We found ourselves in a palatial chamber, the walls covered thickly with splendid tapestries and portraits. From the high gilded ceiling hung enormous chandeliers, glittering and pageantesque. Under one of these giant chandeliers stood an imposing desk covered with papers. An elderly gentleman with a grey wide beard was seated there. We advanced over the thick soft carpets.
M. le Meunier received us with great courtesy.
"Nous avons perdu notre tête!" he murmured sadly.—"Without M. Max we are lost!"
The air was full of agitation.
Here was a scene the like of which might well have been presented by the stage, so spectacular was it, so dramatic—the lofty chamber with its superb appointments and hangings, and these elderly, grey-bearded men of state who had just been dealt the bitterest blow that had yet fallen on their poor tortured shoulders.
But this was no stage scene. This was real. If ever anything on earth was alive and real it was this scene in the Burgomaster's room in Brussels, on the first day of Max's imprisonment. Throbbing and palpitating through it was human agony, human grief, human despair, as these grey-bearded Belgians stared with dull heavy eyes at the empty space where their heroic chief no longer was. Tragic beyond the words of any historian was that scene, which at last however, by sheer intensity of concentrated and concealed emotion, seemed to summon again into that chamber the imprisoned body, the blazing, dauntless personality of the absent one, until his prison bonds were broken, and he was here, seated at this desk, cool, fearless, imperturbable, directing the helm of his storm-tossed bark with his splendid sanity, and saying to all:
"Fear nothing, mes enfants! There is no such thing as fear!"