“Walmerston is cooling; there is no doubt about the change in him. Better strike whilst the iron is hot, or decide to abandon the idea.”
“And risk all ... or give up all. Very well, my friend!” he said, apostrophising the absent writer as though he could hear him, “I will risk all. I wait for nothing but the cable now.”
Even as he said the words the privileged elderly aide-de-camp entered with the thin blue envelope that held the cablegram. He tore it open, and read:
“Town—Dover—congratulates—Prince-President—on—establishment—submarine—telegraphic—communication—between—France—and—England. William—John—Tomlinson.—Mayor.”
XLVIII
It was given to William John Tomlinson to rouse the venomous reptile that lay hidden in this man out of his wintry torpor. A bitter oath broke from him as he read the message. He tore the flimsy scrawled paper and the blue envelope into a dozen pieces, and scrunched them in his small neat hand before he threw the lump of paper on the Persian hearthrug, and spat upon it with another oath, and ground it under his spurred heel.
Not one of those about him had ever seen him so moved. De Morny lifted his eyebrows in C, de Fleury and Persigny looked at each other in consternation, St. Arnaud’s jaw dropped; he gulped, staring at his master with bulging eyes, as Monseigneur strove before them, in the strange emotion that possessed him, wrestling with something that plucked at his muscles and jerked his limbs, and contorted his heavy features, and wrenched the ugly jaw that the drooping mustache and the thick chin-tuft tried to hide, to the right and left as though the man had been a figure of wood and wires worked by some devil at play.
“The Mayor,...” he croaked, after a dumb struggle for speech. “The Chief Magistrate of Dover congratulates the Chief Magistrate of Paris. Damnably amusing!... Good!—very good!”
His laugh was a snapping bark, like the sound made by a dog in rabies. He went on, heedless of the faces gathered about him, speaking, not to them, but to that other hidden self of his; the being who dwelt behind the dough-colored mask, and looked through the narrow eye-slits, guessed at, but never before seen:
“You comprehend, Madame of England and that sausage of Saxe-Coburg Saalfeld, her Consort, think it beneath their exalted dignity to bandy courtesies with me.... Me, the out-at-elbows refugee, the shady character—the needy Prince-Pretender—admitted upon sufferance to West of London Clubs; exhibited as a curiosity in the drawing-rooms of English Society—stared at as some cow-worshiping jewel-hung Hindu Rajah, or raw-meat-eating Abyssinian King.” He clenched his pretty hand and went on, carried away by the tide of bitter memories: