"After lunch..." he said mentally, as he insinuated his graceful figure between a lilac and a lauristinus, and the rich soil, rendered marshy by the overflow of the lily pool, squashily gave way beneath his once immaculate boots. "Why, good Heaven!... the woman to whom that monstrous epistle was addressed actually assists the Foreign Office chef with the cooking! The Chief swears by her ragoûts and her omelettes and her beignets. They are certainly excellent.... I must avoid them for the future. A young married man with a family must be careful. I wonder, if anything unpleasant happened, whether Touti would marry again?"
The bushes were wet with rain. Little cold showers sprinkled the dandy's head and shoulders. His boots sank deeper as the wet trickled down his neck. What a degrading task for a First Diplomatic Secretary! With what shrieks of laughter his lively American Countess would read his written description of his experiences as a spy! A corn began to shoot. He sneezed. This meant influenza to a certainty. Even while he devoted Madame Charles, her bloodthirsty spouse, and all her countrymen to the hottest corner of Tophet, he kept a bright lookout. And in another five minutes or so he saw the person for whom he lay in waiting coming down the mossy gravel path that wound through the shrubbery.
It was Jean Jacques, the clumsy foot boy, whose mistakes and blunders kept the Prussian Chancery attendants in a continual eruption of abusive German epithets, and whose patois, proclaimed to be Swiss, was so extremely puzzling that Hatzfeldt, who had piqued himself upon an exclusive knowledge of the French of the Tyrol, could only assign the youth to a canton of his own. He thrust his hand into the Satyr's toothed gape and pulled out the letter, twisted a wry mug as he regarded it, and said, with an admirable English accent:
"Oh, damn!..."
Then, at the urgent tinkle of a bell from the kitchen regions, he thrust the missive into the pocket of his striped cotton jacket and scampered back to the house.
You will remember that when Juliette had consented to marry the unknown Charles Tessier, she had, for her dear Colonel's very sake, adorned the faceless one with features, a complexion, shoulders, muscles, and so on. She had even boasted to Monica's brother of the swordsmanship of the worthy but unromantic young cloth manufacturer, whose most sportsmanlike accomplishment was the shooting of thrushes and sparrows, which he would bring home to the Rue de Provence in triumph, to be converted by his adoring mother into savory pies.
Now, during these days of tension and anxiety, perhaps to relieve the strain of an otherwise unbearable situation—possibly with the desire of inflicting on her unfortunate adorer the torturing pangs of jealousy, or possibly to create and maintain in herself a fictitious interest in the supposititious husband, she had begun anew to expatiate upon his gifts and graces, and, having begun, could not leave off. Her Charles had not red hair and yellow gray eyes, a blunt nose, and a square chin with a dent in it. He was pale, with melancholy black eyes and a high brow. His jetty mustache was waxed, his imperial finished in a point of the most elegant.... He quoted poetry in a deep voice, and was capable of torrential outbursts of passion. He was altogether a perfect specimen of the type of Balzac's beautiful young man.
Surfeited with these perfections, P. C. Breagh had become restive, to the point, one day, of being clumsily sarcastic on the immunity of widows' only sons from the obligation of military service, and so on.
That afternoon Madame Charles had received a mysterious communication to the effect that her lord had secretly quitted Belgium, penetrated in disguise into France, passed through the Prussian lines in a series of hairbreadth escapes, and joined a corps of Francs-tireurs. Since when, letters containing tirades inspired by the most flaming patriotism, sanguinary descriptions of adventure, and passionate protestations of devotion, had been found at intervals by Madame Charles in the mouth of the Satyr mask. Of late, since she had developed nervousness about fetching the letters herself, Jean Jacques had sulkily performed the office. And when she did not, with due precautions, declaim these effusions for the benefit of her victim and fellow conspirator, his was the task—inconceivably repulsive to a young man suffering the stabs of jealousy, of reading them aloud to Madame Charles. Hence the expletive which had betrayed his British nationality to Count Hatzfeldt, standing disconsolate in his squelching patent leathers under the dripping lilac and syringa trees.