LXIX
The center of a small but lively group, composed of admirers and listeners, Prussian officers known in Berlin, their Bavarian and Hessian friends and acquaintances, American and English Press Correspondents, and a traveling Oriental or two—you might have observed Madame de Straz—a full-blown Comtesse now, in virtue of the patent of nobility asserted by her husband—in the restaurant of the Hôtel des Réservoirs—not always accompanied by her Assyrian-featured lord.
Adelaide had not grown younger since the adventure of the Silk Scarf. Her bold and striking beauty had suffered gravely, though her figure, set off by its fashionable and well-chosen dress, was as supple and graceful as of yore. She looked like some gorgeous fruit that the wasps had ravaged, and to conceal this she made up heavily and wore thicker veils. What she now lacked in loveliness she endeavored to make up in espièglerie and easy-going good-fellowship. Not a few officers responded with enthusiasm to her pressing invitations to breakfast or lunch at the little country villa she and M. de Straz had rented, at Maisons Lafitte beyond St. Germain.
One need hardly say that there was play on these occasions, besides excellently prepared dishes and a liberal flow of the champagne, besides the cognac and liqueurs of which Madame drank a good deal.
To quiet her nerves, raveled by the unhappy situation of her beloved country, she declared, for it suited her to be a Frenchwoman now.
She would have dearly liked to inveigle a Duke, Grand or Hereditary, or even a Prince Regnant, to her roof-tree and her baccarat-board, but these personages, bestarred and beribboned, furred, jack-booted, buck-skinned and long-spurred, were as shy as the hares and partridges in the forest, that were incessantly cracked at by hungry pot-hunters. Wherefore the sumptuous Adelaide must perforce be contented with Counts and Barons, whose purses were less lengthy than their pedigrees, as a rule.
"A solitary nest and too remote, it may be.... But for a bride and bridegroom, solitude and remoteness have their advantages!" had proclaimed M. de Straz, with a shrug of infinite meaning, and suggestive glances of his black Oriental eyes. Certainly the guests of Madame and Monsieur, even when conveyed to the destination in hired broughams and victorias, were wont to find the road, running through abandoned villages and by deserted châteaux, unexpectedly barricaded with felled timber and scarred with unfinished trenches, more than a trifle long.
The nest of these love-birds, half a mile from the sacked railway station and the broken bridge of Maisons Lafitte, was enclosed in private grounds. The villa Laon—how or from whom acquired, nobody ever thought of questioning—was a cottage with Swiss gables and East Indian verandas standing in gardens adorned with glass arcades and Italian pergolas, their vines and roses stripped and shuddering in the bitter wintry winds. There were also Chinese bridges crossing pieces of ornamental water, aviaries of finches and canaries, and wired enclosures once well stocked with silver pheasants, now, thanks to the nocturnal ravages of mysterious marauders, depopulated in a manner painful to behold.
"You pretend," said Valverden teasingly to Adelaide, "that the neighbors creep out at night and annex the pheasants, or that our cavalry pickets take them for the mess-pot, or that they are stolen by Francs-tireurs. Francs-tireurs there are in plenty in the neighborhood—every hour some honest German soldier gets his death at the hands of one of these scoundrels!—but as far as concerns the vanished inmates of the pens and cages, I believe you and M. de Straz have eaten them yourselves."
He stretched his long spurred legs out over the brocade of an Empire sofa gracing Madame's boudoir, and leaning back his handsome head, looked up at her teasingly.
"With my assistance, for that salmis we had for breakfast was of home production I am certain. Come, own that I have guessed as well as Mariette can cook at a pinch."
Adelaide frowned and bit her lip. But she let her gaze dwell lingeringly on the upturned face of the handsome Guardsman, and said, seeming to search for her own sulky, splendid image in the blue eyes with which Adonis made play:
"If you were less like Max I believe I should detest you!..." She added, after an instant: "And if you resembled him more than you do, you would find no welcome here."
"Beyond salmis of pet pheasants, and stewed carp out of your landlord's fish-ponds." His red lips rolled back in a grin that showed the strong white teeth, the fuzzy ends of his fair mustache sparkled as though the hair had been sprinkled with gold-dust. "Who is your landlord? I am dying to know. Do you rent the place of the gardener, or that pompous-looking butler who has not got the key of the cellars, but nevertheless can produce champagne of Comet brand and excellent Roussillon. Or is it a speculative partnership? Some of us have dropped a good deal of money here in play lately.... They are beginning to grumble noisily—particularly that little black-haired aide-de-camp of the Duke of Coburg, and von Kissling of the squadron of Blue Dragoons quartered here at Maisons Lafitte.... What's in the wind I don't pretend to know, but they might get you turned out of here—they might even obtain an order from Headquarters for the return of their lost cash!..."
"Bernhard!" Her ringed white hands tenderly caressed his forehead. "You will protect me from them!—you will stand my friend! Oh! how horrible it is to want money—always money!"
Valverden said, neatly biting off the end of a cigar and spitting the nipped-off end through the open glass-doors leading out upon the veranda:
"Has not M. de Straz got any money? And did not my Cousin Max give you enough?... You used to seem uncommonly flush of the ready when one saw you queening it among the gay cocottes of Berlin."
His tone cut like a whip. But Adelaide was growing used to take insults with outward meekness. She swallowed her wrath and even tried to smile.
It was horribly true that she had need of money. Even before she had fallen into her present state of servitude, she had known that a day was coming when she would be penniless.
Like all other women of her sensuous tastes and clamorous predilections, Adelaide devoured money as a pussycat crunches up small birds. Her dead lover had spent upon her lavishly, had provided that an income should be paid her out of his private estate. But it was not sufficient for a woman so extravagant, and Adelaide had supplemented it in various ways. Firstly, by obtaining information for the Prussian Secret Intelligence Bureau. Secondly, by tapping the bank-balances of admirers of the wealthier order. Thirdly, by signing Bills of Exchange and Promissory Notes for cash at ruinous rates of interest. When she had conceived the idea of obtaining a reconciliation with Henri de Bayard, the prospect of incarceration in a debtor's prison had loomed very near.
The cunning fable of her riches that had been devised to tempt him to his ruin, had failed through the very whiteness of the man's integrity. Ah, Adelaide! The way to have triumphed over the Colonel would have been to have crept in tatters as a beggar to his door.
But she had never understood the man. Let us hope that generous soul of his was spared knowledge of the degradation of the woman he had worshiped, as Valverden went on, barely deigning to hide his contempt of her, or to modify even slightly the insolence of his tone:
"You have asked me to protect you. I have no objection to doing so. My sympathy is not at all with the losers who squeal. Even when I was as poor as a church-mouse I had the gift of being plucked without wincing. Besides, I won money that night when Von Kissling dropped such a lot.... And of course my testimony would be worth—something...."
His tone of bargaining was unmistakable. Adelaide flushed a dusky-red, through which the fading streaks of Straz's love-gift showed plainly, and her dark eyes gleamed covetously as she bent over the young man. She whispered with her hot lips almost touching the diagonal white band of forehead above his soldierly sunburn:
"What, Bernhard? Tell me what it would be worth to you...."
His long blue eyes laughed up into hers, lazily. He said, feeling for the silver case in which he carried his fusees:
"Shall we say ... a little information regarding the whereabouts of Mademoiselle Titania.... M. de Straz has piqued my curiosity, you will observe."
"So!..."
She reared above him like a furious Hamadryad, whispering thickly, for rage dried up her tongue:
"So it is of my daughter you and Nicolas have been talking apart together, both here and at the Hôtel des Réservoirs. Are you both mad? For a pale, plain, dull school-girl ... a peaky, undeveloped, mincing doll!"
He raised himself to a sitting posture, and answered her coarsely:
"Women like you cannot realize what is or is not pleasing to men of my standard. The Prince Imperial must have seen a good many pretty women, young as he is, yet he found your daughter charming, I am told.... M. de Straz, who is a judge, admires her excessively.... If my curiosity is tickled, the fault is your own, for it was you and not M. Straz who first engaged my interest in that quarter.... Did I not speak to Count Moltke at your request of Mademoiselle? Well, he did—though at first he scouted the notion—sound Count Bismarck on the subject, when he called to congratulate him on his First Class of the Iron Cross, and be complimented on his own Order Pour Le Mérite."
He folded his arms on his broad chest and dropped the words out lingeringly, relishingly, his blue eyes gloating over the changes in her tortured face:
"And the Chancellor answered him: 'Do not you trouble yourself! All is well with the pretty young daughter of de Bayard, by that disreputable old woman who played the mistress of Count Max in '67.'"
She screamed, and struck with her clenched hand at the fair, flushed, grinning face as though she would willingly have battered out its beauty. He caught her wrist with a fencer's quickness, and prisoned the other in the twinkling of an eye. He went on, holding her immovable, leisurely enjoying the changes upon her tortured face:
"As a good German I do not interfere with my superiors. His Excellency knows where the girl is, and does not at present choose to tell. But you, Werte Frau, have the right to question His Excellency, whose answer was repeated to me by my Chief, Count Moltke. Do not forget, however, that you lay claim to the disrepute as well as the daughter when you present yourself at the Foreign Office ... in the Rue de Provence...."
She panted breathlessly:
"I shall not go! No one shall compel me!"
"Oh, in that case," said Valverden, rising and releasing her, "I can only leave you to the arguments of M. de Straz. He is coming now—I can hear his voice in the garden. Auf Wiedersehen!" He said over his shoulder, as he lounged out of the cottage: "In the affair of Von Kissling, do not count on my assistance. It is only given on condition you fall in with our views."
So he and Straz were in league.... Rage stung her to the mad imprudence of rebellion—the proud sultana whom a thousand freakish cruelties on the part of her swarthy master had taught to be a trembling slave.
The Roumanian, we know, was nothing if not subtle. When Adelaide flatly refused to call at the Foreign Office in the Rue de Provence in the character of a bereaved and yearning mother, he smiled on her, almost tenderly. He kissed the wrists Valverden's grip had bruised.
"Queen Rose of my Garden of Delights," he said, "why did you let the girl go in the beginning? You recognized her value even when you did not know that she has money in her own right."
Money.... A new light began to break upon Adelaide. The fear of a sudden and violent death no longer stiffened her muscles. She moistened her lips, pale under their rose-tinged salve, and lifted her eyebrows inquiringly.
"Money, soul of my soul," said Straz, who had almost reverted to the original gushing and poetic Nicolas of Adelaide's remembrance, the lover whom in pre-Sigmaringen days she had cajoled and despised and betrayed. "Not a large fortune certainly, but between her grandmother's estate and her father's savings she has a sum of 80,000 francs invested in the Belgian cloth manufactory and dyeing works of M. Charles Tessier. Not a fortune, but not a sum to be at all despised." He added: "I have obtained this information from a person—formerly a clerk in the employment of the Versailles firm of solicitors who enjoyed the confidence of M. le Colonel and his sainted mother." The quirk of his lips and the roll of his eyes as he made this reference, so unsavory in the ears of Adelaide, cannot be described. "From this retentive person—I refer to the ex-clerk—I have purchased the intelligence I now divide with her who has the right to share the secrets of my heart."
Adelaide had previously seated herself, at a motion of his finger. She looked up now as he thrust a hand between his vest and shirt-bosom. Their glances met. He said to her with a snap of his thick white fingers:
"No! Put that out of your head, ma cocotte! Not a sou of de Bayard's will ever come his widow's way."
This uncanny faculty of the Roumanian for reading her unspoken thoughts was one of the secrets of his power over Adelaide. She shuddered now, encountering his look.
"Don't you know," he was demanding, "that with her unique beauty Mademoiselle would be a fortune in our pockets even were she penniless? What! you doubt the justice of my taste—which placed on you the seal of approval when your own charms were at their perihelion. You who have paid the price for those supreme moments when celestial flames enveloped you—when you knew yourself nearest to the bosom of the Sun."
Were all the men in league with this man to taunt and mock and torture her? A fierce surge of blood rushed to her brain. She heard his thick chuckle as she loosened, with shaking hands, the lace about her throat.
"Why do you not kill me outright?" she cried to him, as the tide rushed back to her heart, and left her livid. "Are you not yet weary of playing this hideous farce of marriage? Why murder me by inches?... Will you never set me free?..."
He said, combing his clubbed beard with his thick yellow-white finger-tips:
"When you have helped to get back Mademoiselle, I will think about providing you an honorable retirement. Come! Be pliant.... You have my word that you shall be free. But without funds," he shrugged, "who can do anything? And Mademoiselle has these expectations ... and beyond these I have certain definite arrangements with—a certain personage—who is—content to pay handsomely for an introduction to her."
She cast caution to the four winds and shrieked at him furiously:
"'De Bayard's daughter by that disreputable old woman!...' Ah, for that he shall indeed pay handsomely!"
For though the sentence quoted by Valverden bore the unmistakable stamp of the Iron Chancellor's mintage, the tone in which the words had been repeated, the icy glance of contempt that had accompanied them, rankled in the flesh of the unhappy woman, like barbed thorns.
The venom wrought in her still, even to hardihood and a courage bordering on effrontery, when a few days later her hired carriage drew up before the sentried gate of the Tessier mansion in the Rue de Provence, early in the forenoon of a December day.