"Heaven forbid!" murmured Count Hatzfeldt, expressively raising his fine eyebrows, "when one is able to get a decent dinner, and a daily bath at one's hotel!..."
"Heaven generally ordains, through the mouth of Your Excellency, an exodus," said the Chancellor, laughing, "when a comfortable bed falls to my lot. At Herny my couch had to be lengthened with chairs and carriage-cushions, and these kept parting company all the night long. My feet were on the floor when I awakened in the morning,—literally at cockcrow—for my window opened upon the dunghill where the lord of the poultry-yard sounded his reveillé. Now here I am accommodated in quite respectable fashion; in a little red creeper-covered house at the corner of the Rue Raugraf, and three of the Councillors are stowed under the same roof with me."
"While I," said the Warlock, "have my quarters at a cleanly bakery, where there is quite an excellent piano, by the way. So that, to-night, unless Fate order otherwise, I shall hear my nephew Henry von Burt sing some of my favorite songs. He is in voice for the first time since his attack of sore throat. The King has been much pleased with his rendering of Herder's 'Volkslieder' and 'Die Blumen of Heine, which doubtless Your Excellency knows."
"I am acquainted with the song you mention. Or I was," returned the Chancellor, "in my salad days. They are over for me, unluckily! ... Only Your Excellency possesses the secret of perpetual youth."
And he turned aside to receive a bulky sealed packet of dispatches from a green-jacketed Royal Courier, who had just driven into the Market Place in a farmer's gig, and now got down, tossing a fee to the scowling driver of the muddy, panting roadster. While Moltke stood smiling and humming with characteristic untunefulness a stave of the tender, sentimental ballad:
"If they knew it, the little flowers,
How she wounded this bleeding heart,
They would weep with me in bright dew-showers,
Healing, healing its anguished smart!"
Said the Minister in an undertone to Hatzfeldt, as he transferred to his keeping the bulky sealed envelope received from the courier:
"Let his Excellency sing only loud enough, and neither Steinmetz nor the Red Prince will be able to prevent the music-loving Frenchmen from retiring upon Verdun."
He had not meant the pungent jest to reach the ear of the great strategist. But Moltke glanced round and answered mildly, if with a narrowing of his wrinkled eyelids, and a sardonic twist of his thin, dry lips:
"Then all the more surely should we surround and annihilate them. My second plan is usually stronger than my first. And I have already issued instructions to Prince Frederick Charles and General Steinmetz, indicating the course they are to follow should Bazaine pierce our left wing. Meanwhile let us listen to this fellow's singing. It may please Your Excellency better than mine!"