The Son of Clemenceau

Chapter 12

WHEN THE CAT'S AWAY.

Ten days after the sudden departure of Madame Clemenceau from her residence, a little before daybreak, Hedwig came down through the house to draw up the blinds and open the windows. She carried a small night-lamp and was not more than half awake.

It was the noise of the great invention which had turned the tranquil group of villas and cherry orchards into a rendezvous for the singular admixture of artilleries and scientific luminaries. The peaceful villa entertained a selection of them nightly and it is astonishing how heartily the military men ate and the professors drank, for the enthusiasm had turned all heads.

Hedwig entered the fine old drawing-room where the symposium had been held. It was a capacious room, not unlike an English baronial hall, the doorways and windows were furnished with old Gobelin tapestry and the heavy furniture was of mahogany, imported when France drew generously on her colonies. The long table had been roughly cleared after supper by the summary process of bundling all the plates up in the cloth. On it had been replaced, for the final debate, drawings and models of the guns considered absolute after the novel Clemenceau Cannon. On a pedestal-pillar stood a large clock, representing, with figures at the base, the forge of Vulcan; his Cyclops had hammered off six strokes a little preceding the servant's entrance.

"A quarter past six," she said, yawning. "It will soon be light."

She drew the curtains and pulled the cord which caused the shade to roll itself up in each of the three tall windows, before returning to the table where she had left her now useless lamp. With a half-terrified look, she began to arrange the pretty little cannon, exquisitely modeled in nickel and bronze, and miniature shot, shell, chain-shot, etc., which she handled with a curiosity rather instinctive than studied. In the midst of her mechanically executed work, she was startled by a gentle rapping on the plate-glass of a window. The sight of a face in the grey morning glimmer startled her still more, but, luckily, she recognized it. After hesitation, she crossed the room in surprise and unbolted the two sashes, which opened like double doors.

"Hedwig!" said a woman's voice warily speaking, "open to me!"

The girl held the sashes widely apart, muttering:

"The mistress! why the mischief has she come back when we were getting on so nicely."

But, letting the new-comer pass her, she tried to smoothe her face, and don the smile as stereotyped in servants as in ballet-dancers, while she continued the letting in of the daylight to gain time to recover her countenance.

Csarine threw off a cloak, trimmed with fur, and more suitable for a colder season, but it was a sable with a sprinkling of isolated white hairs most peculiar and a present from her granduncle. She tottered and seemed weak, for she had concluded that an affection of illness would aid her re-entrance. As Hedwig extinguished the lamp, she sank into an arm-chair. She curiously glanced around and inhaled with a questioning flutter of the nostrils the lasting odor of cigars and Burgundy, which the air retained. In this gloomy apartment where she had often sat alone, sure not to be disturbed, the suggestion of uproarious jollity hurt her dignity. A singular way to express sorrow and shame at the loss of a wife by calling in boon companions! This did not seem like Felix Clemenceau, sober and austere, thus to drown care in champagne.

"Are you alone, girl?" she inquired, looking round with a powerful impression that the house had unexpected inmates.

"Yes. No one is up yet in the house," responded Hedwig, sharing her mistress' uneasiness, though from a less indefinite reason; "at all events, nobody has come down yet. But how did you see that it was I who came in here before the shades were drawn up?"

"Well, I had made a little peep-hole to see what my husband and his fellow conspirator were about, in the time before they shut themselves up in their studio. But, if it is my turn to put questions," she went on with some offended dignity, "how is it that the back door is bolted as well as barred and that I have had to sneak in like a malefactor?"

"If you please, madame, it is the rule to be very careful about fastening up, since you went away."

"Oh, on the principle of locking the stable-door when the steed--"

"Oh! they fear the loss of something which, without offense, I may say, they esteem more highly than you."

Hedwig answered without even a little impertinence and the other did not resent what sounded discourteous.

"Then they do not lock up to keep me out?" she questioned.

"It might be a little bit that way, too."

"It is a new habit. Did the master suggest it?"

"Not the master altogether, madame, but his partner."

"Eh! do you mean Antonino? Monsieur had already lifted him up to be his associate, his confidant, his friend, to the exclusion of his lawful friend and confidant, his wife--and now, does he make him his partner?"

"No, madame; though he has a good fat share in the enterprise. It is M. Daniels who found the funds for the new company in which the master is engaged, and he manages the house to leave the master all his time to go on inventing and entertaining the grand folks we have to dinner."

"Mr. Daniels! not the old Jew who played that queer straight trumpet at Munich--"

"Yes, the turkophone! Ah, he has no need to go about the music halls now--he is, if not rich, the man who leads rich men by the nose, to come and deposit their superfluous cash in our strong-box."

And she pointed fondly to a large iron-clamped coffin which occupied the space between two of the windows. It was a novelty, for Csarine did not recollect seeing it before. Continuing her survey, it seemed to her that she noticed a different arrangement of the ornaments than when she was queen here, and that the fresh flowers in the vases and two palmettoes in urns were placed with a taste the German maid had never shown.

"Let me see! this Jewish Orpheus had a daughter--"

"Exactly; she never leaves him. She has rooms within his just the same as at our house in Munich. It appears that Jew parents trust their pretty daughters no farther than they can see them. But I do not blame M. Daniels," went on Hedwig, enthusiastically, "she is so lovely!"

Csarine rose partly, supporting herself with her hands on the arms of the chair. Her eyes flashed like blue steel and her whole frame vibrated with kindled rage.

"Do you mean to tell me, girl, that Mademoiselle Rebecca--as her name went, I think--is now the mistress of my house?"

"In your absence," returned Hedwig, drawlingly, "somebody had to preside, for neither the master, the old gentleman nor M. Antonino take the head of the dinner-table with the best grace. It is true that our guests are not very particular if the wine flows freely. I do not think the young lady likes the position, for I know the old, be-spectacled professors are as pestering with their attentions as the insolent officers. She would have been so delighted at the relief promised by your return that she would run to meet you and you would not have been repulsed at the door."

"I daresay," replied Madame Clemenceau, frowning, and tapping the waxed wood floor impatiently with her foot. "I did not care to announce my return home with a flourish of trumpets. I was not averse to taking the house by surprise, and seeing what a transformation has gone on since I went away. Besides, it is desirable, not to say necessary, that I should speak with you before seeing the others."

Hedwig pouted a little.

"You ought to have written to me, madame, as we were agreed, I thought; I have been on tenderhooks because of your silence. I did not even guess where you were."

"I did not wish it known for a while, and even then, it appears, I spoke too soon," said Csarine gloomily.

"You did not want me to know, madame?" questioned the servant in surprise and with a trace of suspicion.

"Not even you," and hanging her head, she sank into meditation, not pleasant, to judge by her hopeless expression.

The servant, who had the phlegmatic brain of her people, was stupefied for a little time, then, recovering some vivacity, she inquired hesitatingly as though she was never at her ease with the subtle woman.

"Is madame going away without more than a glance around?"

"Why do you talk such nonsense?" queried her mistress, looking up abruptly.

The girl intimated that the mysterious entrance portended secrecy to be preserved. And, again, the lady had come without baggage, even so much as in eloping from home. But Madame Clemenceau explained, with the most natural air in the world, that she had walked over from the railway station, where her impedimenta remained.

"Walked half a mile?" ejaculated Hedwig, who knew that the speaker had been vigorous enough at Munich, but, since her marriage, and living at Montmorency, she had assumed the popular air of a semi-invalid, "So you are strong in health again?"

"Yes; but I have been very unwell," replied the lady, sinking back in the chair as she remembered the course she had intended to adopt. "I was very nearly at death's door," she sighed. "I really believed that I should nevermore see any of you, my poor husband and you others. Do you think that anything hut a severe ailment could excuse me for my strange silence--my apparently wicked absence?"

Hedwig went on going through the form of dusting the huge metal-bound chest, which had attracted the mistress' eyes as a new article of furniture. Had her husband turned miser since Fortune had whirled on her wheel at his door as soon as she quitted it? It was not Hedwig's place, and it was not in her power to solve enigmas, so she answered nothing.

"My uncle was terribly afflicted," said the lady.

"Your uncle?"

Hedwig's incredulous tone implied that she had not believed in the authenticity of the telegram.

"Yes; my granduncle. He was within an ace of dying, and the shock made me so bad, after nursing him toward recovery, it was I who stood in peril of death. My friends sent for a priest and I confessed."

The girl opened her eyes in wonder and a kind of derision, for she did not belong to the aristocratic creed.

"Confessed?" reiterated she; "ah, yes; people confess when they are very bad. Was it a complete confession, madame?" she saucily inquired.

"Complete as all believers should make when on the brink of the grave," replied Madame Clemenceau, in her gravest tone to repress the tendency to frivolity, for she had not resented the incredulity as regarded herself.

"I dare say," said Hedwig, who certainly had one of her lucid intervals, "it is as when a body is traveling, one is in such a hurry that something is forgotten. You went away so sharply that you forgot to say good-bye to the master! if you spoke at all! Whatever did the father-confessor say?"

"He gave me very good advice."

"Which you are following, madame?"

"When one not only has seen death smite another beside one but flit close by oneself, I assure you, girl, it forces one to reflect. Oh, how dreadful the nights are in the sick chamber, with a night-light dimly burning and the sufferer moaning and tossing! Then my turn came to occupy the patient's position, and it was frightful. Can you not see I am much altered--horrid, in fact?"

Hedwig shook her head; without flattery, well as her mistress assumed the air of languor, her figure had not been affected by any event since the slaying of the Viscount Gratian, and her countenance was unmarred by any change except a trifling pallor.

"Yes; after my uncle grew better, I was indisposed and should have died but for the cares of an old friend, Madame Lesperon the Female Bard. But you would not know this favorite of the Muses. You are not poetically inclined, Hedwig!" she added, laughingly. Rising with animation, "but that makes no matter! I am glad to see you home again. I thought of you, Hedwig, and I have bought you something pretty to wear on your days out--bought it in Paris, too."

"Is that so?" exclaimed the girl, much less absent and saucy in the curl of her lip; "you are always kind."

"Yes; they are in my new trunk, for which you had better send the gardener at once. He is not forgotten either. There is a set of jewelry, too, in the old Teutonic style. They say now in Paris that any idea of war between France and Prussia is absurd, and there is a revulsion in feeling--the vogue is all for German things. I am not sorry that I know how to dress in their style, and I have some genuine Rhenish jewelry, which become me very well."

"I see that madame has indeed not altered," remarked Hedwig, plentifully adorned with smiles, as the sunshine streamed into the grave apartment. "You have fresh projects of captivating the men!" Csarine smiled also, and nodded several times.

"Here?" cried the girl, in surprise.

"Certainly here, since I understand you are receiving company in shoals."

"That is all over now, madame, and I am sorry, for the callers were very generous to me. It appears that the War Ministry do not approve of strangers running about Montmorency and into the abode of the great inventor of ordinances--"

"Ordnance, child," corrected Madame Clemenceau.

"And the house is sealed up, as you found it, against all comers. We have nobody here for you to try graces upon except Mademoiselle Rebecca's papa--and he being a Jew, you must not go near him, fresh from the confessional."

Madame Clemenceau seemed to be musing.

"I forgot--there's young M. Antonino," continued the servant.

Csarine made a contemptuous gesture, expressive of the conquest being too easy.

"Such sallow youth are best left to platonic love, it's more proper, and to them, quite as entertaining."

"Well, madame," said Hedwig, like a cheap Jack, holding up the last of his stock, "they are the only men I can offer you; for, since we have been firing off guns and cannon, our neighbors have moved away right and left--we are so lonely. No servant would stay a week!"

"Those the only men?" said the returned fugitive; "Hedwig, this is not polite for your master."

"Oh, madame, a husband never counts."

"You are very much mistaken. He does count--his money, I suppose, if that is his cash-box." And, yielding to her girlish curiosity, she went over to the steel-plated chest and avariciously contemplated it,

"Not at all, madame. That is where they lock up the writings and drawings about the new gun!"

"Oh, what do they say?"

"Nothing a Christian can make head or tail of," returned the servant reservedly. "They write now in a hand no honest folk ever used. An old man who ought to have known better--the Jew--he taught the master, and they call it siphon--"

"Cipher, I suppose? It appears the newspapers are right!" resumed the lady. "He is a great man!" and she clapped her hands.

Hedwig regarded her puzzled, till her brow unwrinkling at last, she exclaimed:

"Upon my word, I believe you have fallen in love with master."

"You might have said: I am still in love. That is why I return to his side."

"If you tell him that is the reason," said this speaker, who used much Teutonic frankness to her superiors, "you will astonish him more than you did me by popping in this morning. He will not believe you."

Madame Clemenceau smiled as those women do who can warp men round to their way of thinking.

"But he will! Besides, if it is a difficult task, so much the better--when a deed is impossible, it tempts one."

"Well, as far as I can see, madame, that is an odd idea for you to have had when far away from master."

"Pish! did you never hear the saying that 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder?' Oh, girl, I had so much deep meditation as I stared at the dim night-light," and she shuddered and looked a little pale.

"Well, madame, I should have rolled over and shut my eyes," said the matter-of-fact maid.

There was more truth in the lady's speech than her hearer gave her credit for. She was no exception to the rule that the wives of great inventors almost never properly appreciate them. By the light of his success, breaking forth like the sun, she feared that the greatest error of her life had been made when she miscomprehended him. In her dreams as well as her insomnia, it was Clemenceau that she beheld, and not the gallants who had flashed across her uneven path, not even the viscount, whose spoil was her nest-egg. Alas! it was a mere atom to the solid ingot which her misunderstood husband's genius had ensured. She had perhaps lost the substance in snapping at the shadow.

"Any way, I love my husband," she proceeded, moaning aloud, and resting her chin in the hollow of her hand--the elbow on the table, to which she had returned and where she was seated. "I am sure now."

"No doubt," said the servant, unconsciously holding the feather duster as a soldier holds his rifle; "madame has heard about our great discoveries in artillery? They are revo--revolutionizing--oof! What a mouthful--the military world!"

"Yes; I read the newspaper accounts during my convalescence," replied Madame Clemenceau.

"Then you fell in love with your husband because of his cannon," said Hedwig, laughing. "I do not see what connection there is between them, and, in fact," reflecting a little and suddenly laughing more loudly, "I hear that cannons produce breaches rather than re-union. Well, after all, if cannons do not further love, its a friend to glory and riches! The Emperor, some of our visitors said, is very fond of artillery, and he will give master immense contracts from the report of the examining committee being so favorable."

"Really, Hedwig, you are becoming quite learned from the association with scientists. What long words you use!

"That's nothing," said the servant, complacently.

"There is no word difficult in French to a German. but I can tell you that, as we cannot live on air, and these promises do not bear present fruit, master has been forced to sell this house."

"Eh! why is that? I like the place well enough."

"You were not here to be consulted, madame, and, we wanted the money. Master does not wish to be obliged to M. Daniels and, besides, he, too, does not get in the cash for his company any too rapidly. Master ran into debt while making his guns and cannon, and we have been pinched for ready money."

"I am glad to hear it!" ejaculated Csarine, without spitefulness, and with more sincerity than she had spoken previously.

The girl stared without understanding.

"I have money--cash--to help him, and it will be far more proper for him to be obliged to his wife than to strangers. Besides, I should not tax him with usurious interest," she said maliciously.

"Money, madame," said the servant with her widely opened eyes still more distending.

"I have two hundred thousand francs, that is, nearly as many marks, coming from my good uncle who is a little late in doing me a kindness--but my attention touched him. But do I not hear steps--somebody at last moving in the house?"

"Very likely," replied the servant tranquilly, "but nobody will come in here, before master has breakfast. Since he stores his secrets in that chest, and no company drops in, this is a hermitage. Mademoiselle Rebecca is not one of the prying sort."

Madame Clemenceau, who had risen with more nervous anxiety than she cared to display to the servants, stood by her chair, looking toward the door.

"Has he talked about me, sometimes?"

"Master? never--not before me, anyway, madame."

"Yet you gave him the telegram that explained all?"

"Yes, madame; but not until some time after your departure and when master had returned from a promenade alone. I know he was alone, because M. Antonino was racing about to show him some of his wonderful experiments."

Beyond a doubt, it was Clemenceau who had stood witness to the tragedy in the meadow. Hence his inattention to the Russian's despatch, which he naturally would disbelieve, and probably to her prolonged absence.

It was humiliating that he had not searched for her.

"What! no allusion to my stay--no hint of my possible return?"

"His silence has been perfect as the grave. Next morning after you left and did not return, master looked at the cover which I had from habit placed for you, and remarked: 'Oh, by the way, you will have another to lay to-morrow, as we shall have two guests for, I hope, a long time.' He meant the Danielses, madame. Their coming made it a little livelier for him and M. Antonino."

"It looks like a plot," murmured Csarine, indignantly, as she pictured the happy reunions out of which she had been displaced in memory--not even her untouched plate left as memento! her chair taken by Rebecca Daniels!

"Mr. Daniels is like M. Antonino, too!" continued Hedwig. "Not only is he getting up the company for the master's inventions, but for the young gentleman's--he has made such a marvel of a rifle--they put a tin box into it, and lo! you can fire three hundred shots as quick as a wink! I walk in terror since I heard of it! and I touch things as if they would go off and make mince-meat of me in the desert to it."

"Never mind that!" cried Madame Clemenceau, testily.

"Although the connection between piping at music halls and enchanting the bulls and bears of the Bourse is not clear to me, I can understand how M. Daniels, as a financial agent, should be lodging under our roof, but his daughter--"

"She is our housekeeper, and, to tell the plain truth, madame, we have lived nicely, although money was scarce, since she ruled the roost. Ah, these Jews are clever managers!"

Csarine did not like the earnest tone of praise and hastened to say bluntly:

"I suppose, then, she threw the spell over him again which once before, at Munich, caused him, a tame bookworm, to fight for her like a king-maker?"

"Mademoiselle Rebecca! she act the fascinatress!" exclaimed Hedwig, with a burst of indignation.

"What is there extraordinary, pray, in a husband, apparently deserted by his wife, paying attention to another handsome young woman?"

"Why, madame, you must forget that master is the most honorable gentleman as ever was, and that Mademoiselle Rebecca is a perfect lady!" Then, perceiving that her enthusiasm on the latter head was not welcome to the hearer, Hedwig, added: "but it does not matter. We are receiving no more company, lest the great secret leak out, and so we don't need a lady at the table. She is going away with her father, who is to open the Rifle Company's offices in Paris, and that's all!"

"It is quite enough!" remarked the other, frowning.

"What is the last word about him?" inquired the servant, "the viscount-baron, I mean."

"M. de Terremonde?"

"Yes; you haven't said a word about him."

"Do you not know?" began Csarine, shuddering as the scene in the twilight arose before her on the background of the sombre side of the room.

"He was not likely to return hereabouts. Master might have tried the new rifle upon him," with a suppressed laugh.

"Well, if you do not know, I need only say that I am perfectly ignorant of his whereabouts. I went to town without his escort, and I suppose--if he has disappeared," she concluded with emphasis, "that he has gone on a journey of pleasure, or is dead."

"Dead," uttered Hedwig, shuddering in her turn, "in what a singular tone you say that word."

"What concern is it of mine?" questioned Madame Clemenceau, pursing up her lips to conceal a little fluttering from the dread she felt at the effectual way in which her lover had been removed from mortal knowledge. "I do not mind declaring that, if I am given any choice in the matter, I should prefer his taking the latter course."

Hedwig's teeth chattered so that the other looked hard at her till she faltered the explanation:

"Your way of saying things, madame, gives me cold shivers up and down the back--ugh! Why, that gentleman was over head and ears in love with you!"

"That is why he probably went under so quickly, and could not keep his head above water!"

"I thought you liked him a goodish bit--"

"I--oh!"

An explosion, very sharp and peculiarly splitting the air, resounded under the windows and caused Csarine to clap her hands to her ears in terror.