Choked by a pin!... An end rather less noble for a great Chancellor than being run over by a donkey cart or smothered in a midden pit full of liquid manure....
Someone was groaning horribly, close beside him. Deep ruckling, gasping groans with a rattle and a catch midway. Were they his own death groans? What was this? The walls were melting and vanishing. Clear, vivid, definite, there unrolled before his filming eyes a picture of Varzin, his Pomeranian country home. It was Spring. The dark pines about the house shone as though newly varnished. The larches were caparisoned with tassels of pale green. The blue sky was vivid as Persian turquoise. He saw his daughter in a white dress step out from the low wide porch and stand smiling upon the terrace. She had a bunch of primroses in her belt, and his great hound Tyras had followed her and was rubbing his great head against her sleeve.
"Dying!" he tried to say to her. "Help your father!" ... But it seemed to him that he uttered nothing but a groan. There was a thundering in his ears like the noise of a field battery. His great bulk reeled toward her.... He pitched forward and fell heavily....
He heard a scared voice crying: "Monseigneur!..." and knew no more.
LXXVI
Juliette had not gone to bed, this snowy night of the Noël. She had said her Rosary and waited until the Christmas carillon. Then she knelt and prayed for her own pardon, for light and guidance, for a blessing upon those living friends she held most dear, for the souls of the beloved departed. And then she had waited, pacing solitary in her bedroom or sitting by her fire, for the sound of Breagh's return.
Madame Potier had gone to the Midnight Mass at the Cathedral. There would be crowds of communicants—she might not reach home before three. And in her absence had Juliette wished to sleep, sleep would have been banished by the sounds of revelry going on in the regions belowstairs.
Those first shouts for the Kaiser had been followed by others for the Chancellor. Even in her remote eyrie she could hear the clinking of glasses and the popping of corks. Then after a wild outburst of cheering she had seen, peeping between the frost flowers on her window into the snowy, moonlit garden, the great figure in the white Cuirassier cloak move down the path between the snow-laden trees.
She was possessed by a great sense of loneliness, and a vague unreal sensation of living somebody else's life, and not the life proper of Juliette Bayard. She locked her door and built up the fire to a cheerful hearth blaze, and sat upon the rug in her white dressing gown, combing and brushing her glorious hair.