The Baron was rather in a dilemma; like all men in office, he hated to bind himself by a promise, but how to refuse that charming woman anything?--at last he stammered out--"Wait a little, Madame, wait, and I will do what I can for you; it is impossible just now, for we are going to reduce the army by sixty thousand men."
While he spoke, Monsieur Stein was announced, and the Princess rose to take her leave; she had got all she wanted now, and did not care to face a thousand Baronesses. As she went downstairs, she passed Monsieur Stein without the slightest mark of recognition, and he, too, looked admiringly after her, as if he had never seen her before. The Baron, by this time pining for more schwartz-bier, and another cigar, devoutly hoped his new visitor, with whose person and profession he was quite familiar, would not stay long; and the Princess, as she tripped past the Huissier at the entrance, muttered, "Sixty thousand men--then it will be peace: I thought so all along. My poor Baron! what a soft old creature you are! Well, I have tried everything now, and this speculating is the strongest excitement of all, even better than making Victor jealous!" but she sighed as she said it, and ordered her coachman to drive on at once to her stock-broker.
The presence of Monsieur Stein did not serve to re-establish either the clear-headedness or the good-humour of the War-Minister. The ostensible errand on which he came was merely to obtain some trifling military information concerning the garrison at Pesth, without which the co-operation of the police would not have been so effectual, in annoying still further the already exasperated Hungarians; but in the course of conversation, Monsieur Stein subjected the Baron to a process familiarly called "sucking the brains," with such skill that, ere the door was closed on his unwelcome visitor, the soldier felt he had placed himself--as indeed was intended--completely in the power of the police-agent. All his sins of omission and commission, his neglect of certain contracts, and his issuing of certain orders; his unpardonable lenity at his last tour of inspection, his unlucky expression of opinions at direct variance with those of his young Imperial master:--all these failures and offences he felt were now registered in letters never to be effaced,--on the records of Monsieur Stein's secret report; and what was more provoking still, was to think that he had, somehow or another, been insensibly led on to plead guilty to half-a-dozen derelictions, which he felt he might as consistently have denied.
As he sat bolt upright in his huge leathern chair, and turned once more to "sublime tobacco" for consolation and refreshment, his thoughts floated back to the merry days when he was young and slim, and had no cares beyond his squadron of Uhlans, no thought for the morrow but the parade and the ball. "Ah!" sighed the Baron to himself as he knocked the ash off his cigar with a ringed fore-finger, "I would I were a youngling again; the troop-accounts were easily kept, the society of my comrades was pleasanter than the Court. One never meets with such beer now as we had at Debreczin; and oh! those Hungarian ladies, how delightful it was to waltz before one grew fat, and flirt before one grew sage. I might have visited the charming Princess then, and no one would have found fault with me; no one would have objected--Heigh-ho! there was no Madame la Baronne in those days--now it is so different. Sapperment! Here she comes!"
Though the Baron was upwards of six feet, and broad in proportion--though he had distinguished himself more than once before the enemy, and was covered with orders of merit and decorations for bravery--nay, though he was the actual head of the six hundred thousand heroes who constituted the Austrian army, he quailed before that little shrivelled old woman, with her mouth full of black teeth, and her hair dressed à l'Impératrice.
We profane not the mysteries of Hymen--"Caudle" is a name of no exclusive nationality. We leave the Baron, not without a shudder, to the salutary discipline of his excellent monitress.
CHAPTER XLI
WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS
We must follow Monsieur Stein, for that worthy has got something to do; nay, he generally has his hands full, and cannot, indeed, be accused of eating the bread of idleness. It is a strange system of government, that of the Austrian empire; and is, we believe, found to answer as badly as might be expected from its organisation. The State takes so paternal an interest in the sayings and doings of its children, as to judge it expedient to support a whole staff of officials, whose sole duty it is to keep the Government informed respecting the habits, actions, everyday life, and secret thoughts and opinions of the general public. Nor do these myrmidons, whose number exceeds belief, and who add seriously to the national expenditure, fail to earn their pay with praiseworthy diligence. In all societies, in all places of pleasure or business, where half-a-dozen people may chance to congregate, there will be an agent of police, always in plain clothes, and generally the least conspicuous person in the throng. The members of this corps are, as may be supposed, chosen for their general intelligence and aptitude, are usually well-informed, agreeable men, likely to lead strangers into conversation, and excellent linguists. As an instance of their ubiquity, I may mention an incident that occurred within my own knowledge to an officer in the British service, when at Vienna, during the war. That officer was dining in the salon of an hotel, and there were present, besides his own party, consisting of Englishmen, and one Hungarian much disaffected to the Government, only two other strangers, sitting quite at the farther extremity of the room, and apparently out of ear-shot. The conversation at my friend's table was, moreover, carried on in English, and turned upon the arrest of a certain Colonel Türr by the Austrian authorities at Bucharest, a few days previously.
This Colonel Türr, be it known, was a Hungarian who had deserted from the Austrian service, and entering that of her Majesty Queen Victoria, had been employed in some commissariat capacity in Wallachia, and taken prisoner at Bucharest by the very regiment to which he had previously belonged. The question was much vexed and agitated at the time, as to the Austrian right over a deserter on a neutral soil, and Colonel Türr became for the nonce an unconscious hero. The officer to whom I have alluded, having listened attentively to the pros and cons of the case, as set forth by his friends, dismissed the subject with military brevity, in these words:--"If you say he deserted his regiment before an enemy, I don't care what countryman he is, or in whose service, the sooner they hang him the better!" This ill-advised remark, be it observed, was made sotto voce, and in his own language. His surprise may be imagined when, on perusing the Government papers the following morning, he read the whole conversation, translated into magniloquent German, and detailed at length as being the expressed opinion of the British army and the British public on the case of Colonel Türr.