Seeing Hector scowl forbiddingly at these unwelcome references, the Marshal made haste to conciliate.
“You have paid through the nose to get de Roux decanted to Algeria. You have been sweetly choused. One must live and learn. See!—I will strike a bargain with you. Do not you be stiffnecked any longer with regard to that question of the von Widinitz Succession, and I will unbutton my pockets.... You shall have money—plenty of money! All that you need to make a splash. I suppose you know that there are millions of thalers waiting to drop into your pockets once the Council of the Germanic Confederation shall confirm your right to the Crown Feudatory.... You will stand upon that right—it is patent and undeniable. And I will have the throne from under the Regent Luitpold in return for that lump of beryl the rogue once robbed from me!”
Absurd, formidable, gross old monster. Was the ravished crystal really the fulcrum of the lever with which the Marshal strove to upset a State? World-changes have been brought about by quarrels springing from causes even more trivial? The price of Luitpold’s blood-pudding had remained for thirty-seven years an undigested morsel in the Marshal’s system. It rankled in him to his dying day.
Though his gouty feet were tottering on the downward slope, his mental faculties were as clear as ever. He watched his son from under his bushy eyebrows as the young man gnawed his lip and drew patterns with his cane on the tesselated pavement of the hall. Hector had uttered sounding reproaches, arrayed himself on the side of Heaven a moment previously. The merry devil who laughs over human contradictions and mortal frailties, must have chuckled as he listened to the terms of the bargain now arranged between the father and the son.
Money. For the sake of the golden mortar without which the House of Hopes that Jack builds must inevitably tumble to ruin, Dunoisse reluctantly consented to become the puppet of an ambition he had scorned. The instrument of a desire for vengeance that had never ceased to rowel the old war-horse’s rheumatic sides.
“So! It is understood, then, after all this fanfaronade of high-mindedness. You will meet my Bavarian agents, Köhler and von Steyregg—and you will be compliant and civil to them, do you understand?”
He lashed himself into one of his sudden rages, the gouty old lion, and roared:
“For my Marie’s son shall not be slighted—kicked aside into a corner while that knave Luitpold holds the Regency of Widinitz from the Bund. I will give him a colic for the one his pudding gave me! And I will have no more accusations and reproaches!—I will not permit you who are my son to taunt me with your own begetting, and throw your mother’s Veil of Profession, in a manner, at my head.”
He rapped his stick upon the pavement. He was strangely moved, and his chin was twitching, though his fierce black eyes were hard and dry.
“You have said that I stole my wife from God, and it is true; though I do not know that it is very decent in you to twit me with it. And do you suppose I have not smarted for the sin I committed? I tell you I have shed tears of blood!”