"Can't come round for a few days. Just had a tiny wee baby," answered the housemaid, grinning.
"A baby! How's that?"
"Oh, just nigger-shiftlessness, I reckon."
But it wasn't thoughtlessness, or shiftlessness alone, that made the War Lady pin to her breast the grand cordon of the Osmanié Order of Virtue; it spelled, at the same time, a bid for war material, decreed by the businesslike groom. The War Lord saw it and smiled. "Bravo, Gustav, you are the stuff," and "Bertha, as is fit, the yielding lamb."
And the organ pealed and cooed, and the chorus of cathedral singers chanted off the key, and the voice of the officiating minister droned, and everybody thought it most "heavenly," but boring; and the generals and army officers smacked their lips, anticipating the table delicacies in store; and the courtiers congratulated themselves because it was all fun and no work; and each lady thought she looked a heap better than her best-beloved friend; and the War Lord stared at the ceiling contemplating ways and means for mining the Krupp quarry of wealth and efficiency to within an inch of hell.
"And so I pronounce you man and wife," sang out the minister, expecting the biggest fee!
"Hail thee, Frankenstein," thought Wilhelm. He inflated his chest as the archangel aspiring to omnipotence may have done: from this moment on the means for such aggrandisement as only Napoleon dreamt of were in his hands, and he was free to plunge the world into irremediable ruin if he liked.
Through Bertha's resignation, through von Bohlen's connivance, he now owned the Krupp works; he was Frankenstein—Frankenstein, the hideous, the abhorred, whose malignity was equalled only by the accumulated wretchedness he meant to visit on all resisting.
Even as he extended his hand to the bride, with lip congratulations, he thought of the riot of despair the troth just sealed spelt for his own people and the nations to be subdued! Was he then—is he then—the hideous fantasm of one bent on naught but destruction?
God knows—mere physical observation discerns no more than the frightful selfishness that has lashed the War Lord to ever-increasing efforts of fury since Bertha's wedding day and is driving him still.