“If he is here—”
“He is with the Americans,” hissed the concierge, the veins on his forehead swollen with excitement. “Now, go, and quickly. I shall watch. Say that when I have secured the lad, I shall take him there. Let all be ready. An hour ago,” he said, raising his great fists on high, “and everything lost. Now hurry, old wooden leg. It is a great night.”
“But—I cannot. Already I have done too much. I am damned. I have lost my soul. I who am soon to die.”
“YOU WILL GO.”
And, at last, he went, hobbling down the staircase recklessly, because the looming figure at the stair head was listening. He reached the street. There, only a block away, was the cobbler’s shop, lighted, but with the dirty curtains drawn across the window.
Old Adelbert gazed at it. Then he commended his soul to God, and turned toward the Palace.
He passed the Opera. On Carnival night it should have been open and in gala array, with lines of carriages and machines before it. It was closed, and dreary. But old Adelbert saw it not at all. He stumped along, panting with haste and exhaustion, to do the thing he had set himself to do.
Here was the Palace. Before it were packed dense throngs of silent people. Now and then a man put down a box, and rising on it, addressed the crowd, attempting to rouse them. Each time angry hands pulled him down, and hisses greeted him as he slunk away.
Had old Adelbert been alive to anything but his mission, he would have seen that this was no mob of revolutionists, but a throng of grieving people, awaiting the great bell of St. Stefan’s with its dire news.
Then, above their heads, it rang out, slow, ominous, terrible. A sob ran through the crowd. In groups, and at last as a whole, the throng knelt. Men uncovered and women wept.