"But the marriage!" he said, raising his voice unconsciously to a shout in the desperate effort to drive home his point. "The marriage must be cancelled! When the truth is known that Trafford helped Karl to escape he will become the most hated man in Weidenbruck. The Queen must never unite her fortunes with such a creature."
Bernhardt gaped, as if the matter had begun to bore him.
"Then the truth must not be known," he said, between his yawns.
"But it shall be known!" cried the soldier angrily. "I shall proclaim it myself from the housetops. The mad American must be whipped out of the country."
"Captain von Hügelweiler," said the ex-priest solemnly, "just now I was enjoying two things: some deliciously bitter poetry and some deliciously bitter liquid. At the present moment I am incapacitated by your disturbing presence from enjoying either. Do I make myself plain?"
Von Hügelweiler turned to go with a stifled oath.
"A fine time for dissipation!" he said, as a parting shaft. "The fortunes of the country are at stake, and Bernhardt, Father Bernhardt, the people's leader, the man of the hour, swills absinthe and absorbs the pernicious writings of a decadent poetaster."
In a flash the ex-priest was on his feet, with blazing eyes and an air of almost terrible menace. Von Hügelweiler thought he had been talking to a sodden drunkard. He found himself confronted by the embodiment of masterful and savage energy.
"You fool!" cried Bernhardt in tones of withering contempt. "May not a man rest? May not a strange man rest in a strange way? I do the work of a hundred—must not the brain be fed and the nerves braced to meet the strain?"
The Captain shrugged his shoulders weakly. Despite his own strong feelings, the other's imperiousness cowed him.