"'De Bayard's daughter by that disreputable old woman!...' Ah, for that he shall indeed pay handsomely!"
For though the sentence quoted by Valverden bore the unmistakable stamp of the Iron Chancellor's mintage, the tone in which the words had been repeated, the icy glance of contempt that had accompanied them, rankled in the flesh of the unhappy woman, like barbed thorns.
The venom wrought in her still, even to hardihood and a courage bordering on effrontery, when a few days later her hired carriage drew up before the sentried gate of the Tessier mansion in the Rue de Provence, early in the forenoon of a December day.
LXX
One of the black-garbed Chancery attendants opened the yellow-painted hall-door. Madame tendered him a card, and said in her most musical tones, plying the archery of her fine eyes:
"Madame de Straz, formerly de Bayard. By appointment to see His Excellency the Chancellor."
Von Keudell looked out of the drawing-room and signaled. The Chancery attendant caught his eye. Madame, borne upon a gale of costly perfume, swept her velvets and Russian sables over the Foreign Office threshold, and amidst the tinkling of lockets, and charms, and bracelets innumerable, was ushered into the drawing-room.
As the door shut, and the Chancery attendant resumed his bench and his German newspaper, Jean Jacques Potier, who had been polishing the hall parquet with a flannel clout on one foot and a brush strapped on the other, resumed his labors with a very red face. Madame Charles Tessier, who had been watering the ferns and pot-plants on the console-tables, wrapped in the woolen shawl that seemed parcel of her individuality, might have struck the young man, when he furtively glanced at her, as being whiter than her shawl.
But the deadly whiteness passed, and the rigor of terror could add little stiffness to the gait that was a compound of a limp and a shuffle, as the Twopenny Roué's bugbear climbed the back-stairs to her second-floor room.