“The women wear magnificent jewels, and are handsome, are they not?” commented the Hussar. “These English skins of cream and roses, these thick, straight profiles, these rounded contours, these fine eyes, lacking expression and fire, but still magnificent, these superb chevelures would atone to most men for their lack of grace and verve. But to me, my dear fellow—word of honor! the little finger of a chic Parisienne is worth the whole of Belgravia. Pray, how is Madame de Roux? Heavens! how her presence would eclipse a roomful of British beauties! They tell me”—possibly the speaker was not guileless of a dash of malice—“de Roux is exerting himself to get transferred to a Home command. For me, I find that natural. Don’t you?”
And the attaché, whose loquacious vivacity could not hide the excitement and suspense under which he was laboring, and which were palpably shared by every official encountered on the way upstairs, paused at a curtained archway at the end of a short corridor on the second floor, and said, lifting the velvet drapery that Dunoisse might pass within:
“This is His Excellency’s library. Wait a moment, and I am instructed to say that he will join you here. Excuse me that I am compelled to leave you now!”
The curtain fell heavily, blotting out the handsome martial figure. Dunoisse moved forwards, and found himself in the middle of an octagonally-shaped library, furnished in the somber, sumptuous style of the Empire. Bronze bookcases, surmounted by crowned eagles holding wreaths of bay and laurel in their beaks, lined the walls, bronze-colored velvet curtains draped the windows, the walnut furniture was upholstered in bronze leather; the needed note of color being supplied by the superb Persian rugs that covered the polished walnut parquet, the single gorgeous amaryllis that bloomed in a tub of Nankin ware upon an inlaid ivory stool, and the brilliant trophies of Eastern arms that gleamed from the upper walls and covered the ceiling. A glowing fire of billets burned on the bronze dogs of the fireplace. Above the carved walnut mantelshelf, where groups of wax tapers burned in silver candelabra, hung a fine replica from the brush of David, of the painter’s imposing, heroic, impossible portrait of Napoleon crossing the Alps. And Dunoisse, sinking down with a sigh of relief amongst the cushions of a capacious armchair and stretching his chilled feet towards the cheerful hearth-glow, remembered with a faint amusement how violent an outburst of indignation this picture invariably provoked from the Marshal; who with many oaths would denounce the long dead-and-buried painter as an ass and a jackanapes, incapable of imagining the conqueror of the Simplon as anything but a barley-sugar soldier, or of representing upon canvas the true spirit of War.
“He rode a mule, did my General, and left his charger to his bâtmen. The flaps of his cocked hat were turned to keep the snow out of his neck and ears; he tied them down with a peasant-wench’s red woolen shawl, and wrapped himself in an old gray cloak lined with skins of lambs. Death of my life! the road to glory is not paved with sugar-plums and rose-leaves.... A fellow who looked one way and spurred his beast another as the fool is doing in that accursed picture would have found himself at the bottom of an ice-gulf before he could say ‘Crac!’”
There was something in the Marshal’s roughly blocked-out word-sketch that warmed the heart and stirred the blood as the classical equestrian figure of the David portrait failed to do. Dunoisse, even in his childish days, had recognized this. He was looking at the picture between half-closed eyelids; and the spirited charger had begun to shrink into a mule, and the red woolen shawl of homely truth had covered up the laced cocked hat of ornamental fiction, when the imperative summons of a door-bell pealed through the house, and was succeeded by a sudden lull in the Babel of general conversation.
L
Dunoisse, roused by the unmistakable double ring of a telegraphic messenger, started to his feet. The undelivered letter in his breast seemed to burn there like red-hot iron. His keen ears pricked themselves for what he knew must come, if this were as he suspected, a cable from Paris.
He stepped towards the door, put aside the velvet draperies of the portière, and turned the handle. He emerged upon the landing, where a few persons were gathered, conferring eagerly in undertones. He moved to the balustrade of the great well-staircase, and looked down into the flower-decked, brilliantly illuminated hall, to find it packed with a solid mass of heads of both sexes, all ages, and every shade of color. Bald craniums of venerable diplomats nodded beside the more amply thatched heads of middle-age politicians or the hyacinthine curls of juvenile Guardsmen; tiaras of diamonds crowning snow-white or chestnut, sable or golden locks, blazed and coruscated, wreaths of flowers twined in Beauty’s tresses made a garden for the eye. And all these heads, it seemed to Dunoisse, were turned towards the full-length portrait of Monseigneur, attired in the uniform of a General of the French Army, smiling with his imperturbable amiability above the marble fireplace.
For what were they all waiting? Leaning over the balustrade above, Dunoisse could see that a small round ventilator in the wall immediately above the picture, and hidden from the persons assembled in the hall below by the bespangled canopy, was open. Through the aperture came a hand holding a lighted taper; and in another moment, with a faint hissing sound, the initial N and an Imperial crown above it leaped into lines of vivid wavering flame.