervals in the soft, soaked ground, and German bodies decently interred therein. Huge canvas sacks crammed with identification-tags, papers and purses removed from these stood ready to be carted away. Volunteers and Red Cross helpers had rendered like services to dead Frenchmen. And at the head of a trench, marked by a board on which was chalked in awkward letters:

"CHASSEURS OF HORSE OF THE IMPERIAL GUARD. OFFICERS, 6; TROOPS, 200."

a single widish grave had been dug, in which had been deposited the body of de Bayard.

The place was marked by a cross made of the broken, halves of a Uhlan lance lashed with a fragment of cavalry picket-rope. About the cross Mademoiselle de Bayard's veil had been loosely tied, and the vertical shaft topped, grimly enough, with M. le Colonel's talpack. None of the heavy clay soil had been thrown back. Waiting some hand to draw Earth's rude coverlet charitably over him, de Bayard lay, staring back in the brazen face of the sun.

His green silver-braided dolman had been torn open--the blood-drenched ceinture cut, showing the mortal lance-thrust. The red, silver-striped pantaloons had been slashed at the hips, no doubt in search of pocket-book and purse. It was difficult to credit that the sternly extended right arm, and the determined frown graven deep between the eyebrows, did not mean that Life was extinct, but merely in abeyance; that the cold glitter of the bold dark eyes and the grim setting of the pale mouth under the martial mustache would not warm and soften and relax into a smile.

He was so disdainful in his rigid silence, so much a chief of men, even in death, that the disheveled scallawag who dared to love his daughter winced at the cold stare of those dark, glittering eyes. But for Juliette's sake P. C. Breagh nerved himself to the sticking point--got down into the squashy clay beside de Bayard, and took his medals, and Cross of the Legion of Honor, giving him Juliette's Rosary instead.

"You know, sir, I don't intend to take a liberty," he felt like saying: "I'm only carrying out what I've given my word to do. If I'm not quite up to your mark, please overlook it! As to being worthy of her--is any man breathing? Ask yourself the question, and the answer will be No...."

Save the Algerian, Crimean and Sardinian medals, and the Cross, nothing of value remained upon the Colonel....

Some soldier having left a spade sticking in the clay at the head of an unfinished trench, P. C. Breagh possessed himself of the utensil, and began to fill the grave in, though the dead face looked at him so haughtily that until he had covered it with the black silk veil, he boggled hideously at the task.

Winking away the tears that blinded him, and gulping down the lump that stuck in his throat, he finished. Remained but the need of a Catholic priest to read the Office. You saw the caped cloak, and the broad-brimmed hat, or the cossack and biretta of the Roman ecclesiastic, working side by side with the Jewish rabbi, the English Protestant clergyman, and the Lutheran pastor, in these harvest-fields of death. The secular priest and the tonsured religious were to be found with the Red Cross Ambulance-trains and in the temporary hospitals; doing their best for the souls and bodies of their broken fellow-men, now that War had done the worst.

To whom should one appeal? Hardly to the burly, bearded Franciscan, who passed supporting a laden double-stretcher at the upper end. You saw his brown robe hitched up under his white girdle, and his muscular bare legs, ending in boots of the elastic-sided description, stained as though he had been treading out ripe grapes in the press. An Army chaplain succeeded the monk, upright and thin, in a dark military frock and black-banded forage-cap, half leading, half carrying a French corporal of infantry, who had received a bullet through both eyes. Farther off, a gray-haired ecclesiastic, whose dress betokened his episcopal dignity, was administering the Viaticum to a dying Mecklenburg Hussar. Even as the sublime Mystery of Faith was uplifted--even as the Englishman bent the knee in adoration--his glance fell upon the kneeling figure of an old man a few yards away.

Undoubtedly a priest, the poor shepherd of some poverty-stricken country parish, for the cassock that covered the frail, wasted body was threadbare, green with wear and heavily patched. Absorbed in devotion, his broad-brimmed hat lying on the ground before him, his thin hands crossed upon his sunken breast, his white head erect, his rapt gaze fixed upon the Host, he remained immovable, until the brief but solemn rite was at an end. Then he looked up at the sky--shaking back the long white hair that had fallen about his peaked and meager features--making three times rapidly the sign of the Cross. And the serene and beautiful peace that rested on that broad furrowed forehead, the radiant smile upon the toothless mouth, and the beaming kindliness in the brilliant dark eyes that rested on P. C. Breagh's, told him that here was the needed man.

Yet he hesitated to speak to the priest, who rose and moved a few steps farther to where a shell-torn horse, tangled in the rope-harness that had attached to it a smashed artillery caisson, lay groaning and thrashing its long neck and tortured head to and fro.

Parties of Uhlans told off for the purpose, were even then shooting such hopelessly wounded victims. But no merciful bullet had ended the pain of this suffering beast. It groaned again, and coughed up blood as the old man stopped to look at it, and fixed its haggard eyes almost humanly upon his face.

The appeal went home. Stepping over the prone body of its dead comrade, the old man bent over the horse and gently stroked its neck. He said, and the words came clearly to Carolan:

"Poor creature of God! be thy sore anguish ended. In the Name of the Father ..."

As he ended the Triune Invocation, the horse's head sank down heavily. A deep sigh heaved the creature's sides, and exhaled in a gasp. The hind legs contracted sharply toward the body, and then jerked out, heavily hitting the axle of the ammunition-cart. All was over. The Samaritan moved away, but P. C. Breagh followed and overtook him, crying:

"My Father..." And the old man halted and turned himself, leaning for support upon a knotted ash-stick and saying:

"Surely, my child. Do you need my poor assistance?"

A lisping voice, speaking with a country accent. And with that smile of radiant kindness making it angelic--the face of Voltaire.

There were the features of the Philosopher of Ferney, rendered familiar to this later age by many portraits and busts. The broad and lofty brow, the great orbital arches, the mobile expressive eyes, wide-winged, sensitive hawk-beak, thin-lipped mouth, with the subtly-curving corners and the deeply cleft humorous chin, were all there. The face lacked nothing of Voltaire but cynicism and devilry. In place of these imagine a Divine simplicity, and a tenderness so pure that the young man was abashed....

"My Father," he got out: "in charity to the dead and pity for the living, will you consent to read the Office of Burial by a Catholic soldier's graveside?"

"Surely, surely, my child," nodded the wearer of the threadbare soutane. And pulled out of his pocket a red-cotton handkerchief, wrapped about a battered Office-book and a shabby stole, and trotted back beside the Englishman. Then, standing opposite to where the green and red-plumed talpack topped the broken lance-shaft, he read the Absolution, the Libera me, Paternoster and Collects, and with a wide and sweeping gesture, solemnly blessed the grave and the trenches it neighbored, saying, at the close of the De Profundis that followed, with one of those rare smiles that made the old face beautiful exceedingly:

"My poor prayers are for all my children. Now kneel and make your confession. No one will hear you--it is as though we were together in my poor little church."

"But, my Father!..." P. C. Breagh protested.

The old man said, looking at him penetratingly:

"My child, you would tell me that not so very long ago you discharged your religious obligations. But to-day is the Octave of the Assumption of Our Blessed Lady, and you have not confessed or received Communion since Whitsuntide. Will you tell me that your conscience is clear enough to meet death without apprehension, when Saints at the moment of dissolution tremble, anticipating the terrors of the Divine Judgments of God!"

Tears stood in the radiant eyes, brimmed over and ran down in two channels worn by that sorrowful-sweet smile of his.... He clasped his hands entreatingly, then threw them wide, crying in a very passion of pity and love:

"My poor child, with Death on every side of you, will you turn from Him Who is Lord and Giver of Life? And what shall I say to Him when I stand before Him, and He asks me: 'Didst thou suffer a sinner to depart whom pleadings might have won?'"

There was no resisting that passionate entreaty. Another instant, and the barrier of pride broke down. P. C. Breagh knelt in the raw, moist clay by Henri de Bayard's graveside, and poured out his full heart under the light yet thrilling pressure of those thin old hands upon his head.

With the murmured blessing that followed the Absolution the hands were withdrawn and their owner went away. How he went and whither he betook himself, his penitent never knew.

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LVIII

The hamlet of Petit Plappeville lay strangely still and silent in the westering sunshine. Hitherto a small oasis of untouched ordinary life situated on the edge of a vast area of blackened devastation, it now partook in the general aspect of upheaval and ruin. The doors of the dozen cottages forming its single street stood wide open. Household! goods, furniture, clothing, broken loaves of bread, smashed and empty wine-bottles were strewed upon the street and in the little, flowery front yards. All the doors stood open, some that had been locked and driven in hung crookedly on twisted hinges, the broken windows displayed shattered splinters edging gaping holes. Not a human being showed, not a fowl pecked among the litter. The hand of the marauder had plainly been at work. P. C. Breagh groaned as he crossed the threshold of Madame Guyot's cottage, such a scene of domestic chaos housed between its denied walls.

Chests of drawers and cupboards had been ransacked of clothes and linen, these, hideously befouled, had been rent into rags and thrown upon the floor. The fragments of the Englishman's knapsack, temporarily left in Madame Guyot's keeping, the ruins of his shaving-tackle, and some stray leaves of filled note-books, deplorably appealed to their late owner's eyes. But P. C. Breagh's eyes were busied elsewhere. With the ripped-up feather bed from the inner chamber, where Juliette de Bayard had passed the previous night. With the soiled and trampled remnants of some delicate articles of feminine underwear--a lace-frilled night-robe, a filmy chemise. He took them up with reverent, shaking hands--looked instinctively for an initial.... There were letters embroidered in dainty Convent-taught stitchery--"J. M. de B."

He would have cried out, but the cry stuck in his throat, and a chilly sweat broke out upon and bathed him. He had glanced toward the corner occupied by the truckle-bed whereon my Cousin Boisset had lain. Covered with a sheet dyed partly red, something long and stark and still lay outstretched upon the palliasse. And a lance driven home to the shaft stuck upright in the body, from whose drained-out veins the last drops splashed heavily into a dreadful pool that slowly widened on the stone-flagged kitchen floor.

Something snapped in P. C. Breagh's brain at that sight. His under-jaw wrenched to one side and dropped idiotically. He yelped out wildly the name of his Infanta, and went on yelping, and could not stop:

"Juliette! Juliette! Where are you? What have they done?... Oh, Juliette!..."

And then the piercing agony of his loss and the certainty of a fate of nameless horror for her, were lost in an immense relief. Underneath the bed of death something moved and rustled. The slender thread of a voice replied:

"Monsieur Breagh, I am here! Do not be so alarmed, I beg of you! Terrible things have happened, but I am not hurt at all!"

And the ensanguined pall was pushed aside and the little figure crept out from its hiding-place. Dust and cobwebs could not dim her in the eyes of her true worshiper. He choked and made a dive to help her, stumbled and fell upon his knees as she rose to hers. And then she was in his arms, not clinging to him, but leaning against his broad chest, and shivering as though she were perishing cold. And through the chattering of her teeth he heard--did he really hear her falter:

"I knew--I knew that you would come! When a priest had been found to bless the grave of my father. Not before!... You would never have returned before!"

Her faith in him filled him with a joy that was anguish. He rose up, lifting her toward the light, but not at all releasing her.

"I came as soon as I had done my best to keep that promise. Shall I ever forget what I felt when I set my foot in at the door?... Oh, Lord!... Ten million times worse than when that luckless Angéle poisoned me!... Didn't I make sure you were dead or worse than dead!"

"It is he who is dead!" She drew her small, cold hands from his that were as icy, and went to the bed and turned back the upper end of the sheet that covered the still form. "Monsieur Breagh, you look upon a noble soldier, who gave his life for me," she said proudly, and showed the snow-white face of my Cousin Boisset.

"Wouldn't I die for you? If I got the chance!... Don't you know it?... No--how can you know it?"

Carolan clenched his hands in jealous misery, and she looked back at him to say:

"I do know it! To-day you placed yourself between me and the violence of those Prussians. I have no words to thank you for your courage, sir! Had I words for him"--she looked back at my "cousin"--"he would not hear them.... Nor can he be sensible of this----" She stooped and kissed the dead man's forehead between the boldly arching eyebrows. "Yet with all my gratitude I place it there!"

P. C. Breagh said, flushing scarlet to his hair-roots: "I would change places with him to get that--and I believe you know it! Cover him up and let me take you away from here...." He added, as she looked at him in breathless questioning, "Somewhere where you'll be safe. There must be somewhere!"

"Until night comes to cover us," she told him, "we are more safe here than anywhere. You do not think the comrades of those savage men who made this scene of desolation would halt in passing to ravage a plundered nest?"

"But here ... you can't stay here ... in all this--beastliness."

His gesture of repugnance was as forcible as the word.

She thought, and said as the outward shadows lengthened, and a deep red sunset streamed through the shattered window-panes:

"Behind the house there is a little cabane ... I should say, 'a shed,' where Madame kept her firewood. We will hide ourselves in there until the dark. For what are you looking?"

He answered, stirring the débris on the flagstones:

"For a comb and a razor for choice, out of my knapsack. No!... Except the rags of a spare jacket--they've left me nothing but this."

One stout clasped notebook had suffered little. He thrust it into his pocket and turned to Juliette. She said, with a rueful catch of the breath as she regarded the wreckage of her own property:

"Me they have not left anything at all of luggage. The little portemanteau and the sac de nuit I brought with me from Belgium ... behold their contents destroyed by those most wicked men! Is it not deplorable? Pray look, Monsieur!"

But Monsieur, suddenly seized by an attack of ultra-British prudery, had turned away to rummage in the corner of a cupboard, where perchance might lurk a loaf.

Nothing was there but a little knitted white shawl, which Juliette recognized as her own, and claimed gladly.... She threw it about her head and shoulders, and they passed out cautiously together by Madame Guyot's back door, as destitute a young couple as ever tramped. But not before Juliette de Bayard had replaced the sheet over the face of the dead gunner, and sprinkled it with holy water from a crockery stoup that hung above the bed.

"He was so good.... He should now be safe in Paradise. But we must always remember him in our prayers!..."

It would not have been wise to move about, but they could talk in whispers, partly buried in the heap of clean dry dead leaves filling half of the lean-to. Thus P. C. Breagh learned the story of the death of my Cousin Boisset, and told in return his own tale.

"You had departed, it might be one-half hour, when a man came running down the street, who cried: 'Hide! Run! The Uhlans are coming! They have plundered the Château Malakoff, and drunk M. Bénoit's eau de vie and wine!'

"This Château Malakoff is the house of a rich peasant whose vineyards have suffered much by the German guns. You will remember Madame Guyot saying so, and M. Boisset responding, full of gaiety, 'He will get all the better prices, my cousin, for the old vintages he has in store!' Naturally the outcry made much confusion, one peasant running this way and one that.... Madame Guyot caught hold of me and would have forced me to accompany her, saying that in the quarries beyond the village would be found a refuge. But I refused to leave the house!"

He broke in:

"Think what you risked! Why didn't you escape with her?"

She looked at him wonderingly:

"Why, do you ask me? ... Had I not given you my parole to stay?"

He could not speak. She went on quickly:

"So I said: 'I will remain, wearing my brassard of the Croix Rouge, and the Prussians will take me for the nurse of M. Boisset.' But when Madame and the villagers had gone, hearing the galloping of horses approaching and a howling as of wolves, that brave soldier said to me: 'Mademoiselle, when men like these are mad with wine, they care nothing for the Red Cross! Cover me over with a sheet, and hide underneath the bed I lie on. Thus they will think me dead, and possibly go away. The good God may let me save you, though I have often sinned against Him!'"

A tear brimmed over and fell on her white cheek. She brushed it off and went on:

"I obeyed, Monsieur; I locked the door, taking out the key and hiding it. Then I covered M. Boisset with the sheet, took a crucifix from the wall, and laid it on his breast. Then I got under the bed, for I heard men at the door. There was the 'tinc' of spurs and the sound of breathing. Then heavy blows struck on the door until the lock gave way.... They entered.... Monsieur Breagh, that noble man had said to me, 'For your life, do not make a sound!' For my soul, more precious than life, I could not have spoken or moved!..."

Above the narrow band of black velvet that clipped it, P. C. Breagh could see her little throat swelling. Her tragic eyes seemed to have no room for him. He waited, possessed by a strange hazy feeling that this meeting with her amidst surroundings so frightful must be taking place in a dream of uncanny vividness. That he must wake up next moment in the clean spare bedroom of the gardener's cottage, to find his garments, cleansed of soil and stain, brushed and repaired by the deft hands of the charitable Sisters, and a battered tin bath of genuinely hot water, waiting to receive the Englishman.....

"They came in," said Juliette, "talking in their guttural language. Me, I could never learn more than ten words of German at school.... But I comprehended that they were angry at finding so little in the cupboards and closets of my poor Madame Guyot. That was why they tore up clothes and linen--broke the dishes and glasses--behaved as wild beasts, rather than men. That they were drunk, I knew, though I saw their boots and not their faces. The smell of wine and brandy made me desire to be sick.... But when they approached the bed, with what anguish of apprehension I waited.... If I could have screamed, it would have been in that moment, when they pulled back the sheet...."

Her eyelids shuddered over trembling eyeballs. Her nostrils quivered with each sharply-taken breath. Her tragic upper lip shut down upon its neighbor as though it would never relax in smiles again:

"I heard my own heart beat--so loud it was like thunder. I felt M. Boisset trying to hold the breath.... I prayed to the Mother of God to cover us with Her manteau. I think she has certainly heard me when the Uhlans put back the sheet.... Alas, how terribly I am to find myself mistaken! When the Uhlan moves from the bed I believe he is about to go. Then--there is a savage cry!--a groan, hollow and terrible.... The lance comes plunging through the body of M. Boisset, through the palliasse--through the sacking that is underneath--through the sleeve of my dress, which is soaked with blood.... See!..."

And she drew out a fold of the loose sleeve, and showed the rent made by the steel in it and the wet red patches fast drying into brownish stains. And he who saw could only choke out, as his brows scowled and his yellow-flecked eyes burned tigerishly:

"The brutes!... The cowardly beggars! Oh, if I had only been there!"

"Of what use?" she said. "They would only have killed you!"

"An Englishman," he blustered: "I'd like to have had them try! Why, we're neutral. No Germans would dare----"

She said, bending her great black brows upon him, and sternly drawing down her upper lip:

"Monsieur, they would have killed you, as they killed my father. They have no pity, these men with panther hearts. How should they, when he has none--that soldier-Minister whom Germany worships to idolatry. Contradict me--say that I am wrong--to convince me would be impossible. For I read the soul of Count Bismarck when I looked him in the face."

For the owner of the domineering voice that had roused her from her stupor of misery was for Juliette de Bayard a very Moloch, ravenous for flesh of men, insatiable in thirst for blood. And comprehending this, P. C. Breagh put forth no plea for a more tolerant judgment of his erstwhile hero, beyond lamely saying:

"He's a great man--a terribly great man, however you look at him. And he--do you know, he saved my life once!"

She said, with her deeply cut nostrils swelling and quivering:

"Our Lord will say to him upon the Day of Judgment, 'You saved this one. How many others have you given to death?'"

Then, as P. C. Breagh winced at the brief, semi-contemptuous 'This one,' Juliette healed the wound with one gentle glance. The delicate voice crept to his sore heart soothingly:

"But for that rescue, I should now be quite alone in my great misery. I think that God permitted it, knowing this day upon its way to me."

P. C. Breagh said, tingling all over:

"Do you really believe that?..."

She answered simply and directly:

"If I did not, I would not say it.... Now I will shut my eyes and rest a little. I am so very tired, me!"

And she leaned back with lowered lashes on her rustling pillow of last year's dead leaves. He asked himself what had she not gone through on this day, poor fragile, tender child!

Had the news of her father's death been brought to her in London or Paris, there would have been closed doors, a darkened chamber for the mourner, the presence of some well-loved consoler, the counsel of her director, the silent sympathy of understanding friends.

But here, where every custom and conventionality was suspended or shattered--where human life was bared to the bedrock by the furious struggle of nations in War, she had sought for a wounded warrior, to find a bloody corpse amidst a jumble of other corpses, and returned from that overwhelming experience to sit with strangers at a peasant's board.

No wonder Juliette was very tired. Would her reason suffer from the results of this shock? Would she droop and die of the horrors undergone? Was it possible that in a body so frail there dwelt an indomitable and unconquerable spirit? It had looked out of her stern eyes, it had sat upon her lips when she had spoken of the Iron Chancellor.

Even as P. C. Breagh leaned toward the small white face, brooding over it, breathlessly studying it, she opened sapphire eyes upon him, to say, with the suddenness of a child:

"I have been told that the Crown Prince of Prussia is good and has a noble nature. Do you not think that if he knew how wickedly those Uhlans have killed the poor M. Boisset he would without mercy have them shot?"

P. C. Breagh, caught staring, confusedly opined so. She said, her heavy eyelids weighed down with drowsiness:

"They were cowards, for they took the alarm and mounted and rode away calling that the Franzosen were coming.... Yet when they had gone and I crept out from my concealment, what do you imagine is all that I view? In effect, nothing more terrible than an old, bent, white-haired priest in a ragged soutane, who was walking through the village saying his Rosary...."

She went on, as P. C. Breagh pricked his ears, and opened his eyes widely:

"He looked so good and like the pictures of the holy Curé d'Ars, for whose intercession I had been praying, that I cried to him: 'Help, my Father! Help for one dying! Help for another in misery!' But he must have been less holy than he looked, or very deaf, for he passed on. Then I crept back under the bed, and then--at last, you came to me. What should I have done if you had not come, Monsieur?..."

For once Carolan did not hear her. His thoughts were busy elsewhere. He was asking himself if the old priest in the patched cassock who had shown himself to Juliette, could be the Curé who had read the Office at the grave of de Bayard?

And if that priest were mortal man, how had he covered the distance between the battlefield and Petit Plappeville, and what had scared the drunken marauders from their prey? And was it not strange that the resemblance to the saint of Ars had appealed to both Carolan and Juliette?... The problem must remain unsolved for all Time, it might be.

Yet this fact had stamped itself on P. C. Breagh's consciousness, deeply as his own heavy nailed boots had bitten into the clay by the Colonel's graveside. On the moist surface of the spot where the Servant of Heaven had been standing, the clumsy iron-buckled, wooden-soled shoes had left no print at all.

An interesting illusion, bred of the exaltation of the senses under emotion, produced in part, says my friend the Physiologist, by subconscious Memory. A significant phenomenon, remarks my other friend, the student of Psychology, testifying to the thinness of the Veil dividing the Visible World from the Unseen. While my Catholic terms it a rare but not isolated or uncommon revelation, pointing the stupendous truth contained in that clause of the Credo referring to the Communion of Saints and illustrating the dynamic force of Prayer.

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LIX

Juliette breathed so evenly, and lay so long without moving, that P. C. Breagh believed her asleep. Twilight showed nothing but a black shape, vaguely feminine, a pale oval patch represented her face....

Suddenly as before, her eyes opened and met his. She said, following up some previous train of thought:

"It is nobler than the portraits, and yet more pitiless. I speak of the face of my country's enemy.... See you well, Monsieur Breagh ... if I were Our Lady, I would never rise from my knees until Our Lord had saved France!..."

"What would save France?" Carolan asked her. She answered, turning in her rustling couch of leaves:

"Death, striking the hand that slowly strangles her.... Death, freezing the brain that plans her fall.... Death, overtaking the merciless giver of Death to her children.... Nothing else could now save France!..."

He who heard was dumb, knowing that this harping was the very note of madness. She went on, speaking with somber earnestness:

"Always is it that women are accused by men of weakness. Frenchwomen are, in addition, termed 'timid and frivolous.' Yet France has twice been saved by the courage of her daughters.... Remember the holy Jeanne d'Arc, beloved of God and Our Lady ... and Charlotte Corday also, Monsieur!--the courageous citizeness of Caen.... At school I learned her words, spoken before the Revolutionary Tribunal.... 'Me, I have slain one man to save a hundred thousand!...' Why has not France a Charlotte Corday now?"

There was something in her tone that menaced like the flicker of lightning, seen through a rent in stormy wrack. That a creature so frail and slender should dream of heroic vengeance was incredible. One would have expected it from a heroine of the Krimhilde-Brünhilde type. To divert her from the dangerous theme by changing the conversation was impossible. The only thing to do was to feign to doze.

He yawned, stretched his aching body on the clean dry litter, shut his hot and sandy eyes, seeing rings of green-blue fire. Oblivion descended on him. Pretense became reality. He sank into a very gulf of sleep.

Long after her comrade's heavy respiration had told her that he was wrapped in slumber, Juliette Bayard sat staring out into the deepening dusk. Insomnia born of nervous strain and mental shock claimed her as a victim. She was far more near to madness than Carolan had dreamed.

It was a night of chilly breathings from the northwest, and violent contrasts in light and shadow; a high bright moon making black silhouettes of hills and trees, and bottomless infernos of hollows and ravines. Gigantesque clouds up-piled monstrous ramparts on the southeast horizon, others topped these with the strangest sculpturesque shapes.... An iceberg with a veiled crouching figure on it; a mammoth with elevated trunk and great curved tusks, bellowing in dumb show; wrestling shapes of Titans prone or erect; lovely children playing in meadows of asphodel; vast winged shapes of genii with hidden faces, speeding across unthinkable distances of cold, crystal-blue atmosphere.

But the cloud-shape that most persistently recurred was that of a heavy-browed, mustached Colossus, who sometimes was helmed and cuirassed, and bestrode a monstrous horse of war. In other vaporous pictures he addressed great multitudes from a high rostrum, or from some fantastic hill-peak urged on rushing armies; or sometimes counseled a crowned figure that sat upon a high-placed throne.

Yet whatever the giant was, there was sure to be another figure, slender, weak, fragile, a mere vaporous wisp of mist. And the watcher had strange cognizance that this was the appointed Fate of Colossus, and that her constant presence was an augury of ill for him.

He walked amid trees in a wood, and his Fate dogged his footsteps, a pistol or poignard ready for her country's enemy.... He ate at a daïs-table in a banqueting hall--she served him a golden cup of wine iced and poisoned. ... He lay down to sleep on a lordly bed, the frail shape glided in with a torch and fired the curtains.... He dreamed of Power on the brink of a precipice, and his tiny Fate crept near unseen, and thrust him screaming down.

The moon had long southed, the cloud-shapes were growing vaguer, the eyes of the stars looked through their thinning veils. The wind had fallen, the silence was profound and awful. She shuddered, thinking of the battlefield....

What of de Bayard lying under his clay coverlet? What of the thousands of bodies buried in the newly-dug trenches? What of the myriads yet unburied, lying stark and awful under the canopy of Night?

Did they understand, the Dead, whose hand had really poured red life from them, and thrown them like empty, broken vessels abroad upon the trodden fields? Did they curse him with their stiff, silent lips, and point at him with their rigid fingers? Would they know, in Paradise or Purgatory, if anyone avenged them? In Hell they would be sure to know, because their murderer would be there....

"Ting...."

What was that faint approaching sound, drawing nearer and nearer through the darkness, that banished the haunting, dreadful images that crowded in her brain? It loosed the iron band that was bound about her aching temples. It melted the icy armor that was riveted about her torn and sorrowful heart....

"Ting-ting!"

She turned her head to the quarter whence it came, and listened, breathing quickly. Again came the silvern tinkle.

"Ting-ting-ting! ..."

Now the sound of heavy approaching footsteps came with it, and Fear fell from her like a pall all snow-wet. She rose up among the rustling dead leaves, bent, laid her hand on the shoulder of the sleeper, and roused him cautiously. He awakened, and said through the fingers she laid in caution on his lips:

"Who is it?..." And then instantly remembered, and passionately kissed the warning hand.

"Ting-ting, ting-ting!..."

"Do you hear, Monsieur?" she panted.

She snatched away the hand. He rose to his knees and listened.... Dawn, creeping into the hovel, painted their hands and faces gray. White teeth flashed in the gray of his, as he said to her joyfully:

"It is a priest, with the Blessed Sacrament!"

No more was said. They took hands and went out of the hovel, and passed round and through the little flowery front yard into the littered street of Petit Plappeville.

At its upper end two black figures, encircled by the yellow halo of a lantern-flame, moved toward them. Their shadows were thrown sidewise upon the littered road and the whitewashed garden walls. The bell tinkled, telling of the coming of Him Who is the Light of the World. The wheezing of someone troubled with asthma accompanied the clumping of wooden-soled country shoes.

Presently came in sight an old woman in sabots, carrying an immense umbrella, and a huge and antique lantern with horn slides. The stout figure of an elderly priest followed her, covered with a biretta, wearing a wide black mantle, and walking at a slow and decent pace.

At intervals he tinkled the small hand bell he carried in his left hand. His right arm was folded over his breast. As Juliette sank down in the dry dust, her companion hesitated an instant, then knelt down beside the girl.

The priest stopped as he neared the kneeling pair, and blessed them in silence. His round face looked puckered and anxious. He said, as his glance took in the bareheaded young man and the slender young woman, and their environment of ruin and desolation:

"My children, are you the only living creatures remaining in this unhappy village?"

Juliette was praying. P. C. Breagh answered in a reverent whisper:

"Yes, my Father. The Prussian horsemen came, and the villagers left their houses.... There was a wounded soldier in the cottage of Madame Guyot. He feigned to be dead, and the Uhlans ran him through with one of their lances. He lies within there! May his soul rest in peace!"

The priest solemnly raised the Host, and blessed the house of death. Then he said to Carolan and Juliette:

"It will be best that you should follow me to the place where I am going. A person lies there in extremity, to whom I carry Our Lord. Your presence will be something of an additional protection, in case any of these foreign soldiers should offer insult to Him I bear."

He rang the bell, and moved on along the street that was cumbered with the wreckage of humble households. The old woman in sabots preceded him, assiduously lighting his path. And the boy and girl came after the priest, walking side by side decorously. But presently, when Juliette stumbled, Carolan took her hand.

"Ting!"

They might have been walking to the Sepulcher on that earliest Easter morning, when He Who wrought man in His Own Image broke asunder the bonds of Death. The air was sweet with a wonderful reviving fragrance. Their pulses throbbed calmly, their blood flowed through their veins smoothly as new milk. Presently the old woman who walked before them began in a monotone to recite the Rosary. They answered, murmuring the sacred words in unison, moving on as though in a dream.

Over the smoldering villages in the southeast the August moon was setting, hanging like a great ripe glowing fruit against a background of translucent silvery hue. A broad band of primrose-yellow banding the purple blackness in the East betokened daybreak. Above, there hung one star of blazing emerald.

When they turned out of Petit Plappeville into a lane that trended upward, they could see upon the right the long lines of Prussian watch fires twinkling like rubies out of a mist that covered the low-lying country like a shallow, milky sea. Upon the left rose the ivied stone wall of some orchard or chateau garden. Steps rose to an archway in which hung the fragments of a door that had been battered in.

"Ting!"

As the priest rang his bell a bareheaded man appeared in the doorway. He was very pale, his dress was disordered, and his eyes had a strained and anxious look. He bent the knee and crossed himself, then stood aside as the Curé mounted the doorsteps. His wild eyes questioned the faces of the strangers who followed the lantern-bearer. He seemed reassured by what he saw there, and said to the priest in a muffled tone, loud enough to be heard by his companions:

"Take care ... there is broken glass strewed everywhere about here. Do not put out the lantern; it will be safer walking with more than one light!"

Then he took up a heavy silver candlestick he had set down upon a sort of rustic flower stand. The candle wax had guttered all down one side, making what old women call a winding sheet. He glanced at this as he took it up, and then at Mère Catherine. Then he moved forward, taking her place as guide, and the glass of smashed wine bottles that covered the ground cracked and crackled under his own boots, and the Curé's wooden-soled shoes. The huge sabots of Mère Catherine made short work of the splinters. Following in her Brobdingnagian footsteps, Juliette's small feet took no hurt.

A long, low house rose up before them. Its rows of barred basement windows indicated an extensive cellarage. Many of the windows were broken, and some of the ground-floor shutters had been wrenched off. Shattered furniture was thrown about in confusion, shrubs and rose trees had been ruined, broken bottles were here, there, and everywhere. And as a slight sound of astonishment came from Juliette, the priest having mounted some red-brick steps and entered after his guide at an open hall door, the old woman, to whom silence was evidently a sore penance, glanced back at the young one and said to her in a whisper:

"This is the Château Malakoff. Perhaps you remember?... And all those broken bottles.... The soldiers drank the wine...."

Then she hung her old white-capped head, and hurried after the Father, finishing the last decade of the Rosary as she went. Juliette and Breagh would have waited in the square hall on which the front door opened, but from the landing immediately above the aster of the house looked back frowning, and imperatively beckoned them to ascend.

They went upstairs.

The door of the death chamber stood open. From within, came the murmuring sound of the priest's voice. Red-eyed servants knelt in prayer about the threshold. The master of the house was just within the door. His square black head and vigorous shoulders looked angry and wrathful. Old Catherine whispered to Juliette as she beckoned her to kneel beside her:

"It is his wife, Madame Bénoit.... They were only married a year!"

Then she clashed her great Rosary and joined in the prayers vigorously, while the thin crying of a baby in an adjoining chamber pierced the sudden, deep, profound silence that fell upon all present when the priest elevated the Host. A little later she broke down again, and hissed in Juliette's ear that Madame was dying, that the baby had been born too soon, because the mother had been frightened by the Prussians ... that M. le Curé would give the Holy Oils after administering the Viaticum. And then in a gray pool of quiet that ensued some moments later, a woman's voice cried out with astonishment and terror and anger in it:

"Mon mari!... Mon mari!... Au secours!... Les Prussiens----"

And the cry broke off short with a horrible suddenness; there was a momentary confusion, and then the priest came out, looking stern and sorrowful. He opened the door widely, beckoning in several of the women. And Juliette, rising to make way for him, saw the wavering flames of tapers burning on either side of a Crucifix on a white-draped table, and the figure of the house master, with a face of ashen grayness turned toward her, leaning over a white bed, clasping something even whiter in a desperate embrace. Only two great hair plaits that flowed over the bosom of the dead woman glittered like solid bands of burnished copper in the wavering candlelight. And Dawn crept in through the open window, with the scent of the crushed and trampled roses, and the smell of wine spilled and staling, and the uneasy twittering of frightened birds.

And then--they were picking their way over the broken glass-covered gravel walk, and the priest, released from the obligation of silence, was eagerly asking for more particulars of the death of my Cousin Boisset.

"For the villagers of Petit Plappeville are hiding in the quarry of Seulvent. They will not return until the Prussians have left the neighborhood; they have learned what they have to expect from these men when they are full of wine.... We will stop as we pass, and tell them what has happened.... Then you had better come back with me to my presbytery. The soldiers have not left us much, but there will be coffee and bread!"

"But for me," said Mère Catherine, clumping along stoutly, "there would not be even bread and coffee. But I have my hiding holes of which I tell nobody. And as Monsieur le Curé did not know, he could not say where they were!"

That was a pleasant meal in the little deal-shelved study that had somehow escaped when the presbytery was turned upside down. It stood next the church, a little ancient plain stone building with a square belfry tower and a spire covered in with blackened slating, and two recumbent effigies of the twelfth century, that were dear to the good Curé's heart. After déjeuner he explained that he was going to visit these treasured relics for the purpose of ascertaining whether they had suffered damage at the Germans' hands.

He carried a basket with him when he trotted away on his errand. P. C. Breagh, as he leaned by the open casement of the little ground-floor study, rather wondered why it should contain a corked bottle and a biggish loaf of bread.

Juliette had gone to help Catherine restore order in the kitchen. The young man's hand was in his trousers pocket as he wondered, staring after the stout retreating figure in its cassock of rusty black. Suddenly he uttered an exclamation, and pulled out the hand with something shining in it. The piece of gold given him by Juliette.

He put a hand on the sill, and was out at the window in time to see the priest unlock the heavy sunken door that led into the belfry tower, and vanish into the dusk of the sacred place. He followed, to find the Curé struggling with a heavy ladder that led up to a trap hole in the huge-beamed, plastered ceiling of the belfry--a ladder that was evidently seldom shifted from its cobwebbed place against the whitewashed wall.

"Couldn't I do that? I'm a good deal stronger than, you are.... Halloa!... Lucky I was there!"

P. C. Breagh had thoughtlessly spoken in English, and the priest, who had not seen him enter, had nearly dropped the ladder. He said quite reproachfully, as the young man caught and steadied the ponderous bit of timber:

"Why have you followed me? Is it that you wish to speak to me privately? If so, pray do not do so in your English, which is sufficiently like German to give me an unpleasant agitation of the nerves!"

P. C. Breagh explained, exhibiting the golden coin, that it had been given him by Mademoiselle to secure a Mass.

"But certainly she shall have a Mass. Though five francs will be more than sufficient. Retain the coin, Monsieur, until I can find the necessary francs of change. You see, we are poor in this neighborhood ... it is to be expected!" The good Curé smiled, and added: "As you see me, I am rich compared with many of my confrères--even richer than some of my superiors. Therefore, if you will describe to me the features of the priest who read the Office, it may be arranged with more propriety that he shall offer Mass." He added, seeing the young man hesitate: "Recall his features. Describe his person, if you can!" ...

P. C. Breagh recalled and described. When he had done, the Curé said, in a tone of quiet conviction:

"That priest will not need Mademoiselle's five francs! ... And he is not only my superior.... He ranks above the angels.... Monsieur has spoken face to face with a glorious Saint of God!"

Something like an electric shock tingled from the roots of P. C. Breagh's hair down his spine, and passed out by way of his heels into the worn flagstones. He tried to speak, but his palate and tongue were stiff. The priest went on:

"Upon earth he was the Curé of Ars. As a Catholic, Monsieur has learned of him. But that he foretold this War, possibly Monsieur does not know?... A year before his holy death.... Since it has happened ... this War that the holy Curé prophesied, he has revisited the earthly places where he prayed and labored and suffered.... He has succored the wounded.... He has appeared, just as he was when alive, to the dying, and cheered and consoled them so that they have departed in joy and peace.... In the world this will not be credited. It does not matter!... What matters is, that those who perhaps asked the Saint of Ars to intercede for them in their hour of desperate need have received proof that in heaven, where he now dwells, he is still what he would have wished to be: a worker on behalf of souls.... He said this to me, twelve years ago, with that smile that the good God had given him, to make poor doubters sure that He Himself will one day smile on them in heaven----"

He stopped and wiped his face with a handkerchief that was unaffectedly a blue duster, and, noticing the sweat that had started on the other's face, interrupted himself to cry:

"But Monsieur is still holding that heavy ladder!... How could I be so forgetful!... No! it is not to be replaced against the wall. It is to be attached by the rings in the uprights to those hooks at the edge of that trap-door.... Since Monsieur has been favored with a vision of the Saint of Ars, he is worthy of all trust and confidence. Let Monsieur but fix the ladder while I turn the key in the door, and then he shall see a pigeon that I keep in the belfry tower!"

And the good man bustled to the door and locked it, and then came back to test the steadiness of the ladder, and mounted with asthmatic wheezings and much display of darned socks and venerable carpet slippers, and tapped three times at the trapdoor.

It was lifted at the signal, and P. C. Breagh beheld the gaunt and sunburnt face of a French Cuirassier, peering down out of the gloom of the spire that was faintly lighted by delicate lines of morning sunshine, gilding the upper edges of the shingle boards that roofed it in.

"Thanks, thanks, my Father!" the Cuirassier muttered, as the bottle of coffee and the loaf were handed up into his eager, shaking hands.

"Did you sleep?" the priest asked him, and the soldier answered in the affirmative, adding that he had been awakened by footsteps in the church below him at the earliest break of day.

Said the Curé:

"My child, it was I. A member of my parish was dying--I came to the church to take the Blessed Sacrament from the Tabernacle.... I forgot that you would probably awaken and suppose that your presence here had been betrayed!... But all is well! and a cart of brushwood will stop before the presbytery this evening and carry more than its load when it is driven on. It is going to a farm near Audun--from there you will be able to escape into Luxembourg, and from thence rejoin the Army when your wounds are sufficiently healed. It is said that the Army of Châlons, with the Duke of Magenta and the Emperor, now marches north from Rheims toward Sedan." He added as white teeth flashed in the dark face, and the sullen eyes gleamed scornfully: "You will please yourself as to serving again! You have already suffered greatly for our country!"

The soldier said roughly:

"I would die for her with a good heart!... But I will not fight again for this Emperor and his Marshal, by whom France has been sold and betrayed!"

"Well, well!... Au revoir, my child, and may Our Lord protect you," said the priest, sighing and beginning a puffing retreat down the ladder. "Shut the trapdoor down carefully, keep perfect silence, and remember that it is very dangerous to smoke. The curls of vapor can be seen rising between the shingles. I observed it when we had workmen here in Spring!"

Then he descended, and with P. C. Breagh's aid put back the ladder, unlocked the belfry tower door, and they went out into the clear bright autumn air.

"That soldier came last night," the Curé whispered, as they stopped to lock the door with the heavy iron key that was corroded with rust where use did not maintain its brightness. "He was taken prisoner in yesterday's battle, found to be wounded, disarmed, and left to shift for himself, with others in the same condition. One of them--in whose company this man was--had concealed a pistol, and had the daring to attempt the life of M. de Bismarck--or General Moltke--I am not sure which! But the shot missed its mark, and instantly all those who had seen it fired, with others who knew nothing, were massacred in cold blood. This man by a miracle--escaped!... How, I know not! He says he fell into a pit full of dead, and lay there expecting to be buried with them, until the darkness came to cover his resurrection from the grave."

They went back into the presbytery. The priest went to look for the fifteen francs of change out of Juliette's gold piece. She came out of the kitchen, from which Catherine's bedroom opened, and showed herself freshly laved, and attired in spotless neatness, her face no longer swollen with weeping and weariness, her superb hair brushed to dull cloudy silkiness, and newly coiled upon the summit of her little queenly head.

Her eyes shone brilliant and hard as blue jewels, as she said to her friend in a low, vibrating tone of excitement:

"Mère Catherine says that yesterday a French prisoner tried to shoot M. de Bismarck, and nearly succeeded.... See you well, I would like to meet that man!"

"Why, Mademoiselle?"

"To kiss the hand of one so brave, Monsieur!"

He regarded her in silence. She went on almost with hardihood, throwing back her head, and looking at him with eyes that gleamed between their narrowed lids.

"See you well--if I were only beautiful, I would give my beauty to the man who saved France!"

Her hearer's heart began to pound violently, and a dimness like mist came before his sight. Through it he was aware of long eyes that gleamed like wonderful azure jewels, and a small red mouth that pleaded for the soul of P. C. Breagh.... He saw that the underlip was like the bud of a pomegranate, and that the curve of the upper disclosed teeth as white as curd.... Then he heard the silver voice say with a sigh in it:

"But I am not beautiful ... not even pretty. Ah, Monsieur, if I but were!..."

She was hating herself as she saw his look respond to hers. As the amber sparks in his gray eyes leaped into fire and his under jaw thrust out savagely, she thought:

"There is something of my mother in me--more than a little! How dared I scorn her--I, who can speak and look like this?" And she repeated with a plaintive, lingering inflection: "If I were ... if I but were!"

For the primal Eve is in all women, believe me. When the first Woman bowed herself in her apron of leaves to strike out between the lump of iron ore and the flint flake, the spark that, blown within its nest of dried moss, begat Fire, she laughed and then wept; for she remembered how she had learned of old from the Serpent, wise Teacher of guile and evil! to kindle the hot spark of Desire in the hearts of men.

This knowledge would have come to Juliette as a legacy from Eve, her earliest ancestress, even had she not been born of Adelaide.

Meanwhile Breagh saw nothing but the little red mouth with the subtly wooing smile on it ... the gleaming jewels that were shadowed by their covert of black lashes.... Her will bent heavily on his, weakened by his worship of her. In another instant he would have asked what she wanted him to do.

But the heavy footsteps of the priest, clumping on the little crazy stair, recalled Breagh from the rapids toward which he had been drifting. In another moment the Curé came into the room. He had a knotted blue handkerchief in his hand, which weighed somewhat heavily. He said with a good-humored smile as he untied one of the knots, and took out a little pile of silver:

"Here behold my savings bank! Your fifteen francs, Mademoiselle!"

He was earnest to count them out and return them to her, and she was as earnest that the coins should not be given back.... But she could not deny her poverty when the good man charged her with it, saying:

"Accept the return of this money as a mortification salutary for the health of your soul!"

Then he tied up the handkerchief and stuffed it away under his cassock, and asked them:

"Where are you journeying together, my children? I have a reason for wishing to know!"

He had turned to P. C. Breagh, still thrilling with the memory of that strange look Juliette had cast upon him. The young man answered, glowing through his sunbrown:

"Wherever Mademoiselle de Bayard is desirous to go!"

The Curé pursed his mouth and turned to Juliette; and then sabots clumped in the passage, and a cracked voice cried from the door:

"'Mademoiselle' and 'Mademoiselle,' when she is no more 'Mademoiselle' than I am! ... Why not 'Madame'? ... Call things and folks by their right names!"

There was a terrible pause. Juliette was enduring agonies. The Curé pursed his mouth, and rounded his mild eyes behind their iron-rimmed spectacles. Mère Catherine went on triumphantly:

"It was her father's dearest wish that she should marry his old friend's only son. She told me that when we were washing up the coffee bowls, out in the kitchen there.... When the Prussians came to France, she went to Belgium with the young man's mother. 'To celebrate my marriage,' she told me, 'because M. What's-his-name was there!'"

P. C. Breagh had a sensation as of a weight of cold lead in the stomach. His feet seemed shod with lead, his arms hung down inertly. His tongue might have been turned to lead, so impossible was utterance. "Married!..." kept on ticking inside his head. "Married!..." and with maddening iteration, slowly as the clapper of a tolling bell. "You knew it ... She knew it ... Married all the time!"

His dull stare was set upon the face that had smiled on him so wooingly. It was snow-white now, and the eyes were hidden beneath their heavy fringes of black. The eyebrows were knitted, the pale lips set rigidly. The Curé looked at them a moment, and then asked, plump and plain:

"You are really married? My good Mère Catherine is not deceiving herself?"

Juliette shut down her stern upper lip upon its little neighbor, and raised clear, sorrowful eyes.

"As she says, I went to Belgium to celebrate my marriage. Now that I have returned, I shall await my husband here in France. My father esteemed him highly. He is M. Charles Tessier. He lives in the Rue de Provence, in the town of Versailles."

Whether the good Curé scented the quibble, we are not at all inclined to ask. We are concerned with P. C. Breagh, whose enchanted castle had crashed into dust and brickbats. One glance at his face, sharp as a wedge of cheese, and bleached under its wholesome freckles and sun-tan, told his Infanta what ruin she had wrought. But if he had seized and shaken her and cried: "You lie!" she would have lied again, defiantly. Was she not married, when her Colonel had believed so.... She would be, from now, in thought and word, the wife of Charles Tessier. Ah, Heaven!... The thought was more unwelcome than ever it had been.

Ah, Heaven! if that dear dead father could but have known this brave young Englishman. Would he have been in such haste to break his daughter's heart?... And--ah, Heaven!--again, if this burning of her boats meant parting, how could one live without one's comrade now?

He was so simple, and Juliette adored simplicity. He was so straightforward and honest, one could not guard the heart. When he had thought her dead, how piteously he had cried to her, "Juliette! Juliette!..." When she had crept from under the bed the lance had plunged through, barely missing her, and Breagh had dived at her and caught her up and hugged her, despite her terror and misery, she had known a wonderful thrill....

"Mine!" those fierce young arms conveyed, as they had strained her to his broad breast. Was it wicked, was it unnatural in one so newly bereaved of the noblest and dearest of all fathers, to have been taken by storm in those moments of desolation--to have dreamed since then of the rapture of being able to answer: "Yes, yes!... If our very own!... Never anyone's but yours...."?

Alas! if Juliette had been unnatural in yielding to such thoughts, was she not now punished? She had dealt with her own slight arm the blow that had shattered the fabric of her dreams as well as his.... She would never again see that light in the eyes of Monica's brother; never--against all the accepted traditions ruling the pre-matrimonial affairs of a young French girl of good family--be hugged in that rude, possessive, British way. But what loneliness, what terror, what danger had driven her into the arms that enfolded.... Besides, she would atone by marrying Charles Tessier. A tepid future passed by the side of the young cloth manufacturer extended before her.... She could not restrain a shudder at the thought, even while she mentally renewed her vow that, for the sake of him who had planned it, she would embrace such a future with resignation.... It flashed upon her now, with blinding clearness, that not only must the future be embraced, but the man....

"Tear the picture.... Forget the dream!" The words; of de Bayard's letter came back to her.

Ah, well!--she had done with pictures and dreams.... For her, realities. The comrade looked as though Reality had hit him smashingly. She barely recognized his cheerful voice as he answered to some leading question put by the Curé:

"I am ready and willing to act as escort to Madame. It would be risky for her to attempt to return alone to Versailles."

She tried to meet his sorrowful gray eyes and succeeded. She bent her little head and said with an admirable assumption of newly wedded dignity:

"Monsieur Breagh is very amiable. I will accept his offer with gratitude. When my husband learns of his great goodness, he too will thank him. Alas! at this moment my poor Charles is far away!..."

She sought for a tear, and found more than she had expected. For a whole thunderstorm of big, bright drops burst from those wonderful eyes.

She fell into a Windsor armchair polished by the worthy Curé's stout person, and dropped her arms upon the table, and her head on them, and sobbed, sobbed, sobbed.... The priest beckoned Breagh from the study. They were going to make arrangements for the journey. Horrible Mère Catherine, cause of all the misery, came and cackled over the prone, abandoned head.... Madame was going to start early to-morrow morning.... Allowing for the disorganization of the railway service, Madame would reach Versailles by noon of the same day. The husband of Madame would presently arrive to find her waiting for him. Heaven would shed blessings on their joyous reunion. Let Madame take her occasion of soliciting the patronage of St. Christopher, patron of all travelers. The first little male cherub that should bless the union of Madame and Monsieur would naturally be christened by the name of the good Saint.

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LX

They drove in a country cart to Etain over roads bestrewn for the most part with the débris of the falling Empire, and there caught a train starting for Verdun. It was crammed with wounded French soldiers lying on straw in trucks and horse boxes. Women jostled one another at the doors of these, to supply the poor sufferers with soup and fruit, bread and coffee. The news of the retirement of Bazaine upon Metz was in every mouth, although, thanks to the cutting by Uhlans of the telegraph line between Metz and Thionville, the Emperor did not receive the Marshal's wire until the 22nd.

The Warlock had lost no time. Already the blockade of the doomed fortress city was so far completed that only the most daring French scouts were able to worm their way through the enemy's investing lines.

For, even as the octopus, desirous of increasing his family, throws off a spare tentacle which becomes another octopus, from the First and Second Armies of United Germany had been evolved a Fourth Army of Six Corps under the command of the Crown Prince of Saxony, whose Advance of Guard Cavalry were already over the Meuse.

The Army of the Prussian Crown Prince had traversed the roads south of Toul and entered the basin of the Ornain. The King of Prussia, with Bismarck and Moltke, had started to march on Paris through the dusty white plains of Champagne.

His Great Headquarters had already reached Bar-le-Duc. One of his scouting squadrons of Uhlans had captured a French courier at Commercy. Thus Moltke had learned that the mounted regiments of Canrobert's Corps had been left behind at the Camp of Châlons, and that Paris was being placed in a state of defense to resist an investment expected hourly.

On this very day the vast Camp had been abandoned, the Imperial pavilions, the mess houses, officers' quarters and kitchens were blazing merrily, the lines of rustic baraques usually occupied by the troops were marked out by crackling hedges of fire. While MacMahon, at his camp near Rheims, was torn between Ministerial orders emanating from the Empress, insisting on the immediate relief of Bazaine, and his own conviction that the order of march should be back by the directest route to defend the menaced capital.

Said the Man of Iron to Roon, whiffing a huge cigar as the steady downpour of rain swirled down the gutters and drenched the Bodyguard on duty outside the King's Headquarters at Bar-le-Duc:

"We barricade the straight road that leads to Metz. Will the fellow face the risks of a circuitous march leading him near the Belgian frontier? I should be personally obliged to him to decide quickly.... One does not desire to linger in a Capua as dismal as this."

Bismarck-Böhlen brought him a telegram. He was about to open it when the Warlock hastily entered the sitting room that served as ante-chamber, flourishing a copy of Le Temps, issued in Paris on the previous day.

"A Uhlan of the Advance has got me this paper. He took it from the person of a respectable bourgeois at whose house in Cligny he and his comrades called to drink a drop of wine. Judging it a welcome gift to me, the brave fellow rode here to bring it."

"There is wine of another kind on those pages," said the Minister, pointing to the journal with a smile.

Moltke read from the blood-stained paper:

"'The speeches delivered yesterday at the Chamber are unanimous in the declaration that the French people will be disgraced forever if the Army of the Rhine be not relieved. The dispatches received during the sitting of yesterday's Privy Council, from the Prefecture of Police, the Ministry of War and of the Interior, were of a nature to cause apprehension of the keenest. But the disposition of the people of Paris can be ascertained by any person whose ears are not stuffed with Court cotton-wool. Do not these shouts of "Dethronement!"--these cries of "A Republic! A Republic!" become louder every day?'"

He added:

"This bears out the text of Palikao's intercepted wire of yesterday to the Emperor; and the second from the Empress, virtually saying: 'Abandon Bazaine and Paris is in revolt!'..."

Commented the Minister:

"The Empress-Regent talks like a young woman. Palikao argues like an old one--the speakers in the Chamber gabble like a pack of old gossips, not one of whom looks beyond the end of her own nose. Paris was in revolution at the beginning of August. She will be a full-blown Republic before Christmas, whether Bazaine be abandoned or not."

Moltke said, helping himself from his silver snuffbox:

"MacMahon has not the courage to resist a consensus of quackers. He will march east and uncover the Paris road. I may say I had already drawn out private tables of marches which would thwart him in any case. What have you there? A wire in Secret Code?"

Bismarck answered:

"It is in Russian, with which language the sender knows me to be acquainted. He is an agent of our Secret Service, who combines the trade of wool stapler with the profession of notary, and holds the post of Sub-Prefect in the town of Rethel. He communicates by private wire that the Emperor has telegraphed the Prince Imperial that the junction with Bazaine will not be attempted, and that the march of the Army of Châlons will be directed upon Sedan. He states that when he quitted Rheims to-day the Imperial Headquarters had left for Tourteron...."

"Ei, ei! Is he trustworthy?" asked the Warlock, putting away the silver box.

The Minister answered succinctly:

"The intelligence he supplies is usually worth the money he is paid for it."

He went on:

"He has got into touch with the Roumanian Straz, who has not received cash for some dirty work he did in July at Sigmaringen, and who judges it advisable--Napoleon Bonaparte Grammont & Co. being insolvent--to transfer his services to the opposite firm.... He adds that Straz possesses, or says that he possesses, free access to the Prince Imperial. He appears to think our interests would be served by kidnapping the boy."

"Would they?" asked Moltke.

The Minister raised his shaggy brows, and answered smilingly:

"You are acquainted with the Countess's views in connection with the youngest Bonaparte. If the Queen does not want him to hand her tea and comb her lap dog, why should I not take M. Lulu home as a present to my wife?"

"You are jesting!" said the Warlock, shaking the wise old head in the scratch wig. "You have told this stinking rogue that decent German men make not war upon women or children.... When the time comes that we are guilty of such things, United Germany will be near her fall."

"Her barometer predicts a rise," said the Minister dryly, "at this particular moment."

"With God's help, we shall fulfill the prediction!" returned the Warlock, going to a table where lay spread a map on a comprehensive scale of an inch to a mile. "We will talk over this with the King, when the Crown Prince and Von Blumenthal come over from Ligny. It will be wiser to delay the movement on Paris, and hit this weather cock of a Marshal with all our forces. So, he marches his Army on the Meuse! So'o!..."

And he hummed a bar of the little song about the weeping flowers and the shining starlets, as he set the mental machinery in motion that resulted in the Grand Right Wheel.

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LXI

The closed shutters of the Tessier house in the Rue de Provence gave that pleasant, airy, well-kept residence standing behind its high garden walls of stone-faced brick, festooned with autumn-tinted creepers, an unoccupied and cheerless air.

Repeated rings at the bell of the white-painted gate of wrought iron upon the right of the heavy porte cochère topped by the lozenged archway, elicited a caretaker in the person of the wife of the gardener-coachman, who cried out joyfully upon recognizing one of the ringers, and broke into a spate of words:

"Mademoiselle! ... Madame Charles! A thousand pardons for the error! But a return so unexpected. Nothing is ready...." She queried, her eyes becoming circular as they drank in the fact that the newly-married wife of her master had arrived in company of a strange young gentleman in a shabby brown suit of foreign make, and a straw hat decidedly the worse for wear: "Madame Tessier has not accompanied you?... Or Monsieur Charles?... Nothing has happened?" Upon being assured that her employers were well, and still in Belgium, she raised her eyes piously, and heaved a sigh of relief. "In these days such terrible things happen!" sighed the gardener-coachman's wife. "No one knows who the Prussians will not kill next!... Though, what with the soldiers that have gone away--regiments and regiments marching with their bands!--and the guns--thousands of guns rolling and rolling!--one would say that France possessed enough men.... But who knows! One can feel the fears of the people like a dark cloud blackening the sky.... They say that at Meudon the trees have been cut down and trenches dug, and beautiful villas blown up with gunpowder that the Germans may not live in them when they come. Of what use, then, the great cannon that break the windows when they fire them from the Forts of Issy and Meudon, Vanvres and Mont Valérien, if they cannot keep such people back?"

She had looked at the young man who accompanied Madame Charles as she put her question. He answered, with appreciation of the shrewdness prompting the question:

"One wishes one could answer that! But it is all true about the trenches and so on.... All the main roads leading north and west and east from Paris have been cut up in the same way. And the bridges have been mined--but they will not blow them up yet. They will wait until the Prussians come!"

"Grand Dieu! And all our hospitals here are full of wounded soldiers. They arrive in trains or wagons every hour.... People wait at the railway stations and at the barriers in crowds to see them. Sometimes one cries out: 'My brother!' or 'My husband!'--or 'My son!'..."

The wide mouth of the little woman widened in a grimace of misery. She gulped and sniffed, and the tears began to tumble from her beady black eyes. "My brother Michel has been killed!... My sister has received an official letter that says so. Also my husband's nephew, Jean Jacques--the dear youth who served Madame Tessier so faithfully.... Madame Charles must remember him going about the house in his striped jacket, cleaning the silver and sweeping and polishing the parquet.... And now my poor Potier, whom Madame Charles cannot have forgotten.... At fifty years of age, he has been called to serve again!"

Her poor Potier was even then marching with MacMahon's hundred thousand toward Montmedy by Mézières, and the end that was to meet him there, as the little woman dried her eyes with her blue apron, and bestirred herself to welcome one whom she firmly believed to be her young master's wife.

"No luggage! Madame has returned without luggage!" she commented mentally, as the driver of the hack vehicle that had brought Madame and her companion from the station was paid and jingled away.

Then as she shut the outer gate and locked it she realized that the companion of Madame Charles was a foreigner. She could hear the pair conversing in an unknown jargon as they stood together near the terrace steps. Upon which the perplexity of honest Madame Potier was banished by an effort of simple reasoning. The strange young man would be a Belgian--an employee of M. Charles. M. Charles had determined, all the world knew, to engage a resident bookkeeper. This must be the Belgian bookkeeper who had accompanied Madame. For his manner was humble to dejectedness, as became a dependent, and he looked at Madame with extreme wistfulness. He was actually saying:

"This means good-bye, I suppose, doesn't it?..."

Juliette returned, with her heart wavering in her like a wind-blown taper flame:

"If you desire it, Monsieur, of course it is good-bye!"

He perused the gravel walk with an appearance of great interest.

It was extraordinary that neither he nor Madame had brought any luggage.... Madame Potier fairly writhed with curiosity to learn the reason why. She could restrain herself no longer. She cried, madly clashing the gate keys:

"But the luggage, Madame! ... The carriage has driven away without depositing it. What of the trunks, imperials, portmanteaux, bonnet boxes that Madame possessed when she went away?..."

She was a little, voluble, excitable Frenchwoman, with shiny black hair, bright, snapping black eyes, and a hectic spot in the center of each cheek. As yet her environment had not brought home to her what War meant in reality. When she had wept for her brother and her nephew by marriage, and at parting with her husband, she had relapsed into her accustomed round of duties, not unpleasantly varied by her newer responsibilities as guardian of her mistress's empty dwelling. Like many other excellent women of her type, she could not read or write, and relied on local news imparted by her gossips and bits of intelligence left by the baker with his bread rolls, or served by the woman who brought the morning's milk.

Now Madame Charles turned to her and told her:

"The boxes and imperials are left behind in Belgium, dear Madame Potier. As for the articles I brought with me, they have been torn to pieces by the lancers of M. de Bismarck. Also the luggage of this gentleman, who has, like myself, nothing left but the clothes that he is wearing. Thank him, for had he not protected me, I should never have reached this house!"

"Great Heaven!" Little Madame Potier threw her hands and eyes heavenward. "What wretches! What terrible dangers Madame has surmounted!... What horrors one hears of!--what miseries and sufferings!... Death is everywhere.... One would say it was the end of the world! But still there is hope, is not there, Madame?... Our glorious Army..."

Juliette turned a snow-white face upon the eager woman, and lifted a little, tragic hand. She said, and in that tone and with that look most feared and dreaded by the man who loved her:

"Our glorious Army has been betrayed and massacred! With these eyes I who speak to you have seen vast tracts of country covered with the slain!"

Madame Potier winced and drew herself together. Her black eyes glared. The red spots sank out of her sharp face. And Juliette went on:

"I traversed one of these huge fields of carnage. Many Germans were there--but most of the dead were our French soldiers.... And in the silence you heard their blood running, and the earth lapping it like a great thirsty dog!..."

In the throat of the other woman, listening, an hysterical knot began growing. You could see it working as her dry lips twitched. She held her breath as though to keep back a scream.

"I sought among all these dead men for my father," said Juliette. "And I found him!... His dead hand beckoned me from a mountain of corpses.... I would have known it without the ring that he always wore.... And I went to him and sat beside him, and asked God to let me die also.... And a sword seemed to cut my soul from my body.... I grew cold--and all was blackness about me!... I felt no more ... I breathed no more ... I thought: 'This must be death!' Then a voice spoke to me.... I was too far away to answer. It called me loudly--and I came to life again.... I rose up.... I saw the face of the man who had called me.... And then I knew why I must not die just yet!"

She laughed, and so strangely that Madame Potier cried out in terror. She would have rushed at the girl and clutched her but for Breagh's strong interposing hand. He said in her ear in the bad French she took for Belgian:

"Madame has traveled many miles, fasting, and she has suffered a great bereavement.... Do not question her, but go and make ready her apartment, and prepare food for her. Hot soup--she needs that before all!"

The little woman addressed looked sharply at the speaker, then mounted the two steps leading to the terrace, scuttled across it in front of the shuttered windows of the drawing-room and billiard-room, descended the steps upon the other side, and vanished in the direction of the basement kitchen door.

Then P. C. Breagh, wondering at his own daring, stretched out a hand and touched Juliette's. It was very cold. He lifted it gently and led her unresisting down the ivy-bordered path that led into the pleasance.

For she must not be left alone in this mood, and the garden was still, and scented, and beautiful in the noonday sunshine. Its beds of autumn flowers blazed from their setting of smooth and still verdant turf. The great wistaria on the stable buildings was magnificent in trails of fading purple blossoms. The oaks were browning, the chestnuts shedding their yellow fans. The stately limes were bleached pale golden, the tall acacias were already stripped quite bare.

It was not yet the season of song for thrush and blackbird, but the robin's sweet shrill twitter came from the heart of a hawthorn, marvelously laden with gorgeous crimson fruit. The breast of the bird, not yet attired in fullest winter plumage, showed orange as japonica berries beside the ripe haws' splendid hue.

Said P. C. Breagh, trying to speak lightly and naturally:

"Look at him! What a pretty little beggar! Nobody ever told me you had robins in France!..." Then as the bird cocked his round bright eye and hopped to a higher twig, and Juliette's pale face remained unchanged, and her fixed stare blankly ignored him, her sorrowful friend cried out in a passion of entreaty:

"Juliette! Juliette, take care! For the love of God, don't yield to this! Oh, Juliette! have pity upon others, even if you have none on yourself!"

The cry touched a chord that responded in vibration. The stiff waxen mask softened, and became the face he knew. She looked at him, and her eyes were no longer fixed and glassy. She asked in wonder:

"What do you want me to do?"

Trees hid them from the house with its closed slatted shutters. They were near a rustic seat that was under the great tulip tree. Breagh led her to the seat, made her sit down, and sat himself beside her. He made no effort to retain the little hand. "It is not mine," he said to himself, as he looked at it, and then his heart jolted, and stood still.... Where was her wedding ring?... Didn't French married ladies wear the plain gold circlet? Of course they did! Then why?... Came her faint, sad voice again:

"What is it I might do and do not do, for myself and others? Tell me, Monsieur, for I do not like to be unkind!"

He said, trying to speak clearly and unemotionally: "It is because you love so greatly those who are near you that I ask you to be kind to these and to yourself. You have suffered a great loss, you brood upon it to your injury.... You dream of revenge upon a man, high-placed and powerful, whom you accuse of having brought about the War."

She had taken off the black silk veil that she had worn as head covering. A dry leaf fluttered down from the tulip tree and crowned her splendid coils of mist-black hair. Her thin arched brows were drawn together and frowning; from the dark caverns that Grief had hollowed round them looked eyes that were cold and hard and brilliant as blue diamonds. She asked in almost a whisper:

"And if I dream ... and accuse ... am I not justified?... Because he saved your life, do you take his part?"

Breagh answered her with a sudden spurt of anger:

"I take no part. I speak for your own good. If a woman as frail and sensitive as you are yields to the promptings of a hate so overwhelming, a time comes when she cannot, if she would, control them or rule herself.... When voices sound in her ears, urging her to deeds of violence, and she cannot silence them by any prayers.... Then she goes away into a strange dim country peopled with shadows--lovely or queer, strange or awful. And that is the country of Madness, where live the insane.... Even those who love her as I--as your friends and your husband love you!--can never reach her there!"

The pleading seemed to touch her. Two great tears over-brimmed her pure pale underlids and fell upon her shabby black gown. She said, trembling a little:

"You are very good to have so much solicitude for me. I thank you very humbly. It is true that I have sustained a terrible wound, and that it rankles--is that the right word? My nature is not gentle--not amiable!--I long to strike back when I am wounded.... When those I love are hurt..." She stopped and controlled herself with a visible effort, then resumed: "I have it in me to be pitiless! See you well, there is something of my mother in me!"

"Of your mother?..."

He echoed the words in dismay that was almost ludicrous.... He had never asked whether Juliette possessed a mother or not. Now he looked to the house, expecting one of the shuttered French windows to open, anticipating the appearance of a middle-aged lady arrayed in mourning crape and weepers, and Juliette followed and understood his look. She said, with sorrowful meaning:

"Where friends of my father live. Monsieur, you do not find my mother. She is very beautiful, but not good, not noble, as he!... She left him many years ago, when I was an infant. See! I could not have been higher than that!" She measured with her hand above the turf the height of the baby of five years, with hair that had been silky and yellow as newly hatched chickens' down. She said, her clear, transparent face darkening with the shadow that swept across her memory: "Before I encountered you at Gravelotte I had passed through a terrible experience. This lady--of whom I dread to speak!--was thrown across my path. She did not reveal to me that she was my mother, when I quitted Brussels in her company.... She represented herself as the wife of an officer who had been wounded. She told me that my father was a prisoner in the hands of the Prussians. She took me to Rethel, that I might lay my case before the Prince Imperial, and beg him to obtain my father's release."

P. C. Breagh looked at her doubtfully, fearing--what he most feared for her. She said, drawing a folded envelope from the bosom of her black school dress:

"Never shall I forget how graciously Monseigneur received me. Here is a little keepsake he gave me with his own hand.... You shall hold it in yours, because you are my friend, and Monseigneur would permit it.... No one else, because no one deserves it save you!"

And she exhibited with dainty pride the splinter of rusty scrap iron. The envelope bore a small Imperial crown in gold, with the initial "E" beneath.... It was directed in violet ink and in a handwriting pointed and elegantly feminine, to S. A. the Prince Imperial, with the Great Headquarters of the Imperial Army, at the Prefecture of Metz.

"He is so brave!... He wanted to join M. de Bazaine and fight the Prussians. He stamped ... he wept ... he suffered such chagrin when the telegram came from the Emperor.... No! I must not tell you of the telegram.... My Prince said: 'Mademoiselle shall hear it because she is discreet!'..."

She folded away her treasure in the envelope that bore the Empress's handwriting, and hid it away again in its sweet nest close to her innocent heart. Life and vivacity were hers again as she descanted upon the graces and gifts of her Imperial princeling, and P. C. Breagh listened, grateful for the change in her. The shadow came back for a moment as she told him:

"And when I descended to the vestibule, Madame had gone away.... She had been seized with faintness in the moment of our arrival, when she had encountered a stranger passing through the hall.... Then I went back to the hotel, and crept up to my room quietly. Madame--whom I had discovered to be my mother!--was engaged with a visitor.... I do not know at all who he was. But I heard him say, on the other side of the door that was between us ... 'When she comes, you shall present me to the little Queen of Diamonds!' And he laughed.... Mon Dieu! how strange a laugh!... It made me feel cold. It makes me cold even now to remember it.... But I do not think I have been really warm since the night upon which I found the portrait, and my mother said: 'The discovery was inevitable! Now, with your leave, I am going to sleep!'"

With such truth did she render the very tone of the sumptuous Adelaide's languid irony that P. C. Breagh started as though he had been stung. Somewhere he had met someone ... a woman who spoke like that?... Who was she? Where had they encountered?... He beat his brains to evoke some reply, in vain. And Juliette went on:

"It does me good to tell you this, Monsieur, though I thought at first I would not. You will understand how terrible it was to discover in this lady, who had deceived me, the mother whom I have believed dead until a few months ago. There was something in her very beauty, and ah! she is so beautiful!--that made me regard her with terror.... See you, I prayed to Our Blessed Lady for aid to overcome that terror. Then at the daybreak, I rose and went to her bed. When I saw her sleeping, I think I feared her more than ever. The face can reveal so much, Monsieur, in sleep. And hers was a sleep uneasy, and troubled by visions.... Without waking she said a thing so strange.... 'Only a woman of fashion would be guilty of such infamy!' ... What made you start so violently, Monsieur?"

For P. C. Breagh had jumped as though he had been hit by a bullet. His mouth screwed itself into the shape of a whistle, his eyes rounded unbecomingly. He remembered when and where he had heard that utterance--in the resonant accents of the Man of Iron, and addressed to the adventurous beauty encountered at the Foreign Office in the Wilhelm Strasse, Berlin.

What were the words that had preceded the sentence, scathing in their irony, terrible in their implied contempt?

"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!"

And an English boy had picked it up, and seen the devastating change wrought in that softly tinted mask of sensuous beauty, by Conscience, roused to anguish by the vitriol splash of scorn.

So the Duessa of the Wilhelm Strasse was Madame de Bayard! How strange the chance encounter that had brought them together in that house! What was the bargain she had hoped to drive with Bismarck? What had she intended when she had taken her daughter to Rethel? Who was the man who had been waiting to be presented to the little Queen of Diamonds?... And how true had been the instinct that had warned the girl of danger, whose nature her Convent-bred innocence made it impossible for her to conceive?

She was speaking:

"Do not think me wicked or insensible, Monsieur. I am deeply sensible of all your goodness!... I know very well that there is truth in what you say!... You are noble, candid, magnanimous.... You do not comprehend what it is to hate so that it is torture ... like fire burning here, here, and here!..."

She touched her slight bosom and her throat with the joined finger-tips of her small hands, shielded her eyes and forehead with them an instant, then swept them wide apart. A curious gesture, and notable, in its suggestion of surging overwhelming emotion, and the dominance of an impulse obsessing in its evil strength.

"Here where it is so quiet I shall recover in a little.... I shall become calmer.... I shall learn to sleep again.... You cannot imagine how much I wish to sleep, Monsieur!... But when I lie down it is as though great doors in my brain were thrown wide open. There is music ... and processions of people come pouring, pouring through.... There are voices that make great clamor--there are hands that wave to me and beckon. But I clench my own hands and lie still--so very still! I pray to Our Lord that one figure may not pass among the others, for then I know I shall have to get up and follow him.... I cry to Our Lady to cover my eyes with Her cool hands, that I may not see if he does come. But always he passes; walking or driven in a chariot--riding a great horse, or borne upon the shoulders of guards. And then I resist no more, for it is useless! I wake!--and I am standing in the middle of my room!"

Said P. C. Breagh, comprehending the situation: "In a word, you are suffering from overstrain and consequent insomnia. And I wish I were a full-blown M.D., because I think I should know what to do. But you will let me prescribe the doctor, if I may not undertake the case, won't you? What's that? Who's there?"

Something like a gurgling laugh had sounded behind them, and Juliette glanced round, and back at Carolan with something of the old gayety in her eyes.

"It is the Satyr of the pool, where Madame Tessier grows her water plants. He laughs like that when the water bubbles in his throat."

She rose and followed a little path leading through a shrubbery of lilac and syringa. Beyond rose the ivy-hung and creeper-covered eastern boundary wall of the pleasance. From the grinning mouth of the Satyr mask wrought in gray stone the slender spring spouted no longer. It trickled from a hole in the pipe behind the mask, and yet the laugh sounded at intervals as of old. The wall below the mask was wet, and green with a slimy moss-growth, fed by the dampness; the ferns that bordered the pool, the water plants that grew in it, had suffered from the diminution of their supply. The brook had diminished to a slender trickle winding among stones crowned with dry and withering mosses. Juliette cried out at the spectacle in sheer dismay.

What would Madame say if she knew how spoiled was this, her cherished bit of sylvan beauty? Never mind. When she returned all should be found in order of the best. The kitchen garden, perforce neglected since the departure of M. Potier, should be weeded diligently. The dead roses should be snipped off with loving care, the withered blossoms pulled from the sheaths of the flaming gladioli.... The place needed a mistress, that was plain to Mademoiselle de Bayard's order-loving eye.

"We will work here!..." she said, and almost clapped her hands at the thought of the pleasant labor waiting them. "Me, I adore gardening! And you also--do you not, Monsieur?..."

Could P. C. Breagh deny? He cried with a hot flush of joy at the thought of long days of sweet companionship: "Indeed I do!... and of course I will, Madame!"

"'Madame!...'"

She had nearly betrayed the truth, but she nipped her stern upper lip close down upon its rosy fellow.... Was she not married? Nearly, if not quite....

So nearly that until M. Charles appeared with Madame, she would maintain the character of a recent bride. It would be better not to rekindle in the gray eyes of Monica's brother that fire that had blazed there so fiercely a few hours before.

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LXII

How strangest of the strange, to love a person so nearly a stranger!... What had Monica's brother been thinking of? In January they had met, and parted coldly ... in August they had met again, and had spent together not quite three days.... But what days! to brand themselves upon the memory. After that morning on the bloody field of Gravelotte--that night spent in the woodshed behind the cottage of Madame Guyot--that gray dawn when they had walked, hand clasped in hand, behind the bearer of the Blessed Sacrament, could He and She be ever anything but friends?... Close friends ... dear comrades, linked by indissoluble bonds of memories ... of perils shared, of experiences unforgettable by both.... What would Life be like when one had to face it shorn of the sympathy and companionship of Monica's brother?... Juliette did not dare to question. The thought of such loneliness was enough to freeze the heart.

Meanwhile, here was Madame Potier, heated and triumphant, proclaiming Madame served with the best that could be got. A lentil soup--an omelette with ham, coffee, and fruit from the garden. One would do better later, let Madame only wait.... The apartment of Madame Tessier had been got ready for Madame ... the small room usually occupied by M. Charles might be prepared for the Belgian gentleman.... Or--since that room was dismantled for cleaning purposes, and Madame Potier herself occupied the apartment adjoining ... would Monsieur mind sleeping at the garden cottage? She would guarantee there cleanliness and more than comfort.... Was not the bedroom hers and her poor Potier's?... Had they not slept in that bed for ten years past?... Ah, wherever her poor Potier might now be sleeping, he would never find the equal of his own bed....

The proposal, possibly prompted by discretion on the part of the excellent Madame Potier, was gratefully accepted by Breagh. And from that hour, under the sheltering wing of the hectic little caretaker, began a little idyll of happiness for two young people, who asked nothing better than that it should last.

It was exquisite autumn weather. They rose early, and passed out of the iron gate together, and so through the quiet streets to Mass at the great church of Notre Dame in the Rue St. Genevieve. Or they would attend it at the Chapel in the Convent of Carmelites that is now the Petit College in conjunction with a colossal Lycée. Then they would come back to déjeuner, laid on a table under the trees on the lawn, and afterward they would work in the garden, or read, or talk. But they read no newspapers, and for the best part of two months they never exchanged a word about the War.

It was the treatment devised by P. C. Breagh, who had failed of his practicing degree in Medicine, and under this régime the shadow that had rested upon Juliette lifted day by day. He had taken Madame Potier into his confidence, and she entered into a conspiracy for the better nourishing of one whom she firmly believed to be the wife of her master. She dragooned Juliette into drinking a vast quantity of milk, and the girl's haggard outlines began to fill out, and her dreadful dreams ceased to haunt her. Sleep returned, strength revived, her grief for the lost father, unassuaged, became less poignant. She could look back upon the happiness of their old life together without the anguish that rends the heart.

Daily she doled out to Madame Potier the small sum necessary for housekeeping. Under the able management of the hectic little woman, a very little money went a long way. Such butter, such cheese of Brie, such excellent bread, milk and cream, such country chickens, such fruit, and vegetables from the garden, were daily set upon the table, that a honeymooning Prince and Princess could not have been better served. The reward of Madame Potier was to see her handiwork vanish under the combined onslaughts of Madame Charles and Monsieur.... She waited upon them at table, and joined in their conversation, after the inconvenient habit of her simple kind.

As, still after the habit of her kind, she conceived an affection for her young mistress, she developed cunning of a wholly lovable sort. The first time she heard her idol laugh, she clapped her hands with rapture. Another day, in pursuance of a stratagem she had elaborated, she placed upon the dinner table a dish, with the blatant boast:

"My poor Potier used to declare by all that is sacred that no living woman could cook ragoût of veal except his wife!"

She whipped off the cover. Madame Charles helped Monsieur in silence, and unwittingly P. C. Breagh played into Madame Potier's hands. For he sniffed approval, and said, as she set his sizzling hot plate before him:

"M. Potier was quite right! If the woman lives who can cook a better ragoût, I've never met her, Madame!"

Juliette's eyes sent forth blue sparks as she sat erect at the head of the table. Her sloping shoulders sloped terribly, her upper lip was preternaturally long. She helped herself to a very little of the dish before her, and began to eat without perceptible enthusiasm. Madame Potier stood back and watched her, her red hands on the hips that were embraced by her apron of blue stuff. She said:

"Madame Charles will perhaps have forgotten the menus she used to prepare for Madame Tessier and M. le Colonel." She crossed herself at the mention of the dead man's name.

Juliette's blue eyes filled, and the stiffness went out of her. She laid down her knife and fork. P. C. Breagh scowled savage reproof at Madame Potier. But Madame, at first overwhelmed, recovered herself. She went on, as though she had never broken off:

"Menus composed of excellent--but excellent dishes!... What a pity to think that Madame Charles cannot make them now!--Look you, to cook well is an art that may be easily forgotten!... Hey, Madame is not eating to-day!"

Madame said in accents that were dignified and frigid:

"There is a little too much sugar in the ragoût, dear Madame Potier; otherwise it is, as Monsieur says--excellent!"

"'Sugar.' ... But one doesn't put sugar----" P. C. Breagh was beginning, when both the women turned on him and rent him, figuratively.

"Who does not put sugar? Will Monsieur answer me?"

The piercing shriek was Madame Potier's. And the silvery accents of Madame Charles took up the burden, saying:

"Dear Monsieur Breagh, the delicate brown of coloring that pleases you--the suavity that corrects the sharpness of the salt--these are due to sugar--burnt and added at the last moment. But one should use it with delicacy, or the effect is absolutely lost!"

"Can you really cook?" he asked, in his senseless, masculine fashion, smiling rather foolishly and staring at her with his honest gray eyes.

And Juliette answered with a trill of delicate, airy laughter:

"Do you find it so incredible? Well, I will not boast now, but presently--you shall see!"

Next morning, when Madame Potier returned from market, with an unusually heavy basket, Madame Charles donned a stuff apron of the good woman's, and vanished with her into the kitchen, whence their voices could be heard chattering as though a particularly shrill-voiced pea-hen were singing a duet with a reed warbler or crested wren. The twelve o'clock déjeuner was memorable, the five o'clock dinner a marvel, from the croûte au pot to the sole au gratin, and from the sole to the filet aux champignons! There were beignets afterward--crisp, adorable, light as bubbles. P. C. Breagh ate hugely, and praised, while the excellent Potier chuckled. Her work, she told herself, sat at the head of the table, in this slender creature with the wild-rose cheeks and the beaming, sparkling eyes.

Juliette had found in a trunk full of garments that had been committed by her to Madame Tessier's keeping a simple dinner dress of thin filmy black. Jet gleamed in the trimming of the skirt and polonaise, and upon the elbow sleeves and about the V-shaped neck of the bodice, the somber gleam of it threw into marvelous relief the ivory whiteness of the young, fresh skin. Her dainty slimness was emphasized by the absence of all ornament. Her marvelous black hair, fine as cobweb, silky without glossiness, crowned her chiseled temples with its dusky coils. When she lifted a slender arm to thrust in a hairpin more firmly, the sunset reflection from the sky caught the fragile hand and reddened the delicate palm of it, and the tiny nails that shone like rosy, polished shells.

She did not look as though she had been toiling in a kitchen among casseroles and stew pots. Rather an elfin Queen of Faerie--a Titania robed in cobweb and moonbeams, whose smile sent a breeze of happiness flowing through the sad, empty places in one's heart. For the heart of the young man who loved her grew the emptier the more her sweetness filled it, and realized its own sorrow the more she showed herself to be naturally a daughter of joy.

She belonged to Charles Tessier, and all these sparkling looks and lovely flushes, these sweet, unconscious provocations of gesture and tone and inflection were for him--and no other man.... This remembrance was always alive in Breagh to rear a barrier between him and his Infanta.... And other knowledge, too, was his, held in common with Madame Potier and many thousands of other people, that he had not dared to share with Juliette.

But to-night he had realized that the truth could no longer be kept from her. She was cured. There could hardly be a relapse into the old conditions, even when she learned the dreadful truth. And even if risk there were, she must be told that truth by him to-night, or hear it from the lips of some stranger. It was a miracle that she had remained so long in ignorance of the fate of France--her beloved France.

"For seven weeks we have played together like two children on the brink of an open grave!" he said to himself. "Have I been right or wrong? Only Time can tell!"

Madame Potier had clattered out of the room, and across the hall, and down the kitchen stairs to make the coffee. Behind those little black beady eyes of hers she hoarded the knowledge of well-nigh unspeakable things. She had been faithful in guarding them from the knowledge of Juliette. But now she had said to P. C. Breagh: "You must speak to-night, Monsieur! We have done our best, but we two cannot keep from the poor little lady that to-day the King of Prussia will enter Versailles!"

She had given him a look as she had left the dining room that had said: "Remember!" P. C. Breagh, nerving himself to the ugly task, felt like one who seethes the kid in its mother's milk.

As he pondered, something cool and fragrant struck him on the forehead. He picked up the red carnation that had fallen upon the dessert plate before him. He inhaled its fragrance lingeringly, holding it so as to hide his mouth. Over it his troubled gray eyes scanned the face that was all alight with sparkling gayety. Why had Juliette thrown the flower? Why had she challenged him? She, who had up to this moment been decorous and reserved almost to stiffness. Was it true that in every woman lives a coquette?

She was asking herself the same question, pierced by the conviction that her grandmother would have been horrified. But it had been impossible not to hurl the perfumed missile at the brooding face with its smear of dark-red meeting eyebrows, and the short, square nose and the pleasant lips.

He had on the shabby suit of brown, for his funds did not permit of a visit to the tailor. His new linen was spotless, and under the narrow turned-down collar he wore a loose-ended black silk tie. The bow was pulled out upon one side so much longer than upon the other that Mademoiselle's feminine fingers itched to adjust it. How careless he was in matters of dress, this adorable young Englishman!

She was restless this evening. He had aroused her curiosity. Some hours after she had retired upon the previous night she had risen, and stolen barefooted to the open window that looked upon the moonlit garden, and parted the thin curtains that hung before it, and peeped out....

There was not a breath of air to bring the autumn leaves down. A white dew sparkled on the turf that Breagh kept closely cut. The countless clocks of the white town of royal palaces tinkled and chimed and belled and boomed out the witching hour of two.

Her room was on the east front, facing the garden.... A downward glance showed her that Breagh was pacing there.

Up and down, backward and forward, leaving black prints of footsteps upon the lawn that was all be-gemmed with dewdrops. The presence of so many reservoirs makes Versailles more than a trifle damp.

How rash!... How unwise! Did the young man desire a fever? Juliette, accustomed of old to subject her Colonel, for his health's sake, to a daughterly surveillance, had a lecture ready on the tip of her tongue. She might have spoken, had not the patroling figure come to a standstill, and looked up wistfully at her shrouded window, and said something in a low, dogged, dejected tone, and shaken his head and gone away.

"I've got to tell!--and I don't want to tell!--and I don't know how to tell, that's the bother of it!... Give it up!... For another night!"

Without the muttered words, the glance and the headshake would have conveyed his doubt and his perplexity, to the subject of his sore reflections, returning in a flutter of strange, sweet wonder, and expectation, to her recently vacated couch.

You may imagine how she tossed and turned, seeing his miserable gray eyes looking at her out of the shadows in the corners. Those eyes could blaze in tigerish fashion when he was angry, for she had seen.... When she had crept from under my Cousin Boisset's death bed, they had flamed with a wonderful light of joy and triumph, and when he had caught her fiercely to his breast....

Oh! to be snatched again into those strong young arms, and held against the heart that shook one with its beating.... Was it wicked to feel that one hated Charles Tessier? Was it unnatural, in these days of mourning, to think of anyone except her lost Colonel?... Was it not exceedingly unmaidenly to determine that Monica's brother should say whatever it was he had got to say, and did not want to say, and did not know how to say, no later than the following night?...

True--she had purposefully conveyed to him the impression that she was married, but she would explain that she had meant that she would be by and by.... Alas! what would her grandmother, that sainted woman, have said regarding this lapse from the way of truth?

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LXIII

But she certainly had not planned to throw the carnation. The missile hurled, she had been seized with paralyzing fright. The shade of her grandmother seemed to rise, appalling in its shocked propriety. One could almost hear her saying: "My unhappy child, you have become more like your mother than I could have believed, had I not seen!..."

Now in sheer desperation she mocked on, dissembling her terror.

"What is the matter? Why are you so dull and distrait? Are you tired of living shut up in a garden? Answer me, I pray you, Monsieur!"

He looked at her, and his cleft chin squared itself, and his broad red eyebrows lowered into a line of determination. He said doggedly:

"The happiest time of my life has been spent shut up in this garden! I believe you know that very well!"

She burst into silver laughter and cried to him teasingly:

"But you did not look at all happy when I peeped at you in the night from my window. See! Thus, with the hands miles deep in the pockets, and the shoulders elevated to the tips of the ears!"

She jumped up and mimicked the slouching gait of the midnight cogitator, brilliantly and with fidelity, parading between the dinner table and the long windows that opened toward the lawn. He recognized himself, and reddened, while he laughed with vexation. He had never before seen her in this mood of Puck-like mischief. He had yet to become acquainted with another phase of Juliette.

"Did you learn to act so well at your Convent?" he asked her, and she answered with sudden gravity:

"Acting can never be learned, Monsieur.... It is a gift, of the good angels or the bad ones, which can be brought to perfection by use. To 'make' an artist of the stage is not possible. He or she is born ... and that is all I know...." She added: "When I make my appearance at the Théâtre Français, they shall send you a billet de faveur. Then you shall see acting. I promise you!"

She was more like Queen Titania than ever as she held up her fairy finger, and smiled and sparkled at the bewildered young man.

"For example, if MM. les Directeurs assign to me the part of a grandmother of sixty, do you think I shall put on wrinkles with paint? ... Non, merci! The true artist says to herself, 'I am old!' and she is old.... 'I am ugly!' and she becomes hideous. 'I am wicked!' See here!... Is this a face to regard with love, Monsieur?"

The last sentence had been croaked, rather than spoken. No Japanese mask of a witch could well have been more furrowed, puckered, scowling, or malignant than the face that had been Titania's a moment back. Breagh called out in protest, half angry, half amused, wholly fascinated; and Oberon's bright Queen came back again to say:

"Or I can be stupid, very stupid--if that will please you!... Gentlemen sometimes admire stupid girls.... We had one at the Convent--your countrywoman and a great heiress. Miss Smizz--the daughter of Smizz and Co., Tea Merchants, of Mincing Lane."

She banished all expression save a smile of absolute fatuity, puffed out her cheeks, narrowed her eyelids, permitting her eyes to twinkle through the merest slits. She giggled inanely, and said, combining the consonantal thickness of catarrh with the gobbling of a hen-turkey...

"All the eggstras.... Whad does expedse battere whed you've got a Forchud to fall bag od? Besides, Ba says I bust barry iddo the Beerage, ad accoblishbeds are dod usually expegded of a doblebad's wife!"

She added, in her own voice, summarily banishing Miss Smith, her expectations, and her splutter:

"Do not be vexed with me, Monsieur Breagh, I beg of you!... I am perhaps a little excited. There is something strange in the air.... I have a humming in my ears as though great crowds of people were talking very softly.... What is it?" she asked in bewilderment, pressing the fine points of her small fingers into her temples. "What is the matter with me to-night?..."

Then P. C. Breagh spoke out, in a tone that hurled a challenge to Destiny:

"There is nothing the matter with you!... That is the glory of it! You were ill, and now you are well.... You can laugh again, and sleep again, and cook a dinner and help to eat it.... You have made capital use of your time!... For we came here on the twenty-first of August, and this is the fifth of October. We have been shut up in a garden, as you say yourself, for more than six weeks!..."

"Can it be possible?"

She looked at him intently and realized his earnestness. He answered with a glow of pride in his work:

"Fact! And in all the time you have never seen a newspaper or asked a question about the War. Even when you have heard the great guns firing from the forts below Paris--Issy and Vanves and Montrouge and the rest--you never said a word that showed you noticed.... Do you know why?..."

His voice wavered exultantly. She looked at him and slightly shook her head.

"No!..."

"Because I willed you to. By George! there are times when I believe that even yet I'd make a doctor. Mental suggestion was the line I took with you...." He rubbed his hands. "Not that I could have done anything without the help of Madame Potier--first-class little woman!--regular brick that she is!... You see, your brain had sucked up all the trouble it was capable of holding. You wanted rest.... Well, you've had it, thank God! Night after night I've walked up and down, backward and forward, on the lawn, just as you saw me doing last night, saying: 'Sleep! Forget! You have my orders to!"

The tone of mastery thrilled, even while the muscles of her mouth twitched with repressed laughter. He was beautiful in her eyes as he leaned forward smiling at her. She said, repressing her tears, and concealing her admiration:

"But last night you did not say 'Sleep!' but something else, Monsieur...."

There was a swift change in him, telling her that for once he was not listening. His eyes were alert, his ear eagerly drank in a sound composed of many sounds that grew louder as they came more near. Now the whole room was full of the trampling of horses and the fainter clink of spur and scabbard and bridle.... Cavalry were passing up one of the great avenues south of the Rue de Provence--not the Avenue of St. Cloud--probably the Rue des Chantiers--there was a distant roar of cheers.... Then in one little oasis of silence came the rolling of carriages, and then the walls shivered with the roaring of lusty lungs:

"Hoch der König! Hoch der Kronprinz!"--and the shouts were drowned in a great burst of martial music, and the trampling of men and horses, mingled with the beat of drums and the blare of trumpets, rolled on tumultuously again.

The blood ebbed from Juliette's cheeks and lips to her heart as she listened. Then the double doors of the dining room were butted open with the corner of a wooden coffee tray, and Madame Potier appeared with a steaming pot and two cups. She was pale round the hectic patches that blazed in her thin face. Her black eyes leaped to Breagh's with an eager question in them ... "Have you told her?" ... and he answered with an almost imperceptible shake of the head.

Then before either of them knew, Juliette had risen. She went to the little woman and kissed her on the cheek. She said, taking one of the gnarled work-worn hands in one of hers and holding out the other to Carolan:

"Dear friends, to whom I owe so much, tell me now what in your great compassion you have kept from me. For I think the time has come when I must hear!"

The time had come, indeed, with the ring of Prussian cavalry hoofs upon the ancient cobblestones, and the roll of the carriages that came with them. And before either of those the girl addressed could speak in answer, the resonant sound of a Prussian trumpet pierced their silence:

"Clear the way! Clear the way! Here comes the King!"

And followed a cry, pitiful as the wail of a hare in a gin trap: "Those are Prussians!" ... and another scream, shrill and thin and clear.... Then a crash!... Madame Potier had dropped her coffee tray.... Before the hot steam of the spilled liquid rose up from the Tessier carpet, the small hand Breagh had clasped was suddenly, violently snatched from him. He sprang to his feet, but Madame Potier had been quicker than he. She had caught the girl round the waist, and now wrestled with her.... The silent, desperate strife was horrible. The slender black-clad figure writhed for freedom like a snake.... Then all at once the life seemed to go out of it.... They carried her to the sofa and laid her down....

"Monsieur should have told her!" Madame Potier said angrily. "Why leave it to the Prussians to break the news?..." Tears were running down her cheeks as she unfastened the girl's dress, and rubbed the limp hands, while Breagh dropped Cognac between the little teeth, a drop or two at a time.

And presently Juliette was looking at them, not wildly, and Madame Potier was answering: "It was nothing!... Madame was startled into an attack of faintness when I was so clumsy as to drop the coffee tray. Now I shall go and get more, and Monsieur will talk quietly to Madame as she lies there. She must hear everything that we have kept from her.... Yes, yes! that is quite understood!"

And she clumped away, with a backward glance of disdain directed at the masculine boggler, and Breagh drew a chair near the sofa where his wan Infanta lay, and sat down and told her all.

Red sunset flooded the autumn garden as he talked. Not a leaf stirred, hardly a bird uttered a nooning note. But the strange sound that had haunted not only the ears of Juliette went on incessantly. It was the sighing and whispering and muttering of the vast crowds that had filled the Rue des Chantiers behind the lines of troops to witness the entrance of the conquerors, and now gorged the great Place of the Prefecture (above whose entrance flaunted the standard of the Hohenzollerns)--filled the upper end of the Avenue de Paris--and surged over the vast expanse of the Place d'Armes, beating in black and restless human waves against the lofty blue and golden railings of the Royal Château, above whose golden dome floated the black-and-white Prussian Standard and the white Flag with the red Geneva Cross.

We know what he had to tell her.... The false step of MacMahon, the unavailing attempt of Bazaine to break out of Metz, the conflict on the Meuse, ending in defeat and the loss of 7,000 prisoners with guns and transport. The flight and escape of the Emperor to the fortress city of Sedan.... The battle between the ill-led, unfed, dispirited French forces and the Three Armies. The taking of 20,000 French prisoners, the wound of MacMahon, leading to his resignation of the chief command into the hands of General Wimpffen, summoned from his command in Algeria in time to capitulate. The pitiable surrender of the Emperor's sword to the King of Prussia. His transport into Belgium as a prisoner of War. The flight of the Empress from the Tuileries. The formation at Paris of the New Government of National Defense. The entry of the King of Prussia into Rheims, and the arrival of the First and Third Armies in force before Paris. The fight upon the heights of Châtillon--the defeat of Ducrot by a Bavarian Division--the German advance upon Nemours and Pitiviers--the investment of the capital, now encircled with an iron ring.

For three days the Crown Prince had been established with his Staff at the Prefecture. This day had seen the Great Headquarters of the Prussian King removed to Versailles, from Baron Rothschild's Castle of Ferrières....

Truly it had been time to break the news to Juliette. She lay still during the recital, only quivering now and then. She drank the coffee when Madame Potier brought it, and thanked the faithful soul affectionately. When the gas lamps were lighted, and the shutters shut, she bade P. C. Breagh good night in a faint whisper, and gave him both hands, saying with a liquid glance:

"Thank you, my friend!..."

He whispered as he kissed the little fingers:

"You will sleep to-night, will you not?..."

And she nodded in assent. But when he had gone to his bed at the cottage, the old terrible thoughts came crowding back.

That electrifying blast of glorious sound from the silver instrument of the Great Staff trumpeter had wakened and brought them like hornets buzzing and stinging about her ears.... She longed for her friend, but he had departed. And the loneliness was too terrible to bear.

She caught up a little white shawl that she had brought with her, and often wore when walking in the garden upon chilly evenings, or going to Mass in the early mornings, before the sunshine had warmed the air. One turn of the wrist draped it faultlessly about her head and body. Thus shielded, she went into the hall, and laid her hand upon the lock of the door.

As she did so, cavalry horses ridden at a sharp trot came clattering down the cobbled street. They were pulled up outside the Tessier mansion. There was an imperious tug at the gate bell. She waited for the opening of the kitchen door.

Then she heard it unlocked, and the clatter of Madame Potier's clogs upon the terrace. Klop--klop--klop! they crossed the leads, descended the three steps that led to the gravel walk, and went on to the iron gate. It was locked, as always, in the absence of Madame Tessier. Presently the keys clashed, the lock scrooped back from the mortise, and the hinges uttered a protesting cry....

Then the harsh tones of a man, speaking French with a frightful German accent, turned the listening girl to ice. There was an exclamation from Madame Potier, a rejoinder in the stranger's gutturals. A horse trampled. The rough voice of the rider swore at the brute in German. Then there was a clatter of boots upon the pavement, with a great clinking of spurs and scabbard, and the now-dismounted rider said in his infamous French jargon:

"Go you before and open! His Excellency is coming in!"

Terrified, Madame Potier obeyed ... scuttling across the terrace like a frightened beetle. Juliette, paralyzed with horror, heard the heavy spurred footsteps crunch and jingle up the gravel walk and ascend the steps to the hall door. Almost directly, as little Madame Potier darted panting up the stairs from the kitchen, the hall doorbell clanged a deafening peal.

A carriage had rolled down the Rue de Provence, and stopped before the smaller gate, ere the doorbell's iron echoes had ceased shouting through the house of the Tessiers. There were other voices at the gate, other footsteps upon the gravel.... They mounted the steps. A resonant, unforgotten voice said to the ringer in German:

"The Herr Intendant General may spare himself the trouble.... I will interview the people of the house myself!"

The person addressed replied in the harsh tones that had terrified Madame Potier:

"But supposing Your Excellency be met with some insolence?..."

The resonant voice answered with a smile in it: "In that case, Herr Intendant General, my Excellency will take the risk. There are only women in the house, and should they offer violence, I have Count Hatzfeldt and Count Bismarck-Böhlen here!..."

There was a laugh--gay, mellow, and careless--and a young man's voice answered:

"Your Excellency may safely rely on our protection!"

There was another laugh. Under cover of it, Madame Potier hissed into the head folds of the white shawl:

"They have quartered the Prussian Chancellor and the Foreign Office upon us. That is what the sacred brute in the big boots and spectacles shouted, when I went down to open the front gate.... What is the Prussian Foreign Office?"

From the white folds of the shawl a sibilant whisper hissed at her:

"It is a man. They call him Count Bismarck. Now if you love me, be quiet, and watch and listen. He shall ring the bell with his own hand.... Then I open the door!..."

"But, Madame!..." whispered the distracted caretaker.

No verbal answer.... The white shawl pulled closer, shrouding round the slender form and girlish features. A little hand, firm and unfaltering, ready upon the latch of the door.

Poor Potier whimpered....

"Madame Charles.... My child! my treasure! for the love of Christ and Mary!... Tell me what you are going to do!"

The bell rang again, with a new and imperious hand upon it. She well knew whose was the hand. And the snow-water in her veins became liquid fire. She threw open the hall door and stepped back to admit the Man of Iron.

He stood upon the doorsteps like the house's master, a huge dominating figure, dressed as she had seen him on the battlefield of Gravelotte, in his high black, pewter-buttoned military frock and white peaked Cuirassier cap, riding cords, and great black jack-boots with long steel spurs. He was powdered with dust as a man newly come off a journey, though his boots were clean, for he had driven in a carriage from Ferriéres. Upon the step below him stood Count Hatzfeldt, his First Secretary, a man of thirty, tall, broad-shouldered, and débonnaire, wearing, as did Bismarck-Böhlen, the semi-military Foreign Office undress. The lean trap-jawed personage in a dark uniform with velvet facings, whom we must recognize as the Intendant General, waited in the background, glaring through his spectacles at the tardy portress in the white shawl, and the peaked face and flaring black eyes of little Madame Potier, who stood beside her mistress as ready to spit and scratch for her sake as a pussy cat to defend its young.

There was no pause. The dominating figure stepped into the hall. His great Cuirassier sword clanked on the threshold. He touched the peak of his cap with his bare right hand, and said, looking down from his great height upon the women:

"This is the house of the Famille Tessier?"

One of the women, who was swaddled in a white shawl, dropped him a stiff little middle-class reverence. Behind her, the other bobbed a serving woman's curtsy. He went on, addressing White Shawl as the superior:

"This house, Madame, has been selected as the official residence of the Prussian Foreign Office. We shall pay you an adequate sum for our accommodation, and remain here some weeks ... possibly three."

He glanced at Hatzfeldt, and said with a flicker of sardonic humor playing in his heavy blue eyes, and about the corners of the deeply cut mouth that was masked by the heavy iron-gray mustache:

"Though the actual duration of the visit depends--not upon ourselves--but upon the decision of the United German Powers, and the position which they shall decide to take up with regard to Conditions of Peace. We are not the invited guests of France, whose stay can be cut short because our manners do not prepossess our hostess. We came because we thought it advisable ... we will go when it is convenient to depart!"

"If Jules Faure could hear Your Excellency!..." said Bismarck-Böhlen, grinning.

"He would cast up his fine eyes more tragically than he did at Ferrières," said Hatzfeldt, "when the three words, 'Forfeiture of Territory,' drew from them so many patriotic tears...."

"He is a weeper," said the Minister, pulling off his left glove, "and Wimpffen was a posturer, with his 'Moi, soldat de l'Armée Français'--and the Duke of FitzJames is a manufacturer of bugaboos.... Our German caricaturists should draw him as a pavement artist, holding the hat beside a horrible red-and-yellow chalk picture of our atrocious cruelties in Bazeilles."

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LXIV

We know that Bazeilles had been on the thirty-first of August a town of 2,000 inhabitants, mostly weavers, gathered about the ancient château that sheltered the boyhood of the great Turenne. Bazeilles had not observed the Law of the Neutrality of the non-combatant. The village had formed the extreme right of the French position on the day of the Battle of Sedan. Lebrun's Corps had occupied it, and its inhabitants had been seized with the fighting fever, and had helped to hold back a Bavarian Division for nearly six hours. Elderly civilians armed with antiquated rifles had displayed desperate bravery. One old woman, possessed of an ancient horse pistol, is said to have shot down three of the enemy. The men, their women and children, were now cinders mixed with heaps of calcined brickbats. The grim lesson had been taught very thoroughly. Bazeilles served as an object-lesson on Prussian methods throughout the remainder of the War.

"I will remember Bazeilles!" had flashed through the young head that was swaddled in white woolen. "My friend shall not forget to tell me what was done there!"

But the imperious hand of the Minister was upon the door of the billiard room. She saw it summarily thrown open. He went in, followed by Hatzfeldt, Bismarck-Böhlen at their heels.

"Capital!" he said to them. "We will have this arranged as a Bureau for the Councilors, the dispatch secretaries, and the cipherers. What is this?" He went to the glass door that led into the winter garden, looked through, and commented: "One could smoke a cigar here after dinner in wet weather; very well, it seems to me!"

The owner of the quick ears sheltered by the shawl of white woolen understood but little German, as she had previously said to her absent comrade. But what slight lore she had in the abhorred tongue had been gained in conversation with a Prussian mistress. She found that, thanks to the enemy's clear, melodious diction, she had no great difficulty in comprehending the substance of what he said.

His long heavy strides carried him next into the drawing-room, that apartment destined to become famous in history as the seat of the various negotiations which led to the treaties with the States of South Germany, the proclamation of the King of Prussia as German Emperor, and later, to the surrender of the City of Paris, and the settlement of the Conditions of Peace. The simply furnished, medium-sized room boasted a few mediocre oil paintings, a cottage piano, a sofa, some easy-chairs, and wall mirrors framed in handsomely wrought ormolu. Upon a little table against the wall stood an old-world timepiece, surmounted by a bronze figure with fiendish attributes, which engaged his attention curiously. His great laugh burst out, as he contemplated the grotesque.

"Now," he said, his voice still shaken by amusement, "if that malignant little demon be a model of the guardian spirit of the Famille Tessier, the Socialists and Ultramontane will be of opinion that I have come to the right shop!"

The young men laughed at the jest uproariously. He joined them, crushing down their lighter merriment with a mirthful giant's thunderous "Ha, ha!..." Then the double doors of the drawing-room opened. He came out with his followers into the hall place, demanding of little Madame Potier in fluent French whether gas was laid on in the rooms above:

"I think it probable, for you are a luxurious people in your habits, even down to the bourgeoisie and peasantry of France. At home, I am accustomed to go to bed with a candle, and blow it out when I get between the sheets. But here in Gallia I shall do as the Gauls!"

"There is gas in the bedrooms, Monseigneur!" shrilled White Shawl.

"So!" He looked down from his great height upon the speaker. She caught up a box of matches from the hall table and thrust it into Madame Potier's shaking hand....

"Go up quickly. Light the gas in the bedrooms. Monseigneur wishes to examine them all!" She added in her shrill voice: "They are in use at the moment, but can be vacated and got ready for the occupation of Monseigneur in something less than half an hour!" She broke off to shriek to the ascending Madame Potier.... "Quicker, Jeannette! Thou art always as slow as a tortoise!... But I come myself!..." And with a halting, shuffling gait which made Count Bismarck-Böhlen grin, and even the polished Hatzfeldt put up his eyeglass, she jerked across the beeswaxed parquet of the hall, and mounted the gray-and-red drugget-covered stairs.

What virtue lies in contrasts! When Juliette de Bayard walked, you learned what poetry could be in simple motion. Her skirts had a rhythmic swing and flow. Those little feet of hers made twenty steps to the stride of an ordinary English girl. At Mass, when folded in her white School veil, she advanced to the Communion rail to receive the Blessed Sacrament, she swam, she rocked as though upborne on waves of buoyant ether. Watching her, you would have said that thus Our Lady must have glided onward, bearing the gracious burden of her Divine Child.

This peacock-voiced creature who hid under a white shawl what the men who sneered at her dimly felt must be a countenance ugly to repulsiveness, had one shoulder thrust upward and forward, reaching nearly to the ear on that side.... A palpable curvature of the spine caused the curious gait, and possibly to this deformity might be attributed the voice that was so harsh, raucous, and torturing to the ear.

"Do not laugh.... It is pitiable rather than ridiculous," she heard her enemy say, in his own tongue.

Hot wrath, fulminating indignation, mingled in Juliette with the pride of the comedian who has made an effective exit.... To be pitied by him, and for a second time! That liquid flame that circulated through her veins, illuminated her brain in its every cell and convolution. By its lurid light she saw her own intention in all its ugliness. Was she to blame, who had fled from this her destiny? Had she sought for her vengeance? Of his own will had he not come, this world-shaking Colossus, to find his Fate waiting for him?

And Breagh. What of her promise to her comrade? The thought was a knife-keen stab compelling a shriek. She stifled it in the folds of the shawl, bent down her head, and with an exaggeration of the grotesque gait, scuttled upstairs with the agility of an escaping spider, provoking a guffaw from the Twopenny Roué, a laugh from the well-bred Hatzfeldt, even a deep chuckle from the Enemy. Let him laugh! As she fled from room to room, and the gas-jets leaped up flaring and shrieking under her small, fierce hand, like little Furies and Vengeances, and tell-tale articles of feminine attire and use were caught up and thrust into a small portmanteau, she bade him laugh as much as he would. As she opened a cupboard by the chimney-piece where Madame Tessier had kept medicine and cosmetics, and took from the shelf a flat-topped, wide-mouthed chemist's vial, and thrust it within her dress, deep into her bosom, she told herself that France should laugh before long!

Meanwhile, her enemy and France's waited, chatting in the hall at the foot of the stair. When she descended, he went up with Hatzfeldt and Bismarck-Böhlen, and made a brief inspection of the rooms. His own choice was made with the least delay possible. Opening from the square, skylighted landing at the head of the main staircase, was a room, some ten paces long and seven broad, lighted by one window on the right side of the main front, looking toward the stables, and commanding a view of the pleasance and shrubbery from two more windows in the eastward wall. This apartment, which was partly above the dining room, and had been occupied by Madame Charles Tessier, the Minister appropriated to his own use. A second room, communicating with this, and looking on the pleasance, and boasting also a glass window door leading out upon the iron bridge topping the conservatory on the south side, he set apart for Bismarck-Böhlen.

A somewhat better-furnished room looking upon the Rue de Provence would serve, as would the drawing-room upon the ground floor, for the reception of strangers and guests. Privy Councilor Abeken would occupy the bedroom next to this, also with an outlook upon the Rue de Provence. A tiny cell near the back stairs, only big enough to hold a bed, chest of drawers, and washstand, was set apart for Secretary Bolsing. Upon the second floor Dr. Busch or Privy Councilor Bucher would occupy the best bedroom, the two Prussian body servants from the Wilhelm-Strasse sleeping in the attic overhead. The two remaining chambers on the second floor--small, angular, ill-ventilated places--the women of the house were free to move into, and retain, if they desired. "Only in that case," said the masterful voice, "they must contribute their services toward keeping the house in order. Where I live, there must be no idlers. That is understood!"

Below in the hall, White Shawl and Madame Potier heard his strong laugh echoing amid the empty chambers and his heavy stride shaking the rafters above their heads.

"I am pleased with my room, though it has a window opening toward the stables, where the detachment of troops supplying the sentries will be quartered for the present, with my orderly and coachman and the two grooms. But common sights do not annoy me, any more than common noises, and there are two other windows overlooking the park. The trees in their autumn coloring will remind me of my own woodlands at home. Altogether the place has been chosen intelligently. A more roomy and better-furnished house might afford spiteful people an excuse to accuse the Chancellor of the Confederated States of luxury--the love of which has never been a besetting sin of mine. True, I must have a table supplied well, punctually, and generously.... That is always an understood thing. A sine qua non, in fact.... The King is quite aware of this.... I told him again yesterday, ... 'Sire, I must be fed properly if I am to make proper terms of peace!'"

His great laugh sounded again as he came trampling downstairs, bringing with him a masculine perfume of Russian leather and cigars of super-excellent quality. And Hatzfeldt was saying in his languid, well-bred accents:

"With Your Excellency's permission, I will now take leave of you--I must go and see the place where I am quartered. It is at No. 25, Avenue St. Cloud."

"So, then.... A pretty good distance from the Chancellor of the Confederation, should he require at some unusual hour the services of his First Secretary.... You will have to find the Count more convenient lodgings." The Minister turned to the Intendant General, who barked:

"At Your Excellency's honorable orders, the change shall be immediately made!"

"Oh, for Heaven's sake, not to-night!" expostulated Hatzfeldt, with graceful peevishness. "I am horribly done up with the heat and the dust we had on our way here. Why should the King have dragged us to Choissy-le-Roi, in order to see the troops? Cannot he see troops every hour of his existence? Ah, by the way! Did Your Excellency notice that at Villeneuve St. George the bridge of boats had been blown up?"

The Minister shrugged:

"Who can understand this destructive mania? It is a national disease peculiar to the French. Since the beginning of the war, they have destroyed bridges and railways to the tune of millions--for the sheer pleasure, one would suppose, of building them up again. Well, good night!" He held out his hand pleasantly to Hatzfeldt. "Good night to you, Herr Intendant General!"

The Intendant saluted stiffly and barked in his peculiar style:

"I wish a very good night to Your Excellency!" Then he clanked down the steps after Hatzfeldt and over the gravel walk to the front gate.

"I know what Count Paul has it in his mind to do," chuckled Bismarck-Böhlen, looking after them. "He will take a bath and dine at the Hôtel des Réservoirs."

"It would not be a bad plan to follow his example," said the Minister, "since some of the Foreign Office fourgons may be late in getting here. Unless Madame Tessier is prepared to supply us with a dinner upon the spur of the call?"

He added:

"Come, shut the hall door. I see they have already placed sentries. The grooms and Niederstedt will bring in the luggage by the back door and up the servants' staircase." He continued as Bismarck-Böhlen obeyed: "They are particular about such matters in French houses, where there is so much wax polishing of the floors and woodwork. Where are the women? ... There were two. A bonne and her mistress, the proprietress...." His powerful glance fell upon them standing near the doorway of the dining-room. He motioned them to enter, and followed them in.

"Madame Tessier!" he began, taking as by right the chair at the head of the long shining dinner table, upon which the tapestry cloth had not yet been replaced. He looked at White Shawl. The shrill voice cackled:

"Madame Tessier is in Belgium.... I am Madame Charles Tessier, the wife of Monsieur, her son!"

He said in his excellent French, laying on the table the flat white Cuirassier cap he had removed on entering:

"I congratulate M. Tessier! Can your servant cook, Madame?"

The shrill voice responded:

"Monseigneur must be judge of that when he has tried her dishes. She does her best--the excellent Jeannette! But if Monseigneur is to be served as befits his state and consequence ... I should prefer to cook for him myself!"

"So!" He leaned one elbow on the table, meditatively regarding the speaker, and the lambent blue flame of humor danced and flickered in his eyes: "Since we do not require you and your domestic to leave the house--only to confine yourselves to the two smaller bedrooms on the second floor--it may be as well that you should assist to a degree in the kitchen.... But for all that does not require women we have our servants--you understand? And the chef attached to the service of the Prussian Chancellery is extremely competent. He is--rather a personage in his way!"

Bismarck-Böhlen sniggered in his characteristic fashion.

White Shawl shrilled, gesticulating with a hand that resembled a claw:

"If your Prussian cooks better than I do--or even the chef of our gredin of an Emperor, he may call me a Bonapartist and I will not slap his face!"

The Minister drew his well-shaped sunbrowned hand over his mustache, perhaps to hide a smile at the epithet. He asked with his powerful glance intent upon Madame Charles Tessier:

"So, then, you are not a lover of the Bonapartes? What is your party? Are you Republican or Monarchist?"

She shrieked with raucous energy:

"I am a patriot, and a citizeness of the French Republic! All my life I have execrated the Bonapartes. See you well--I do not love Prussians!... But you have humiliated and dethroned this sacred pig of a Napoleon.... And for that I could kiss the hand that received his sword!"

The person to whom the shrill tirade was addressed listened with imperturbability, although Bismarck-Böhlen, standing on the other side of the table, between the windows, involuntarily clapped his hands to his sorely sacrificed ears.

Now the Minister said in his suavest French accents:

"The hand was not mine, Madame, I beg to assure you, but that of the King of Prussia, who is hardly likely to pay us a visit here.... Should His Majesty elect to do so, your ambition may be partially gratified. You will see the monarch who has paid your Imperial bugbear so thoroughly well in his own coin."

Here Bismarck-Böhlen broke in.... "Excellency! ... talking of coin ... you told me to remind you of what happened the other day...."

"Ah, so I did!" said he. "It is a mere coincidence, but worth remembering.... Upon leaving the weaver's hovel, near the village of Donchery, outside which you and Leverstrom waited while I discussed the terms of the capitulation with Napoleon in a garret containing a table, a bed, and two rush-bottomed chairs, the French Emperor presented five pieces of gold to the weaver, which Leverstrom afterward told me he vainly endeavored to buy of the man. His stupidity or the weaver's, we will not say now which was the greater!... But the coins displayed in unbroken sequence--the portraits of five rulers of France. There was Napoleon I., imperially wreathed, on a fine fat piece of 1820; a Louis XVIII., inane and aristocratic; a Charles X., with the knob in his nose; a Louis Philippe, looking like a bourgeois, and Napoleon III., Emperor of Ready-Made Plebiscites...." He broke off to say: "And now, Madame, what news of this dinner? Can you supply it, or must we go elsewhere? Decide. I am always an economist of time!"

And the penetrating glance shaded by the shaggy eyebrows of the Minister questioned the meager peaked countenance of which merely a wedge showed between the curtaining folds of the white shawl.... Lover of good cheer as he was, he was perhaps asking himself whether a creature so mean and pinched-looking could set before him the nourishing, well-flavored, well-cooked dishes, calculated to restore energy to his giant's frame. She was studying the face revealed in the circle of light cast downward by the shaded lamps of the gasalier above the dinner table, half loathing, half fascinated by the tremendous personality now revealed.

How much the published portraits of the man lacked, she realized now, clearly. What mental and physical power, and force, and energy were indicated in the lines of the great domed skull and the astonishing frontal development. What audacious courage and ironic humor were in the regard of the full blue eyes that rested lightly upon her own insignificance.... What deeply cut, pugnacious nostrils he had; what a long stern upper lip the full gray mustache curtained! He had a cleft in his chin that reminded her of a friend she loved....

This last and the other characteristics of the visage that confronted her were fuel to her roaring furnace of hate. A baleful light blazed in the eyes she curtained from him. Her heart seemed a goblet brimmed with intoxicating, poisoned wine. And then a little thing tamed the snake in her. It drew in its quivering, forked tongue, covered the fangs that oozed with venom, lowered its hooded head, and sank down, palpitating among its cold and scaly coils.

With all its power, the profound weariness of his face had suddenly come home to and arrested her. He looked, as was indeed the fact, like a man who had not known a good night's rest for weeks. There were sagging pouches of exhaustion under the masterful eyes, and the lines about the forehead and mouth and jaws were deeply trenched with fatigue and anxiety. With pain, too, for he was suffering from facial neuralgia brought on by nervous strain and overexposure, and divers galls and blisters, the result of days spent in the saddle by an elderly heavy-weight. Now he yawned and leaned back in his creaking chair, and suddenly was no despot helmed with terrors, armed with power, mantled with ruthlessness, but a man fagged out, and tired and hungry, athirst for rest and the comforts of home.

He had a wife living, she knew, and sons serving in the Prussian Army. Perhaps he had a daughter who loved him, too.... Perhaps she was thinking of him ... praying for his return in safety.... Oh, God!... The dreadful thought was not to be tolerated.... It must be driven away ... banished from the mind, if one was to carry out the plan....

All these thoughts volted through the brain under the white shawl in the passing of an instant. The next, she heard the shrill voice say:

"It is for Monseigneur to decide!... There is no difficulty about dinner--that is, provided Monseigneur can eat a good soup of artichokes made with cream!..."

His startlingly blue eyes laughed. He acquiesced, seeming to snuff the air with his deeply cut nostrils.

"There is nothing better than puree of artichokes--provided it serves as the prelude to a solid, sustaining, and well-cooked meal."

White Shawl shrilled:

"There might follow a six-pound trout, boiled, with sauce à la Tartare.... One came in this afternoon, fresh to a miracle, a fish from the Gauche near Montreuil."

He said to Bismarck-Böhlen:

"The trout of the Cauche are capital eating ... especially those caught in the upper part of the stream, a mile below Parenty. What else, Madame?"

She proclaimed in the raucous voice that made Bismarck-Böhlen grimace and shudder:

"A dish of cutlets and a ragoût of partridges with little cabbages. It is now upon the fire, simmering in the casserole--I meant it for next day!"

Like the trout, it had been designed for P. C. Breagh's delectation.

She added:

"And there are a cold ham, a peach tart, and a jelly of Maraschino, and I could toss up a savory omelette to follow the sweet dishes. As for dessert ... we have pears and plums from the garden.... But, Monseigneur..." It was greed that made the woman's strange eyes glitter so intolerably--"I shall be well paid for the excellent food and all my trouble, shall I not, Monseigneur? ... In good French money--not in Prussian notes?"

Under the heavy mustache he showed his sound, even teeth in a laugh of enjoyment.

"In good French money. You have my promise. So--you do not like our Prussian notes?"

White Shawl screamed:

"They are good where they come from, it may be, Monseigneur!... But here--the people would as soon take dead leaves for pay!..."

He thrust his hand in his breeches pocket, pulled out a gold Napoleon, and threw it ringing on the shining table. Her eyes snapped. The little clawlike hand darted from the folds of the enveloping white shawl and pounced on the gold piece. She curtsied like an elder-pith puppet to the great figure sitting at the table head, and with the extraordinary gait that combined a hitch, twist, and shuffle, hobbled out of the room, shrilling as the door closed behind her:

"Jeannette! Jeannette! Monseigneur will dine here! Make you up the kitchen fire! I will go myself to the cellar and get the fruit.... And the wine ... Monseigneur will certainly require some wine! Later on you must help me get ready the bedrooms. Put out sheets and pillow cases to air!"

Bismarck-Böhlen was saying, as he followed his great relative into the drawing-room, and extended himself upon the green plush sofa, as the Minister selected the largest armchair, and lighted one of his huge cigars:

"What a woman! What a voice!"

The other laughed through the fragrant smoke rings:

"You could say no more and no less of an operatic diva, had you recently fallen a victim to her charms. My landlady pleases me. My tastes, as you know, are somewhat peculiar.... But you need not feel anxious on the Countess's behalf. My sentiments in this instance are highly platonic." He added, smoking and speaking almost dreamily: "If in cookery Madame's performance equals her promise, what with trout, and partridges aux petit choux--cold ham to fall back on, and a savory omelette, we ought not to do badly at all!... With half a dozen bottles of that champagne we brought from Rheims, and a little of the Epernay..."

He added, yawning and stretching his great limbs: "I am not usually poetical, but I have a fancy with regard to the deep blue, green-fleshed grapes of the country, that their color affects the river into which the hillside vineyards drain. The Marne water is as brilliant and green as though it were made of melted emeralds. And the must from those grapes yields the best champagne of Rheims and Epernay...." He yawned again and went on: "There is something in surroundings! In this house I feel that I can work comfortably. The view of old trees, and bushes and flower beds from the room I have chosen as a bedroom and study will make one feel almost at home. Two of my servants shall sleep upstairs in the attics--of which there are several, and my coachman Niederstedt--who was my porter at the Wilhelm Strasse, shall have a shakedown somewhere belowstairs. He is as strong as Goliath and as sharp as a needle. An unusual combination of qualities, because giants are supposed by little people to be dull-witted and easily taken in!"

He sent out a long column of fragrant blue vapor, and added, looking at the antique bronze clock surmounted by its grotesque bat-winged shape: "A fallacy, since I myself belong to the family of the Anakim. Do you observe that my landlady's familiar spirit appears to be winking at what I have just said?... Kobold or gnome, there is a family resemblance between his countenance and Madame's. I must get her to sell him to me, to carry home to Berlin."

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LXV

P. C. Breagh had gone back to his bedroom at the gardener's cottage, under the garret where had slumbered the unlucky Jean Jacques Potier. The pet rabbits of the young man were even now in a hutch in the stable yard, and his striped house jacket and the green baize apron he used to wear when cleaning the Tessier silver hung on a hook in Madame Potier's closet, with the civil integuments of M. Potier, now deceased.

It was too early to go to bed. He pulled off jacket and waistcoat, filled and lighted the venerable briar root, and, sitting on his bed, re-perused by the light of his tallow candle a letter in headings, and bearing the date of September 23rd, which may be reproduced as written, here:

288 GREAT CORAM STREET, LONDON, W.C.

"MY DEAR YOUNG MAN!

I WAS SURPRISED AND GRATIFIED

To Receive Letters dated respectively July 28th, 31st, August 4th, 11th, 26th, Sept. 5th, 19th, from:

ONE WHO HAD VANISHED SWALLOWED ALIVE BY THE ROARING WHIRLPOOL OF WAR. THEY ARE SLAP-UP AND NO MISTAKE! ROBUST TO BRUTALITY! THEY HAVE BEEN ACCEPTED PUBLISHED AND PAID FOR! BY THREE SUBURBAN EDITORS SIMULTANEOUSLY. A NEW IDEA LONG CHERISHED BY SOLOMON KNEWBIT. A MAN BORN BEFORE HIS AGE! THE BOSS OF A FLEET ST. WEEKLY IS NOW NIBBLING AT 'BANG! A DOG'S TALE.' I Have Recovered My Fifteen Shiners And Have Cash in Hand For My Young Swell WHEN HE COMES MARCHING HOME! MARIA SAYS YOU HAD BETTER LOOK SHARP!

AN IMPORTANT CLUE DISCOVERED! MYSTERY OF LOST FORTUNE ABOUT TO BE CLEARED UP! ABSCONDING TRUSTEE HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED IN ECCENTRIC LODGER BY THE LANDLADY! PROOFS IN A SEALSKIN WAISTCOAT! BE READY! AT ANY MOMENT THE SUMMONS MAY COME!

I remain, My dear young man, Truly and faithfully yours, SOLOMON KNEWBIT."

At the bottom of the last page was written in a curious up-and-down handwriting:

"Dr mr Breagh,

"yu kno How mr Knewbit Has a Way of Puting Things queer but it Wold be Best For you To Come Home it Realy Wold. There Is a Pore Siner only Wating To maik Amens wich Is Mind must alwais Have Bean weak and People Puting There Afares in the Hands of sutch a Trustea Can ixpect Nothing but Truble, mr Chown of Furnival's Inn is To Be let kno If He Gives Warning to Leeve the House wich i think never will Drink being got Hold of him to sutch an xtent dear mr Breagh you have thought you were Pore. But your Fortune of 7,000 lbs was only took awai by the Almighty Goodness to Be Given back again, trust and beleive. I am Dr mr Breagh,

"Respectfully and afexnly "Maria Ling."

P. C. Breagh folded up the pregnant pages--owing to Mr. Knewbit's professional predilection for capitals and spacings, the double letter covered a good number--and put them away and began to think.

Would it not be best that Juliette should return to her husband in Belgium, since M. Tessier gave no sign of returning? And whether she agreed with the notion of leaving Versailles or not, was it wise of P. C. Breagh to stay?

He loved her. He would love her always. There were times when her eyes had tenderness in them for him. Those unforgettable days passed together ... those strange and dreadful sights seen in common, those perils mutually encountered had made a bond between them that might never be broken now.

But was it wise to remain near her, breathing her atmosphere, drinking in her rare, delicate, exquisite beauty, and growing more besotted in his worship of it with every day? He knew that it was not. By the anguish the mere thought of leaving her cost him, he realized how deeply the love of Juliette Tessier had taken root in his heart.

His nature, as simple as hers was complex, made it easy to hold her blameless in all. She had not led him on. They had been flung together by force of circumstances. That there was something guileful in her very guilelessness never suggested itself to Breagh.

The gate bell pealed as he sat ruminating, causing him nearly to leap out of his skin. That M. Tessier had returned was the possibility that instantly suggested itself. He knelt by the window of the low-ceiled cottage chamber and leaned out into the deepening dusk.

German voices at the gate, the stamping of horses, and the clinking of bridles.... The grinding of heavy boots on gravel, the jingle of spurs and the sound of scabbards scraping against the ground, rapping against the steps. A pause and a voice he knew said clearly and resonantly:

"The Herr Intendant General may spare himself the trouble. I will interview the people of the house myself!"

A loud voice barked out something unintelligible to the listener, ending with "insolence." The voice of the Man of Iron returned:

"In that case, my Excellency will take the risk. There are only women in the house, and, should they offer violence, I have Count Hatzfeldt and Count Bismarck-Böhlen here."

If there were any further words, the listener missed them, so deafeningly loud was the drumming of the blood in his ears.... The door was opened. There was a gleam of something white in the dusky hail place. And He entered and the other men followed him.... What did they there? What was it best to do?...

Now one by one the upper rooms were illuminated. The house door was opening. Two men came out and descended the steps. One who walked lightly and hummed a tune between the whiffs of his cigar passed away, still humming, toward the Avenue St. Cloud. The second who trailed a clanking sword gave harsh-voiced orders in the staccato tone of Prussian military authority to some persons in the street outside, mounted a charger held by an orderly, and rode jingling away toward the Boulevard de la Reine. His helmet and his orderly's could be seen bobbing over the top of the wall that screened the Tessier house from the Rue de Provence, and the dark silhouettes of the heads and bodies of men who crowded the double box seats of two private luggage vans that waited beyond the porte cochère under an escort of cavalry. No doubt they were fourgons sacred to the traveling Foreign Office of the Minister, bearing, besides the material of diplomatic labor, a working staff of Chancery clerks. Other vehicles were waiting, and videttes of cavalry were posted at each end of the quiet street. The trampling of their horses could be heard distinctly, with certain gruff admonitions, presumably addressed to pedestrians desirous of using the thoroughfare.

Now the leaves of the porte cochère were being opened and hooked back by the dusky silhouettes of a couple of men. Liveried grooms, because of stray gleams of light flashed back from buttons and cockades. Light thrown by the blazing yellow lamps of a large, empty, traveling landau that rolled in under the lozenged archway, at the heels of a splendid pair. The horses smelt of dust and sweat, and whinnied as they whiffed the stables. They were driven by a huge coachman, and a second carriage followed, piled with luggage, and containing three persons, who might have been secretaries or body servants, one could not decide. Four led horses followed, guided by orderlies of Cuirassiers. These did not follow the carriages, as they turned up the short avenue and pulled up at the hall door. The orderlies, quite as though they knew the place, rode down the longer gravel drive that ended at the gates of the stable yard. One trooper got down and opened the gates, and the eager horses were conducted in.

Tramp, tramp, tramp!...

A detachment of infantry, marching down the Rue de Provence. Turning in under the archway of the carriage entrance, an eighth company belonging to a regiment impossible to specify, because of the enfolding, deepening dusk. They also smelt hot and dusty and tallowy. A subaltern was in command of them, and an under officer. They halted, marked time while they posted a sentry at each of the gates, then tramped on toward the gardener's cottage, and turned into the Tessier stable yard. They were going to bivouac there. It was all clear and plain and simple. It was as fascinating as a shadow play--but for the tragic element that mingled in. Now the servants and grooms were unloading the luggage from the carriages and marvelously deft and noiseless they seemed at the work. A little later--and both carriages turned from the house, and were driven into the stable yard. You could hear the grooms and the big coachman hissing as they unharnessed the weary horses, and the horses snorting recognition as they scented their stable mates. And then P. C. Breagh became aware that the venerable pair of ponies that drew Madame Tessier's basket carriage were not to be permitted to remain in their comfortable loose boxes.... He could hear the elderly man who groomed and fed and exercised the ponies vainly protesting at the summary eviction of his charges, and the officer who commanded the detachment of infantry--Green Rifles, as it turned out--answering his complaints:

"Find the beasts another stable, and the rent and forage will be paid for. But remember!--if you grumble, His Excellency will have you shot!"

And the ponies were led away in search of new quarters, as the Foreign Office fourgon, with its escort of Uhlans, ground over the trampled gravel and pulled up at the terrace steps. One could hear the voice of Madame Potier and the creaking of the Venetian shutters. Then the billiard-room windows threw broad stripes of light across the terrace toward the wall. They were going to carry in the dispatch boxes and light traveling safes, the copying presses and letter books and the rest of the Foreign Office impedimenta by way of the long windows.... One guessed whose idea that had been.

A dominating, transforming spirit had invaded the quiet house in the Rue de Provence, bringing with it this purposeful, orderly bustle, this disciplined irruption of elements strange and new.

Of all these servants and attendants, some would certainly take up their abode at the gardener's cottage. Would P. C. Breagh, like the Tessier ponies, be presently turned out to seek cover elsewhere?

And Juliette.... The thought of her roused all his stinging apprehensions. He told himself that presently, when the house should have resumed something of its normal quiet, he would steal across the lawn in the shadow of the trees and borders, and lie in wait for a glance ... for a word....

He would force her to leave at once for Belgium. She must not remain in the house with all these men.... The time crept by with maddening slowness as he waited. Dark shadows moved in lighted rooms, passing across the blinded windows.... The whole house was flaring with gaslight now.

How long.... The slatted Venetian shutters of the dining-room were now unbarred and thrown open. He could not see into the room by reason that it faced east toward the pleasance, while the window from which he watched looked southward, immediately commanding the hall door. But broad beams of light were thrown down the steps and across the grass plot. Tall shadows moved across the streaks at intervals. There was the clatter of china, glass, and cutlery, a smell of cooking delectably savory. The Man of Iron was dining, and Hate had spread the board.

A shudder went through Breagh, and a cold perspiration bathed him. His hair seemed to rise and stiffen upon his creeping scalp. A sound broke from him ... perhaps a groan, perhaps an exclamation. There was a soft step in the darkness under his window and a whisper like a sigh.

"Monsieur Breagh.... Do not descend! It will be better that I mount the stairs to you!"

His first impulse was to reassume the discarded coat and waistcoat. Then he remembered that it was dark. The floor creaked under his stealthy footsteps as he reached the landing and crept on stockinged feet down the narrow stairway. She had pushed back the unlatched door and passed into the tiny passage. He met her almost on the threshold, felt for and seized her little hands. How feverishly hot they were! He pressed them as he whispered:

"I guessed what had happened!... I know who has come here!... For hours I have been waiting my chance to get a word alone with you. I was just coming when I heard you under the window!"

She whispered--and, although her hands burned in his, they trembled and her teeth chattered:

"Monseigneur de Bismarck desired to dine here. Every day one does not entertain a guest so noble. See you well! I have cooked for Monseigneur with my own hands a dinner worthy of--himself! He has devoured like an ogre the trout à la sauce Tartare, and the cutlets, and is now engaged upon a ragoût of partridges. When it is time to fry the savory omelette that follows, Madame Potier will ring the little bell, and I shall run back to the house."

The sentence ended in a stifled titter. An ugly sound that sickened Breagh as he heard it. He pressed the small hands, whispering entreatingly:

"Don't laugh! You must not laugh. Go back and get what you need for a journey. Tell Madame Potier I am taking you to Belgium. Back to your husband! ... your place is where he is! You shall not stay here ... you must not, I forbid you!..."

She ceased to laugh and pulled her hands away from his. Her answer came: an inflexible utterance to be breathed so softly:

"I remain here, Monsieur, until my husband comes!"

He panted the old prayer:

"Juliette, for the love of God...! You don't know what terrible danger you are risking!..."

The reply fanned past his cheek like the velvety wing of some great night moth:

"Monsieur, I remain here, until the arrival of M. Charles Tessier. Although you will do wisely to depart while you may--unseen!"

He said between his gritted teeth, while the pounding of his heart choked him:

"I shall stay here! ... I decline to be sent away!..."

She seemed to cogitate. Then came the mere breath of an utterance.

"Will you swear to be secret and faithful?"

He said hoarsely:

"Juliette, I must first know what you intend to do."

She whispered, and her voice set his blood rushing and the fragrance of her maddened him.

"Stoop!... Why are you so tall? Bend down your head!"

He stooped from his majestic altitude of five feet nine inches and a bittock, and two little hands that scorched him clasped his neck about. Light and soft as the touch of a flower was the contact of the mouth that whispered:

"I will tell you.... There is a line of one of your English poets--I forget his name--but the words run like this....

"'Throw but a stone--the giant dies!'

He gasped:

"I hear you!"

She whispered, still with her mouth against his cheek:

"See you well!--for the deliverance of my country, it is I who am going to throw that stone!"

He panted through the shuddering that had seized him:

"Do you know what will happen, whether you succeed or fail? You will be led out--placed with your back against--this wall perhaps--and shot!"

He felt her lips smile against his cheek as she answered:

"And what of that! It will be the fortune of War! But you..." She sharply drew her face away, and the slight hands thrust him from her. "I will have you leave this place to-night!"

A weakness seized him. He sank down upon his knees and stretched his arms out, in the darkness, to the dimly outlined silhouette of the slight elfin creature standing on the threshold, and the scents of rose and jasmine came to him in gusts from the night-veiled garden with another fragrance that had no name. He whispered, driven beyond himself:

"I will not go! I love you!"

She said:

"I have nothing to do with Love--who have consecrated myself to vengeance. And your presence here might ruin all.... He knows M. Breagh, the Englishman.... Have you not told me over and over that once he..."

She broke off there. But the intolerable stab brought Breagh to his feet. He snarled at her through his clenched teeth.

"He may know Breagh, the Englishman, but he doesn't know Jean Jacques Potier. Tell Madame that I shall wear her nephew's clothes and take his name, and do his work about the house and garden. All his duds are in the cupboard up in my room there, and his apron and clogs and so forth...."

Appalling triviality of the sex feminine. The conjured picture evoked a titter. She breathed, and he was stung with rage to know her shaken with irresistible mirth:

"But you do not know how to sweep and clean, and how can you conceal your very red and curly hair? French servant men have not such hair! You will be betrayed by it, Monsieur!..."

His blood boiled, and he thundered in a whisper:

"I shan't!... Call it what color you like to-night. It won't be there to-morrow! There are clippers in the cupboard, and I shall have it off."

A distant bell rang. She was gone like a bat in the darkness. His word was given. He was pledged now to follow her wherever fate should lead.

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LXVI

Versailles, always a town of martial music. Royal or Imperial fanfares of brass, and welcoming salutes of deep-voiced cannon, had been--since a day early in October, when the girdle of iron and steel had closed about Paris--resonant with Prussian bugle calls and throbbing with Prussian drums.

From dusk to dawn the electric search ray now mounted on the summit of the Arc de Triomphe, as the broad wheeling beams from Vanves, Issy, Mont Valérien, and the whole ring of forts that guarded the great, magnificent, menaced capital, whitened earth and sky in token of the unsleeping vigilance of the Parisians, and their ceaseless expectation of a German night attack, even as the long indicatory fingers of brilliant blue-white light, stretching from the ridge of St. Cloud and from the heights of Clamart, from Marly, Vanesse, Epinal, Noiseau, Choisy, and Bourget--no less than the formidable battery of big guns on the Place d'Armes, with their muzzles placed so as to sweep the avenues radiating from the Château--betokened the invaders' anticipations of yet another sortie.

Ah, why had there been no sortie earlier than that abortive effort toward Chevilly on the thirtieth of September? There were, at the beginning of the Investment, no more than 180,000 German troops of the Crown Prince's Army encircling Paris. Up to the tenth of October what a triumphant turning of the tables might have been effected by a vigorous sally, effectively carried out!

Huge German forces were engaged in the sieges of Metz and Strasburg, Belfort and Soissons, Schelsstadt and Verdun. General von der Tann was engaged with the Army of the Loire near Artenay. The stubborn resistance of Orleans kept an Army Corps of the Red Prince extremely busy. The Grand Duke of Mecklenburg, with the right wing of the Prussians' covering army south of Paris, was actively engaged with the French at Dreux and Le Mans.

And there were 55,000 troops of the Line within the walls of Paris; there were 105,000 Mobiles--not fighters to be sneezed at. There were 30,000 National Guards--perhaps too soft in muscle and well-developed in the region of the corporation to be very effective--pitted against such seasoned warriors as Schmidt, Klaus, Kraus, and Klein. But add to these, 25,000 Marines, Douaniers, Gardes-Champêtres and Forestiers, and there you had a force of 485,000 trained Frenchmen, asking nothing better than to sally out by St. Denis, Villejuif, and Charenton, cut the line of investment north, clear the blocked road south, effect a junction with the Army of the Loire, destroy the Warlock's subtlest combinations, promptly raise the Siege of Paris, and deliver France from the invader.

What was Trochu, Military Governor of Paris, thinking about? What were MM. Ducrot and Vinoy doing, to delay until the garrison and fortress of Strasburg were surrendered, until the Capitulation of Metz on the twenty-seventh of October, and the fall of Verdun on the seventh of November, had released the main Army of the Red Prince for the strengthening of that steel and iron girdle that lay outside the defiant ring of forts? The tentative sally of the twenty-ninth of November was foredoomed to failure from the outset. No wonder Trochu and his plans furnished hungry Parisians with abundant food for mockery, when the Specter of Famine brooded over the City on the Seine. Narrow-eyed and tight-lipped, cold, sinister, and mysterious, the man was a mere bag of wind, when all was said and done.

Meanwhile, the great bronze muzzle-loaders of the Forts of Mont Valérien, Issy, Montrouge, Vanves, and Charenton, St. Denis and its twin sisters, roared at intervals throughout each day, raining common shell, chain shot, solid ball, and shrapnel into the lines of the investing host. But the trenching and battery-making went on steadily; the high-walled farmyards and gardens of country houses in the environs were being converted into emplacements for artillery of the largest caliber. Already several of Krupp's stupendous siege-howitzers, with muzzles cocked at angles of forty-five, demonstrated the possibilities of the bombardment for which the German Press daily shrieked.

"Not for the reduction of the military defenses, but to produce by the exercise of sheer terror, bodily suffering, and destruction of private property, such an effect upon the unarmed multitudes--subjected to a hail of incendiary shells within their encircling ring of walls and fortresses--as to compel the chiefs of the Government and garrison to come to terms at command of the popular voice."

Thus the leader-writers of the Berliner Zeitung and other journals--peaceful-looking, stout men, with full beards and short-sighted eyes behind spectacles--wrote, as though they longed to dip their quills in newly shed French blood.

"It is sad, very sad," said the Warlock, vexed for once, "that the siege trains conveying more than 100,000 hundred-weights of ammunition cannot be brought over a single line of rails with sufficient quickness to gratify these excellent gentlemen.... Yet for the present we can do no more than invest the place and wait for the means of attacking it. The process of starving out is, as the mighty fortress of Metz has shown, a very slow one. But as the loud voices of one hundred and one guns have already proclaimed to our Berliners--the empty stomach triumphs over the most obstinate resistance. We now require an army to guard 300,000 prisoners of War! Since the Babylonian Captivity the world has not heard the like! And yet the chamber prattlers and the journalists accuse us of tardiness. Already from several anonymous quarters have reproachful or ridiculing letters reached me. One even contains a villainous comic verse, which I am told is sung in the music halls in Berlin."

And the great tactician read, with the expression of one who savors the bouquet of sulphureted hydrogen or asafetida:

"_Guter Moltke, gehst so stumm? Immer um das Ding herum: Bester Moltke, sei nicht dumm, Mach' doch endlich: Bumm, bumm, bumm!_"

And he tore up the rude verses in indignation and threw them into the waste-paper basket of the Prussian Great Headquarters at the Palais de Justice, on the right of the Prefecture, and strode downstairs, too much out of tune to hum.

To have been called slow and stupid, and affectionately urged to hurry up and make an end of things with bang, bang, banging!... He was almost glad that his departed Mary was not alive to know of the humiliation inflicted by these scurrilous rhymesters on her beloved old man.

It was an unfortunate moment chosen by a new junior assistant aide-de-camp upon the Chieftain's personal staff, for tendering a request for leave of absence until the following day.

"What, what?... You have barely entered upon your new and important duties, the wine in which your comrades of the Guard pledged you is still bubbling in your veins.... Is it another congratulatory banquet, or a supper tête-à-tête ... Am I right?" The Warlock's keen glance glittered between his lashless eyelids at the tall, fair-headed young officer standing rigidly before him. "Prut! that reminds me!..." he added. "In whose company did I see you lunching only yesterday at one of the little round tables in the ante-chamber of the dining salle at the Hôtel des Réservoirs?"

Said Valverden, his blue eyes meeting the sharp gray glance with a charming candor:

"Excellency, the lady is the recently married wife of a Roumanian noble. Her name, if Your Excellency desires to know it, is Madame de Straz."

Said the Field Marshal with an acute look and a dry intonation:

"In Berlin, not so long ago, she called herself something else!"

Valverden answered, with a conscious side glance at the twist of silver braid that marked his rank of Captain:

"Her first husband was killed in action with his regiment at Gravelotte. She is now legally married to M. de Straz."

Moltke took snuff and said laconically:

"She has not taken long in changing her state."

Valverden began, rather lamely:

"Madame had virtually been separated from M. de Bayard----"

Like a bayonet thrust came the retort:

"Since your Cousin Max ran away with her from Paris, fourteen years ago! The woman is an adventuress, whom you will be wise to avoid."

Valverden answered, with his disarming look of frankness:

"Your Excellency, I was applied to by the person you mention for advice in a matter of serious urgency. Madame de Straz has unhappily lost all trace of the whereabouts of her daughter, Mademoiselle de Bayard.... She has entreated me to solicit for her an audience with Your Excellency, in the hope that you might aid her to recover the young girl."

The War Eagle croaked, ruffling his feathers with indignation:

"Does the woman suppose that I have got the unfortunate young creature in my pocket? Or does she suspect you of knowing where she is to be found?"

Valverden said, hastily and flushing:

"Your Excellency, upon my honor, I have never seen the girl!"

The Warlock tucked away his snuff box and pointed the terrible withered finger at the left side of the young man's bosom, where hung upon a broad black, white-bordered ribbon a cross of dark metal, edged with a narrow line of silver, and bearing a crown and the letter "W." A terrible grating voice said, and with all his cool effrontery Valverden quailed at the words and the stern look that accompanied them:

"To you, young man, upon whom the Second Class of the Iron Cross has been conferred by the hand of your Crown Prince, for daring and gallantry upon the war field--no more I say than this: Do nothing to disgrace the wearer of that decoration--which should be sacred in your eyes...." He added: "The leave you ask is granted. Until twelve noon to-morrow, Captain von Herding will take your place."

And His Excellency the Field Marshal returned his aide-de-camp's salute and wheeled sharply, and had taken a couple of strides across the vestibule, when he halted to ask:

"This girl you speak of--how came she lost?..."

Said Valverden, hesitating slightly:

"According to Madame her mother, the ladies were on a visit to Rethel during the time when the Prince Imperial of the French was staying at the Prefecture. They had obtained an audience of the Prince.... Madame de Straz was prevented by illness from accompanying her daughter.... The young lady--Mademoiselle Juliette de Bayard--has never been seen since."

The lean neck and spare features of the greatest of strategists became suffused with indignant scarlet. He said:

"The mother is a trollop of the very first water. She took the girl to the Prefecture--why did she contrive an interview? She sends her up alone--she declares that she has never since seen her.... Pfui!... The affair, in my nostrils, fairly stinks of vulgar intrigue. Have no more to do with it--though the unlucky girl is no doubt to be pitied.... I will speak to His Excellency, Count Bismarck, who has agents in Rethel."

And he steamed across the marble vestibule of the great hall of the Palais de Justice, crossed the Place des Tribunaux, and vanished into the Prefecture, over whose entrance hung the Hohenzollern banner and the Prussian standard, that was very soon to show a stripe of red beside the black and white....

For the hitherto recalcitrant States of Baden and Hesse had joined the Bund. The King of Saxony had signed,--Würtemburg would sign the treaty of Federation shortly. There were prospects of a definite settlement with the King of Bavaria. The ambition of the Man of Iron was shortly to be realized.... Bismarck was to rule a German Emperor!

You might have seen him, upon this bland November morning that had succeeded a night of shrieking northerly gusts and driving pelts of sleety rain, walking with the Count Hatzfeldt in the garden of the Tessier mansion in the Rue de Provence. The house immediately opposite had now been converted into a guard post. Sentries in the uniforms of the Green Jaegers were on duty at the gates. Over the principal entrance hung the black and white Prussian standard.

The sky was deep blue, with argosies of white clouds sailing toward the northeast. The leaves that yet remained upon the elms and poplars shone in the sunshine like newly minted gold. Those that the gale had stripped lay in wet drifts upon the grass and gravel, though the three oak trees on the pleasance yet retained their suits of crisping russet brown.

To the right, at the rear of the house, a young man servant was sweeping away the leaves that adhered to the narrow terrace of steps running round three sides of the building. The swish of his birch broom punctuated the sentences of the newspaper article being read by Hatzfeldt to his Chief.

It was the continuation of the article in the Berliner Zeitung that had roused the ire of the Warlock a little while before.

"Unanimously," it concluded, "and in the interests of Humanity, we demand that this measure be taken at once. We reprehend in the sternest terms, not only those military commanders who are in favor of procrastination. We cry in the ears of the Chancellor-and-Minister-President, Count Bismarck himself, who is credited with being the main factor in this policy of delay: Mene, mene, tekel upharsin!--'Thou art weighed in the balance, and found to want!'"

Said the Man of Iron to Hatzfeldt:

"Did I not know that my wife regards women who enter the lists of journalism as unsexed, and outcasts beyond the hope of redemption, I should be inclined to believe she had written this." He added: "I have often been accused of inhumanity, but to be reproached for an excess of tenderness is something quite new to me. How shall we reassure these excitable gentlemen? Buschlein"--he referred to his Press article-writer, the rotund author of the famous "Recollections"--"Buschlein shall write that he has authority from Count Bismarck to state that his universally credited predilections for slaughter have not been blunted by recent experiences, and that he much approves of the bombardment idea, but that he has no control over those high military functionaries who command His Majesty's investing forces, and is not accustomed to be consulted by them."

He spat and resumed:

"Private correspondents worry me to know whether I am really averse to the bombardment, and why I won't allow firing into the town? What pernicious rubbish! They will be blaming me next for all losses during the investment. Which are not small; for in little skirmishes, and during the short time occupied by those abortive sorties, we have lost more troops than we should have done had we regularly stormed the place."

He added, looking humorously at Hatzfeldt, whose handsome, débonnaire countenance invariably fell at any reference to a bombardment:

"By the way, another balloon has been taken with letters from Paris, some of which I have already read, and a Figaro of yesterday's date. It has been decreed by the French Government that all wine and provisions are to be taken away from private people, as the poorer classes have already begun to fricassee their dogs and pussy cats. So your American father-in-law will have to look out for his cellar--an excellently stocked one, as I have heard from you. And your wife's famous mouse-gray ponies will probably be made into cutlets--a pretty piece of intelligence for your next letter to Madame!"

"Ah!... for Heaven's sake, Your Excellency!" cried Hatzfeldt, with ruefully elevated eyebrows, "I implore you not to conjure up the image of my wife's indignation and despair. Every letter I receive from her begins and ends with her precious ponies."

The Minister appended:

"Her mother, father, and her brother, Henry, who is living at their estate of Petit Val, near Marly--I think you told me--being sandwiched in between the little beasts."

They were pacing the garden paths. The Chancellor had recently risen, and seemed inclined to be in a jesting mood. He continued, throwing away the butt of a finished cigar:

"I must be careful, or the Countess will send me no more pâté of pheasants, or sausages. Pray tell her, with my compliments, that both were excellently fresh and good.... Did you notice written on my table card that the Mayor of Versailles is to have a ten-minute interview before M. Thiers arrives at half-past twelve? If I have not polished off the Republican official before Thiers toddles up the doorsteps with his portfolio under his short arm, and his gold spectacles twinkling, engage him in conversation below here for an instant--do not send him up straightway to the torture cell." Thus the Minister had christened the small room adjoining his private apartment. He went on: "I do not want him to go down to Sèvres with his white flag and his escort, and meet Jules Favre with a string of tales about our orgies and revelings, of the enormous expense of which the Mayor is coming to complain."

"What insolence!" commented Hatzfeldt.

"It seems," continued the Minister, "that we all cost the town too much to keep, the chief offenders being the grand ducal and princely personages at the Hôtel des Réservoirs. Of course, one knows that the Tinsel Rabble eat and drink a great deal more than they require, and waste much more than they consume. But to a Frenchman, one cannot admit as much. So I shall tell the Mayor that he must apply to the French Government at Tours for permission to raise a substantial money loan, and as M. Thiers has only just come from there, he would naturally buttonhole the old gentleman if he encountered him. Which--as our plump, neatly shaved old Professor is as timid as a hare and as soft as a baby--would discompose him very horribly...." He continued: "He is dying to make peace with us, because there will soon be famine in Paris. Imagine how I caught him out when I told him yesterday: 'Monsieur, you have only visited the city for a few hours. We know better about the contents of its magazines than you do. They have ample provisions to last until the end of January....' What a look of incredulity! I had only been feeling his pulse, as it were.... His amazement told me what I most wanted to know. What a man to make a bargain about an armistice, an invalidy civilian, who cannot conceal his feelings! Who lets himself be put out of countenance and pumped!--actually pumped!"

He turned aside to cough and hawk and expectorate copiously.... "There!" he said, wiping his mustache vigorously with a large white cambric handkerchief. "You see what it is to have a stomach as sensitive as mine is.... That injustice done me in the Berliner Zeitung with reference to the bombardment has caused an overflow of bile, by which I was already incommoded. Thiers will be certain to remain closeted with me for two hours. He is nothing if not expansive and flowery, and redundant. I shall not be able to get on horseback before three o'clock, and we dine at six." He went on, punctuating the sentence with more coughs and hawkings: "And as our table is to be graced--tchah!--by a huge trout pasty, a love gift to the Chancellor of the--hah!--Confederation, from a Berlin restaurant keeper who throws into the bargain--ahah!--a cask of Vienna March beer and his photograph, taken with his wife and--brr'r!"

He turned aside and spat vigorously, before ending, resuming, as he used the big white handkerchief:

"One would desire to do justice to a gift so welcome.... More bile!... I spat like this half the night through.... Decidedly I am not as well as when we galloped along the highroads with the Great Headquarters Staff.... I have wondered: Do I eat too much? Does this sedentary life conduce to indigestion?" He spat again, and answered himself: "How can it be so, when I breakfast on a couple of eggs with dry toast, and a cup of tea without milk? I don't lunch--lunch is a mockery of a meal--but in the evening I make a hearty dinner. With beer and champagne in plenty, and wash all down with half a dozen cups of tea. Then I go to bed--as you know, never before midnight. There's a doze--and I waken up with my brain as bright as daylight--all sorts of things running through it, and my mouth full of this bitter--faugh!"

"Your Excellency will need a fresh handkerchief," said Hatzfeldt, slightly shuddering, as the Chancellor vigorously crumpled the soiled cambric into a ball. "Shall I send Your Excellency's servant to fetch another?"

"No, no! As it happens, I have sent Grams out. And Engelberg is busy. There is Madame Charles's factotum!" He called in French: "Hola, Jean Jacques! Approach, my brave young man!"

His full blue eyes, their whites now red-veined and biliously injected, had turned to where the strongly built young male servant was still sweeping the steps of the rear of the house. Cropped to the scalp, you saw the fellow attired in a well-worn morning jacket of striped linen, a blue waistcoat and tight blue cloth trousers, yellow piped at the side seams. Summoned by an imperative word and gesture, he knocked the damp leaves off his broom, stood it up against the side of the conservatory, and shambled to where the Chancellor was standing, muttering with a downcast air and a furtive, sulky look:

"Ouiche, Monseigneur?... What is it Monseigneur desires?"

Said the Minister, with a smile that curved the great mustache and showed the white, square teeth that a young man might have envied:

"Monseigneur desires that without delay the brave Jean Jacques would betake him to the kitchen, and desire Madame Charles Tessier of her goodness to favor Monseigneur with a clean handkerchief.... Perhaps two would be better.... Ask for two, Jean Jacques, and compel thy legs to rapid motion, for to croquer le marmot is not a favorite pastime with Monseigneur! Comprehend you?"

Jean Jacques replied in his extraordinary patois, with a bow of the clumsiest:

"Ouiche, Monseigneur!"

"De quel pays sont vous?" asked Hatzfeldt curiously.

Jean Jacques responded with sulky unwillingness:

"La Suisse, Monsieur!"

Hatzfeldt said, as the young man returned to the scene of his abandoned labors, picked up his broom, and went round the end of the conservatory toward the kitchen quarters:

"There are Frenchmen who call themselves Belgians or Swiss because they are too funky to fight!"

Said the Minister:

"Madame Charles Tessier, who knows all about this fellow, describes him as a native of Neufchâtel. Here she comes herself, bringing my handkerchiefs. Thank you a thousand times, Madame! But why inconvenience yourself?"

Madame Charles, whose black hair, heavily streaked with white, was crowned with a dreadful lace cap with lappets, parted in the middle, and brushed down in two old-fashioned festoons on either side of her haggard white wedge of a face, shrilled in her raucous voice that it was no trouble whatever.... The laundress's basket with Monseigneur's clean linen had but that moment come in.

Madame Charles wore a gray poplin gown of rich, stiff, antique material, trimmed with black gimp upon the gores, round the bottom of the expansive skirt, and upon the sleeves and waist. It had been discovered in a wardrobe belonging to the mother of M. Charles Tessier. She had on one of Madame's black silk aprons, a pair of her black silk mittens, and the black chenille net adorned with steel beads that confined her back hair had housed the iron gray curls of her respected mother-in-law. Over her narrow shoulders hung the inevitable white woolen shawl.

She curtsied deeply to the Chancellor and slightly to Count Hatzfeldt, and went on into the garden, and disappeared round the corner of the ivy-bordered path. Seen thus in the searching daylight, the elevation and forward thrust of the left shoulder that lent her gait its unpleasant peculiarity, and the curvature in the lower part of the spine were even more painfully apparent. It occurred to her as she moved away from the two men, whose eyes, reluctantly or curiously, were following her, that to ape this deformity so persistently might be to bring it in reality upon herself.

She shivered a little, despite the bland warmth of the November sunshine. Round the corner of the green glass conservatory, well out of sight of those who walked in the garden, Jean Jacques Potier was shivering, too.

When the Chancellor had coughed and spat and spat again, the knees of Jean Jacques had shaken beneath him. His heart had sunk like a leaden plummet, and the sweat of terror had started on his skin.

He was afraid--horribly afraid. Not for himself, but for another. There was no knowing. The thing he feared might happen at any time.

"Throw but a stone--the giant dies!..."

He could hear now the very voice in which she had added: "See you well, it is I who am going to throw that stone!"

He had expended all the eloquence he possessed with the object of turning Juliette from her purpose. He did not know whether he had succeeded. She would give him no promise. She was sphinxlike, inscrutable.... You could never feel sure that in the middle of the night there would not be a cry--and then a commotion of running feet upon the stairs, and then--the arrest, and the accusation. He had made up his mind to say, when that happened: "It was my doing. She knew nothing about it. It was I who put poison in the food of this man!"

Then he would be taken out and shot. It would be done instantly, whether the owner of the life that had been attempted died or got well. Perhaps the man would not die? He had an iron constitution and the frame of a Titan. But sometimes he looked weary and haggard and bilious. And when he spat as just now, and pulled wry mouths over the bitter stuff he expectorated, the heart of P. C. Breagh would sink to the pit of his stomach, and his legs would shake under him, as they were shaking now.

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LXVII

Meanwhile, the Man of Iron had commented to Hatzfeldt:

"Our landlady is going for a little promenade ... she does not fear damp, that is quite plain ... see how she trails her skirts over the wet grass. Now, if she were to show her feet, should we be grateful, or the reverse?"

A light of cynical amusement flickered in his blue eyes as he noted Hatzfeldt's disgust of the creature of whom he spoke. He went on:

"Ugly women have sometimes pretty feet, and hands that are exquisite. Have you ever looked closely at the hands of Madame Charles? If not, I recommend them to your notice. They are well worth looking at." He added, ignoring the shudder that convulsed the dandy: "I propose that we follow her--discreetly and at a distance. I have still a few minutes before the Mayor arrives."

He led the way. They crossed a portion of the lawn and turned into a gravel walk, damp and miry and drifted over with wet and rotting leaves. The shining patent-leather boots of Hatzfeldt suffered by their contact. The Chancellor, observing this, said:

"Never mind.... You can have them cleaned! My man Niederstedt polishes boots capitally!"

Hatzfeldt returned plaintively:

"I can have them cleaned, as Your Excellency observes. But never again will they be the same after a wetting. And they are made by the only man in the world who knows how to make boots."

The Minister said brutally:

"Order another pair of the fellow!"

Hatzfeldt returned with a shrug and a rueful look:

"He lives in Paris--Rue de Lafayette. And Your Excellency is going to have Paris bombarded!"

Said Bismarck, his great frame shaken by internal laughter:

"The fellows who write the newspaper articles out of their own heads know a great deal better than that.... According to them, I am a humanitarian--altruistic to imbecility."

"But we, who only write to Your Excellency's dictation, know Your Excellency better than they!"

The injury to his immaculate foot coverings, and the impending destruction of his bootmaker's establishment, incensed Hatzfeldt to the point of an imprudent retort.

The granite face turned. The heavy regard rested upon him. With his characteristic stutter--a signal as warning to those who knew him as the rattle of the crotalus hidden in the brake, the Minister said:

"So I am not a philanthropist, or a--or an apostle of light and sweetness. I would prefer to build an Empire with the fallen towers of the modern Babylon?..."

Hatzfeldt bowed with the grace inherited from the Russian Princess, his mother. The Minister went on in a lighter tone:

"As a boy, I always preferred the apples that hung on the highest branches. They were bigger and sweeter and rosier than the others, though in stealing them I risked both my breeches and my neck. Well! To be plain, there are two apples just now that I particularly covet: the Bombardment--and the Proclamation of the Emperor of Germany from the Tuileries...." He added: "The via media is not the surest road to an arrangement that shall be lasting. The most convincing arguments are uttered by the iron mouths of big guns!"

They had emerged from the shrubbery at the bottom of the garden. The patch of green still spread upon the eastern boundary wall, where the water trickled down. The aquatic plants had been weeded, and the tiny pond cleaned out by Breagh under the supervision of his Infanta, but the pipe remained unsoldered because the plumber's men had gone to the War. Thus the Satyr's mouth remained dry, though the chuckle still sounded in the Satyr's throat.

Madame Charles had been standing near the mask as the Minister and his courtly First Secretary stepped into the open. She started slightly, glanced round, bent her head, and limped painfully away.

Said the Chancellor, barely glancing after the awkward, misshapen figure:

"I hope that it has not occurred to Madame Charles to look over the garden wall!"

Hatzfeldt's eyebrows went up in mild surprise. He objected:

"It would hardly be possible. The wall must be eight feet high, and how in the world could a woman, elderly and with that distressing deformity----"

The laugh that shook the great figure beside him puzzled as much as the utterance.

"She is a daughter of Eve--and it would be possible, by putting a toe in the jaws of yonder grinning gentleman, to ascertain that I have had two sentries posted on the other side of this wall. Listen!..."

He rapped on the masonry with the walking stick he habitually carried, and an answering rap came from the other side.

"There is a good large garden there, belonging to an unoccupied house," he added. "And ranged along the wall are bushes, behind which my two men stand well screened."

"Did Your Excellency apprehend danger from that quarter?" inquired Hatzfeldt.

"Hardly," said he, "though it is as well to be on the safe side, and Versailles is pretty well packed with people by whom I am rather particularly detested. But as a fact, I placed the soldiers for the purpose of catching Madame's postman. You did not perceive as we stepped out of the shrubbery that she slipped an envelope into this creature's mouth?"

Hatzfeldt answered, in some astonishment:

"Why, no, Your Excellency. I saw nothing of the kind!"

The Minister said, shaken with the internal, secret laughter:

"And yet you have good eyes, better than mine for seeing some things at a distance.... A pretty face behind a thick veil ... a graceful figure concealed by a shawl. Possibly the friend who communicates with Madame Charles with the aid of this grinning fellow admires her.... There is no accounting for tastes...."

Hatzfeldt asked in a tone of disgust:

"Who is Madame Charles's friend? Is it possible that misshapen creature has a lover?"

The Minister answered with a curious grimace:

"A lover who is apparently a Franc-tireur."

Hatzfeldt returned with acrimony:

"One of those marauding free shooters who wear a black cloth uniform, and carry a black standard with a skull above a pair of crossbones. Perhaps his lady-love sat for the picture of the Death's head?"

The Minister returned, with a look of amusement:

"Possibly she did.... Though there have been moments when, under Madame's extraordinary coiffure with the black lace lappets, I have seen peeping at me--imagine what?"

"I cannot imagine.... Hatred, possibly?" said Hatzfeldt.

"Hatred, blazing from two extraordinarily blue eyes...." The Minister went on: "But not only hatred.... Youth, and prettiness. Now, look here, and--for I am perfectly convinced that you believe me bewitched by our landlady--behold my rival's billet-doux!.."

Hatzfeldt could scarcely speak for laughter. The Minister put his hand into the Satyr's mouth and extracted therefrom a little envelope, inscribed in a bold, black, inky scrawl.

"To My Adored Wife."

The Satyr chuckled almost humanly as the Minister held the superscription under his Secretary's eyes, and calmly proceeded to open the envelope.... Hatzfeldt, at first crimson, and writhing with repressed merriment, became graver as the Minister read aloud:

"What of thy husband? dost thou ask in the nights that are sleepless and solitary. Credit, my little one, that thy Charles is often near. In the thought of thy husband, if not in person, he rests upon thy heart so faithful and fond."

Hatzfeldt spluttered. The reader continued:

"We Francs-tireurs attacked a squadron of Schleswig Hussars the other day at the village of Hably.... We shot down many of the Prussian marauders and killed their horses. Only eleven escaped with life. They returned later and burned the village, committing unexampled brutalities, and murdered several of the inhabitants. It is well! We have another cause to feed our roaring furnace of hate.

"All means of revenge are good, for ours is a holy war waged upon a merciless invader. We number nobles, peasants, citizens, criminals in our armed and organized ranks. Each man will kill as he knows best. The rifle, the knife, the scythe, or the cudgel, the gardener's shears, the chemist's drugs, and the barber's razor are weapons lawful to be used against the enemies of France. We will dig wolf-traps for these Prussian foes of ours, who plunder by method and wreck scientifically. We will tumble them down wells, drown them in rivers, burn the huts they are sleeping in over their heads. And our sisters?--our wives? They are united with us in our solemn compact of destruction. They will embrace to strangle. They will smile and stab! They will cook savory dishes for Messieurs les Prussiens, and the dogs will eat of them and die.

"These kisses on thy sweetest eyelids. These for thy two little hands. Dost thou love me? Till death and after,

"_Thine and thine only, "Charles Tessier._"

There was a silence. The Minister broke it with a grim sentence:

"When this fine fellow is not murdering Prussians, he is making love to his spitfire of a wife. A fine breed of young criminals should spring from such a union!"

The Satyr's mocking chuckle sounded like a comment on the speech. The Minister had deftly opened the envelope without tearing the flap, which was still moist. He now refolded and slipped back the sheet into the envelope, wet his finger in the little jet that gurgled from the hole in the pipe behind the mask of the Satyr, and reclosed the envelope. He drew out his watch and consulted it, as the clocks of Versailles struck the half hour, and said to Hatzfeldt, replacing the watch:

"Half-past twelve.... Do you know, I read something by Félix Pyat very like this"--he slightly waved the drying envelope--"in a copy of the Petit Journal that was brought me the other day.... Now, my Mayor is due, and M. Thiers is certain to arrive on his heels.... I must return to the house; but I should prefer that you stayed here."

"Here, Excellency!"

The Minister laughed in the amazed face of the Secretary.

"I want you," he said, "to play the part of Leporello.... Frankly, I cannot understand why Madame Charles herself placed this letter in the gape of the mask.... I am curious to know who will fetch it away from there.... I am going to ask you to hide in the shrubbery and find out."

Hatzfeldt glanced dubiously at the wall. The Minister nodded.

"My two men are not sufficiently sharp-eyed to see through these bricks. Really, I must ask you to stay here and oblige me. Von Keudell must keep M. Thiers in play instead of you.... Why, you are quite pale!..."

Hatzfeldt gulped and admitted:

"That letter gave me an unpleasant sensation. I am regularly shaved by a Frenchman, you understand!... And these Francs-tireurs seem to be everywhere. Really, it is horrible!"

The Minister's brow became thunderous. The lines about his mouth hardened to granite. He said in his grimmest tone:

"They should be hanged whenever found! And not cut down, but left hanging, for a salutary warning to other rascals.... Do you know that the Combat--the organ edited by that blackguard Félix Pyat--wishes to get up a subscription for the purchase of a gold-mounted rifle to be given to the scoundrel who succeeds in removing the Prussian King.' ... Doubtless they have set their price upon the heads of Moltke, and the arch enemy Bismarck. Well--Auf Wiedersehen! Ride out with me after lunch to the aqueduct of Marly, and tell me what I want to know."

And the great figure strode away, leaving the First Secretary to his unwelcome task.

"After lunch..." he said mentally, as he insinuated his graceful figure between a lilac and a lauristinus, and the rich soil, rendered marshy by the overflow of the lily pool, squashily gave way beneath his once immaculate boots. "Why, good Heaven!... the woman to whom that monstrous epistle was addressed actually assists the Foreign Office chef with the cooking! The Chief swears by her ragoûts and her omelettes and her beignets. They are certainly excellent.... I must avoid them for the future. A young married man with a family must be careful. I wonder, if anything unpleasant happened, whether Touti would marry again?"

The bushes were wet with rain. Little cold showers sprinkled the dandy's head and shoulders. His boots sank deeper as the wet trickled down his neck. What a degrading task for a First Diplomatic Secretary! With what shrieks of laughter his lively American Countess would read his written description of his experiences as a spy! A corn began to shoot. He sneezed. This meant influenza to a certainty. Even while he devoted Madame Charles, her bloodthirsty spouse, and all her countrymen to the hottest corner of Tophet, he kept a bright lookout. And in another five minutes or so he saw the person for whom he lay in waiting coming down the mossy gravel path that wound through the shrubbery.

It was Jean Jacques, the clumsy foot boy, whose mistakes and blunders kept the Prussian Chancery attendants in a continual eruption of abusive German epithets, and whose patois, proclaimed to be Swiss, was so extremely puzzling that Hatzfeldt, who had piqued himself upon an exclusive knowledge of the French of the Tyrol, could only assign the youth to a canton of his own. He thrust his hand into the Satyr's toothed gape and pulled out the letter, twisted a wry mug as he regarded it, and said, with an admirable English accent:

"Oh, damn!..."

Then, at the urgent tinkle of a bell from the kitchen regions, he thrust the missive into the pocket of his striped cotton jacket and scampered back to the house.

You will remember that when Juliette had consented to marry the unknown Charles Tessier, she had, for her dear Colonel's very sake, adorned the faceless one with features, a complexion, shoulders, muscles, and so on. She had even boasted to Monica's brother of the swordsmanship of the worthy but unromantic young cloth manufacturer, whose most sportsmanlike accomplishment was the shooting of thrushes and sparrows, which he would bring home to the Rue de Provence in triumph, to be converted by his adoring mother into savory pies.

Now, during these days of tension and anxiety, perhaps to relieve the strain of an otherwise unbearable situation--possibly with the desire of inflicting on her unfortunate adorer the torturing pangs of jealousy, or possibly to create and maintain in herself a fictitious interest in the supposititious husband, she had begun anew to expatiate upon his gifts and graces, and, having begun, could not leave off. Her Charles had not red hair and yellow gray eyes, a blunt nose, and a square chin with a dent in it. He was pale, with melancholy black eyes and a high brow. His jetty mustache was waxed, his imperial finished in a point of the most elegant.... He quoted poetry in a deep voice, and was capable of torrential outbursts of passion. He was altogether a perfect specimen of the type of Balzac's beautiful young man.

Surfeited with these perfections, P. C. Breagh had become restive, to the point, one day, of being clumsily sarcastic on the immunity of widows' only sons from the obligation of military service, and so on.

That afternoon Madame Charles had received a mysterious communication to the effect that her lord had secretly quitted Belgium, penetrated in disguise into France, passed through the Prussian lines in a series of hairbreadth escapes, and joined a corps of Francs-tireurs. Since when, letters containing tirades inspired by the most flaming patriotism, sanguinary descriptions of adventure, and passionate protestations of devotion, had been found at intervals by Madame Charles in the mouth of the Satyr mask. Of late, since she had developed nervousness about fetching the letters herself, Jean Jacques had sulkily performed the office. And when she did not, with due precautions, declaim these effusions for the benefit of her victim and fellow conspirator, his was the task--inconceivably repulsive to a young man suffering the stabs of jealousy, of reading them aloud to Madame Charles. Hence the expletive which had betrayed his British nationality to Count Hatzfeldt, standing disconsolate in his squelching patent leathers under the dripping lilac and syringa trees.

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