The Man of Iron

by Richard Dehan

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.