The Minister opened the glass door and looked in. The officers sprang to their feet and stood saluting him. He smiled at the little tree, and asked, nodding at the door at the end of the conservatory, leading to a room where the library of the late M. Tessier had peaceably moldered until the clerks and decipherers of the Prussian Foreign Office had been assigned it for their quarters:
"Have those fellows yet gone to bed?"
And even as he queried he knew by the peculiar smile upon the faces of Captain von Uslar and his subaltern, that the scene in the dining-room was repeated here. He said with a shrug:
"Oh, well!... They had my permission to make a night of it. One would like to be sure, though, that there are no candles to upset!"
The junior officer moved to the library door and opened it, setting free a puff of hot air laden with wine fumes, and a chorus of snores ranging from piping alto to deep bass. Nothing could be seen except the vague outlines of prostrate bodies, revealed by a pale gleam of moonlight that made its way down the chimney and shone upon the dead ashes of the hearth.
"Shall I wake anybody?" queried the lieutenant's look. The Minister made a sign in the negative, bade a pleasant good night to the two officers, and withdrew, shutting the glass door. He quitted the drawing-room, went into the hall, tried the fastenings of the hall door, and crossed to the hatchway under the main staircase that led to the kitchen quarters. A gas jet was flaring in a draught at the bottom of the staircase. He went down, regulated the light as he passed to a safer volume, and tried the handle of the door leading to what had been a housekeeper's parlor, and was now used by the house steward and the Chancery attendants as an upper servants' hall. A gasalier of flaring jets revealed five persons in here, wrapped in the heavy sleep of drunkenness. One, the house steward, snored, recumbent on a sofa; Grams and Engelberg, those monuments of rigid respectability, reposed with their heads and shoulders resting on the table, appropriately decorated with empty bottles and upset glass beakers, and in the center of which stood a great china bowl.
The Minister peeped into this vessel curiously. Apples stuck with cloves, and cinnamon sticks left high and dry at the bowl bottom testified to the Yuletide correctness of the punch, brewed by the skilled hand of the Foreign Office cook. He, the artist responsible for the dinner which had astonished the three Bavarian plenipotentiaries, leaned back, slumbering profoundly in a high-backed armchair. A china pipe, gayly tasseled and painted, drooped from one side of his relaxed mouth. His feet rested upon the sprawling back of the gigantic Niederstedt, who had gone to sleep upon a sheepskin rug in front of the wood stove. His huge right hand still grasped an empty bottle that had contained his favorite Old Nordhausen. He opened one eye as the Minister stooped to inspect him—uttered a stertorous snort, and relapsed again into his hoggish Nirvana, leaving the Minister, as he deliberately turned out the gas and quitted the steward's room, to realize that, save himself, the two officers smoking in the winter garden, and the women presumably sleeping on the second floor, the house whose outer precincts were so vigilantly guarded, did not contain a sober head.
"Well, well! A bout of drunkenness may well be condoned in the servants when the master himself gave the signal for revelry!"
He told himself so, smiling as he made the round of the basement house doors. Nothing had disturbed his equanimity saving the discovery that Niederstedt was incapable of speech or movement. For with his strange characteristic mingling of audacity and caution, the Minister, while leaving Mademoiselle de Bayard practically free within the house limits, had insured by private orders that the giant East Prussian should sleep henceforth outside his master's bedroom door.
Again, as the master's long strides carried him upstairs to the hall again, and he took his bedroom candle from the row on the Empire console, he knew a moment of inward f rat. There was nobody to help him undress, and put away his clothes. Wherever Fate and the Intendant General had assigned the Minister's sleeping quarters, the deft Grans, or the attentive Engelberg had always appeared—or, failing these, the stolid Niederstedt—to render these and other personal services, the lack of which after long use is keenly felt.