The Roumanian, by dint of diligent, patient inquiry, had collected and pieced together with marvelous cleverness, the information gathered, correlative to the movements of Juliette. Her departure from the Prefecture at Bethel, her frustrated journey to the Camp at Châtel St. Germain—her halt at the village of Petit Plappeville, her search for the Colonel upon the battlefield, were all pieces in a mosaic miraculously restored. M. de Straz knew that Count Bismarck had seen and spoken to the young lady—had ordered separate burial for the body of de Bayard. He could even name a soldier of the German burial-party, who had helped to dig the grave. Subsequently Mademoiselle had been seen in company with a young Englishman ... she had returned with him to Petit Plappeville. The village had been raided and sacked by Prussian cavalry. Since when, Mademoiselle, with the young Englishman, had returned to Versailles.... She was occupying the Tessier mansion up to the moment of the arrival of the Chancellor with his Foreign Office Staff. And—by a most curious and deplorable coincidence, from that psychological moment to the present, all trace of Mademoiselle had been lost....
"Consequently," Adelaide wound up her well-conned lesson, "myself and M. de Straz have no resource but to apply to Your Excellency. Naturally M. de Straz desires that the daughter of M. de Bayard and myself should be extricated from a compromising position and placed under our joint guardianship. He takes—such chivalry is innate in his nature—a parental interest in the poor young girl!"
Said the Minister, smiling with cynical amusement:
"Therefore in the interests of Chivalry and Morality—you call on me—as proprietor of the seraglio in which you suppose Mademoiselle to have been hidden away.... You demand"—he struck the riding-glove he had removed upon the palm of the right hand it had covered—"and the hint of such a demand is a menace—do you hear?—a menace—that I should render the girl up to you, or pay through the nose for what I once declined to buy. You think at this epoch in the history of Germany—when the search-ray of international interest is turned upon the doings of that fellow Bismarck at Versailles—that I should not care to be classed with the Minotaurs who devoured youths and virgins. Madame, they were French monarchs, I am only a Pomeranian squire...."
He rose up, towering over the quaking woman, and strode across the shaking floor and pulled the green silk bell-rope by the fireplace. It came down in his hand, top ornament, wire and all, and he said as he looked at it and tossed it from him:
"That is a suggestion on the part of your Fate which I shall not adopt, though I could hang you and your paramour...."
He added, speaking loudly as Von Keudell opened the door, and the wretched woman rose and tottered toward him:
"Did I hold the secret of your daughter's hiding-place, I would not betray her to you.... Adieu, Madame de Bayard.... You observe that I do not add, 'and au revoir!'"
The great resonant voice had sounded through the whole house like a beaten war-gong. Lying upon the floor of her room, straining her ears to catch some fragments of their colloquy, it broke over Juliette in waves of thunderous sound.
Jean Jacques, below in the hall, was told by Von Keudell to "see the lady to her carriage," which, in virtue of her appointment, had been admitted through the Tessier porte cochère. The Swiss youth obeyed with even a clumsier grace than usual, the polishing-brush being still strapped about one instep, and the clout still swathed about the other foot, as he hobbled down the shallow doorsteps to open the brougham-door for Madame. As she stepped in and took the seat, her strained eyes leaped at his face suddenly. As he leaned in arranging the rug about her knees—what was it he heard her say: