“You see there the fruit of three years of unremitting labor, performed in secrecy. To-night there is an end to secrecy. I hardly thought the hour would come so soon!”
He took from a compartment of the shelves two square sheets of yellow, semi-transparent tracing-paper, and turned to face his audience exactly as an actor would have done upon the stage. He was master of the situation—he was making the great disclosure just as he had mentally rehearsed it. Not for nothing had he trusted in his Destiny and his Star.
“The sealed orders you, M. de St. Arnaud, were to have received from me upon your departure for Marseilles to-morrow,” he said, addressing the Commander-in-Chief of his Eastern Army, “would have made you sole participator in my secret. Yet I feel no hesitation or reluctance at enlarging the circle of my confidence,” he added, as he encountered the satirically-smiling glance of de Morny. “To betray me would be an act of madness. For—insignificant as I may appear—I am the Empire! Remember that, Messieurs!”
He delicately laid one of the semi-transparent, crackling papers upon the lamp-illumined Russia leather surface of a writing-table near him. A pencil tracing of just such a map of Eastern Europe as was habitually in use at his Ministry of War, and in his Military Institutes—only that the tracing was enriched with added lines, diagrams and notes, in red and blue and various-colored inks. He said, as his followers crowded to look at this—and now there was a shiny gray dampness on his cheeks and forehead, and he secretly dried the palms of his hands with his delicate handkerchief:
“These numbered circles and squares in colored inks represent depots of timber, cattle, salted provisions, forage, and grain, established by me—under private names of ownership—at Sinope, Bourgas, Varna, Kustendje, and other places on the shores of the Black Sea. So that, in the case of an Army of Invasion marching from Varna towards the frontiers of Bessarabia, or maintaining a siege, shall we say?—of any fortified harbor on the coasts of the Crimea——You are surprised, M. de Morny? That is gratifying indeed!”
De Morny had given vent to a long shrill street-boy’s whistle, about as expressive of astonishment as it could be. But he did not possess the quality of reverence. He sang, in English, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his wide-hipped, silver-striped, white cashmere pantaloons, and executing a cancan step cleverly and neatly:
“That’s the way the milliard went!
Pop! goes the weasel!”
and ceased as Sire my Friend went on, rolling his handkerchief—dampened with his hidden agony of exultation—into a ball between his palms:
“Immense contracts for the further supply of cattle, provisions, cereals and fodder to France, have been signed by the heads of the principal firms in the Levant and Eastern Europe. Much of the land-transport throughout the Danubian Principalities had already been chartered by Russian agents—a partial check, I will admit, to my views in this direction. Yet thousands of wagons, arabas, telegas, and other vehicles; hundreds of teams of horses, yokes of bullocks, strings of baggage-mules, are at my sole disposal—their proprietors having received liberal payment on account, and having before them the hope of treatment still more generous. Do I weary you? Am I prosy? Do stop me if I bore you!” entreated Sire my Friend.
Nobody stirred or spoke. He went on, savoring his triumph, tasting each sentence as a morsel of some delicate dish: