LXXI
In the Tessier drawing-room, where the carpet was threadbare with the traffic of the feet of Princes and plenipotentiaries, and the brocade furniture was soiled with the contact of muddy breeches, and ragged with the rowels of spurs; where the bronze, bat-winged figure presided over the ancient clock of ormolu and malachite that had marked the passing of so many hours in this the death-struggle of bleeding France, Jean Jacques Potier stood up to give an account of himself, while just without the doorway waited a brace of muscular Chancery attendants, and the gigantic East Prussian coachman, Niederstedt, patrolled the terrace outside.
"You have not forgotten him! He used you somewhat roughly at the Foreign Office in the Wilhelm Strasse. Nor, as it happens, has he forgotten you. Come!—what have you admitted to that Witch of Endor, la veuve Bayard? You are no friend to her daughter if you have told the woman that Mademoiselle is here, under this roof."
"So you—know?..."
P. C. Breagh had gasped the words out before he could stop himself. The Minister's flashing blue eyes lightened in laughter as they met the appalled stare of the young man with the cropped head and the green baize apron. He said, lisping a little as was his wont:
"I know, and I have known almost from the beginning. Everything must be known in this house. Did you suppose I had left my Prussian Secret Service at home in Berlin? Here! This belongs to you!"
He was standing on the hearth, his great back to the wood fire that blazed on the steel dogs. One of a brace of letters that he pulled from his breeches pocket, and tossed to the culprit under examination, fell at that wretch's feet.
"Pick it up, Mr. Patrick Carolan Breagh," he said. "You will find it a more-than-ordinarily interesting epistle. It was brought me something over an hour ago. Your legal friend, Mr. Chown, of Furnival's Inn, Holborn, London, advises you to go back there without procrastination. Your absconding trustee, Mr. William Mustey, Junior, has been found in Bloomsbury lodgings, the War having apparently frightened him out of France. Odd, because the scent of battlefields proves attractive to birds and animals of the predatory order. Mustey is dead, but luckily for you he has left nearly all of your property behind him. Some £500 of your inheritance of £7,000 seems to be missing. I daresay you will be willing to let the deficit go. What are you saying?"
His victim, with lips screwed into the shape of a whistle, had murmured:
"The Post Office.... Gee-whillikins!... they've given me away!..."
"Given you away!... You are a pretty conspirator!" The masterful eyes flickered with humor. There was amusement, suppressed, but evident, in the lines about the grim mouth hidden by the martial mustache. "Where should my blue Prussian bees gather intelligence, if not at the Post Office? Did you not give yourself away, as you term it, when you employed the time not occupied in smearing silver plate with whitening, and bedaubing polished boards most execrably with beeswax,—in acting as a voluntary assistant dresser at the auxiliary Military Hospital that has been established under the Red Cross at the Convent of the Sisters of the Poor? When a young Swiss—who is supposed to be ignorant of any language save his own extraordinary gibberish—betrays a more than superficial knowledge of French and German surgical terminology, and evinces a degree of skill in bandaging and so forth, such as you have permitted yourself to display, the German authorities, while they avail themselves of the young gentleman's service, are to be pardoned for supposing him to be other than he appears! Come, it is time this farce of yours and Mademoiselle's ended. I am going to ring the bell, and send for her, and tell her so now!..." The imperious hand went out to the bell-rope of faded red, and he stayed his summons to add: "Then you and she must pack up and betake yourselves to England.... I will furnish you with a permit to travel by railway and a laissez-passer. You will return to me a certain half-sheet of Chancellery notepaper which I gave you in the Wilhelm Strasse last July! Further—I have no advice to give you except that you would be wise not to select the theatrical profession for your next venture. You have not a gift for the stage, unlike Mademoiselle.... As for her, the vixen! you would do well to marry her promptly. Nothing else will cure a young man of the stupidity of being in love!"
There was something horrible in the mere fact of being taken so lightly, when one had waited in tense agony for the ominous flurry in the daytime—expecting in sleepless anguish the cry in the night.... The relief that mingled with the horror caused the muscles of the mouth to relax in a smile of imbecility, made one stutter and gulp because of the choking in one's throat....
The life of this man, who was meant when the great ones of the earth now referred to Germany, had been in hourly peril for months past. Now it was safe. She had not bent one's will, ineffectually, to the effort of restraining another's. One had not kept watch and put in one's word for nothing, remembering the debt one owed to that powerful ruthless hand. Not unheard had one prayed in an anguish of supplication that the woman loved beyond all Ideals, however heroic and overwhelming, might be saved from the fate of occupying a red-stained niche in History.
"Marry her promptly!"
He repeated the words, with the flicker of a laugh playing in his eyes and about his heavy facial muscles. His tortured victim, blood-red to his cropped scalp, groaned out:
"She is married already, Sir!"
"Quatsch!" said the Minister, laughing: "Married she is not. Oh, she has been married as the American canvasback ducks are roasted. She has been carried on a dish through the kitchen of matrimony, and taken out at the opposite door."
"But—my God, sir!—I have seen her husband!" cried the young man desperately.
"When did you see him?" asked the resonant, compelling accents. The answer came, bringing down his frown.
"I—cannot tell you!"
Came, curiously lisped, the words:
"I fear I must compel you. All this may lead to something more serious than I have thought...."
P. C. Breagh snarled, knitting the broad red eyebrows so industriously sooted:
"Twice.... There can be no harm in my saying so."
"And how recently?" The grating voice scooped into one's brain like a dentist's burred scraper. P. C. Breagh shook his head, saying:
"I can't tell you that!"
"Why not, if there is no harm in telling?" The voice was almost pleasant. "Was it as recently as three days ago?"
No answer.
"Was it as recently as two days? ... as twenty-four hours? ... Will you not answer for your own sake?"
The stubborn head was shaken resolutely. The Minister's voice said, blandly, persuasively:
"You may, for all you know, be answering for hers!"
There was a stubborn silence. The Chancellor said, with his suave, but warning lisp more perceptible than usual:
"Be good enough to touch that bell upon the table near your hand...."
P. C. Breagh obliged. Grams and Engelberg presented themselves. The Minister said, looking at them over the head of his sacrifice:
"One of you will convey my compliments to Madame Charles Tessier, and request her to speak to me here and now."
The stalwart, black-clad pair retired. The Minister pulled his cigar-case from his breeches-pocket, selected a cigar, bit off the end, and looked for a match. Meeting the burning stare of the gray-yellow eyes under the broad sooted eyebrows, he did not fulfill his intention of lighting, but restored the cigar to its place.
As he thrust the case back into his breeches-pocket the door opened. Madame Charles came in, wrapped in her white shawl, and moving with her characteristic limp and shuffle. Her glance went to the broad-shouldered, lean-flanked figure of the young man standing at attention a little to the left hand of the Minister. She was aware of the huge shape of the watchful Niederstedt keeping guard outside the terrace-windows. She heard the steady crunching of booted feet upon the graveled stone flags of the conservatory, recalling the fact that the two officers of the guard of Green Jaegers were now quartered there. And she said to herself, even as she made her curtsey before the Chancellor: "The hour of discovery has come. Am I sorry or glad?"
The heavy stare met her desperate eyes as she raised them from the carpet. The grim voice began, and she strung her nerves to hear:
"Mademoiselle de Bayard, I have just closed an interview with your lady-mother, who is desirous to reëstablish over your person the maternal authority she once resigned.... That I have not betrayed to her your presence here I think you are aware already. I had a pretty shrewd suspicion that you were listening when I spoke to her loudly just now upon the stairs. Am I right, Mademoiselle?"
She said, meeting his heavy, powerful stare with eyes of burning sapphire, steadily under leveled brows of jetty black:
"It is not for me to contradict a person of Monseigneur's eminence. Might I ask why Monseigneur is pleased to designate me as 'Mademoiselle'? Madame Charles Tessier is my name in this house."
"Mademoiselle de Bayard," he said, ignoring the interruption as a man may when an infant has tugged him by the coat-tail, "I have to congratulate you upon your gift of grotesque character-impersonation, no less than your companion, whose Swiss-French patois, spoken with a British accent, has never since the first instant succeeded in deceiving me. But as one of my more amiable weaknesses is a liking for children, I must own to having found infinite amusement in the spectacle of Missy and Master, dressed up for grandpapa's benefit, playing the game of 'Guess Who I Am!'..."
He was laughing now, unmistakably. He said, smoothing the heavy mustache with a hand that twitched a little:
"But the performance ends here. So we may lay aside the cosmetics, costumes, and properties. The hero's green baize apron, crop-wig, and blackened eyebrows, the flour with which the heroine sprinkles her black hair, and the stockings and towels with which she disguises her charming shape. It will not seem surprising to you that a person of my dubious character should be learned in the secrets of stage disguises.... My early researches in femininity have led me into queerer places than actresses' dressing-rooms. But where did a Convent schoolgirl gain her knowledge of make-up?"
His mockery was intolerable. Her hate and scorn rose up in arms to meet it. She would be silent only for an instant longer, then she would speak and tell him all.
He was going on:
"I have here a letter, brought me some days back by the Prussian official who is in charge at the General Post Office here in Versailles. It is addressed to Mademoiselle Juliette de Bayard, 120, Rue de Provence. It is dated from Mons-sur-Trouille, in Belgium, and is written and signed by M. Charles Tessier.... I will not disguise from you that I have mastered the contents."
He showed her the letter. Monster! he had opened it. Her blazing eyes dwelt on him with a contempt he did not seem to feel. She had let the white shawl drop from about her head and shoulders. Now she straightened her slight form—(as though an artist needed the adventitious aid of towels and stockings!)—and thrust back with a superb gesture of both hands the heavy loops of white-streaked hair that masked her forehead and curtained her small face, whose cheeks, previously pale, now burned with angry fire.
He said, and as he withdrew the letter from its envelope, a small, square enclosure wrapped in white paper, slipped from the interior and dropped near his spurred boot:
"I have not only read this, but I am going to read it aloud to you. For the sake of one present whose fidelity to you deserved a confidence you seem to have withheld."
She caught one sharp breath, dropped her slender arms at her sides and stood immovably before him. Her clenched hands, tense lips and tragic brows, with that fierce flame of hatred and scorn burning beneath their shadow, betrayed the test of her self-command as he read:
"BASSELOT & TESSIER.
"WHOLESALE MERCHANTS,
"WEAVERS AND DYERS OF WOOLEN FABRICS.
"MONS-SUR-TROUILLE,
"BELGIUM.
"December 20, 1870.
"MADEMOISELLE:
"Relying on your good sense and amiability, permit me to make you a confession.
"Torn between the urgent commands of filial duty, and the dictates of ardent affection, I have yielded to the irresistible promptings of Love.
"Wedded to her I adore—the name of Mademoiselle Clémence Basselôt can hardly be strange to you—I offer you the calm devotion of a brother. My mother is resigned to this alliance, at one time repugnant to her maternal feelings. She desires me to say that your luggage, taken on by her from the Hôtel de Flandre, Brussels, shall be forwarded to you at the Rue de Provence, or any other destination you may choose to indicate. Need I say that Madame Charles Tessier and myself regard you as our benefactress—that you will confer upon us the greatest obligation by consenting to remain beneath our roof.
"I would add that the capital of 80,000 francs invested by your regretted father upon your behalf in the business of myself and M. Basselôt can remain at the interest it at present commands (some 7 per cent. of annual profit), or be transferred to your credit at any agents or bankers you may choose to designate.
"Receive, dear Mademoiselle, with my regrets and excuses, the affectionate souvenirs of myself and my wife. My Clémence encloses some wedding-cake, after the touching fashion of England. She made it, she assures me, with her own hands.
"Respectfully and sincerely,
"CHARLES JOSEPH TESSIER."
The reader added, as he looked about him:
"Where is the wedding-cake?—that white thing! ... thank you!"
For P. C. Breagh had picked the little parcel up and restored it to his hand. He took it, returned it to the envelope with the letter, and said with unsmiling gravity, striking a finger on the envelope:
"In the face of this—are you married, Mademoiselle?"
She answered him dauntlessly:
"No, Monseigneur!"
"Th-then," he asked, with his portentous lisp, "wh-why on earth did you—did you pretend to be?"
She answered with surprising quietude:
"To make my place in this house more secure."
"Ah! Might one ask why?"
He put the question with irony. She answered with astonishing composure and dignity:
"Because at that period I desired to gain the opportunity to—kill you, Monseigneur!"
A sound came from Breagh's throat like a curse or a groan or a sob, or all together. Her clear gaze was troubled for a moment, she caught her breath in a fluttering sigh.
"To kill me?..." said the resonant voice of the great figure that upreared its bulk before the dancing hearth-blaze that threw broad lights and shadows upon the ceiling and walls of the darkly-papered drawing-room. It was a bitter, wintry day of sickly white sunshine, and smileless skies of leaden grayness. Freezing sleet-drops rattled on the terrace-windows, outside which the giant ex-porter of the Wilhelm Strasse waited, blowing from time to time upon his chilly knuckles and beating his great arms upon his vast chest to keep them warm, but never removing the sharp little piggish eyes under his low red forehead from the figure of P. C. Breagh....
"To kill me!" said the Chancellor, as a springing hearth-flame threw a giant shadow of him upon the double doors that divided the drawing-room from the billiard-room, where the staff of clerks and decipherers labored from early morning until far into the night.
In the silence that his voice had broken, his keen ear heard a quill pen buck upon a page. He imagined the splash of ink upon the thick creamy Chancellery paper, that had evoked the "Tsch!" of the dismayed clerk, even as he queried: "Might I ask why? It would be interesting to know."
The firelight was full upon Juliette as she answered:
"Because you have made this War;—because through it I have been orphaned and made desolate; but chiefly because you are the merciless enemy of France. These milliards you would wring from her veins ... these groans torn from her heart ... these indignities to all she holds most sacred!... Your scorn and contempt of these great men—Chiefs of her Government—who have stooped to beg from you consideration ... for these things, see you well—you have been accursed in my eyes. I have said to myself a thousand times, that to kill you would be to save my country, and not a sin unpardonable in the eyes of Almighty God!..."
"Your theology is as defective," said the Chancellor, "as your sentiments are patriotic...." He surveyed the small slight figure before him rather ogreishly from under his shaggy brows. "And so," he said, with his wounding irony, "you thought to play the part of a Judith to my Holofernes—a little skip o' my thumb like you.... My good young lady, had you succeeded in murdering me, how was it your intention to evade summary justice? For you could not have escaped detection.... You must be aware of that!"
She said with her quiet dignity, one hand upon her slight bosom, her clear eyes upon the angry, powerful stare that would have crushed another woman down:
"I should not have tried to escape, Monseigneur!"
He commented sarcastically:
"Fanatics are the most dangerous of conspirators. Life has no value—Death has no terrors for them. They believe themselves superior to all laws, both human and Divine. And how, may one ask, would you have done my business? To have dispatched me by poison would have been easiest, for you have assisted our Foreign Office cook. Yes! Possibly it would have been poison?"
She said between her close-set teeth, hissingly:
"It should, Monseigneur, but for one thing!..."
His powerful glance rested on her curiously:
"Ah, Fury!" he said, and with her wild black disheveled locks, her eyes that darted vengeful blue fire, the gloomy brows that frowned over them, the long upper lip pinched down over the little closely-set white teeth, hers was not unlike the mask of a Medusa, wrought in onyx by the hand of some Greek master dead a thousand years ago.
"Ah, Fury!—and what was that one thing? To what fortunate breakage of pots in the kitchen will the Prussian King owe it that he has still a Chancellor, when he is crowned Emperor of Germany in the Palace of Versailles at the beginning of the New Year?"
Here was news. So the recalcitrant States had at last been ringed in. So the sensitive objections of His Majesty the King of Bavaria had been by some means overcome.... P. C. Breagh drew a sharp breath at the hearing. The speaker flashed upon him a cynical look.
"There," he said, "is a tit-bit for some enterprising Editor, were it possible to get a wire through to Fleet Street. You see what comes, Mr. Breagh, of being false to one's principles. A few months ago you said to me—I have an excellent memory for such utterances: 'It would be better to cadge in the dustbins for a living than make money out of information gained by trickery.' Yet you have not scrupled to live in this house disguised as a common servant. Really, to one who is aware of your ambitions, the whole thing has—a kind of stink!"
The prodded victim uttered an incoherent exclamation. Juliette cried indignantly:
"It is not true! How can you wrong him so? If you do not know what you owe to him, I will tell you. It is he who has saved your life!"
She flamed out all at once into a rage and cried, seeming to tower to twice her stature:
"Because you have robbed me of my father, and because you are the great enemy of France I would have killed you. I tried to hide this from him, and he found it out. He stayed here—at what risk you know!—for my sake and for your sake.... How often has he not said to me: 'You shall not do it. He once saved me!... You shall not do it because he has a daughter, by whom he is beloved, perhaps, as your father was by you!... You tell me that her portrait stands by his bedside. Go and look at it, and you will never be able to do this hideous thing!' And I went and looked at her portrait, and it was as he had told me.... That night I threw away the poison and swore an oath upon the Crucifix, that, come what might, I would never seek your life!..."
"Halt, there!" he bade her, in his rough, masterful manner. "Touch that bell upon the table near you!" he said to Breagh. As Breagh obeyed and von Keudell entered by the door leading from the hall, shutting it upon a glimpse of the stalwart Grams and the athletic Engelberg, "Fetch me that bottle," he said, "that was picked up by the sentry in the adjoining garden. I gave it to you to lock away for me."
Von Keudell vanished. In the interval that elapsed before his reëntrance the Minister turned his back upon Mademoiselle and her comrade, rested a hand upon the mantelshelf, and said, as he kicked back a burning billet that had tumbled out of the heart of the red fire:
"All that about my daughter's portrait is quatsch!" He suddenly wheeled upon Mademoiselle, thundering: "You were frightened. That is why you seized an opportunity to pitch away your witches' sauce.... Confess! Be candid! Have I not read you? Were not your fine heroic frenzies all assumed to impress—him?" He indicated P. C. Breagh by an overhand thumb-gesture. "Was it not for this spoony fellow's benefit you wrote yourself letters from an imaginary Franc-tireur—full of bombastic vaporings and bloodthirsty denunciations borrowed from the columns of Parisian rags?"
"Monseigneur!..."
She was taken aback. She faltered, flushed, whitened, conscious of the reproachful stare of Breagh's honest gray eyes.
"Did I not tell you?—everything is known to me!... Not only have I read those letters you hid in the mouth of that grinning Pan in the garden—but here is the bottle you threw away!..."
He took it from von Keudell and showed it her—a squat, wide-mouthed chemist's ounce vial, half full of whitish powder, and read from the label:
"ARSENIC: (Poison.)
"The powder as prescribed, to be diluted with Three Parts of Milk, and applied as directed, for clearing the complexion and freshening the skin."
Crash!...
A turn of his wrist, and the corked-up vial flew into the fireplace, smashing on the chimney-bricks and raising showers of crimson sparks from the billets blazing there. A rich incense of scorching wool arose from the Brussels carpet. P. C. Breagh stamped out one red-hot cinder, Von Keudell darted in pursuit of a remoter danger. The Minister himself was fain to extinguish another by vigorous stamps of his heavy spurred riding-boots.
"Take warning," he said to Juliette, a little breathed by his exertions, and wiping his high-domed forehead and florid cheeks with a large white handkerchief, carried, in military fashion, in the cuff of his coat. "In this way dangerous, high-flown emotions should be repressed in young girls, by sensible parents. In what a false and perilous position have your hysterical notions placed you...."
He coughed and hawked, and wiped his mouth with the big white handkerchief, put it away and said, as though trying to lash himself into a rage:
"Foolish child! Silly girl!... Little coquette!—pretending to be married to torture a sweetheart; vaporing of murder—acting the heroine—to take a gaby's breath away!... What you want is a decent, sensible mother to administer a good whipping...."
A shudder convulsed her slight body. In the firelight her face looked rigid and drawn.
He might have pursued, had not the gaby to whom he had unceremoniously referred stopped him by crying:
"Be silent! I will not stand by and listen to such language! I will not permit you to speak to her so!"
"So!" He surveyed the crop-headed, red-faced young man in the green baize apron, with grim incredulity. "You will not permit me to speak! You will silence me?... How?"
P. C. Breagh said desperately:
"I do not know how—but I will somehow silence you!... Perhaps by reminding you that Mademoiselle de Bayard is helpless and unprotected. That she has no stronger champion and no better advocate than a gaby like myself."
"Retire to your room, then!" he said to her grimly. "Henceforth you do not meddle in the kitchen, Mademoiselle. You cook capitally, your beignets are worth a bellyache, but just at this moment I am indispensable to Germany.... Observe! You will remain entirely in your room upstairs, until I decide what is to be done with you!" He added, less roughly: "Madame Potier will attend on you and bring you your meals. And—in compliment to your unflinching candor—I will ask you to give me your parole not to attempt to escape!..."
She put up both hands to her eyes, and they were trembling. When she took them away there were tears upon her face.
"Monseigneur, I thank you. I give my parole not to run away."
"So be it!" he said, and slightly acknowledging her deep curtsey, motioned to Von Keudell to open the door.