Title: The Jugglers
Author: Seawell, Molly Elliot
Language: English
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THE JUGGLERS



  [Illustration]

  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

  NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
  SAN FRANCISCO

  MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED

  LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
  MELBOURNE

  THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.

  TORONTO



[Illustration: “THINK WHAT IT IS TO ACT WHEN ONE FEELS IT.”]



  THE JUGGLERS

  _A Story_

  BY
  MOLLY ELLIOT SEAWELL

  WITH A FRONTISPIECE

  New York
  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  1911

  _Dramatic and all other rights reserved_



  COPYRIGHT, 1911,
  BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

  Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1911.

  _Dramatic and all other rights reserved._


  Norwood Press
  J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
  Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.



  TO
  NELLIE AND ISABEL
  WHO HAVE A GENIUS FOR FRIENDSHIP
  THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED



CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                                  PAGE

    I. DIANE, THE DREAMER                                   1

   II. THE MARQUIS EGMONT OF THE HOLY ANGELS               31

  III. THE SPLENDID EVENTS THAT HAPPENED AT BIENVILLE      65

   IV. THE BRIDAL VEIL                                     95

    V. THE DELUGE                                         122

   VI. THE DAY OF GLORY HAS ARRIVED                       158



THE JUGGLERS



CHAPTER I

DIANE, THE DREAMER


The lazy blue river and the wide, brown plains of Picardy lay basking
in the still splendor of the November afternoon. The mysterious hush
of the autumn lay upon the fields and the farmsteads. A flock of
herons in a near-by marsh meditated gravely, standing one-legged, and
watching the cows kneedeep in the muddy meadows. High in the sunny air,
a vulture sailed, majestically evil, watching both the cows and the
herons. The world was saying farewell softly to the sunny hours.

The only sound that broke the deep silence was the steady trot of the
big Normandy horses on the flinty towpath, as they drew a covered boat
along the narrow and shallow stream, and the faint echo of the voices
of five persons sitting on the roof of the boat in the sunshine. The
herons cocked their eyes toward the boat, and listened attentively,
though they could not understand a word of these strange, noisy,
laughing, weeping, fighting, dancing, talking creatures, called men and
women. Sometimes, so the herons thought, these odd beings were a little
kind; sometimes they were very cruel, but always they were formidable,
and were masters of life and death.

The great question under discussion on the roof of the boat was, where
the theatrical company of jugglers and singers should spend the winter.
Grandin, the proprietor of the show, a tall, handsome, boastful man,
with a big voice like a church organ and a backbone made of brown
paper, always gave his opinion first, but was generally overruled
by Madame Grandin, also tall, handsome, easily wheedled or bullied,
but inexorably truthful. Decisions really rested with the three
subordinates, Diane Dorian, the prima donna, Jean Leroux, her partner,
and the individual known as François le Bourgeois, juggler.

“I have determined upon Bienville,” roared Grandin, in his big, rich
voice. “We wintered there nine years ago, and my lithograph was in
some of the best shops in the place.”

“Oh, what a lie!” cried Madame Grandin, amiably. “They only put your
picture in three butcher shops and the bake shop across the street, and
I am sure you paid enough for it. But Bienville is my choice too.”

Grandin took this with the utmost good nature. Between his propensity
to tell agreeable lies, and Madame Grandin’s natural inability to let a
lie go uncontradicted, the couple struck a very good average of truth.

The manager and his wife having spoken, the real discussion was now on.

“I should say Bienville,” said Jean Leroux, quietly.

He, too, was big--an ugly, resolute man with an indomitable eye, and as
honest as the day was long.

He looked at Diane as he spoke. She was dark haired and dark eyed,
with a skin milk white in spite of grease paint, and had a vivid,
irregular, theatrical beauty, in great contrast to the big, Juno-like
manager’s wife. Also, she was so slight and thin as to deserve the name
of “Skinny,” which was freely applied to her by François, and she had
a voice like the flute of Pan. In spite of her soft voice and gently
drooping head, Diane had ten times the resolution of the resolute Jean
Leroux. She was also the vainest of women, and in order to protect her
matchless complexion wore, over her scarlet hood, a transparent veil
of a misty grey, through which her eyes shone as the flash of stars is
seen through a drifting cloud. Jean Leroux, who frankly adored her, sat
at her right, and François, who always laughed at her, sat on the other
side. This François had the clear cut, highbred features, the slim
hands and feet, that indescribable air of the aristocrat which marks
a man who can trace his descent through many lines of greatness, back
to those who shone at the court of Philippe le Bel. Yet François was
a frowzy person, and his small feet had burst through his shoes; but
he had the same glorious and ineffable impudence of his ancestors who
bullied their kings and princes.

“What do you say, Diane?” he asked, giving Diane a friendly kick.

“I say Bienville,” replied Diane in her lovely stage voice. “I was
born and brought up five miles from Bienville, in a little hole of a
house, for my father, the village hatter, and my mother had a hard time
to keep body and soul together. When I was a little, little girl, I
used to look in clear days toward Bienville where I could see the tall
spires of the cathedral making a dark line against the sky, and I used
to imagine I could hear the bells on the clear December days, and in
the soft summer nights. I yearned with all my heart to go to Bienville
on market day, and to see the wonderful things that I had heard of
there. My mother and father were always promising me that when they had
enough money they would take me to Bienville on a market day, but, poor
souls, they never had enough. So then, when they died and I was twelve
years old, I was taken far away by my uncle. I never saw Bienville,
and tended geese until I was sixteen and begun to sing at the village
festivals.”

“How interesting!” cried François, who had heard the story forty times
before. “When you are prima donna at the Paris Opera, and your noble
lineage is acknowledged by the proudest houses in France, it will be so
romantic to hear ‘The Tale of the Goose Girl’!”

This was an old joke of François’, at which everybody was expected to
laugh, but Diane remained sullenly silent. François had told her by way
of a gibe that her name, Dorian, was undoubtedly a corruption of the
noble name of D’Orian, and the ridiculous story had taken possession of
Diane, who was as ambitious as Julius Cæsar, and not without repartee.

“Anyhow,” she answered tartly, “it is better to rise from being a goose
girl to being a singer in a nice company like this, than--” Diane
stopped, but François finished the sentence for her.

“Than to be born in a chateau and come down to being general utility
man in a nice, though small, theatrical company. But I tell you, ladies
and gentlemen, that the fault is in the stars, not in me. God is a
great showman, and arranges many highly dramatic events in certain
lives. He has a little string, which He calls Life, and when He pulls
it, we walk, talk, and sin. And when He cuts that string, we walk,
talk, and sin no more. To return to the concrete, however--I give my
voice for Bienville too, because the Bishop is a friend of mine, and so
is the major general commanding the district.”

Now, François had never before been known to mention any great people
he had ever known in his former life, claiming acquaintance only with
organ-grinders, ratcatchers, and the like. So all present pricked up
their ears at this.

“When I was a little lad five years old,” continued François, “they
wanted to teach me to read, but I did not want to read, so then I was
taken into the meadows and shown two big boys, twelve and fourteen
years old, who watched the cows, and meanwhile each carried a book
which he read every moment he could. One of those boys has become
Bishop of Bienville, and the other, I tell you, is a major general
commanding. I suppose they will turn up their noses at me, as indeed
they should. But Bienville is the place for the winter.”

The three subordinates having spoken, the question of spending the
winter in Bienville was considered settled, provided they could get a
cheap hall in which to give performances three times a week. The horses
were to be sold, as they always were at the end of a season, and the
boat tied up at the quay, because it could not be heated for winter
weather.

“I am sorry,” said Diane, “that the summer is over, and this is the
last time for this year that we shall travel by water.”

Diane did not suspect that it was the last time she should ever travel
in that way again.

The horses trotted on steadily toward the far-off steeples and roofs
of Bienville coming within clear sight. By that time it was nearly
dusk, and a great golden, smoky moon hung in the heavens. The boat was
stopped on the river bank where the streets of the little town ran
down to the waterside. The horses were taken out, rubbed down, and
fed, while the Juno-like manager’s wife and the future prima donna
of the Paris Opera cooked supper. Presently they were all assembled
around a little table in the small, stuffy cabin, lighted by a kerosene
lamp hung on the beam over their heads. They were very humble people,
and poor, but they were not unhappy, and lived in a singular harmony
together, in spite of the fact that the three ruling spirits, Diane,
Jean Leroux, and François were all made on a special model. But each
had that strange, artistic conscience which begets the iron discipline
of the stage. Apart from the stage, François was frankly an outlaw, and
submitted to things because there was always a strong and relentless
world against him.

When supper was over and everything settled for the night, Grandin and
his wife were soon snoring loudly in the little coop which was their
room. Diane was not in her little coop, nor was Jean Leroux huddled
in his blanket in the large cabin which he shared with François. Both
Diane and Jean were sitting on the roof of the cabin watching the moon
and stars reflected in the black river, and listening to the sounds
brought to them upon the wandering breeze of a merry little town at
night. Jean Leroux, a taciturn man, was, as usual, on or off the stage,
watching Diane.

“At last I am in Bienville,” murmured Diane. “After so many years of
longing and yearning! I feel that something will happen to me here,
something great and splendid.”

“Now, Diane,” said Leroux, “don’t let François’ jokes get into your
head as serious things. Nothing is going to happen here. You sing
pretty well, but you have no more chance of being a great opera singer
than I have of being an archbishop. You haven’t the voice, my dear, for
opera at all. You will never get beyond a good music hall artist.”

“You are so discouraging, Jean,” complained Diane. “You have a fine
voice and know how to act too, but you never aspire to anything but a
music hall.”

“No, and I never mean to,” was the reply of the practical Jean. “I wish
you had good sense, Diane. But I love you just the same as if you had.”

Diane made no reply, and Jean was confirmed in his belief that women
were the most obstinate and senseless creatures on earth when once they
took a notion into their heads.

“Besides,” continued Jean, “you are too old, twenty-six, to begin
training for grand opera, and you haven’t the money either. At this
moment, your capital consists of two hundred and forty-six francs; you
told me so yourself.”

“Two hundred and sixty-six francs,” cried Diane with flashing eyes.
“You ought to be more careful how you talk about such important things,
Jean.”

“Anyhow,” answered Jean gruffly, “for you to try grand opera would be
exactly like a cow trying to play the piano.”

Diane argued with him angrily for half an hour. She had not the
slightest intention or even wish to be a grand opera singer, and knew
the absurdity of the situation quite as well as Jean. But having, like
all women, great powers of deception, she was carefully concealing the
true object of her wishes and ambitions--to go to Paris and become a
great music hall artist, a profession which she consistently derided
and contemned. The simple creature, man, is no match for the complex
creature, woman.

“After all,” murmured Diane, “I am in Bienville. I have dreamed three
times lately of putting on my petticoat wrong side out, and that means
that I shall make a great deal of money. And then I have twice dreamed
of cooking onions, and that means a splendid lover.”

This was more than Jean could stand.

“Very well, Diane,” he said, “you had better go to bed now, and dream
of petticoats and love and onions. I am off.”

Jean got up and took Diane’s hand as she ran nimbly down the short
ladder to the deck of the boat. The touch of that hand thrilled poor
Jean. His heart yearned over Diane; she was such a fool, and always
wanted to do things and to get in places for which she was eternally
unfitted, so Jean thought. As a matter of fact, Diane was as practical
as Jean, but chose to talk a little wildly.

Meanwhile, Diane in her little coop was sitting on the edge of her bed
and looking through the small, square window toward the town. Afar off
she heard the echo of a military band playing.

“There is a garrison here,” she thought to herself, and then suddenly
remembered that the silk petticoat of which she had dreamed was red
like the color of the soldiers’ trousers, and also that the onions
which she had cooked in her dreams were red. Then her mind wandered
to Jean. If she should have a splendid lover, how should she get on
without Jean? It was he who taught her most that she knew about singing
and had a peculiar scowl that he gave her on the stage when she was
getting off the key. Jean evidently did not fit into the plan of the
splendid marriage which she was certain to make in Bienville, nor did
anything seem to fit without Jean. While Diane was puzzling over this,
she slipped into her narrow cot and fell asleep, the laughing stars and
grinning moon gazing at her through the little window.

The next morning began the serious business of going into winter
quarters at Bienville. It was a busy day for Jean. First, the horses
had to be sold. Anybody who flattered Grandin could get horses or
anything else out of him, so Jean felt it his duty to go with the
manager to the horse mart where the horses fetched a good price.

François, who was very little use in any way, except doing his stage
tricks, was with Madame Grandin and Diane, looking for lodgings. Jean
had some confidence in Diane’s management of money, but this confidence
was rudely shattered when he and Grandin met the two ladies at the
corner of a street, and were taken to inspect the lodgings which were
under consideration for the whole party. First, Jean was dubious
about the street, which was much too nice. The sight of the lodgings
confirmed his worst suspicions. There was actually a sitting room in
addition to a bedroom for the Grandins, a little kitchen, and beyond
it a small white room, with a fireplace, for Diane. Under the roof was
a big attic where Jean and François could be accommodated royally. The
price, of course, was staggering, one hundred francs the month. For
once, however, Jean found himself unable to move Diane or to bully the
Grandins.

While they were all in the sitting room arguing at the top of their
lungs, Diane’s high-pitched, musical voice cutting in every ten
seconds, the door opened and in walked François.

“Look here, François,” said Jean, “help me to reason with these people.
A hundred francs for lodgings, and we haven’t even got a hall yet, and
don’t know whether anybody will come to the performances or not.”

“A hundred francs! A bagatelle!” cried François, slapping his hat down
on the table. “Do you suppose when I come to a place where the Bishop
and the general commanding are my friends, that I intend to stand back
for a little money? No, indeed. If we are thrown out of these luxurious
quarters, we can all go to the workhouse anyhow.”

“Just look at this!” cried Jean, pointing to the carpet on the floor,
and the mirrors on the walls.

“But come and look at my bedroom. I am sure that’s plain enough,”
shrieked Diane.

“It is the best bedroom you ever had in your life,” growled Jean.

Then they all trooped back beyond the kitchen to the little white room
for Diane. There was one window in it, and it looked across the street
directly in the garden of a small, but very nice hotel, much frequented
by officers. There was a pavilion enclosed in glass, and at that moment
there were officers breakfasting there, with their swords about their
legs. As Diane and the rest watched, an orderly rode up leading an
officer’s horse. Then the officer came out, a handsome young man in a
splendid dragoon uniform, and putting on his helmet with its gorgeous
red plume waving in the sunny air. He mounted and clattered off,
followed by the orderly and also by the eyes of Diane. Jean, looking
at her, felt a knife enter his heart. Her eyes had been fixed upon the
young officer with a look of enchantment; her red lips were partly
open. She was like a person hypnotized.

“Diane will be a big success with the officers of the garrison,” said
François, laughing.

“You mean with the corporals,” said Jean. “François, you remind me of
those soldiers called gentlemen-rankers, gentlemen, that is, who get
into the ranks. They always give trouble. You don’t belong with us. You
ought to go with people of your own kind, who understand your jokes.”

“But I can’t,” responded François, with unabashed good humor. “They
have kicked me out long ago.”

Then, the discussion about the lodgings began all over again, everybody
talking at once, except Diane who remained perfectly silent. When they
were talked out, Diane spoke a word.

“I will take the whole apartment myself, if the rest of you don’t,” she
said. “I have two hundred and sixty-six francs of my own.”

Jean said no more, and Grandin sent for the landlady, and made the
terms, Jean looking after him that he did nothing more wildly foolish
than to take the apartment at a hundred francs.

When that business was over, the whole party started out to find a hall
suitable for their performances. In this they had extraordinary good
luck, finding a large place in the same street, the whole front of
glass, and which had been lately vacated as a furniture shop. It would
not take much to build a little stage, and the dressing-rooms could
be divided off with canvas. Jean then piloted the whole party to the
office of the agent, where Diane was put forward to make the plea for
the company. The agent was a susceptible person, and Diane’s soft eyes
and arguments that the place would become better known by having many
persons attend it, caused him to make a ridiculously low offer, and it
was promptly accepted. On the strength of this, Diane assumed to be a
fine business woman, and gave herself great airs in consequence.

When all was complete, the entire arrangements were not so bad. The
money received for the horses paid a month’s rent in advance and for
the erection of the stage. In the latter, both Grandin and Jean helped
the workmen and nailed and hammered industriously. François was willing
to help too, but rather hindered by his jokes and stories, which
distracted the workmen and kept them laughing when they should have
been working.

At the end of three days everything was settled for the winter. The
beds and stools and kettles and pans had been brought from the boat,
which was tied up for the season. The hall was in readiness, the
license was obtained, and the big posters were out announcing three
performances a week by the celebrated Grandin troupe of jugglers,
singers, and dancers.

On the night of the first performance the hall was so well filled that
Grandin was in ecstasies of delight, and Madame Grandin wept with joy.

Across the street, the pavilion was full of young officers, dining.
The new place evidently attracted their attention, and presently the
whole crowd sallied forth through the garden of the hotel, and across
the street. At that moment, François, by Grandin’s direction, went out
to see if the old woman who was hired to take in the money was doing
her duty. As the crowd of laughing young officers crossed the street,
François, who had inspirations of genius, ran inside and pulled up the
great green shade before what had once been the shop windows. Within
could plainly be seen Diane doing one of her best acts with Jean.
She was dressed as a fishwife, her skirts tucked up high, showing a
charming pair of ankles and small feet in little wooden shoes, and
a delicious white cap such as the fishwomen wear flapped upon her
beautiful black hair. The officers raised a shout of laughter and
applause and dashed into the little hall, throwing their money at the
old woman, and not waiting for change.

François pulled the curtain down, and rushed back of the stage. As
the officers came clattering in, they were led by one whom François
recognized as the dragoon officer who had fascinated Diane’s eyes three
days before. This made François nervous, because if the same thing
should happen, the act would be ruined. Diane, indeed, had seen the
young officer, but the effect was exactly opposite from what François
had feared. This, thought Diane, was the meaning of her dream. She
sang better than ever before, and no fishwife ever had so dramatic and
delightful a quarrel as she had with Jean. The end of the act was that
Diane gave Jean a beating with a broom, at which Jean bellowed, to the
great delight of the audience.

This audience, made up wholly of soldiers and working people, except
the officers, shouted with laughter, and the young officers made more
noise than any one else present, led by the handsome dragoon who had
struck Diane’s fancy that morning.

Diane was kept smiling and bowing, and blushing under her grease
paint, before the row of candles stuck in bottles that represented the
footlights. This went on for so long that the next feature on the bill,
a juggling act in which Grandin and his wife did miraculous things,
was delayed ten minutes. Madame Grandin, who was more nearly without
jealousy than any woman François had ever known, sat quite placidly
in her tights and short skirts, and wrapped in a shawl, waiting for
the hullabaloo to subside. Grandin was torn by rival emotions; joy
that Diane had made such a hit, and annoyance that the audience seemed
to prefer singing to burning up money and making an egg come out of
a pumpkin. Presently, however, Jean ruthlessly lowered the piece of
canvas that did duty for a curtain, and Diane came back palpitating
and quivering between laughter and tears. The Grandins then went on,
and François, who was not due on the stage for ten minutes, slipped on
his outside clothes over his stage costume and quietly dropped into the
audience and took his seat by a laughing corporal.

“Who is that young man over there?” whispered François to the corporal.

“Captain, the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel, captain of dragoons. I am in
his troop.”

The corporal, as he said this, made a little motion with his mouth, of
which François knew the meaning. It implied that Captain, the Marquis
Egmont de St. Angel was a person to be spat upon.

François knew the name well enough; he knew the names of all the great
families. He gave the corporal a wink, which was cordially returned,
and then went out, and to the back of the stage. He found Diane
sitting as if in a dream in the little canvas den which she shared as
a dressing-room with Madame Grandin. François, who was to go on in two
minutes, began jerking his arms about and bending his body as if it
were made of India rubber, by way of preparation, chatting meanwhile.

“Talking about love and onions and petticoats,” he said, “the young
officer who led the rest into the hall happens to be a cousin of mine,
about three removes, but we are blood relations, just the same, and I
think he will end in a worse position than that of a juggler when he
keeps sober, and a street vender when he is not quite so sober. He is
the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel, called Egmont for short. I was just
thinking,” continued François, making himself into a circle like a
snake, “that there are no such things as trifles in this world. I went
out just now and pulled up the window shade, and a certain man saw you.
The pulling up of that shade was a momentous act, perhaps.”

“I knew something splendid would happen in Bienville,” murmured Diane.
“The Marquis Egmont de St. Angel! What a splendid name! I never had a
hand clap from a marquis before.”

Then it was time for François to go on the stage. He did his part,
which was chiefly acrobatic, so badly that he came near ruining the
Grandins’ act.

Within the canvas den, Jean was preaching to Diane.

“Look here, Diane,” he said, “don’t let those young officers turn
your head, particularly that handsome one in front. They are not good
acquaintances for a girl like you.”

Diane turned on him a look as virginal as that of Jeanne d’Arc.

“No man can do me any harm,” she said, “except break my heart. I
suppose some might do that. And besides, Jean, I am full of ambition.
The women who misbehave and drink too much wine, lose their voices very
soon and are not respectfully treated by managers. Don’t be afraid for
me.”

“I am not,” answered Jean. “At least in the way you think. I am afraid
of your breaking your heart and doing something foolish.”

“I shan’t do anything foolish,” promptly answered Diane.

When the Grandins and François finished their act and the curtain was
down, even the placid Madame Grandin said a few mildly reproachful
words to François for his carelessness which might have caused a bad
accident. Grandin, who was sincerely attached to his wife, was much
shaken and nervous and violently angry with François.

“Never mind,” answered François coolly to Grandin’s invectives, “wives
come cheap, but if you are so shaken in the next turn as you are now,
your wife will be in a great deal more danger than she was with me.
Behave yourself, Grandin, and get the upper hand of your nerves. A
juggler who loses his nerve because another juggler hasn’t tumbled
fair, isn’t any good at all and a very dangerous person.”

Grandin was much taken aback by this onslaught of François, and could
only mumble:

“I don’t know why it is, François, that you always get the upper hand
of me.”

“I know,” replied François. “It is because I was born a-horseback and
you were born a-footback. That’s why.”

The second appearance of Diane upon the stage was greeted with greater
applause and laughter than ever. Jean, who was a capital low comedian
and singer, was scarcely noticed. When the act was over, it had to be
repeated, and at the end money was showered upon the stage. It was all
silver, however, except one twenty franc gold piece which was thrown by
the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel.

On the whole, the performance was a great success as far as money went,
but nobody had got any applause to speak of except Diane.

It takes some time to wash off powder and lamp-black and grease paint,
and to get into even the shabbiest clothes, so that the street was
almost deserted when the players came out in the quiet autumn night.
One person, however, was on watch. This was the Marquis Egmont de St.
Angel, known as Egmont. He stepped up to Diane and said with a low bow:

“Mademoiselle, will you do me the honor of taking supper with me in the
pavilion of the Hotel Metropole?”

“I thank you very much, Monsieur,” replied Diane in her flute-like
voice, “but I make it a rule always to go home with my friends,
Monsieur and Madame Grandin, after the performance.”

The Marquis remained silent for a moment, then he said, bowing to
Madame Grandin:

“Perhaps your friends will give me the pleasure of their company too.”

“It is as they wish,” answered Diane. “But I must return home. I cannot
stay out late; it affects my voice unfavorably.”

The Marquis stared at her as if she were a lunatic; he had never known
stage people of this class who refused anything to eat and drink.

Diane then, with Jean, started up the street shepherded by the
Grandins. When they reached the corner, Grandin found his big,
melodious voice, and thundered at Diane:

“What do you mean by declining for us to go to supper? I never went to
supper with a marquis in my life; it would be worth a hundred francs’
advertising!”

François had lagged behind, and was saying to the Marquis,

“Are you Fernand or Victor Egmont de St. Angel?”

“I am Fernand,” said the Marquis. “What do you know about my family?”

“Oh, merely that we are cousins.”

The Marquis shouted out laughing, while François, rolling up his
sleeve, gravely exhibited his arm tattooed with a crest and initials.

“This was done,” he said, “when I was a child, in case I got lost. I
have got lost since in the great, mysterious maze of the world, but I
have no objection, like that young lady yonder, to go to supper with
you, provided you will have a good brand of champagne. Cheap champagne
is worse than bad acting.”

“Come!” cried the Marquis, “I know that crest. You have indeed got
lost! But you shall have champagne at twenty francs the bottle if you
will tell me all about that young lady who kicked about so beautifully
in her little wooden shoes.”

François then slipped his arm within that of the Marquis and the two
paraded across the quiet street singing at the top of their voices some
of the songs they had heard that evening from the sweet lips of Diane.

Nothing was seen of François that night, but the next morning when
Madame Grandin, who added thrift and early rising to her other virtues,
was going out to the market at sunrise, she came across François lying
drunk on the door-step. Madame Grandin, a good soul, instead of calling
her husband or Jean, who would be likely to use François roughly,
tiptoed to Diane’s door and the two women very quietly managed to get
François, who was a small man, up the stair, on his way to his attic.
As they passed Grandin’s door, the manager appeared in a very sketchy
toilette.

“What’s the matter with François?” asked Grandin.

“Drunk,” hiccoughed François, thickly, and perfectly happy. “Too much
high society. Champagne at twenty francs the bottle, and my cousin, the
Marquis Egmont de St. Angel, paying for it. Just let me sleep all day,
and I will be as sober as a judge by six o’clock.”

And this actually happened.

It is a very serious thing for a juggler to get drunk while he is
juggling, but François, who had as good artistic conscience as Jean
Leroux or anybody else, never attempted his profession unless he were
dead sober. That, he was, at six o’clock when he walked into the little
sitting room and joined the rest of the party at supper which was
cooked by the excellent Madame Grandin and Diane in collaboration.

“Don’t be afraid to do the pumpkin act with me to-night, you dear
old goose,” said François to Madame Grandin. “I wouldn’t risk your
precious life for anything. Where would Grandin get as good a wife and
as good a partner as you if I should break your neck? And besides, it
would break up the show for a fortnight at least, and perhaps ruin the
whole season just as Diane is in a fair way to become a marquise.”

“What do you mean, François?” asked Diane.

“I mean that the young officer who admired you so much was the Marquis
Egmont de St. Angel, a cousin of mine. We got gloriously drunk together
like old Socrates and the boy Alcibiades the time that Socrates came in
and caught Alcibiades and a lot of Greek boys drinking, and they swore
that Socrates should drink two measures of wine to one of theirs, which
he did the whole night through, and in the morning left them all lying
about the floor while he went and took a bath and then lectured on the
true, the beautiful, and the good in the groves of Parnassus, with all
the wisest men in the town at his heels.”

“And who was Parnassus?” inquired Grandin in his big voice. “His name
sounds like a German university professor.”

“That’s just what he was,” answered François. “One of those _langsam
schrecklich_ German professors who don’t mind having a mob of
ragamuffins overrunning the place.”

All present gazed with admiration at François, amazed at his learning,
as well as his great family connections.

Diane’s thoughts were with the Marquis; her face grew rose red as she
wondered if the Marquis would be on hand for that night’s performance.



CHAPTER II

THE MARQUIS EGMONT OF THE HOLY ANGELS


The Marquis, known familiarly as Egmont, was at the music hall the next
night, not in his splendid dragoon uniform, nor yet in evening dress,
but in ordinary clothes which suggested the notion of a disguise on
Egmont’s part, to François.

Evidently, the company as a whole, and Diane in particular, had
made a great hit, for the former furniture shop was packed with
persons. François went through his juggling and his tricks with
the Grandins without the slightest nervousness. Not so, Diane.
She began to give signs of what is dangerous and even fatal to an
actress--self-consciousness. No one noticed it except Jean, who saw
everything with the sharp-sightedness of love.

When the performance was over, and the hall closing for the night, the
old woman who took in the money at the door handed a note to Diane,
who slipped it into her breast. When she got home and was alone in
her little white room, she took the note out and read it. Many notes
of the kind had Diane received in her short theatrical career, chiefly
from young shopmen and susceptible lawyers’ clerks and the like, but
this was from a marquis, and written upon beautiful paper. It was very
respectful in tone, and asked Diane why she had been so cruel the night
before, and what evening would she honor Captain, the Marquis Egmont de
St. Angel with her company at supper. The foolish Diane kissed the note
and slept with it under her pillow.

The next morning about ten o’clock, Diane went out on a shopping
expedition in the streets of Bienville. She was one of those women who
have an instinctive knowledge of how to make the best of herself. She
adopted a demure style of dress, a trim little black gown and large
black hat and a thin black veil, all of which gave her a nun-like
appearance. When she raised her eyes, however, there was nothing of the
nun about Diane.

She walked rapidly along the bustling streets of the town, and looked
like a pretty governess somewhat alarmed at being out alone. In truth,
Diane had been out in the world alone since her seventeenth year, and
knew perfectly well how to take care of herself. She went into a paper
shop to buy some writing paper elegant enough to reply to the Marquis’s
note. As she walked out of the shop, she came face to face with the
Marquis swinging along in his dashing uniform, and carrying his sabre
in his arm. He smiled brilliantly at Diane and took off his glittering
helmet with its red plumes, and bowed profoundly to her, but Diane,
whose face became scarlet as the dragoon’s plumes, turned and ran as
fast as she could, and was lost to sight, diving into a narrow and
devious street. She heard footsteps behind her and kept her head down,
thinking it was the Marquis, but the voice in her ear was that of Jean.

“That man means mischief as certainly as you live, Diane,” said Jean,
who had a brusqueness and common sense sometimes most painful and
uncompromising.

Diane stopped under an archway, dark even in the bright autumn morning.

“I don’t know what he means,” she said, “but neither he nor any other
man can do me any harm. In the first place, I am by nature a modest
girl, you know that, Jean. Then, you laugh at my ambitions. Very well;
when the time comes that the newspaper reporters are digging into my
past, they won’t find anything disgraceful, upon that I am determined.
If the Marquis wants to marry me, I shall marry him. But the only way
he can reach me is through the church door.”

Jean laughed a hearty, mirthful laugh.

“I believe you,” he said, “and as you always were the most persevering
and most determined creature that ever lived, I think that you will
stick to what you say. But neither this marquis nor any other marquis
will ever want to marry you. As for this fellow, he is a scoundrel. I
have heard it in the last twenty-four hours, and I see it for myself.”

“You are so prejudiced, Jean,” complained Diane. “However, I will show
you the note that I shall write him, so that you can point out any
mistakes in spelling I may make.”

“François is the man for spelling,” answered Jean.

Diane thought so too, so after writing her little note first on a
piece of wrapping paper--Diane was nothing if not economical--she
showed it to François, who corrected two mistakes. It was very short,
simply saying that Mademoiselle Dorian thanked the Marquis for his
compliment, but that she did not accept invitations to supper.

“But I wish, Skinny,” said François, “you would go with him. He will
be certain to say or do something impudent, and that will disgust you,
and there will be an end of it. But you are acting, my dear, like a
finished coquette.”

This Diane violently denied, as it was the truth and she did not wish
it known.

The Marquis continued to haunt the little hall every night, and the
effect upon Diane’s acting was not good, especially in a little love
scene she had with Jean.

After a week of this, one night when the performance was over and they
were all preparing to go home, Jean spoke to Diane in her little canvas
den of a dressing-room.

“Something is the matter. Your acting isn’t improved, Diane,” said
Jean, “by your eyes wandering over the audience, and shrinking away
from me when you ought to throw yourself in my arms. If you go on like
this, you will never get to Paris even as a music hall artist. Your
acting won’t be worth your railway fare, third class.”

“I know it,” answered Diane with pale lips. “But while I am dressing I
am asking myself all the time, ‘Will the Marquis be in front?’ If he
isn’t there, there doesn’t seem to me as if there were anyone in the
hall; then as soon as he comes in he seems to fill the hall and to be
on the stage with me. Pity me, Jean!”

“I do,” answered Jean, “from the bottom of my heart, and I have a
little pity for myself, too. But, Diane, where is your courage, your
resolution, of which you are always boasting?”

“It is here,” answered Diane, laying her hand upon her heart. “It is
that which keeps me away from him, which drags me to my room when I
want to go with the Marquis. It is that which makes me a victor every
hour, for I am forever struggling to keep away from him, and I _have_
kept away from him. But when he comes where I am--oh, Jean!”

Diane sat down on the rough box which held her stage wardrobe,
consisting of two costumes, and wept plentifully. Jean kneeled by her.

“But you won’t be a coward, Diane,” he cried desperately. “Keep on
struggling and fighting. The fellow is a scoundrel, that I assure you.
I know the kind of a fight you are making. I have had the same kind
ever since I knew you. Think what it is to me to take you in my arms
and then to throw you off as we do on the stage every night. Think what
it is to act when one feels it.”

Jean stopped. The love of one man matters little to a woman who is
desperately in love with another, but Diane, out of the depths of
her own agony, looked into Jean’s eyes and realized that some one
else could suffer besides herself. They both forgot that François was
changing his clothes on the other side of the piece of canvas and could
hear every word. Suddenly François’ head appeared above the canvas
partition which was only about six feet high, and with a convenient
upturned bucket François, who was a short man, could mount and see over
into the next canvas den.

“That’s the way it is,” cried François, laughing. “You know the
Spanish proverb, ‘I am dying for you and you are dying for him who is
dying for someone else.’ I haven’t even the privilege of taking you in
my arms, Diane, on the stage, like Jean. This is a cursed world!”

There can be no secrets in a travelling company of five persons between
whom there is seldom more than a canvas partition.

Diane did not stop crying, and Jean still knelt on the ground looking
at her. Presently he glanced up at François’ grinning face, and cried:

“François, because you never loved a woman, you don’t know what it
means, to see her wretched and foolish and crying her eyes out for a
worthless dog, as Diane is doing now.”

“True, true, true!” laughed François, “I have done many foolish things
in my life, but I never intend to love any woman, especially Diane. Ha,
ha! Here, take this stage dagger and kill yourselves like a couple of
lovers in grand opera. It is not much of a weapon, but it will do the
job. It is the only way out of a three-cornered love affair.”

“François, you are so unfeeling,” said Diane, angrily, and drying her
eyes.

As the stage dagger came clattering over the canvas, François got down
off his bucket on the other side.

“Never loved a woman!” muttered François to himself. He had a habit
common to imaginative persons, of talking to himself when he was under
a great stress. “There they go off together. I wonder if they have
taken the dagger with them.”

He sat motionless, gazing into the dingy little unframed mirror hung
against the canvas, apparently fascinated by the glare in his own eyes.

“Don’t stand on that bucket again, François, my man,” he said to
himself between his clenched teeth. “If the dagger is on the floor-- It
is a clumsy thing, a blunt and horrid weapon to use on one’s self.”

In vain he tried to hold himself by his own glance into the mirror, as
one man tries to cow another by his gaze. He backed away until his foot
struck the overturned bucket; then he jumped up and glanced over into
Diane’s dressing-room. No, there was no dagger on the floor; there was
nothing but the box, which was locked, and a bit of a mirror, a towel
and soap, and a comb and brush. As François looked, his eyes lost their
wild expression. He breathed freely like a man released from the grip
of a wild beast. He even laughed, and in his excess of relief, turned
a double somersault on the floor, and putting on his shabby coat and
shabbier hat, went off whistling gaily. As he came out of the narrow,
black alley entrance which did duty for a stage entrance, he saw the
Marquis Egmont de St. Angel stepping across the street toward the Hotel
Metropole. He had gone through his usual performance of watching Diane
go home.

“Halloo! my dear Egmont of the Holy Angels,” cried François, “I will
take supper with you to-night if you will ask me, or if you will pay
for the supper, I won’t even stand on the asking.”

“Come along, then,” answered the Marquis. He was willing to pay for
François’ supper in order to talk about Diane.

The Marquis got a table in an alcove of the pavilion so he could talk
freely. The contrast between the two men was extreme--the Marquis, in
his splendid dragoon uniform, for he had just come from a reception
at the house of the general commanding, and François in his shabby
clothes. The waiters, who knew that François was a juggler at a cheap
place, nevertheless treated him with an odd kind of respect due to a
note of command which his voice had never wholly lost.

“I had to go to a dull reception at the house of the general,” said the
Marquis when he and François were seated at a little table, “and got
away as soon as I could. What a bore are those pink and white girls,
clinging to their mothers’ skirts and as ignorant as children! They are
quite colorless after Mademoiselle Diane.”

“Diane isn’t ignorant. She could not well be,” replied François,
sipping his wine. “But in mind she has an eternal innocence. There is a
great difference between the two things--ignorance and innocence.”

“I don’t know about that,” replied the Marquis, whose mind was low,
and who was not so intelligent as François. “That capricious little
music hall devil has given me more trouble to bring around to my way
of thinking than half the girls I have met to-night. But she keeps me
dancing after her, damn her, the little darling!”

François laughed at this, and laughed still more when the Marquis
inquired anxiously:

“I think it is that great, hulking fellow who sings and dances with her
that frightens her. Perhaps she is in love with him; women are such
crazy creatures!”

“Oh, no,” cried François, beginning to attack the supper which the
waiter had brought, “Diane is not in love with Jean, nor with me
either, strange to say, although I was born both handsome and rich.”

The Marquis pushed his chair back a little, and the waiter being out of
hearing, brought his fist down on the table.

“The infernal, proud, presumptuous little devil probably thinks she can
marry me! Very well, let us see who will beat at that game. Just look
at this impudent note she wrote me.”

The Marquis tore from his breast Diane’s cool little note, the only one
he had ever had from her.

“She doesn’t go out to supper after the performance. She remains with
Monsieur and Madame Grandin, her friends.”

The Marquis howled with laughter at this, and then kept on.

“And she a singer and dancer in the cheapest music hall in this dull
old town of Bienville! Oh, she has got it into her silly head that by
holding off she can become a marquise, but she won’t.”

“But you are carrying around her note in your breast pocket,” suggested
François.

“Oh, yes, I am fool enough for that,” calmly admitted the Marquis,
putting the note back in his breast pocket and drawing his chair up to
the table. “I can feel it, I can feel it there, although it is only a
bit of paper. Who was her father, François?”

“The village hatter,” replied François, “like the father of Adrienne
Lecouvreur. That was her prosperous period, when she enjoyed the
advantages of a polite education at the village school. Then her
parents died, and she was taken to the house of an uncle who owned
three acres of ground, and Diane worked in the cabbage garden and
tended geese.”

“And where did she learn to sing, and all those devlish, captivating
little ways of hers on the stage?”

“From Nature, the mighty mother of us all. She took some singing
lessons from the village teacher, and used to sing at country fairs
after she was sixteen. Then, a couple of years ago, we found her and
took her into our company. Singing on the stage was taught her by Jean
Leroux, her partner, and I taught her something of acting and little
stage tricks, but I must say she was a very apt pupil. She has got it
into her head to go to Paris and study for the grand opera, but she
has no grand opera voice, and has two hundred and sixty-six francs to
pay her expenses.” For Diane had palmed off the grand opera story on
François as well as on Jean, when really her mind was set upon a big
music hall.

“Everything that you tell me,” said the Marquis, “shows how admirably
unfitted this wide mouthed, skinny girl is to become the Marquise
Egmont de St. Angel.”

“You have hit upon her name,” cried François, laughing, “for we call
her Skinny. Our little Skinny a marquise! And your title is worth at
least two million francs in the open market. As for yourself, I may,
with the frankness of a relative, say you would be dear at two hundred
francs.”

“Has anybody ever told you that you were extremely impudent, M. le
Bourgeois, as you call yourself?”

“Occasionally,” replied François. “Here, waiter.” The waiter came from
a distance. “Take this chicken away,” said François,--“it was hatched
during the First Empire, I think,--and bring us one that isn’t old
enough for military service.”

The Marquis rambled on, admiring and cursing Diane all through the
supper.

When François got home an hour later and passed Diane’s door, he saw a
thread of light under it, and the door opened gently, showing Diane’s
pale, dispirited face. She knew well enough where François had been;
nobody except the Marquis had so far asked him to supper.

“Yes,” said François in a whisper, answering the question in poor
Diane’s eyes, “I have been to supper with him. It always raises me
in my own esteem, for I see that I, François le Bourgeois, born in a
chateau, and now juggler and acrobat when I am sober enough, am a far
more respectable character than the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel; he has
no more brains than my shoe, and is the handsomest young officer I ever
saw. I am ashamed of him as a relative.”

Diane slammed the door angrily in François’ face.

The days and the weeks crept on, and the performances in the
ex-furniture shop maintained and even increased their popularity.
Diane could have had supper every evening with an officer or with a
young advocate or any of the gay dogs who are found in every town, but
Diane, being a shrewd little person, concluded that it was worth more
as an advertisement to decline these offers than to accept them. Soon
it became the subject of numerous wagers among the gilded youth of
Bienville as to who should first have the triumph of entertaining Diane
at supper. Presently the wagers were changed; it was a question whether
any of them could succeed in this commendable project.

This sudden popularity of Diane by no means weakened the devotion of
the Marquis de St. Angel. She still turned an unseeing eye and a deaf
ear toward him, although her heart beat wildly and her pulses were
racing. One person profited by this--François. He could get supper
at any time out of the Marquis by merely telling about Diane, and
especially of the notes and letters she received, and even the presents
which she haughtily returned. The Marquis continued to pursue her and
to damn her for an affected prude and subtle advertiser, and not half
as handsome as a plenty of other ladies in her profession who were not
so obdurate.

Grandin at first bitterly reproached Diane for not encouraging the
Marquis and the other young bloods, but in the course of time he came
around to her opinion.

“It’s much better advertising,” said Diane. “If I should go out to
supper with one of these young gentlemen, the box office receipts would
fall off fifty francs at least. And think, Grandin, how nice it is for
you to have all these people following us and looking at you because
you are my manager.”

“True,” replied Grandin. “I have been photographed, actually
photographed when I appeared upon the street.”

One day in midwinter two great honors were paid the Grandin company of
jugglers, acrobats, and singers. A card was brought up to the little
sitting room where Diane and Madame Grandin were making a suit of
stage clothes for Grandin, who was not only without his coat, but also
_sans-culotte_. It was a beautiful card inscribed Captain, the Marquis
Egmont de St. Angel, Twenty-fifth Regiment of Chasseurs. The two
Grandins and Diane were immediately beside themselves. Diane, who had
on a large white apron, took it off and put it on again, frantically,
and rushed to the little mirror to tidy her hair when it all came
tumbling down her back in a glorious mass. Grandin tore the pinned-up
jacket and short trousers off and made a dash for his clothes which
Madame Grandin seized and withheld violently, mistaking them in her
agitation for the stage clothes. In the midst of the commotion, while
the Marquis was cooling his heels in the narrow passage below, François
passed him and walked upstairs to the little sitting room.

“He is downstairs!” shrieked Diane incoherently, trying with trembling
fingers to put up her rich hair. “He is downstairs, and Jean didn’t
want us to take this sitting room! He said we didn’t need it, and now
Madame Grandin won’t give Grandin his trousers, and I don’t know what I
shall do!”

François, however, with his usual coolness, knew exactly what to do.
He thrust Grandin into his own room, threw the scissors and the work
things and scraps into Diane’s apron, which he gathered up and flung
after Grandin, and going to the top of the stairs called out, laughing:

“Come up, my Marquis Egmont of the Holy Angels.”

The Marquis walked in smiling, having heard all of the commotion.
Madame Grandin greeted him with deep agitation, having never received a
marquis before, as indeed, neither had Diane.

Diane’s usually pale face was scarlet, and she sat as demurely as a
nun on the edge of her chair, with downcast eyes, responding “Yes,
m’sieu,” and “No, m’sieu” to the Marquis’ chaste remarks. François
remained so as to keep Madame Grandin and Diane from a total collapse.
As he looked at the Marquis it occurred to François that any girl might
fall in love with so splendid an exterior. He was certainly the most
highbred-looking man François had ever seen, not excepting himself.
The Marquis’ undress uniform fitted him to perfection, and showed the
supple beauty of his straight and sinewy figure. Then his voice was
peculiarly sweet, not big and sonorous like Grandin’s, but rather low
with a crispness in it like a man accustomed to giving orders.

They talked about nothings, as people do when the ladies of a party are
not quite at ease. The Marquis was perfectly at ease, however, and had
a laughing devil in his eye which responded promptly to the laughing
devil in the eyes of François. Diane’s voice was ever peculiarly
sweet, and it occurred to François that the talk between her and the
Marquis was like a duet of birds in spring, or the rich notes of the
’cello blending with the sharp sweetness of the violin. And they were
just the right height, and Diane was dark-eyed and black-haired and
white-skinned, while the Marquis was chestnut-haired and blond and
bronzed.

The Marquis complained gently to Diane that she would never accept his
invitations to supper, and asked her if she would do him the honor to
sup with him that night, when he hoped also to have the company of
Monsieur and Madame Grandin and Monsieur le Bourgeois.

“I thank you, no,” replied Diane sweetly. “I made a resolution before
we came to Bienville not to accept any invitations to supper.”

“Oh, Diane!” burst out the excellent and too truthful Madame Grandin,
“you did no such thing. You only took the notion after you got here,
and besides, you were never asked to supper before by a marquis.”

“I made the resolution in my own mind,” replied Diane suavely, who had
never dreamed of such a thing in her life. “It is most kind of the
Marquis, but I can make no exception.”

The Marquis protested, backed up not only by Madame Grandin, but by
Grandin himself, who was listening attentively at the door behind the
Marquis, and put out his head, grimacing and gesticulating wildly in
protest to Diane. The Marquis saw it all in the little mirror, and
burst out laughing, at which Grandin’s head suddenly disappeared. But
Diane was relentless, and the Marquis had to leave, asking permission,
however, to call again.

“You may call every day,” replied Madame Grandin. “My husband thinks
it would be a very good thing for the show to have a marquis attentive
to Diane. She is a perfectly good girl, I assure you. We made inquiries
about her character before we engaged her.”

When the Marquis and François were out in the street and laughing
together, François said:

“Beware of Diane! She is the most determined creature I ever saw in my
life. If she makes up her mind to marry you, you are lost.”

François then walked off, taking his way past the Bishop’s palace, a
shabby old stone house with wide iron gates before it. The Bishop was
just coming out for his daily walk, and François, who was as bold with
a bishop as with a rat-catcher, went up and said:

“I perceive your Grace does not recognise me. I am--or I was--François
d’Artignac of the Chateau d’Artignac on the upper Loire.”

The Bishop, a gentle, unsophisticated man, overflowing with
benevolence, shook hands cordially with François, saying:

“Ah, it is a great pleasure to me to meet one of your family, for I and
my brother, General Bion, were both born and reared upon that estate
where our father and our grandfather and our great-grandfathers for
many generations back were laborers. We do not seek to disguise our
humble origin, my brother and I. We were always well treated by the
family of d’Artignac as far back as we can remember, and I am happy and
proud to meet a representative of that family.”

The Bishop was now out of the gate, and François and himself were
promenading together along the street, one of the best in the little
town.

“I remember you and your brother well,” answered François. “You were
always reading and improving yourselves, and taking all the prizes in
the village school.”

“We did our best,” replied the Bishop modestly. “But I recollect you,
the little François, the beautiful boy in dainty clothes, that used to
walk in the meadows with a footman behind you, while my brother and I
kept the cows. Oh, they were happy days!”

François, by design, led the Bishop directly past the lodgings of the
Grandin company, and looking up at the window, saw the noses of Grandin
and his wife and Diane glued to the window-pane. They also passed
Jean, who bowed respectfully to the Bishop and then thrust his tongue
in his cheek on the sly to François.

Meanwhile François had told a pretty story of his downfall in the
world, and his resolute determination to earn a living when he had lost
all his property and had been repudiated by his family. He did not
mention various little episodes with regard to raising money through
means prohibited by the law, drunkenness, and a few other shortcomings.
He gave as a reason for his change of name the desire to spare the
noble house of d’Artignac the mortification of such a fall.

Directly opposite the Hotel Metropole they met General Bion, a stiff,
discerning person, who had a low opinion of his brother the Bishop’s
insight into human nature.

“Brother,” said the Bishop, “here is an old acquaintance of ours in
our boyhood. We could not call him a friend, because he was so far
above us in position, being of the house of d’Artignac. He has had many
misfortunes which give him only greater claim upon us.”

General Bion looked suspiciously at François, with a dim recollection
of having heard that François’ family had never been proud of him. His
greeting, therefore, was rather cool, although being a man of sense he
promptly referred to the fact that his father had been a laborer upon
the estate of François’ father.

“He calls himself Le Bourgeois now, for his stage name,” said the good
Bishop. “I think he shows a true spirit of Christian humility.”

The General made no response to this, which caused the Bishop to
show François the greater kindness, asking him to breakfast the next
morning, which François promptly accepted.

When François returned to his lodgings, the story of his grandeur had
already preceded him, and all his fellow-players, except Jean, were
overcome with the magnificence which was being showered upon them. Jean
said good-humoredly:

“Now, François, don’t play any tricks on the good old Bishop. He is as
innocent as a lamb, and it would be a sin to trick him.”

François took no offence at this, whatever.

But François was not the only one of them who walked that day with a
distinguished person. In the late afternoon, although the day had
grown dark and a brown fog was creeping up from the river and the
low-lying meadows, Diane went for the walk which she religiously
consecrated to her complexion. She took her way past the Bishop’s
palace through the best quarter of the town, indulging herself in
dreams of the time when she would be the mistress of a mansion like the
big stone houses, with gardens in front, in which the aristocracy of
Bienville resided. Presently she came to the gates of the park, which
she entered. It was so quiet and so deserted by the nursemaids and
the children, because of the damp and the fog, that Diane could think
uninterruptedly of the Marquis. The great clumps of evergreen shrubbery
loomed large in the dimness of the fog, and the bare trees were lost in
the mist. Diane entered a little heart-shaped maze of cedars, cut flat,
and towering high over her head on each side. Here indeed was solitude;
not a sound from the near-by town broke the silence, and the darkness,
which was not the darkness of night, was like that of another world.
She threaded the winding paths quickly and presently found herself in
the heart of the maze, and sat down on an iron bench. Then, to shut out
the world more completely, that she might think only of the Marquis,
she put up her muff to her eyes.

As she sat lost in a delicious reverie, she felt two strong hands
taking her own two hands and removing them gently from her face. It was
the Marquis, who was so close to her that even in the pearly mist she
could distinguish his face. Never had he looked so handsome to Diane.
His military cap was set jauntily over his laughing eyes, and his trim,
soldierly figure, with his cavalry cloak hanging over one shoulder, was
grace itself.

Poor Diane!

Having taken her hands from her face, the Marquis laid his mustache on
Diane’s red lips in a long and clinging kiss, and then sat down beside
her, drawing her trembling and palpitating close to him. It was like a
bird in the snare of the fowler.

“I saw you and followed you,” he said after a while. “You cannot escape
me; but why are you so cruel to me?”

“Because I must be,” answered poor Diane, trembling more and more.
“Everybody’s past is known some time or other, and when the time comes
that the newspaper reporters begin to ask about me, I don’t want to
have anything ugly in my past.”

At this, the Marquis, who knew much about women, laughed.

“That is always the way,” he said. “You women think much more of your
reputation than you do of your virtue. No woman kills herself because
she has yielded to her lover. It is only one of three things that
drives her to suicide afterward. The first is the dread of being found
out; the second is to be deserted; and the third is starvation. But
there is no record of any woman killing herself for the mere loss of
her virtue, which shows that modesty is more highly valued than virtue
by women themselves. Is that not true?”

Diane looked at him bewildered. Was it true?

“All I know is,” she said obstinately, “that I don’t intend there
shall be anything in my past that anybody can twit me about. I would
rather die. You may call it either modesty or virtue, but it is
stronger with me than life or death.”

The Marquis looked at her curiously, and saw in her eyes that
peculiar, deadly obstinacy and resolution which was Diane’s strongest
characteristic.

“I once read in a book,” kept on Diane, holding off a little from
Egmont, “that the first time a certain royal prince saw Rachel Felix
act, he wrote something on a card--I am ashamed to tell you what it
was--and sent it to her back of the stage, and she laughed, and invited
him to come to see her. If I had been in her place, I would have killed
him!”

“Killing is rather difficult for a woman,” replied the Marquis,
laughing a little uncomfortably.

Diane rose and stood before him, and seemed to grow taller as she spoke.

“God would have shown me the way,” she said. “Jael had only a nail,
but she killed the enemy of her people, and Judith cut off the head of
Holofernes, in his camp, surrounded by his guards.”

The light in Diane’s eyes startled the Marquis. But it melted into a
dovelike softness, when Egmont drew her once more to his side.

“I suppose,” he said, “you adorable little devil, that you want to
bully me into marrying you?”

“No,” answered Diane, “I am so much in love with you that I don’t want
to bully you into anything; only it is marriage or nothing. I don’t
know why I say this, or feel this, but I tell you it is as fixed as the
stars. You have a power over me so far and no farther.”

Diane, as she said this, laid her head contentedly on the Marquis’
shoulder, and his lips sought hers.

And so half an hour passed in the reproaches and confessions of the
woman who loves and the man who pretends he loves. The mist was growing
colder and more dense. It was as if they were alone in a white,
mysterious, soundless world inhabited only by themselves.

Presently, as Diane lay on the Marquis’ breast, there sounded afar off
the faint echo of a church bell from the other world which they had
forgotten. At the sound, Diane suddenly and violently wrenched herself
from the Marquis’ arms and stood upon her feet. Two thoughts raced
through her mind, one equally as important as the other. The first was
the reproach of the church bell that she had allowed the Marquis to
kiss her lips and put his arm about her. And the second was the iron
discipline of the stage which drags men and women apart when it seems
like the tearing of a heart in two; which calls them from death-beds;
which makes them report at the theatre when they are more dead than
alive.

“There is the cathedral bell,” cried Diane in a choking voice, “and it
tells me that I have been a wicked girl, and that I may be late for the
performance.”

The Marquis stood up too, laughing at the jumble of ideas in Diane’s
mind, but the next moment she was gone, speeding in and out of the
maze. In her agitation and the white gloom of the mist she lost her
way, and the Marquis, following her, though unable to find her, could
hear her sobbing on the other side of the hedge as she ran wildly about
trying to find the outlet. At last, however, she escaped and was in the
open path running toward the park gates.

The Marquis took his way leisurely after her, not smiling like a
successful lover, but grinding his teeth and cursing both her and
himself. Was it possible that this presumptuous, impudent little
creature meant to force him to marry her?

Diane got back to her lodging in time for supper with the Grandins,
Jean, and François. François amused and delighted them all, telling
them of his interview with the Bishop.

“To-morrow,” François said, “I shall be breakfasting in distinguished
company, with the Bishop. He asked me, and I accepted, you may depend
upon it.”

“What an advertisement!” cried Grandin, with an eye to business. “If
only you could manage to get it into the newspapers!”

“Then he wouldn’t be asked to the palace any more,” responded the
practical Jean. “There is a limit to advertising, Grandin, which you
never know.”

“We could say,” said Grandin, meditating, “that François was passing
the Bishop’s palace and fell down and hurt himself, and was taken
within by the Bishop’s servants. Anything will do, just to have it
known that François has been at the palace.”

“Oh, Grandin!” cried Madame Grandin, “how can you invent such lies?”

They were all so interested in the story of François and his grand
acquaintances, that no one except Jean noticed how silent Diane
was, and that she ate no supper, although her appetite was usually
remarkably good. Jean saw that something had happened, but mindful of
that extraordinary loyalty to art of which the theatrical profession is
the great model, forebore to ask, lest he should agitate her more.

As Diane and Jean were always partners, they invariably had a love
scene in whatever they played together. To-night Diane played the love
scene very badly, so badly that the audience noticed it, and she got
very little applause. That waked her up, and she picked up her part, as
it were, and played it with a renewed spirit that put the audience once
more into a good humor with her.

When the performance was over, Diane was a long time in dressing to
go home, and the Grandins and François had already gone. Jean, in his
shabby, every-day clothes, was waiting for her at the stage entrance.

“I am glad you took yourself by the throat,” he said to her grimly, as
they picked their way through the mist which still hung over the town,
in which the gas lamps made only a little yellow ring. “I thought the
scene was gone at one moment, and expected you to be hissed.”

“Never!” cried Diane, for once thoroughly frightened. “But Jean, I
hate love scenes on the stage.”



CHAPTER III

THE SPLENDID EVENTS THAT HAPPENED AT BIENVILLE


The next day François duly presented himself at the palace at twelve
o’clock for breakfast with the Bishop. Much to his disgust, the General
was present. François, who loved to fool people, assumed an air and
tone of extreme virtue, and again told, with many additions, a pretty
story of his reverses and his determination to earn an honest living
by doing juggling and acrobating, the only things he knew how to do by
which a franc could be earned. The good Bishop was lost in admiration
of François, and said:

“That, my dear M. le Bourgeois, as you call yourself, is the highest
form of virtue and respectability, is it not, my brother?”

General Bion maintained a stiff silence, which annoyed the good Bishop
exceedingly.

The General meant to sit François out, not doubting that he would
contrive to borrow a small sum of money from the Bishop before leaving.
But François held his ground, as his ancestors had held theirs on many
a hard-fought field, and the General, called away by his military
duties, had to leave the wolf in conversation with the lamb. He left a
deputy, however, in the person of Mathilde, the Bishop’s housekeeper,
an angular and ferocious person of sixty, who disapproved of the
Bishop’s fondness for picking up stray acquaintances and lost dogs and
cats and giving them the hospitality of the palace.

When François and the Bishop were left alone in the Bishop’s study,
then François laid himself out to amuse his host. Soon he had the
Bishop roaring with laughter over jokes and merry stories, and at two
o’clock it was as much as François could do to tear himself away.

By the time he was out of the room Mathilde had stalked in and
proceeded to give the Bishop a piece of her mind.

“Does your Grace remember,” she asked wrathfully, “the last adventurer
your Grace took up with, who borrowed ninety francs of your Grace and
then skipped off to Paris?”

“Yes, my good Mathilde, I know,” responded the Bishop, using a soft
answer to turn away wrath. “But this gentleman, you see--for he is
a gentleman--belongs to a family which were exceedingly kind to my
family, and especially my father. He was a laborer upon the estates of
this gentleman’s father. Think of it!”

“That shows,” cried Mathilde, “what a good-for-nothing scamp he must
have been. Who ever saw a gentleman standing on his head, like this
fellow does, and playing tricks with cards? I kept my hand upon my
purse in my pocket all the time I was serving the General and your
Grace and this ragamuffin at breakfast.”

“Mathilde,” said the Bishop, trying to be stern, “I cannot permit you
to call a guest in my house a ragamuffin.”

“Then,” cried Mathilde, “I will give him his right name, and call him a
rapscallion!” And then she flounced out of the room, banging the door
after her.

The Bishop sighed. He was a celibate, and yet he was henpecked worse
than any man in Bienville.

François, listening outside, walked away laughing and resolving to pay
off Mathilde for knowing the truth about him.

Two days after that, François again met the Bishop face to face in
the street in front of the palace, and was warmly greeted. François,
eying the clock in the cathedral steeple, saw that it was ten minutes
of twelve, and remembering the history of Scheherezade and the Arabian
Nights, began telling his crack story to the Bishop. In the midst of it
came the bells announcing noon, and the odor of broiled chops from the
kitchen window of the old stone house known as the palace. The Bishop,
like other men, was subject to temptation, and he could not do without
the end of the story, and besides he had always that excellent excuse
that his father had been a laborer upon the estates of François’ father.

“Come in,” said the Bishop, “and have breakfast with me. My brother
will not be here.”

“Thank God,” replied François. “Now, if you could get rid of that old
battleaxe of a housekeeper while we are at breakfast, it would be
better still.”

“That I can’t do,” said the Bishop ruefully. “But after all, she is
a good creature, and my brother, the General, says it if were not for
Mathilde I would never have a sous in my pocket or a coat to my back.”

“He is probably right,” answered François, taking the Bishop by the arm
as they marched up the steps. “It is your cursed good nature that will
always be giving you trouble.”

François’ reception at the hands of Mathilde was a trifle more hostile
than before.

There are some tricks of legerdemain which can be played without the
aid of a confederate. In the midst of the breakfast, while François was
telling some of his best stories, the Bishop inadvertently took his
purse from his pocket with his handkerchief, and left the purse lying
on the table. When breakfast was over, the purse was missing.

Mathilde assumed an air of triumph, and the Bishop looked very
sheepish. At once a search wits begun, Mathilde shaking the cloth,
looking under the chair occupied by François, and doing everything
except rifling his pockets. The purse contained eighty francs, a large
sum for the poor Bishop, who lived from hand to mouth. In the hunt the
dining room soon looked as if a cyclone had struck it; drawers were
pulled open, chairs knocked about, and Mathilde watched François with a
hawk’s eye.

“That is a good bit of money to let lie around in the presence of a
servant,” said François, impudently. “Come now, you woman, haven’t you
got that purse in your pocket this moment?”

Mathilde, furious, thrust her hand into her own pocket where she
carried a handkerchief, a notebook, a large bunch of keys, a
prayer-book, a rosary, and a little figure of St. Joseph in a tin case,
and her own purse. But what she brought out of her pocket was the
Bishop’s purse. The Bishop laughed long and loud, and François laughed
louder than the Bishop.

After this was over, the Bishop invited François into the study.
François, in addition to telling some of his best stories, proceeded
to go through some of his most comic antics. The good Bishop laughed
until he cried, and excused himself on that ever excellent plea about
his father being a laborer on the estates of François’ father. Then
François went to a wheezy old piano in the room and began to play and
sing some simple old songs of the Bishop’s youth--the songs his mother
had sung to him in the laborer’s cottage in the meadows. Presently the
tears were trickling down the Bishop’s face.

“Go on, M. le Bourgeois,” he said tremulously. “I love those simple old
airs that take me back to my childhood when my good mother worked for
us all day, and then had the heart to sing to us in the evening. As
you sing, I can hear in my heart the tinkling of the cow-bells and the
sharp little cries of the birds under the thatched roof--for our roof
was only thatch, you remember. Oh, my mother, my dear, dear mother!
Her hands were hard with toil, her back was bent with hanging over
washing-tubs and the soup pot on the fire; but in Heaven I know she is
straight and soft of hand, and one day all her children will surround
her and pay her homage as if she, the peasant mother, were a queen!”

François continued to play soft chords, the Bishop listening and
sighing and smiling. Presently François heard from the Bishop’s big
chair a gentle snore. Then François, rising noiselessly, pulled off his
own shoes, which were cracked, and with professional sleight-of-hand
took off the Bishop’s new shoes, which he put on his own feet, and
then slipped his own shoes on the Bishop’s feet. There was a desk
in the room, and François scribbled on a piece of paper, “I would
have taken your Grace’s stockings, but they are cotton. If I were a
bishop, I would wear silk stockings. I hope your Grace will remedy this
impropriety, and in the future wear silk stockings worth the taking.”
This scrap of paper he pinned to the Bishop’s cassock, and went softly
out through a door opening on a balcony, from which he swung himself
down into the garden. As he walked along, he saw a row of beehives
on a bench. Stepping gently, he took off his coat and threw it over
a beehive, and then lifting it carried it out into the street. A
policeman stopped him, saying:

“What have you got there, my man?”

“A beehive,” replied François, “just out of a hothouse, and the bees
very active.”

The policeman suddenly backed off, and François marched away with his
beehive, which he subsequently threw over the stone wall around the
Bishop’s garden.

Meanwhile the Bishop waked, and reading the piece of paper, looked down
at his feet to find full confirmation of François’ words. In the midst
of it, Mathilde tore into the room.

“Well, your Grace,” bawled Mathilde, “what does your Grace think of
your rowdy friend now? He stole a beehive off the bench as he went by.
Pierre, the cobbler’s boy, was passing and saw him and told the cook
who told the footman who told me, and I went out, and the beehive is
gone! And look at your Grace’s feet! The wretch actually stole your
Grace’s shoes!”

“Why do you speak with such violence?” said the Bishop, loath to lose,
for a single pair of shoes and a beehive, the joy of François’ company.
“Suppose I meet a man whom I have known as a boy, when I was in very
humble circumstances and he was very high up in the world, and suppose
that man’s shoes are worn, and I choose to give him a good pair and
take his in return? Is that anybody’s business except my own? And
suppose I gave him the beehive by way of a joke, you know?”

“It would be exactly like your Grace,” snapped Mathilde. “But it was
the only good pair of shoes your Grace had in the world, and I shall
have to go out into the town immediately to buy your Grace another
pair.”

“Do,” said the Bishop, delighted to get rid of Mathilde on any terms.

When the door had slammed after the excellent Mathilde, the Bishop drew
a long sigh of relief.

“I did not tell a single lie,” he said to himself; “I merely stated a
hypothetical case. After all, the poor fellow needed the shoes, and he
turned it into a pleasantry. I owed him that much for the hearty laughs
he gave me, and for singing my mother’s old songs to me.”

The Bishop was always meeting François in the street after that; it was
as if François were lying in wait for him, and by the simple expedient
of beginning a good story, or intimating that he had a merry song, just
as they reached the gates of the Bishop’s palace, François could always
get a meal.

The affair of the purse had made Mathilde his mortal enemy, and she
complained to the General that the Bishop was giving scandal by having
that acrobat and juggler, François What’s-his-name, to breakfast at
the palace about three times a week. General Bion, who was punctilious
beyond any maiden lady in Bienville, felt it his duty to remonstrate
with his brother about having François so often at the palace.

“But, my brother,” mildly urged the Bishop, “you would not have me,
the son of our father, a laborer, uppish to the son of the Count
d’Artignac. And besides, François has a good heart, and I am trying to
bring him to penitence and to leave his present uncertain mode of life
and to settle down somewhere. I think he is very amenable to grace, and
I shall succeed in doing much with him. And then, he sings to me the
songs our mother sang--ah, me!”

The General was silenced for the time, but Mathilde gave him privately
some valuable information. It was true that whenever she came into
the study François was always talking about his soul, and his desire
to repent. But as soon as her back was turned she could hear sounds
of laughter--François was none too good to be laughing at her--and
sometimes she thought she heard the patter of feet, like dancing. It
could not be his Grace. If the General could pay an unexpected call
some day after François had breakfasted at the palace--

The General took the hint, and one day when he had seen François going
into the palace arm in arm with the Bishop, the General bided his time.
When he knew breakfast was over, he unceremoniously opened the door
of the Bishop’s study. Mathilde was close behind him. There sat the
Bishop in his great arm-chair, his hands crossed upon his waistcoat his
mouth open as if it were on hinges, while François, in a ballet costume
improvised from a table-cloth, was doing a beautiful skirt dance and
carolling at the top of his lungs one of the gayest of the music hall
songs. The entrance of the General was like a paralytic shock. The
Bishop forgot to close his mouth, and François stood with one leg in
the air.

“Good morning, brother,” said General Bion sarcastically. “So this is
bringing M. le Bourgeois to penitence and reforming his wandering life.
I am afraid he is laying up material for you as a penitent.”

The poor Bishop knew not where to look nor what to say, but François,
with unblushing impudence, ran behind the General, caught Mathilde in
his arms, and proceeded to do a high kicking waltz with her, in spite
of her screams and protests and fighting like a tiger. Not even the
General could stand that with gravity; he laughed in spite of himself.
After that day, when François breakfasted at the palace the General had
a way of dropping in, and there would be an audience of two instead of
one to the antics of François in the good Bishop’s study.

Meanwhile, things went on in the lodgings opposite the Hotel Metropole
without the slightest change. The Marquis still haunted the place,
and Diane still gave him rare interviews in the presence of Madame
Grandin. François chaffed her unmercifully about this prudery, but Jean
encouraged her.

“Don’t let that man see you alone,” said Jean sternly to Diane. “A
marquis and a cheap music-hall singer is a bad combination.”

“It is because you are jealous, Jean,” said Diane frankly, at which
Jean looked at her with an expression so piteous, so heartrending, in
his honest eyes, that even Diane was touched.

One afternoon about three weeks after Diane’s adventure in the maze
with the Marquis, it was the same sort of an afternoon, the white fog
from the river enveloping the town like a muslin veil, and making a
mysterious light that was neither day nor night, darkness nor light.

Diane, on going out for her walk, determined to live over that hour of
tumultuous joy in the maze, to indulge her imagination in the notion
that there she should meet the Marquis. She started out, therefore,
tripping lightly along, and made straight for the park. Once more she
entered the wide driveway, half veiled in the floating white mist,
and with an unerring instinct, she found the opening to the maze. As
she walked between the tall, green walls of the clipped cedars, she
felt a hand laid on her shoulder, and looking up, there was Egmont,
his military cap sitting, as ever, jauntily on his handsome head, his
cavalry cloak draped about him like the mantle of a young Greek.

“I caught sight of you as you came out of the house, and I followed
you here. Don’t you suppose that I have lived over in imagination the
half-hour we spent in this place? And then think how tantalizing it is
to sit up in that stuffy room and talk to you across the table in the
presence of that silly creature, Madame Grandin.”

“She isn’t silly, she is one of the best women-jugglers in the
profession,” answered Diane, loyal and illogical as ever.

There was no resisting him on the part of poor Diane, and presently
they were sitting on the bench together, Diane’s soft, cool cheek
resting against the Marquis’ mustache. Presently he said:

“Now, what do you suppose I followed you here for, besides these sweet
kisses? Your obstinacy has conquered at last. Will you be my wife,
Diane?”

Diane gave a great gasp, and before Egmont knew what she was doing, she
had slipped to the damp ground and was kneeling against him, weeping
and laughing.

“Do you mean it? Do you really mean it?” she was crying.

“Of course I mean it,” said the Marquis, lifting her up once more on
the bench beside him. “You are one of those women, Diane, who can make
their own terms with men.”

“I will never be the least trouble to you,” said Diane, still weeping;
“I never will be in your way; I will never utter a complaint. I know
what it means for you, but I will efface myself. I will go to live in a
hovel in the country if you like. All I ask is a little love.”

“That you shall have,” said the Marquis, kissing her red lips. “Not
a little, but an immense deal. And as for living in the country, it
is quite true, Diane, that you would be happier and better off living
quietly and out of sight for a while, until you learn how to be a
marquise. I am thirty years old, and I have no family, so there is no
one to protest. The chateau of Egmont is leased, because, to tell you
the truth, Diane, I am a poor man. But I have a little shooting-box an
hour from Bienville where you could live very comfortably, eh, Diane? A
little box of a house with a garden and lilac hedges around it, and a
summer-house and some trees and fields and a little river where I often
go to fish when I am off duty. Now if you were there--!”

The prospect was so dazzling to Diane that she had to close her eyes to
see the splendid vision, and her lips could only whisper:

“A summer-house, a lilac hedge! Oh, glory, glory! One maid will be
enough!”

When her first rapture of gratitude and joy was over, Diane, ever
practical, said trembling:

“I am willing to live quietly and never to bother you, but I want my
people, the Grandins and François and Jean, to know that I am really
married to you. I could not live--I could not live, if they don’t know
it.”

“Certainly,” answered the Marquis readily. “You see, I really belong
in the district where the shooting-box lies. My Colonel will ask me
questions, for an officer can’t get married on the sly, but trust me
to manage that. Let me see, I can get three days’ leave three weeks
from to-day; this is Saturday. You and I and Madame Grandin can go to
the little place and the civil and religious ceremonies can both be
performed the same day.”

“And M. Grandin and François and Jean can go too?” asked Diane
anxiously.

“What’s the use?” replied Egmont. “Grandin will be certain to talk
too much in that rumbling big voice of his, and create remark. As for
François and that great, hulking Jean, I object to them decidedly. You
will need two witnesses. Madame Grandin is one, and I can find another
at my place.”

Diane remained silent; a great lump was rising in her throat. But the
idea came into her mind, “This is the first thing he has asked me.
Shall I refuse him and make it unpleasant for him when he is doing me
the greatest honor in the world?”

They remained sitting on the bench and exchanging the sweet nothings of
lovers until the faint sound of the church bell again startled Diane,
when, as before, she rose and ran panting through the park and along
the streets until she reached the lodgings. Once more she found them
all at supper, and, as before, she sat pale and silent and eating no
supper, but her eyes were glorified. Jean looked at her with a heavy
heart; he knew without telling that she had seen the Marquis.

When supper was over, the table cleared away, and they were about
starting for the little music hall, Diane, looking about her, said in
her most dramatic manner:

“Listen, all of you. I said I knew something splendid would befall me
in Bienville. It has come this afternoon. The Marquis Egmont de St.
Angel asked me to marry him, to become his wife, to be a marquise. Oh,
how glad I was!”

Madame Grandin clasped Diane in her arms, while Grandin sank on a
chair overwhelmed with the magnificence of the thing. Neither Jean nor
François spoke.

“I shall maintain a dignified silence with the reporters,” said
Grandin, “and refuse to say a word upon the subject of whether Diane is
to marry the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel or not. But I shall meanwhile
write a circumstantial account of everything, mentioning all our names
as frequently as possible, and send it to all the Paris newspapers,
anonymously of course.”

François threw himself back in another chair and laughed uproariously.

“I always said, Skinny,” he cried, “that you were the most obstinate,
pig-headed, impudent, determined creature that was ever on this planet.
Here you have actually bullied a marquis into making you an offer of
marriage!”

Jean, almost as pale as Diane, spoke composedly:

“I wish you happiness, Diane,” he said. “Now, tell us all about it.”

“We are to be married this day three weeks,” said Diane. “When I think
of it I am so happy I feel as if I could fly. The Marquis has a little
shooting-box an hour from here, and we are to drive there, the Marquis
and I and Madame Grandin. She will be one of my witnesses, and the
Marquis will provide the other. The civil and religious ceremonies will
both take place the same day. The Marquis says his colonel will take a
hand in the business, but that he can manage that.”

A slight chill fell upon all present. Diane, realizing it, blushed and
felt every inch a traitor. Then Jean spoke:

“It seems to me, Diane,” he said, “that you ought to have some man
friend with you, M. Grandin, for example. Not that _I_ wish to go. Oh,
no, not for a moment!”

As Jean said these words, his strong, clean-shaven face was distorted
for an instant. Everybody knew that he least of any one in the world
wished to see Diane married to another man.

“Diane is a quick study,” said François, laughing, “but it will take
her all of three weeks to learn her part as a marquise. It is the best
joke I ever heard--a joke on her, and on my cousin the Marquis, and on
all of us!”

“I left it all to him,” said Diane, bursting into tears. “I could not
find fault with him when he was doing me the greatest honor in the
world, and he a marquis. And then,” she continued, recovering herself
and speaking boldly, “I am as good as twelve men and a boy, anyhow to
take care of myself.”

“Oh, it’s all right,” broke in Madame Grandin, cheerfully. “Marquises
have their own way of doing things quite different from people like
ourselves. The thing is, now, to get some one in Diane’s place and
rehearse her so she can appear this night three weeks.”

At that Diane wept afresh. There was a strange shock in the thought
of some one else in her place; she began to realize the tremendous
dislocation of her life which was coming. This feeling grew upon her
as she entered the little music hall, and she acted her part with
extraordinary power, born of her beating heart, the tension of her soul.

When the performance was over, and she was putting on her hat in the
little canvas den, she found herself trembling and weeping a little,
and called to Jean in the next den, and he came to her.

“Oh, Jean!” she said, “think, in three weeks it will be the last time
that I shall ever step upon the stage again! It will be the last time
that I shall ever see those hundreds of eyes full of interest in me,
and good will! It will be the last time that I shall make up and wear
funny little short skirts, showing my ankles that are so nice! And
I do so love to show my ankles! And it will be the last time that I
shall ever see any of you as Diane, your fellow-player! After that, I
shall be a marquise, the happiest person in the world, no doubt, but I
shall never feel quite at ease with any of you again. I shall always
be watching and thinking that I am being too kind to you or not kind
enough. Oh, Jean!”

And then Diane did a strange thing for the happiest person in the
world; she burst into a passion of tears.

“It’s enough to make you cry,” answered Jean stolidly. “You are being
removed from one world into another. In our stage world everything
goes right, and the villain is always punished before the curtain
comes down. That’s why it is the theatre is a necessity of life; it
represents the ideal world where the sinner always repents and is
forgiven, and where lovers are always united in the end, and where the
scoundrel is paid in full. We, who live in this ideal world, find the
real world very dull in comparison.”

“That’s why, I suppose, I feel so badly about leaving the stage. But I
never thought of anything to-day, when I felt Egmont’s arms around me
and his lips were upon mine.”

Jean gave a strangled cry, and sat down heavily on the box which was
the only seat in the little den.

“A man can’t stand everything, Diane!” he cried desperately. “In the
name of God, don’t tell me anything more like that!”

“You mustn’t take it so hard, Jean,” said Diane, drying her eyes.
“After all, I am only one woman out of millions and millions of them,
and you are so nice and so good and act and sing so well, I am sure you
could marry some girl much higher up in the profession than I am. And
then, everybody has a thorn in the heart. Come, let us start home. The
Marquis does not need to dog my steps now.”

The Grandins had already left, and Diane walked home between François,
who joined them outside, and Jean. François called her Madame la
Marquise, and made all sorts of good-natured fun of her. Jean was glum
and silent.

When the two men parted with Diane on the landing and went up to their
garret, their beds separated only with a canvas curtain, François
slapped Jean on the back, and said:

“Never mind, old man! It’s easy enough to forget a woman.”

Jean turned on François a look of contempt.

Jean undressed quickly and laid down upon his hard bed, but not to
sleep. He would not give François a chance to gibe at him next day
about a sleepless night, and so lay rigidly still in the blackness of
the long, low-ceiled garret.

He knew when it was one o’clock by the sound across the street of
the closing of the Hotel Metropole, the banging of shutters, and the
barring of gates. By some strange psychic intimation he knew that
François, although perfectly quiet, was as wide awake as he. Presently,
he heard strange sounds from the other side of the canvas partition,
something like suppressed sobs and groans. Jean, thinking François was
ill, drew aside a corner of the canvas at the end. François was huddled
in a heap on the floor, clasping his knees and rocking back and forth,
while strangled sobs and smothered cries burst from him. Jean, abashed,
returned to his own bed.

The next morning, a bouquet of roses and a little note arrived from
the Marquis. This gave unalloyed happiness to two persons--Diane and
Grandin.

“A bouquet for a lady in my company from a marquis!” cried Grandin.
“It’s enough to make a man mad with joy!”

Before breakfast Diane sallied forth, and came back bringing a book on
etiquette which she immediately proceeded to study diligently.

When they all assembled for the twelve o’clock dinner, Diane could
scarcely be torn away from her book.

“You see,” she said to the assembled table, “I have got to learn how to
behave like a marquise--and all in three weeks.”

“_You_ behave like a marquise!” said Jean, somewhat rudely, and
laughing. “You will be about as comfortable as a mackerel in a gravel
walk! Excuse me, Diane.”

“Yes, I will excuse you,” said Diane, serenely. “You have been so good
to me for so long, and now I have but eighteen more performances with
you.”

Her lips trembled a little at this, but she quickly resumed:

“The book says that a girl must never see her fiancé alone, and a
fiancé should not call oftener than twice a week. That I shall arrange,
and Madame Grandin will stay with me.”

At this, even Jean laughed.

“How about your trousseau, my dear?” asked François, “especially your
court costumes?”

“That will have to come later,” replied Diane. “I shall be so busy
seeing the Marquis, and studying up this book, and trying to help you
with the new girl that I sha’n’t have time to get a regular trousseau.
Besides, I don’t want to spend as much as three hundred and four
francs, which I have now, in a hurry. It is a great deal of money, and
I must think over it and look well about before I spend it. I have
my nice white muslin trimmed with lace at fifteen sous the yard, and
I can wash and iron it so beautifully it will look like new. I shall
be obliged to buy a wedding veil and wreath, but, by looking around a
little, I think I can get one for five or six francs. How amusing it
will be when I am a marquise thinking about these things!”

Grandin set on foot plans to secure a young lady in Diane’s place.
In this, he was immediately rewarded, and succeeded in getting
Mademoiselle Rose le Roi, as she called herself, a strapping young
woman, blonde and beautiful, and as tall as Jean, and exactly the
opposite of Diane in every respect. In this, lay a pain new and
sharp for Diane. She had hoped that Mademoiselle le Roi would prove
excessively stupid. On the contrary, the young woman turned out to be
very bright.

No one knows the meaning of pain who has not suffered jealousy. The
iron entered into Diane’s soul when she overheard Grandin saying to his
wife that the new girl would soon be as good an actress as Diane, and
was much handsomer, which was the truth. And everybody was so taken up
with rehearsing Mademoiselle Rose; Diane felt herself already thrust
out from that ideal world of the stage which to her was the real world.
True, the anticipated joy of being married to the man she adored lost
none of its delicious charm, its soft seductiveness, but with it was
mingled much real suffering, and a strange and awful dislocation of
life.

In those three weeks, Diane was so torn by powerful emotions of all
sorts, love, pain, grief, jealousy, fear, triumph, and a thousand other
minor things, that she neither ate nor slept, and grew even thinner
than ever. And Mademoiselle Rose was so fresh and fair! Nevertheless,
Diane’s acting did not suffer. On the contrary, like the poor princess
who had burning needles in her shoes, Diane was keyed up to do better
work than ever in her life. Never had been her comedy so good. Off
the stage, she had no more humor than a cat; on the stage, she could
throw an audience into spasms of merriment. Her voice, too, had in it a
celestial thrill that made her little songs move to laughter or bring
to tears as never before.

The Marquis was often at the music hall in those evenings, and Diane
unconsciously played directly at him.

Every night, as she made up before her little scrap of a mirror in the
canvas den, she would think to herself, as a condemned person thinks of
the day of execution:

“There are but ten more nights for me.”

And the next night:

“There are but nine left.”

As to the Marquis’ visits, which Diane rigidly fixed at two a week, and
had her own way about it, as she always did, they, like everything else
in the extraordinary time, were full of joy and pain. First, was the
joy of being with him, of hearing his delightful voice, and seeing him
in his beautiful uniform, and the stupendous triumph of it all to her.

At these visits, Madame Grandin, frightened half to death, was always
present. Diane invariably rose in a stately manner at the end of half
an hour--her book of etiquette prescribed that--and the Marquis, acting
just as the book said all fiancés should, complained bitterly of being
turned out, and promised reprisals.

It was a strange time to all who were drawn within the whirlpool of
emotion that dashed them around in a circle of agitation, stunned
and amazed them, made them to be envied and pitied, and in short, as
François said, they were exhibited as the puppets of the great God.



CHAPTER IV

THE BRIDAL VEIL


The Grandins were perfectly satisfied with Mademoiselle Rose, to
Diane’s infinite chagrin. This reconciled them to Diane’s marriage,
which, of course, overwhelmed them with its splendor. Grandin let
his imagination loose, and told so many lies about the Marquis’
shooting-box, which was magnified first into a large country house,
then into a chateau, and finally into a mediæval castle, that he really
came to believe the story himself. In vain Madame Grandin corrected him
and pointed out amiably that he was lying. But Madame Grandin herself
grew capable of believing anything when she saw a real, live marquis
sitting in a chair discussing wedding plans with Diane.

Jean Leroux plodded about in the daytime, and at night, like Diane,
would say to himself:

“There are but ten more nights; there are but nine more nights.”

Alas, like her, the storm and stress of feeling improved his acting.
He conceived a hatred of the innocent and buxom Rose le Roi, and
began to dread the idea of making stage love to her. Being an honest
fellow, however, he kept this to himself, although in his own mind he
called the tall, handsome Rose a great bouncing lummux, and about as
impressionable as a Normandy heifer.

François was the only one of them who behaved unconcernedly, or who
laughed during those three weeks. He chaffed Diane remorselessly, but
always with good nature, and offered to provide her with a pedigree
as long as that of the Marquis, and advised her to return to what he
declared was the original spelling of her name, D’Orian, and boldly
proclaim herself a scion of that noble house. The family, he declared,
antedated the Cæsars, and was founded shortly after Romulus and Remus,
and asserted that the planet Aurania was named for Diane’s ancestors.
At these jokes, all would once have laughed; now, nobody thought them
amusing except François himself.

François breakfasted with the Bishop several times in those tumultuous
days, and on every occasion, as Mathilde sardonically remarked to the
Bishop, something mysteriously disappeared. A handsome muffler of the
Bishop’s apparently evaporated, also an excellent umbrella, and several
other useful trifles.

“But,” said the Bishop, boldly, to Mathilde, “suppose I gave that scarf
to M. le Bourgeois? I never liked it. And as for the umbrella--well,
it stood in the anteroom and may have disappeared in any one of a
hundred ways, and an umbrella is like innocence--once lost, it is never
recovered. Why are you so suspicious, Mathilde? And besides, do you
think I can forget that my father was a laborer on the estates of--”

“So your Grace has told me a thousand times,” rudely interrupted
Mathilde, flinging out of the room.

The Bishop winked softly to himself; as usual, he had merely suggested
a hypothetical case. He knew as well as Mathilde where the scarf and
the umbrella and the rest of the things went.

Even the General succumbed to François’ charms to the extent of ten
francs which François asked as a temporary assistance.

“Because,” as François said, “you know the proverb--‘God is omnipotent,
but money is His first lieutenant.’ Virtue cannot secure a man from
poverty--else, would I be lending money instead of borrowing it.”

General Bion promptly handed out the ten francs, and as promptly put it
down in his notebook under the head of “Charity.”

The Bishop, by way of excusing himself for listening to François’ songs
and jokes and watching his delicious antics, began to urge François
quite seriously to repent and confess. At this François balked.

“If I should do that, your Grace,” he said, “I would commit the only
one of the sins in the calendar of which I have not had experience;
this is hypocrisy. I don’t repent of anything I ever did except one
thing. The other sins I repented when I was caught.”

“François,” cried the Bishop, scandalized, “after what you have
admitted to me that you have done! And what, pray, is the only sin that
troubles your conscience?”

“Once,” said François, “I saw a young lady, an actress now in our
company, who is soon to be married, dressing in her dressing-room at
the theatre, and I looked at her in her unsunned loveliness for about
two seconds. I am very sorry for that.”

“It was indeed wicked, gross, beyond words,” said the Bishop. “But
there are other wicked things.”

“The others,” said François, grinning, “were merely sins against
myself. I think I have been remarkably free from injuring other
persons.”

The Bishop could not concede this, and delivered a long lecture to
François. In return for it, François did some of his best stunts with
only the Bishop as audience, and then going to the wheezy old piano
played and sang some of the old songs which always made the tears rain
upon the Bishop’s gentle face.

On the Thursday night was Diane’s last performance, as it was desired
that Mademoiselle Rose should make her début before the Saturday night,
when they always had the biggest audience of the week.

No prisoner dressing for the guillotine ever felt more acutely that
he was crossing the bridge between two worlds than did Diane on the
Thursday night. That night she would dwell for the last time in the
world where lovers were always true and the villain was always punished
in public. Beyond, in the other world, lay Paradise, but it was
unfamiliar. That day she had seen the Marquis for the last time until
she and Madame Grandin were to step in the carriage which the Marquis
was to send for them on the Saturday morning, and go out to the village
near the shooting-box where the wedding was to take place in the
village church. Diane had begged the Marquis to remain away from the
music hall that night. She said to him in Madame Grandin’s presence:

“If I see you, and even think you are in the audience, I shall break
down; I can never go through my part, and I shall be forever disgraced.”

“How ridiculous!” cried the Marquis, laughing. “What difference can
it make to you now that you are to become the Marquise Egmont de St.
Angel?”

Diane made no reply; she could not make any one understand, who had
not lived in the ideal world, what it meant to disgrace one’s self in
public by breaking down. Madame Grandin said, however:

“That is true. But how can a marquis understand common people like you
and me, Diane?”

Everything was ready; the white muslin, nicely washed and ironed, was
in Diane’s chest of drawers. The wedding veil and wreath of orange
blossoms, which had cost all of ten francs, lay on top of the wedding
gown, carefully wrapped in tissue paper. That wedding veil was floating
before Diane’s eyes just as a poor mortal, leaving this world which he
loves and all the people in it, sees the silvery cloud that masks the
gates of pearl leading to Paradise. All the time, whether on the stage
or off, she was saying to herself:

“It is the last time, the last, the last, the last.”

And all the others said the same:

“It is the last time, Diane.”

The Grandins drove a knife into Diane’s heart by adding:

“But we expect to do just as well with Mademoiselle Rose.”

Even Jean, the taciturn, said:

“Think of it, Diane, after to-night we shall never act together any
more! To-morrow you will be a different person, and Saturday you will
have a different name and be living in a different world.”

“But I will never change, Jean, while I live,” cried Diane,
tremulously. “I will always run to meet you when you come to see me.”

They were both off the stage for two minutes while they were speaking.

“But I sha’n’t come to see you,” said Jean. “Good night will be good-by
for me.”

François’ reminders were totally different.

“I sha’n’t expect to be noticed by you after you are a marquise,” he
said. “My family is not as ancient as that of the Egmont de St. Angel,
although we are related, and my ancestors fought with Philippe le Bel.
But the Marquis’ family were ennobled before mine, and as for you--good
God! we are all parvenus when compared with the D’Orian family, going
back to Romulus and Remus.”

This made Diane laugh a little, but it did not loosen the clutch of
something like the hand of fate upon her heart, and she frankly burst
out crying when François added:

“Nobody will ever dare to call you Skinny again.”

Diane, when she wiped the grease paint off that night, washed her face
with her tears.

Madame Grandin suggested that she leave her make-up and little mirror
for Mademoiselle Rose, as they represented several francs, but Diane
would neither give them nor sell them to her successor, and jealously
carried every scrap of her belongings back to her lodging.

All night she lay in her little white bed staring at the winter sky
through the window, and at a mocking, grinning moon that obstinately
refused to leave the sky until day was breaking, a pallid, wet, and
dreary day. As soon as it was light, Diane slipped out of bed and went
to the chest of drawers and took a look at the wedding veil and wreath.
It seemed to her as if she had spent a night of agony, and that the
sight of that veil and the memory of Egmont’s kisses were all that
could solace the strange passion of regret that possessed her.

Diane contrived to busy herself the whole morning through. It did not
take her long to pack up her small wardrobe, but she could not persuade
herself to sit down in splendid idleness like a true marquise, but went
to work in the kitchen, cleaning out presses and boxes, anything, in
short, to keep her at work. Even that was the last time she would have
the privilege of cleaning up a kitchen.

The Grandins were very much taken up with Mademoiselle Rose at the
music hall, and Jean and François were assisting in rehearsing the
newcomer.

At the midday dinner Mademoiselle Rose was present, and received,
so Diane thought in the bitterness of her heart, entirely too much
attention. In the midst of the dinner a magnificent bouquet for Diane
arrived from the Marquis with a letter sealed with a crest. It seemed
to Diane during that meal that the storm of conflicting emotions
reached its height; she felt herself to be the most triumphant and the
most humiliated of women, the most reluctant and the most eager of
brides, wretched beyond words, elated beyond expression, miserable,
happy, and utterly bewildered.

In the afternoon a fog came up, cold and white, and Diane was thinking
of once more going to the park and seeking in the maze of clipped
cedars the spot where she had known a tumult of joy. As she stood
looking out of the window of her little room, an omnibus passed and
stopped. From it descended a lady and a little girl who came straight
to the door and pulled the bell. Steps were heard ascending the stairs,
and a knock came at Diane’s door. When she opened it, the lady--for she
was unmistakably that, in spite of the shabbiness of her attire--walked
in unceremoniously, holding by the hand the little girl, and, turning,
locked and bolted the door behind her. Then, throwing back her veil,
she said in a smooth and composed voice:

“This, I believe is Mademoiselle Diane Dorian?”

Diane bowed, and her quick eye took in the appearance of her guest.
She was a woman of thirty, and had once been pretty and even now was
interesting, but sallow and thin like a person recovering from an
illness. The little girl, too, who was about six years old, was as
pale as a snowdrop, and sank rather than sat upon a little stool,
leaning her head against her mother’s knee, who sat down at once.

“Pray excuse me,” said the newcomer, “but I am very tired with
travelling, and I am not strong.”

“Can I do anything for you?” asked Diane with ready sympathy, and
advancing as if to take the child’s hand.

The visitor held up one hand and put the other around the child as if
to ward off Diane.

“Wait,” she said, “let me tell you who I am. I am the wife of the
Marquis Egmont de St. Angel, and this is his child. Here is my wedding
ring.”

She drew off a small and shabby glove, and handed a plain gold ring to
Diane. Inside of it was clearly legible, “F. E. de St. A. and E. F”
with a date seven years back. Then the wife of the Marquis de St. Angel
took from her breast a large locket containing three miniatures painted
on the same piece of ivory. One face was her own, another was that of
Egmont de St. Angel, and the third was the baby face of the little
child. On the back were engraved their names.

Diane handed both the ring and the locket back to the wife of the man
she loved, and stood motionless for a moment. Then she reeled and fell
upon the bed. The silence in the room was unbroken for five minutes
except for the coughing of the pale little child. But Diane had not
a drop of coward’s blood in her body. At the end of five minutes she
rose, and, drawing up a chair, said:

“Tell me all about it, please.”

“We were married,” said the wife of Egmont, “seven years ago in
Algeria, where my husband was stationed. We disagreed as a husband
and wife will disagree when the husband learns to hate the wife and
forgets his child. I was willing to remain in Algeria in a very quiet,
small place suited to my limited means, and the climate was good for my
child, Claire. The Marquis, you know, is head over ears in debt, so it
was easier for me in my position to be poor in Algeria than in France.
I called myself Madame Egmont. He often proposed a divorce, and I as
often refused and offered to return to France, although I did not wish
to come, because it suited me in every way to remain in Algeria. Some
weeks ago I heard that he professed to have got a divorce from me, and
would marry a music-hall singer. I came home at once. But I was ill on
the way and could not travel for a few days after landing. I found out,
no matter how, that you were the woman he proposed to marry. I found
out, also, that his conduct in other ways has been such that he will
soon be dismissed from the army, so that I suppose he was willing to
take desperate chances, for he is a desperate man, you may believe.”

“I do believe,” answered Diane. “And I promise you that I will see him
but once again, and that is to-morrow morning when he comes to take me
away--but he will not take me.”

The two women talked in an ordinary key and with strange calmness.

“How could you fail to suspect the Marquis?” said Madame Egmont. “Have
you no friends to advise you?”

“Oh, I have very good friends. But we are very humble people--except
one of us--and we don’t understand great people.”

“I shall remain here,” said Madame Egmont, “in this town for some
days, until I can see my husband’s colonel--I want to save the name my
child bears. Besides, I am not really able to travel--”

She rose as she spoke, and then, suddenly turning an ashy white, fell
over in a dead faint in Diane’s arms. Diane, who was strong and supple
despite her slimness, carried Madame Egmont like a child and laid her
on the bed, Diane’s own bed, and loosened her clothes and did promptly
what is to be done for a woman in a faint. The frightened child began
to cry, and the sound seemed to bring back Madame Egmont’s wandering
consciousness. Diane picked up the child and placed her on the bed, and
then ran and fetched a glass of wine for Madame Egmont.

“If I had a bit of bread,” she whispered.

A light broke upon Diane’s mind. She ran back into the little kitchen,
started up the fire, and put some broth on it to warm; then rummaging
in the cupboard she found some milk which she heated, too.

In ten minutes she walked in the room with a tray. Madame Egmont,
sitting up in the little bed, ate her broth and bread, while Diane fed
the child sitting in her lap. Then laying the little girl in the bed by
the side of her mother, Diane took out a fresh night-dress, and going
up to Madame Egmont proceeded unceremoniously to undress her.

“What do you mean?” asked Madame Egmont, weak and bewildered.

“I mean,” said Diane, “that neither you nor this child are in any
condition to leave this house to-night, and that you are to sleep in my
bed, and I will make a comfortable place on the sofa with pillows for
Claire, and you shall stay here, and I will take care of you until you
are able to leave--for you are the best friend I ever had in my life.”

Madame Egmont suddenly put down her spoon, and covering her face with
her hands, burst into wild weeping, crying meanwhile:

“I thought that you would not care, that you would have my husband on
any terms, and now--”

“The broth is getting cold, and the child is getting frightened,”
interrupted Diane with authority. “Now pray behave yourself, and stop
crying, and let me put the child to bed.”

Madame Egmont did not stop crying at once, but Diane, drawing up the
sofa to the other side of the bed, proceeded to make with pillows and
covers ruthlessly taken from Madame Grandin’s stores, a comfortable
little nest for the child. She then proceeded to put a dressing-sack
of her own on the little Claire, by way of a night-dress, and bundled
her up in bed, where she gave her more hot milk. Next, she started to
make a fire in the little fireplace. The wood was sullen, however, and
would not go off at once. Diane, opening the drawer in the bureau, took
out the wedding veil and wreath, and thrusting them into the fireplace,
a cheerful, ruddy blaze sprang up immediately. Madame Egmont laughed
softly at Diane’s action.

Kindness and warmth and food worked a miracle in Madame Egmont and the
child. Madame Egmont lay in bed, calm and resigned; she was a feeble
creature physically, not strong and robust like Diane, and the limit of
her struggles was reached for the time.

As for the little girl, she lay quite happy and peaceful and dozed off
into a soft sleep.

“Now,” said Diane, “you shall stay here as long as you wish. I claim
one more interview with your husband at which I shall treat him not
as a fine lady like you would treat him, but as an honest girl, a
music-hall singer, would. I promise you I shall make him sad and sorry.”

Something like the ghost of a smile came to the pale lips of Madame
Egmont at this frank admission of the social gulf between them.

“I am going out now,” said Diane, “but I will come back at seven
o’clock and bring you a good supper, and make you both comfortable for
the night.”

Madame Egmont held out her arms.

“I can’t kiss you,” she said, “because I know my husband has kissed
you, but you may kiss my child.”

The two women looking into each other’s eyes understood perfectly;
Madame Egmont, in giving Diane permission to press her fresh, red lips
to the cheek of the little snowdrop of a child, was being accorded the
greatest honor that one woman may accord another.

“I thank you,” said Diane, “from the bottom of my heart,” as she
kneeled by the sofa and took the child in her arms and kissed her.

It was five o’clock, and the fog was increasing every moment, but
something stronger than herself drove Diane at full speed toward the
maze in the dusky park. She did not want to face the Grandins and
François and Jean, and especially Mademoiselle Rose, until she was
obliged to do so.

At supper, which was at six o’clock, the party missed Diane. As it
was the first night of Mademoiselle Rose’s appearance, they were all
rather hurried, and made no search for Diane, expecting her to appear
at every moment. Just as they were about to rise from the table, Diane
walked in. Her face was flushed, her eyes brilliant. She had to make a
terrible confession, but, with the undying instinct of an actress, she
meant to do it in the most dramatic manner possible.

“Listen, all of you,” she said; “the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel is a
scoundrel, a criminal. He has already a wife and child that are now in
this house. Just wait until to-morrow morning when he comes to take me
to the village that we may be married--Ha, ha!”

Her laugh, studied and rippling like an actress’s, made Jean’s blood
run cold.

“Ask me no questions, and I will tell you no lies,” she added. No one
spoke, except Madame Grandin, who, after a gasp, said that it was well
Diane had found it out in time.

Mademoiselle Rose looked a trifle uneasy. She thought that Diane might
want her old place back again. Diane knew this by clairvoyance.

“Don’t be alarmed, Mademoiselle,” said Diane, who considered the
innocent Rose as her worst enemy next the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel.

“I can get an engagement in Paris without the slightest difficulty.
When you come back from the theatre, Grandin, please to go to your room
the other way, because I shall have to sleep on the sofa here to-night.
The wife and child of the Marquis are in my room. To-morrow I shall be
gone.”

They all were stunned and dazed, but governed by the iron discipline of
the stage which required them in five minutes to be in their canvas
dressing-rooms, rose to go.

“I always told you I was ashamed to own the Marquis as a cousin,” said
François after a moment.

“But the advertisement is not utterly lost,” bellowed Grandin. “I only
hope Mademoiselle Rose will have an adventure with a marquis.”

“Oh,” cried Madame Grandin, reproachfully, to her husband, “you always
think of advertising first! Well, Diane expected something great to
happen at Bienville, and I am sure something great _has_ happened.”

Only Jean lingered a moment as he passed Diane, his strong face working
in agitation.

“I will kill him, Diane!” he said.

“Oh, no!” cried Diane, catching him by the sleeve, “that would be doing
him a service. And besides, it would cost your life. No, leave him to
me; I will do much worse than kill him.”

Jean went out, and Diane, taking off her hat and cloak, busied herself
with arranging a little supper on a tray for Madame Egmont and the
child. She took it in, stirred up the fire once more, and lighted a
softly shaded lamp. Madame Egmont made no fresh protests of gratitude,
but her eyes were eloquent, and the little girl clung to Diane. Warmth
and food and attendance were luxuries to the wife and child of the
Marquis Egmont de St. Angel.

The next morning at ten o’clock a handsome livery carriage drove up to
the door, and the Marquis in ordinary morning dress got out and came
upstairs. He knocked gayly at the door of the little sitting-room, and
Diane’s clear voice called out:

“Come in.”

The Marquis entered, and, instead of seeing Diane in bridal array,
found her wearing her ordinary black morning gown, and sitting by the
table with a basket of stockings before her which she was darning
industriously. He started in surprise, and said:

“What is the meaning of this, Diane? I have come for you and Madame
Grandin.”

“I am not going to be married to-day,” responded Diane, coolly, holding
up a stocking to the light and clipping a thread; “I have changed my
mind.”

The Marquis stood in stunned surprise for a few moments, then gradually
an angry flush overspread his handsome face, and he shouted:

“What do you mean? This is the most extraordinary conduct I have ever
known.”

“Not half as extraordinary as yours,” answered Diane, still darning
away diligently.

“I demand an explanation,” replied the Marquis, violently. “I do not
choose to be treated in this manner.”

Diane finished a pair of stockings, smoothed them out, rolled them up
carefully, laid her sewing implements in the basket, and taking from
her pocket the locket of the Marquis and his wife and child, showed it
to him.

The face of Egmont de St. Angel changed to a deadly pallor.

“That woman,” he said, “was my wife, but she disappeared in Algeria,
and I have not seen her or heard of her for seven years, so that I have
a legal right to presume that she is dead.”

“Oh, what a terrible lie you are telling!” answered Diane. “You have
heard from her in the last year, but you thought she was out of the way
in Algeria. And I don’t think now that you ever really meant to marry
me.”

Here was the chance of the Marquis. He smiled and answered:

“Well, I was doing you a great honor in taking up with you on any
terms.”

He had remained standing, and Diane rose, too, and went toward the
bedroom door of Madame Grandin. She opened it suddenly, and Madame
Grandin, who had been on her knees listening at the keyhole, tumbled
into the room, but speedily got up on her feet. Behind her were
Grandin, François, and Jean.

Then Diane turned, and, walking back to the Marquis, lifted up her
strong, young hand and gave him a terrible blow on the cheek.

The Marquis, stunned with surprise, staggered back, then, recovering
himself, advanced with his fist uplifted. The gaze of the man and woman
met, hate and fury in the eyes of the Marquis, fury and hate in those
of Diane.

Meanwhile, the Grandins, François, and Jean had all burst into a
concerted stage laugh.

“Come now, my dear Marquis of the Holy Angels!” cried François; “you
haven’t done the handsome thing, I must say, and this young lady has
served you right.”

Jean said nothing at all, but making a lunge toward the Marquis,
collared him and threw him on the floor. Then with his knee on the
Marquis’s chest, Jean thumped and pounded his enemy.

Diane stood by, laughing and clapping her hands. The Marquis was a
strong and lithe young man, but Jean, a maniac in his rage, was a match
for two of him. In the end he had to be dragged off the Marquis, who
tottered to his feet, wiped the blood off his face, and made some vague
threats. But he was evidently in the house of his enemies.

“You shall pay for this, every one of you!” he shouted; “I will call
you all as witnesses to this assault.”

“Do!” cried François; “I will go before the police and swear that you
struck this young lady and were threatening to kill her, and were only
prevented by Jean Leroux holding you, and that you have made threats
against the lives of all of us. Of course, the whole affair will come
before your colonel, and then we shall see what we shall see. And by
the way, don’t ask me to supper with you any more, for I wouldn’t be
seen with a low dog like you. And in particular, I disown you as a
relative.”

There was nothing for it but for the Marquis to leave. He got
downstairs as best he could, limping, with no look whatever of a
bridegroom, slipped into the carriage, and was driven away.

Jean then went to wash off the stains of his encounter, and Diane
disappeared.

François ran off to tell the story to the good Bishop, who dearly loved
gossip.

When they met for dinner at noon, Diane was not present, but on the
table lay a letter addressed to Madame Grandin. It read:

“Dear Madame Grandin: I thank you and Monsieur Grandin for all your
kindness to me, and I thank François for teaching me to act, and Jean
for teaching me to sing and being always good to me. I don’t know how
I can live without all of you, but I cannot face you after what has
happened. I shall be far away when you read this. Take care of the lady
and the little girl in my room until they are able to go away. You will
find one hundred and fifty-two francs in the cupboard in the kitchen,
and I want you to use that for them and buy a plenty of milk for the
little child. Don’t tell them where it comes from; I think they are
very badly off for money. Oh, Madame Grandin! truly, there is a thorn
in every heart, but--”

Here the sheet was blotted apparently with tears, but at the bottom was
scribbled the signature, “Diane Dorian.”



CHAPTER V

THE DELUGE


One brilliant afternoon in July, five years later, all Paris went
crazy. Vast multitudes surged through the streets cheering, laughing,
shouting, singing, for were not the days of glory to be repeated? War
was declared on Prussia, and, after more than fifty years, the eagles
of France were to take their majestic course across the Rhine; again
the soldiers of France were to bivouac in every capital in Europe, for
once started upon the path of conquest, France has ever been impossible
to stop, so thought everybody in Paris that July day.

The streets were like great rivers of humanity, with wild whirlpools
and clamoring cataracts, all drifting toward the ocean, and that
ocean was the Palace of the Tuilleries. Bands rent the air with the
Marseillaise, the great battle hymn of liberty. Often wrested to
unworthy purposes, often sung and played by those who hate liberty and
love anarchy, the mighty hymn ever remained the battle-cry of those
who would be free. Troops were marching along, splendid hussars and
chasseurs trotting gayly through the sunlit streets, steady, red-legged
infantry swinging along to their barracks, Zouaves in baggy trousers
and hanging caps sauntered and swaggered. Officers clattered along
joyously as they made a brilliant streak of color in the great river
of men and women. Everywhere a uniform was seen a ringing cheer went
up from men and women, young and old, palpitating with pride and joy
in these men called to repeat the glories of their ancestors. As the
Emperor had said, whatever road they took across the frontier they
would find glorious traces of their fathers. Wherever the French had
crossed in days past, they had left a trail of glory behind them.

Many groups of soldiers loitered along the streets, or stopped to
laugh and joke on the street comers. Men clapped them on the back,
and handsome young women smiled and waved their hands at them, and
gray-haired grandmothers blessed them. Great ladies in their carriages
stopped and laughed and talked with private soldiers; even the beggars
forgot to beg, and hobnobbed with everybody. A beggar was as good as
the best, provided only he were French.

All was sunshine, a splendor of hope, magnificence, joy. Once more
France would “gird her beauteous limbs with steel,” and smite with her
mailed hand those who would oppress her.

What were her resources? Every man who could carry a musket. What
was her matériel? All the iron, all the steel, all the lead, all the
gunpowder in France. What were her soldiers? Heroes, backed up by all
her old men, her children, her maidens, and her matrons.

The crowd was most dense in the splendid open space before the
Tuilleries gardens, and extended for a long distance on either side of
the palace. The air was drenched with perfume from the gardens; the
river ran red like wine, in the old Homeric phrase; the windows of
the palace blazed in the afternoon light. On a balcony occasionally
appeared the Emperor, who bore the magic name of Napoleon, the Empress,
a dream of smiling beauty, and the Prince Imperial, a mere lad, but
who was to go out on the firing line along with the veterans.

All the gorgeous carriages and all the graceful horsemen and horsewomen
that were usually found at that hour on the Bois de Boulogne formed a
great procession moving at a snail’s pace, and often stopped by the
congestion in the broad Rue de Rivoli and all the fine streets adjacent.

From many points could be seen the Place Vendôme with the great column
made from captured Prussian guns surmounted by the statue of the
immortal man who made Europe tremble at his nod.

The police were good-natured, the crowd was amiable; there was
tremendous excitement, but no disorder. At the slightest incident,
multitudes burst into cheering. The ladies sitting back in their
victorias clapped their delicate, gloved hands and waved their filmy
handkerchiefs, laughing at the soldiers who paid them bold compliments
ten inches away from their faces. The cavaliers and ladies on horseback
exchanged patriotic chaff with those who surged about them.

Among the crowd directly in front of the Tuilleries was Jean Leroux,
not the Jean Leroux of that winter in Bienville five years before,
but another Jean, well dressed, well mannered, successful, but modest
withal.

As the carriages moved slowly past, going a few feet and then stopping,
blockaded by the crowd, a pretty victoria, well horsed, came directly
abreast of Jean Leroux. In it sat Diane, whom he had often seen on the
stage in those five years, but to whom he had never had the courage to
speak; for if Jean was successful, Diane was a hundred times more so.
She was on that day the most popular music-hall artist in Paris. Like
Jean, she was Diane and yet not Diane. Her beautiful, mysterious dark
eyes were unchanged, her frank, sweet smile was the same, but she was
Mademoiselle Dorian, not merely Diane, or worse still, Skinny; that
expressed it all. She had eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; she
knew the great, ugly, beautiful, laughing, weeping, snarling, generous,
wicked, pious world; she was able to take care of herself; she could
stand upon her feet and look the ferocious human race in the eye as Una
faced the lion.

She wore a charming white gown and a lovely flower-crowned hat, and
carried a tiny white lace parasol as if she were accustomed to lace
parasols. Her white kid gloves were dainty, and a great bunch of white
and crimson roses combined with the blue cornflower made a tricolor in
her lap, while on her breast was pinned a tricolor rosette.

As her carriage stopped, the crowd recognized her, and a huge shout
went up:

“La Dorian! La Dorian!”

Diane was used to this cry. She bowed and smiled prettily, like the
experienced actress she was, but that was not what the crowd wanted.

“Sing us La Marseillaise!” they shouted; “you can sing it as no one
else can! Sing it, sing it to us!”

Diane stood up in the carriage holding her tricolor bouquet, and a
great roar of cheering a thousand times greater than she had ever heard
before, stormed the air. Diane stood erect, with her head thrown back.

At last there was silence, and Diane, pointing with her white gloved
hand straight at Jean not ten feet away, cried in her clear,
practised, penetrating voice:

“There is a man who can sing La Marseillaise better than I can. Bring
him here, and make him sing it, too.”

The crowd, cheering and laughing, immediately seized Jean, and, in
spite of his modest protests, hurled him into the carriage, where he
sat down protesting and embarrassed. While the multitude was quieting
down, Diane and he exchanged a few words.

“Why haven’t you been to see me in all these years?” said Diane.

“Because you were too grand,” said Jean. “I didn’t want to thrust
myself upon a great artist. You might have thought that I wanted you to
do something for me, or to get me an engagement. But I have often gone
to the music-halls to hear you.”

“You were always a goose about some things, Jean Leroux!” was Diane’s
reply.

And then the silence was complete, and the multitudes that packed the
streets a mile on either hand waited to hear the first word of the hymn
of battle.

As Diane stood up in the carriage, her slim figure grew taller, and
her blood turned to fire in her veins; her voice cleft the air like
a silver trumpet, sweet and penetrating, and vibrant with patriotic
passion. When she proclaimed,

  “The day of glory has arrived!”

the effect was like Jeanne d’Arc striking her spear upon her shield.
Then came the great refrain,

  “Aux armes! Aux armes!”

One voice arose--the voices of tens of thousands, united in one vast
ringing call to victory, one great demand for the rights of man, one
last appeal to the God of Battles. The mighty echo rose from earth to
heaven; it seemed for a time to fill the universe, and then to leave
the universe listening for it.

The chorus ceased--a chorus greater than ever mortal ear had heard
since first the men of Marseilles marched to the thunder of their
battle hymn--and Jean Leroux stood up and sang the second verse. His
was the voice of a man ready to march and to fight. The artist’s soul
within Diane quivered as she heard Jean’s splendid basso like the
tones of the organ of Notre Dame pealing out. Again the refrain was
thundered from the multitudes that filled miles of streets, and the
sound seemed to shake the towers of the Tuilleries palace. Then it was
Diane’s turn to sing the third verse. The nation that produced Jeanne
d’Arc respects the patriotism of its women; they are as ready to die
for their country as are the men. At the lines,

  “Great God! By these our fettered hands,
  Our brows beneath the open yoke,”

Diane lifted her eyes to Heaven, and raised her clasped hands above her
head. It was like Charlotte Corday demanding God’s blessing, while she
armed to do Him service by killing the enemy of His children. Again did
the voice of the people make the splendid refrain sound like a great
Amen. Men were weeping and clasping each other in their arms. Women
with upraised hands prayed for France. The meanest and lowest among
them were made respectable by love of country. Never again were any of
those who heard the song of the nation sung on that July afternoon,
to hear it so sung. They knew it not, but it was for them the last
triumphant singing of the hymn of triumph.

Diane and Jean sang the hymn through to the end. Then Jean, looking at
Diane, saw that she was as pale as death, and she was trembling like an
aspen leaf, while floods of tears ran down her cheeks. He spoke to a
policeman at the carriage wheel.

“Get us out of here as quickly as you can. This has been too much for
Mademoiselle Dorian.”

A couple of brawny policemen, recovering their senses a little, got the
horses out of the line, forced back the crowd, and the carriage rattled
down one of the small streets leading toward the Champs-Elysées.

“Home,” said Jean to the coachman.

He thought the sooner Diane was in some quiet spot the better. He had
no idea where she lived.

The horses trotted briskly along, the coachman avoiding the great,
thronged thoroughfares. As they drove along, Diane’s composure
gradually returned. The color came back to her lips and cheeks, and her
tremors stopped.

“It was enough to shake anybody,” said Jean; “I, myself, felt as weak
as a cat when I sat down. We have never in our lives heard anything
like that. It has not been heard since before Waterloo.”

Diane said little except some murmured reproaches to Jean for not
coming to see her.

“All of you forgot me,” she said. “I suppose it was because that tall,
red-cheeked, awkward creature who took my place, absorbed you so there
was no place even in your memories for me.”

Jean smiled. This was the same Diane.

“No,” he said, “your going seemed to finish up everything. Mademoiselle
Rose was not a success. The public did not like her.”

Diane gave a little gasp of vindictive joy.

“That was bad, of course, for the Grandins,” continued Jean,
“particularly as they lost François the same night they lost you.”

“How?”

“God knows. After the performance, when François acted miserably, and
was hissed and hit on the head by a cabbage thrown at him--and he
deserved it for his bad acting, and nearly breaking Madame Grandin’s
neck in his acrobatic turn--he disappeared. Grandin owed him some
money, too. All we could ever find out was, that François was seen
during the night on board the old boat, tied up on the riverside.
The police saw a man with a lantern moving about the boat. They went
on board, and found it was François, and they drove him off. Oddly
enough, not two hours later, there was a fire on the dock, and the
wind blew the sparks to the boat, and it was burned to the water’s
edge. You may imagine, with you and François gone, and Mademoiselle
Rose a flat failure, and the boat burned up, it was pretty serious for
Grandin. They had a little money, you know, and so they gave up the
show business and went to a little town in the French Alps and took
to raising chickens. It was as if, with your going, the old life and
everything melted away like a dream.”

“And then, what did you do?”

“Oh, I got an engagement in the Bienville theatre that took me through
the season. I got on very well, and in two years I came to Paris.”

“And how about that scamp, the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel?” asked
Diane in a perfectly natural voice.

“I didn’t like to mention him,” answered Jean; “I thought you
might--perhaps--well, I--”

“You needn’t mind,” promptly responded Diane; “I was a great fool,
of course, but no more so than any other inexperienced girl in my
position. I thought I loved him. I know now that he was nothing
more than a peg to hang my emotions on. It sounded so grand to be a
marquise!”

She laughed so naturally and unaffectedly, that a great load was lifted
from Jean’s heart. The Marquis was rightly appraised by Diane, and she
had no regrets for such a scoundrel. Then she kept on, still laughing:

“I should have been perfectly ridiculous as a marquise!”

“He was kicked out of the army,” said Jean.

“Served him right,” replied Diane, vigorously. “One thing rejoices
me--that awful whack I let him have in the face, and I shall always
love you, Jean, for the beating you gave him. He deserved it all for
his treatment of his wife and child. What became of the poor lady?”

“She went to the Marquis’ colonel and told him the whole story. The
Marquis made a stiff fight because he had powerful family connections,
but they got rid of him. It was really true, though, that he meant to
marry you and commit bigamy.”

“Oh, Jean,” cried Diane with the deepest feeling, “how often have I
though of poor François’ saying, that God takes care of women and fools
and drunken people! If I had married the Marquis, I should have killed
him, certainly.”

“But tell me,” said Jean, “how did you get up in the world so quickly?”

“Because I am a woman and a fool,” answered Diane with great
simplicity. “I had a hundred and fifty-two francs--”

“After you had given half you had to the other woman,” interjected
Jean.

“And I travelled third class to Paris. On the train I bought a
newspaper and looked out for all the advertisements of singing teachers
whose terms were reasonable. I found one in a musician and his wife.
They took me to live in their house for what board I could pay. The
singing master said at once that I had a better voice than I supposed,
and he got me into the chorus at the Opera. That paid me something,
and I worked, I can tell you, at my singing. The first engagement I
had was at a cheap place on the other side of the river, but I went on
steadily, earning more money and more people knowing me. I didn’t visit
Bohemia, nor go out to supper, nor do any of those crazy things that
ruin the voice. I think my singing teacher valued my voice above my
soul, but at all events, the time came when I was able to pay him well
for his trouble, and began to lay up something comfortable for myself.
And here I am.”

“And buy diamonds,” suggested Jean. “I saw you blazing with them.”

Diane laughed scornfully.

“No you didn’t,” she said. “They were pure paste. I am not half such a
fool in some ways as you think. But why, why didn’t you come to see me?
How could you look at me when I was singing and not think enough of the
old days to seek me out?”

“Because you were too grand,” replied Jean. “I took the paste things
for real diamonds.”

Presently they reached in a quiet street a small, pretty house with
a charming little garden. Jean was surprised; he expected to find
something much grander, and plainly said so.

“No indeed,” answered Diane, dismissing the coachman and showing Jean
the way through the drawing-room by glass doors down the steps into the
pretty garden. “I think I am of a saving turn. I know what very few
singers do, and that is, one day my voice will be gone, so I am saving
my money now, that I may be able to live here always, and have you to
tea with me in the summer afternoons. I always knew I would see you,
Jean, and tell you this.”

Jean scowled fiercely at Diane. She was making fun of him and his
honest and modest love, but he did not think she ought to say such
things to any man. So he declined to notice Diane’s speech. When they
took their seats on the iron chairs in the garden before the little
tea-table, Diane continued her confidences:

“When the foolish men would send me diamonds, I would coolly exchange
them for paste and pocket the difference. No indeed, I have heard of
music-hall artists with a great many diamonds who were sold out by
their creditors.”

Jean looked at Diane with admiration.

“I didn’t think you had so much sense, Diane,” he said.

Then the maid brought the tea, and they sat in the sunny garden until
the purple dusk came and a new moon smiled at them from a sky half ruby
and half sapphire.

They talked much of the coming war. Jean, who was a capital shot, was
to join the franc-tierurs.

“I could not keep on singing, you know, when I could be potting the
Prussians.”

“As for me,” replied Diane, “I shall keep on singing as a patriotic
duty. These Parisians look upon their theatres and operas and
music-halls as a barometer. As long as these are open and we sing and
dance and play for this great tyrant, Paris, so long will she believe
that all is going well, but let us once stop, and she will become
panic-stricken. However, I expect to sing before our Emperor in Berlin
next season.”

This seemed quite natural and reasonable to Jean, and Diane, laughing,
but wholly in earnest, promised him an engagement to sing with her.

“For you know, Jean, you would have been just as high up as I am,
except that I had more impudence. Now that you have had your tea, come
into the drawing-room and let us sing together some of the old songs
and do some of the old tricks. I have a companion who can thump the
piano a little for us.”

Diane ran into the drawing-room, called for her companion, a decorous
and withered person, Madame Dupin, who sat down to the piano and
managed the accompaniment while Diane and Jean sang some of the old
songs together with immense spirit. Then Diane proposed to do their
singing act together, which meant a love scene and a quarrel that had
always brought down the house in the cheap music-hall in Bienville.
Jean remembered it well enough--only too well. The memory of the pangs
he suffered when Diane, after she met the Marquis, would hold away from
him and would not throw herself into his arms as a real actress should,
was vivid and painful. But in the pretty drawing-room with Madame Dupin
playing away at the piano, Diane hurled herself into Jean’s arms and
acted as if inspired. When the quarrel came, it was acted so naturally
that Diane’s man-servant, who was peeping through the door, suddenly
rushed in and, seizing Jean by the collar, shouted:

“I will report you to the police for abusing and insulting my lady!”

This amused Diane so much that she threw herself on the sofa convulsed
with laughter, and Jean laughed as he had not done since he last saw
Diane, while the man-servant, when the circumstances were explained,
ran away sheepishly, to be the laughing-stock of his fellow-servants.

It was all so merry and free, and like a last look at a happy past,
when before one lies victory, but with it, war and guns and wounds and
death.

Jean gave himself barely time to hurry back in a cab to his music-hall,
while Diane rushed upstairs to make ready for her own performance.

Great as had been Diane’s fame before, it grew greater in those days
when France marched forth to conquer Europe again, and was smitten on
every hand.

In August and September, when disaster followed disaster, and the
universe seemed tumbling to pieces, Diane still sang La Marseillaise
every night at the music-hall. It seemed to comfort and put new
courage into the hearts of her listeners, mostly striplings and
weaklings and old men who could not go to fight the Prussians, and
could only hate them from afar. The music-hall did a rushing business;
many persons skimped their daily bread to save a couple of francs that
would take them into the music-hall where Diane with her glorious
singing would reanimate their fainting souls. Not even when the siege
began did Diane cease her singing. The prices were then put down, and
the hall was not so full, but all came who could.

Jean was gone. He was in the armies that were defeated, or that melted
away, or that never existed except on paper. But he was never captured.
Two or three times in those frightful months, Diane got a brief line
from him. Once he wrote:

“Whom do you think I have seen? François! And François decorated on
the field, too! But the next day, he was found dead drunk--he had sold
his boots for liquor--so he disappeared. We had some talk, however. He
asked about you, and said he always knew Skinny would come into her
own. I inquired what he had been doing for a living in the last five
years, and he said he had been picking flowers off century plants for
his living. You see, he is the same François, but as brave as if he
were honest.”

One morning in January, every door and window in Paris was closed and
barred. The Prussians were marching in through the Arc de Triomphe,
and the gayest city in the world lay as if dead in her grave-clothes
on that winter morning. Not a wheel turned in Paris that day; even
the dead remained unburied. No theatre or music-hall opened that
evening, nor was there a note of music heard in the whole city. Paris
was indeed the city of Dreadful Night. Then, after a little breathing
spell like that given a man when shackles are put on his feet and
handcuffs on his wrists, Paris, the conquered city, sat in her
sackcloth bewailing herself for her lost glory. And presently, in her
wretchedness and despair, some of her children were turned to devils
and fought and mocked her and lacerated her and dragged her shrieking
and blood-covered in the mire of disgrace. The frightful orgie of the
Commune was an episode in hell for the great, beautiful, miserable,
burning, starving, shrieking city.

Through it all Diane sang, not with the rich, full voice of a well-fed,
well-sleeping woman, but with diminished volume and a little off the
key; for in those days it was remarked that all voices were raised a
semitone higher.

How the months passed when the Commune, that concentration of
wickedness, that collection of fiends who sought to murder their
country in her hour of misery, few who lived through it could describe;
certainly Diane could not. Food and money were scarce enough, though
there was not actual starvation as during the siege, but the guns from
Montmartre thundered incessantly, and those who were to rescue Paris
had to surround her and fight their way inch by inch.

It was in the springtime, and the horse chestnuts in the Champs-Elysées
were pushing out their green leaves through their pale pink sheaths,
and the insensate sky was blue and gold by day and black and silver
by night. From the beginning it was bad enough, but as the sun grew
warmer and the days more halcyon in their beauty, the hell made by
men grew worse, the roaring of the guns more constant. The frightful
disorders in the streets, murders and horrible orgies, were more
frequent. The Commune died hard, as wild boars do. The great city had
no defenders within her lines, and lay at the mercy of fiends. The
few men who had crept back from the battle-fields could do nothing,
and when the Communards in their dirty National Guard uniforms began
to be pressed hard and caught in their traps like rats, they began to
throw barricades across the streets and fight behind them, wildly and
foolishly.

Diane still lived in her small house, although the neighborhood was
daily growing more dangerous; the tide of fighting was pouring that
way, and the quiet street resounded with the rattle of ammunition
wagons and the yells and shouts of drunken National Guards, who were
yet not too drunk to fight. The small house remained closed, and the
two women within it--Diane and old Marie, a faithful creature whom
Diane had picked up some years before--lived in two cellar rooms.
There, they were reasonably safe. They dwelt in darkness, because they
had few candles, and would have been afraid to show lights if they
could. When the one dim candle was lighted, all windows, doors, cracks,
and crannies were tightly closed to give the idea of an uninhabited
house. The upstairs had long been dismantled, and there was little
there to steal.

In those terrible spring days, neither Diane nor the old woman ever so
much as showed themselves in the garden, and only stole forth by night
to buy such meagre supplies as they could afford. For Diane was no
longer well off. She had given freely of her store to her country, and
unless she could once more sing to crowded audiences, she would die as
poor as when she first set foot in Paris with her hundred and fifty-two
francs in her pocket.

One afternoon in the last of May when the fighting had grown fiercer,
the incessant booming of the guns nearer, and the sharp crack of the
mitrailleuse louder and more frequent, a great crash resounded in the
street before Diane’s house. The mob of National Guards had upset a
cart-load of stones, and were beginning to tear up the pavement to
make one of those simple but effective barricades that were sometimes
better than a good many fortifications. It only took a couple of hours
to build this fort in the street, and it was one of the best barricades
so built in Paris, because it was directed by a man trained as a
soldier, who had once been called the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel.
Diane’s first view of him after she had slapped his face was as he
stood or walked about the narrow street, now crowded and noisy with
disorderly National Guards.

The Marquis had changed considerably for the worse in his appearance.
Six years before he had been of superb figure and handsome face,
and dressed with military elegance. Now, he was red and bloated and
slouchy and dirty. His voice had once been sweet and persuasive. Now,
it was a bellow of rage and drink, but enough sense was left amid his
degradation yet to do some harm to his fellow-men, and the barricade
would have been a credit to an engineer.

Many persons had warned Diane to leave her house and seek refuge
somewhere else, but this she refused. Now it was too late. For any
woman to show herself was to court death and horrors unspeakable.

Against a house on the opposite side of the street was piled wood
enough to start a fire when the Communards were ready, for, if they
could no longer defend a point, they set fire to the surrounding
buildings. Meanwhile, the real French soldiers rigidly carried out
their plan to surround and overwhelm the Communards without destroying
the city, and ever the cordon tightened. On this May morning it drew
closer around the barricaded spot, and there was fighting in the
near-by street. But seeing the danger of fire, the French commander in
that quarter played a waiting game.

In the afternoon the day grew dark, and in the evening came a small,
fine rain with the darkness. An adventurous young officer tried to
carry the barricade under the cover of night, but Colonel Egmont, as
the Marquis now called himself, had enough of the devil’s wit left in
him to drive off the attacking party.

Diane, peering through the chinks of a closed jalousie, saw in the
darkness the red-legged soldiers retiring, carrying off with them
a couple of dead men and some wounded ones. In the dense shadows,
however, two French soldiers remained who were not missed. One was
a small man lying flat on his face with a bullet wound through his
leg and another in his shoulder. The other was a big man with blood
dripping from the back of his neck, who scrambled to his feet and knelt
over the little man whose head rested against the tall iron door that
led into Diane’s garden. In a minute or two the door was softly opened
and Diane whispered:

“Come in quickly before you are seen. There is a cellar to the house
where you can be safe for a little while, at least.”

The big man picked the small man up in his arms and slipped within the
garden, Diane softly locking and barring the iron door behind him, and,
running around to the back of the house, lifted the lid of a cellar
door, showing some narrow stone steps that led down into the black cave
of the cellars. As she did this, she recognized Jean in the big man,
and François in the small man he was carrying, and Jean recognized her.

François’ soul was not in this world at that moment, although it was
shortly to return to his body.

Jean and Diane wasted no time in polite inquiries after each other’s
health.

“Can you carry his legs?” asked Jean in a whisper.

“Yes,” replied Diane, slipping down the stairs and taking hold of
François’ legs, for she could step backward, knowing the stairs well.

The next minute they found themselves in the cellars. There were two
small rooms. The windows were tightly closed so that no gleam of light
should betray that the place was inhabited. A handful of charcoal
burned in a little brazier, for the spring night was sharp and the
cellar was cold, and one solitary candle in the outer room merely
revealed the gulf of darkness. Huddled over the brazier was the figure
of old Marie, the cook; in all cataclysms of one’s life, some one is
found who is faithful.

There was something like comfort in the place. A carpet was spread upon
the stone floor, and a couple of pallets in the inner room accommodated
the mistress and the maid. On one of these they laid François,
breathing heavily. Jean stripped off François’ shoes, and Diane,
producing a pair of scissors, cut away the clothing from his leg below
the knee. A horrid wound was spurting blood. Marie ran and fetched some
water from a barrel in the corner, and Diane unceremoniously, in the
presence of Jean, divested herself of her white cambric petticoat, a
thing of filmy ruffles and lace, and tore it into strips to bind up
François’ wounds. Again, with her deft scissors she cut away a part
of his coat and shirt. Old Marie washed the wound in his shoulder,
and Jean, with his rude surgery, bound it up with a part of Diane’s
petticoat. When this was over, François opened his eyes, and looking
about him whispered in a weak voice, and with a weak grin:

“I think I must be out of my head still, because I see the face of
Diane. Give me something to drink.”

Old Marie gave him water which he drank as men do out of whose veins
much blood has run, and who are parched with that terrible thirst.
Diane, going to a wine rack where there were many long-necked bottles
lying head downward, picked up one and gouged out the cork with her
scissors.

Then she poured out in a tin cup some bubbling champagne.

“Is this good for him, do you think?” she asked Jean.

“In the name of God, I do not know,” replied Jean, shaking his head.

“But I know,” responded the patient in a somewhat stronger voice. “Good
champagne will put life into the ribs of death.”

Diane kneeled down by François and tremblingly gave him the champagne,
which he drank, smacking his lips meanwhile.

“I feel like another man,” he said, “and that other man wants another
swig at the champagne.”

But Diane shook her head.

“You can’t have any more,” she answered.

“And now,” said François in a much stronger voice, “I know that I am
not wool-gathering, but it is really you, Diane Dorian, otherwise
Skinny, because you are so obstinate, just as in the old days.”

While Diane was speaking, she noticed that Jean had sunk on a low
bench from which he slipped softly to the floor, his eyes closed and
his face gray. Diane ran to him, and catching his head to keep it
from striking the floor, found blood upon her hand. Jean’s neck was
bleeding--François was not the only wounded man.

Diane, with her lately gained experience and assisted by old Marie,
turned back Jean’s collar and shirt and found there a wound almost
as bad as François’. That, too, was washed and bound with strips of
Diane’s white petticoat, and then Jean came to himself, and asked, as
all wounded men do, for water.

“Give him some champagne,” said François, feebly, from his pallet.

This Diane did, and then, with Marie’s help, laid Jean upon her own
pallet.

Then began for the two women a silent vigil that lasted more than a
week. They took turns in watching and sleeping. By extreme good fortune
both of their patients progressed wonderfully, the wounds healing with
the first intention. At the end of the week Jean was able to walk about
the inner room, while François, though unable to walk, could sit up in
the one chair which the cellars possessed.

Still were darkness and silence maintained within the cellars, although
there was noise enough outside. The barricade had become almost a
fortress, and as the Communards were hemmed in closer and closer, the
barricade was extended. The sound of fighting grew nearer and fiercer,
the shouts and cries of men, the rattle of ammunition wagons over the
stones, the cracking of the mitrailleuse, the crash of bullets; the
beating of the rappel, sounded by night as well as by day.

After night had fallen, old Marie would creep out, and by devious and
winding streets would find her way to places where for much money a
little coarse food could be bought. There was, however, champagne in
plenty, and François had no hesitation in declaring in a whisper that
his recovery and that of Jean depended upon the quantity of champagne
they drank, and that Diane was delaying their convalescence by not
letting them have all they wished.

The hours, instead of being long, were extraordinarily short because
there was no sunrise or sunset, no day nor night, only a vivid darkness
pierced with the light of a single candle. There was nothing to read by
the light of the single candle that burned night and day; there was no
conversation above a whisper. Familiarity with danger and long immunity
made them all forget their fears, but not their prudence.

Old Marie, who had the tireless industry of her class, managed to
keep employed by incessant knitting, after she had done the work of
the two cellars. Diane, a worker by nature and habit, put strong
compulsion on herself to sit still for hours and hours, her hands in
her lap. Jean and François, conquered by their weakness, also remained
still and quiet. Through the open door Diane could not see their eyes
constantly fixed upon her in the little circle of light made by the
one candle. She took them their food, and helped them with all the
natural helpfulness of a tender and capable woman. That was her sole
employment. She often wished in that strange procession of time which
could not be called days or weeks, that she had fifty wounded men to
attend to instead of two.

At last, one night, Jean said to Diane:

“It’s time for me to be going. I feel strong enough to carry a musket,
and I shall feel stronger still when I get into the fresh air.”

Diane said no word; she was the last woman on earth to detain a man
from his duty.

François, who was then able to walk about with a stick made from a
broom handle, protested in a whisper:

“Who is to chaperon Diane and me,” he asked, “when old Marie goes out
at night?”

As he spoke, Jean slipped cautiously to the stone steps and lifted up
the cellar door about an inch, showing the black night without. A great
wave of smoke and an odor of flame rushed in, and through the crack
thus made was seen a sky on fire with the luridness of miles of burning
buildings. Paris had been set on fire by the Communards.

As Diane, leaning over Jean’s shoulder, caught a glimpse of the blazing
sky, there was a crash of doors and windows overhead, a trampling of
feet, drunken men and women shouting, laughing, swearing, fighting. In
the midst of the uproar they could hear the grand piano, the only piece
of furniture left in the house, dragged across the drawing-room floor,
and the crash of music as it was pounded to accompany ribald songs.
Jean quickly dropped the cellar door. They had no arms except each a
pistol out of which their bullets had been fired, and there were no
more bullets to be had.

As the drunken crew overhead grew more noisy and numerous, they
overflowed into the garden, trampling the neglected flower beds and
laughing like demons. Presently they rushed to the cellar door and
lifted it up wide. They saw no light within, but a woman’s voice
shrieked:

“If there is any champagne, it’s in the cellar!”

Then a torch was brought, and a man seizing it jumped down the steps
holding the torch above his head, and came face to face with Diane.
Half a dozen men and women followed him, and, catching sight of the
wine bin, flew toward it with shouts of devilish joy, and began to hand
out the bottles to those above them.

The man with the torch stuck it into an empty bottle, and the light
revealed, not only Diane, but old Marie and Jean and François. The
invader wore the uniform of a colonel of the National Guard, and was he
who had once been known as the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel.



CHAPTER VI

THE DAY OF GLORY HAS ARRIVED


“Well now,” said he who had once been the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel,
but who now called himself Colonel Egmont, addressing Diane, “here I
find you, my very proper young lady, in bad company. How long have you
been down here living with these two men?”

“Nineteen days,” answered Diane, coming a little closer to Egmont and
fixing her eyes, sparkling with rage, upon him. “Nineteen days ago
these two men came here wounded. I have lived in this place with them
ever since--do you understand?”

“Perfectly well,” responded Egmont with an elaborate bow. “Now they and
you shall share the fate of the enemies of the Commune. Come with me,
all of you.”

He turned and climbed the narrow stone steps again, followed by Diane
and Jean and François and old Marie. The mob in the garden had already
begun to drink the champagne, and they were so keen to get into the
cellar that they scarcely allowed their commander to come up with his
prisoners.

“Here,” said Egmont, calling to some National Guards already drunk and
trying to get drunker, “find a cart to take these prisoners to the
Mazas prison.”

Not the slightest attention was paid to this order until Egmont,
drawing his pistol, covered half a dozen National Guards, who then,
with champagne bottles tucked under their arms, surrounded Diane and
Jean and François. Then Egmont sent one of them to stop a cart rumbling
by.

“I can’t trust these fellows,” said Egmont, stroking his mustache; “I
shall have to go with you, myself, to see that you are landed safe in
the Mazas just around the corner. As for you, Mademoiselle, do you
remember the blow you struck me in the face six years ago?”

“With the greatest pleasure,” responded Diane sweetly; “I have never
thought of that blow without a thrill of joy.”

“Very well,” replied Egmont, smiling, “perhaps you have not found out,
in your retirement with these gentlemen, what has happened to women who
are the enemies of the Commune? Twelve Dominican sisters disappeared a
week ago. They have never been heard from, and never will be. Now, I
intend to make you pay for that blow, not once, but a thousand times
over.”

“But you can’t deprive me of the satisfaction I have had all these
years in the thought that I struck it,” was Diane’s response, while
François remarked:

“I always thought that you, my Marquis of the Holy Angels, were a cad
and not a gentleman. Now I know it.”

At this, Jean, who had said nothing, cast a warning glance at Diane and
François.

“I know what you mean by that look, Jean,” said Diane, carefully
smoothing her hair. “But prudence is of no use when you are in the
tiger’s clutch--or rather the rhinoceros--for this fat, ugly creature
looks more like a rhinoceros than a tiger. He means to murder us all,
and will do it, no matter how polite we might be. Dear me! I really
am not properly dressed for a drive through the streets. No hat--no
gloves--no parasol.”

Jean sighed heavily for her, but François only grinned.

“I declare, Skinny,” he said, “I believe you really are a descendant of
the Oriani family of ancient Rome. You have such a glorious spirit.”

“Oh, no, I am not,” answered Diane, with a demure smile. “My father was
only the village hatter. Like Napoleon, I am the first of my family.”

“Come you,” cried Egmont, “and bundle into the cart. I shall go with
you for the pleasure of your company.”

Then they were all thrown into a cart, and a National Guard, less drunk
than the rest, took the reins, while Egmont sat on the tail-board,
laughing and jeering at his prisoners.

The night sky was of a frightful crimson, while a gigantic blanket of
black smoke many miles in length lay over the city which was blazing
on both sides of the river that ran red like blood. On the spot where
Diane and Jean had sung La Marseillaise ten months before was a
great blazing pyre, the Palace of the Tuilleries, and a ring of huge
buildings for miles on either side were sending up enormous masses of
smoke and flames. The heat in the May night was terrific, and the smoke
was like the smoke of hell.

Jean, who had said nothing, spoke a word to Diane.

“Remember,” he said, “we can die but once.”

“I know that,” responded Diane. “And after all, I have found out one
thing before I die, and that is, how much I love you.”

Besides the tumult that raged around them, the noise of the heavy-laden
cart traversing the streets was great, but Diane, accustomed to raising
her voice so it could be heard afar, could yet be heard clearly. She
turned toward Jean with ineffable tenderness in her voice and smile,
while the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel heard every word.

“I think I always loved you, Jean, but after I came to Paris and saw
the other men, and compared them with you, then I fell in love with
you. Don’t you remember last July, the first time you came to my house
with me, what I said to you in the garden? I meant it every word. I
want you to love me in the way that I love you.”

Egmont, raising his hand, struck Diane’s white cheek a hard blow.

“That,” he said, “for the blow you gave me and for your boldness, you
shameless creature, toward this man.”

Jean raised his foot and gave Egmont a kick which knocked him off the
tail-board and sent him spinning to the street. He got up and dusted
his clothes, and, smiling, climbed back into the cart.

“Wait,” he said, “see who wins the game of life and death. As for you,
Diane, you shall pay for the kick as well as the slap.”

“Really, my dear Marquis of the Holy Angels,” said François in his
musical drawl, “you make me ashamed of our class. These people are very
humble, but their manners are better than yours.”

Egmont laughed, and his eyes, filled with the savage joy of a murderer
who can murder in safety, were fixed with amused contempt on François.

The noise in the streets grew deafening. The cordon was being tightened
every moment around the Communards. They were being driven in from
every quarter, and a great mass of drunken, shrieking, howling,
laughing, singing men and women choked the streets.

When the cart reached the prison of the Mazas, the way was blocked by
a crowd surrounding a group of drunken women dancing, and shrieking as
they danced. As Egmont and his three prisoners got out of the cart,
Egmont said to Diane:

“Come now, tuck up your skirts and dance like those ladies.”

“No, I thank you,” sweetly responded Diane, “I am not a dancer, but a
singer, and I am not in good voice to-night.”

“Then follow me,” said Egmont.

They followed him into the great, gloomy prison, and a jailer led
them into a long corridor with iron doors. There were several vacant
cells, and in the first one François was thrust. Before the door closed
upon him, he caught Diane’s hand, and suddenly, without the slightest
premonition, burst into passionate weeping. She had seen him always
laughing, joking, drinking, fighting, dancing, and singing, but never
before, weeping. Even Egmont was stunned into silence at this strange
burst of grief. In a moment or two François had recovered himself, and
with an actor’s command of countenance, his face suddenly shone with
smiles.

“You see, Diane, it’s rather hard to say good-by to you after all we
have been through together, and then not seeing you for so many years,
and being nursed and tended by you in the cellar. I think it’s those
infernal wounds that have weakened me.”

“Why, François,” answered Diane, “now I come to think of it, you were
always kind to me. You taught me all my stage tricks, and always let
me take the curtain calls, and when I was in a hurry to get to the
theatre, you often helped me wash the dishes; and when we were living
on the boat, you carried many heavy parcels back and forth for me,
and had always been good-natured and laughing and joking. After all,
whether we are to live or whether we are to die, we shall meet again.
Good-by, dear François.”

Diane leaned her cheek toward François, who kissed it.

“By the way,” said, Egmont, himself once more, “an old friend of yours,
the Bishop of Bienville, is a fellow-lodger in the same corridor. The
old scoundrel got caught in Paris, and we nabbed him as an enemy of the
Commune. I think the order for his shooting is already given, but you
won’t be far behind him, I can promise you.”

With that, the jailer thrust François back into a cell, and Egmont
marched ahead, his two prisoners in the middle and a couple of armed
guards behind.

When they reached a room which Egmont called his quarters, he very
politely ushered Diane and Jean into it and closed the door. The armed
guards remained outside, but Egmont notified them when he gave two raps
on the floor with his heel that they were to enter.

“Now,” said he to his prisoners, addressing them both, “this young
woman once treated me with great scorn. I tell her, and I tell you,
Jean Leroux, that you shall be shot anyhow, and so shall Mademoiselle
Diane Dorian, unless she agrees now and here to become my mistress.”

Neither Diane nor Jean turned pale. They had lived through so many
horrors in the last frightful ten months, that they had come to regard
terrible catastrophies as the every-day incidents of life.

Jean fixed his eyes on Diane, who turned to him with a radiant smile.

“You see, Jean,” she said, “how little this wretch knows me! I would
rather die ten times over than be his mistress. People are dying all
around us all the time, and we shall go anyhow, a little sooner or a
little later, and it doesn’t matter, particularly as you are to go too.”

“Certainly,” replied Jean with equal coolness. “You never were a
coward, Diane, and most women, I think, would die rather than become
this man’s mistress. As for myself”--Jean snapped his fingers in the
air--“I have been looking death in the eye for ten months. It isn’t so
bad, I assure you.”

Egmont, looking at them, flew into a maniacal rage. He reviled them,
using horrible language. He cursed them; he laughed at them like a
fiend. His revenge was not complete, because he could not conquer their
souls and destroy their courage as he could kill and mutilate their
bodies.

Two raps on the floor brought the guards.

“Take this scoundrel,” he said, “and put him in a cell. Lock this woman
up. Twenty-four hours will see the end of all of them.”

“Have courage, Jean,” cried Diane, as she walked away between her
jailers. “I promise you to die before I become the mistress of this man
or any other man.”

The next day at noon a shuffling procession of a jailer and two
National Guards opened the door of François’ cell, and walked in. The
jailer, a good-natured ruffian, read the name and number written on the
door, and then said to François:

“You, Jean Leroux, are to be shot at six o’clock this evening.”

“All right,” answered François, cheerfully. “I ask one thing--I should
like to see the Bishop of Bienville, who is in this corridor. He can’t
help me to escape, he is too fat, but I should like to see him.”

There are as many kinds of murderers as there are murders, and the
jailer in this case was an amiable murderer.

“I must take you to another cell,” he said. “On the way you can stop
long enough to make your confession if that is what you want, you
superstitious fool, to the fat old fellow from Bienville.”

“Thank you very much,” answered François; “I thought to myself the
first time I saw you yesterday, ‘He is an obliging person.’”

“Then come along with me now,” said the jailer.

François got up nimbly, in spite of his wounded leg, and followed the
guard along the corridor, chatting agreeably with him.

“I swear,” said the jailer when they got to the Bishop’s door, “I am
sorry such a pleasant fellow as you is to be shot.”

“If you could only have known me in my past days, and seen some of my
juggling tricks and heard me sing, you would be sorrier still,” replied
François, affably. “You are quite a decent fellow, and if circumstances
had permitted, I should have been glad to cultivate your further
acquaintance.”

The jailer laughed, and unlocking the door of a cell, opened it,
saying:

“Half an hour is all I can give you.”

François found himself in the cell with the Bishop, and the door locked.

The Bishop was not so stout and ruddy as he had been, but pinched and
sallow, for he had been prisoner for a month. He was, however, just as
glad to see François, and kissed him on both cheeks.

“Now, your Grace,” said François, squatting on the cot, and refusing to
take the only chair in the cell, “I have no time to sing the old songs
for you. I have only time to do what you often urged me in the old days
in Bienville. That is, to confess.”

“Heaven be praised!” piously responded the Bishop; “I always told my
brother, the General, and Mathilde that you were really an excellent
person, and that some day you would become a penitent.”

“I have not much time to lose,” said François, “as I am to be shot at
six o’clock this afternoon. By the way, what has become of the General
and Mathilde? I always hated her.”

“My brother is in a Prussian prison. Mathilde is, I suppose, still
at Bienville. I wish the next bishop joy of her if he gets her for a
housekeeper. For I hardly think that I shall ever leave Paris alive.”

“It has indeed become a cursed place,” replied François. “I never
thought that I should weary of Paris, but I assure your Grace I shall
be glad to get out of it on almost any terms, even being shot. But as I
have only a half hour in which to confess the sins of thirty years, I
think I had better begin.”

François went down on his knees, and began a rapid confession of many
and grievous sins. The last item was:

“And I propose to tell a lie and to say that I am Jean Leroux, for whom
I am mistaken and numbered and put down in a book, and to be shot in
the place of Leroux, an excellent fellow and an old comrade of mine,
who is loved by a woman whom I love. So I think it is better to tell
the lie and to die in the place of Leroux.”

The Bishop, who had been leaning back, quietly listening with closed
eyes to the most remarkable confession he had ever heard, sat up
straight and looked sternly at François.

“I shall not permit it,” he said. “It is suicide.”

“But your Grace can’t help yourself,” responded François, still on his
knees. “It was told you in confession, and you are not permitted to
reveal the secrets of the confessional either to save your own life or
anybody else’s life.”

The Bishop fell back in his chair, his good-natured, sallow, pinched
face grown more sallow.

“I can refuse to give you absolution,” he said.

“But if a man dies to save the life of another man, he is absolved
by his blood,” said François, triumphantly. “You see, I am a better
theologian than your Grace.”

The Bishop leaned forward, and, opening his arms, drew to his breast
the kneeling François.

“You will be absolved,” he said. “Make a good act of contrition, and
pray for me.”

The half hour was soon over, but long before that François had
finished his confession, and he and the Bishop were chatting together
pleasantly, and even laughing.

When the door was opened, and the time came for the last farewell, they
kissed each other on the cheek affectionately.

“Thanks for all your kindness,” said François, “and make my apologies
to Mathilde for all the trouble I gave her. Now, your Grace knows that
I am a true penitent.”

“I think,” replied the Bishop, smiling and blinking, “that I stand no
more chance of seeing Mathilde than you. We shall both be called upon
to make our apologies to the Most High, shortly. Meanwhile, pray that
when my time comes I may be as cool and unconcerned as you. I cannot
say that I would wish to live as you have lived, Monsieur François le
Bourgeois, as you call yourself, but I would certainly wish to die like
you.”

“Ah!” cried François, gayly. “Living is much more important than dying.
_Au revoir_ to your Grace. These Communards are such fools, they won’t
find out for a week that they got the wrong pig by the ear.”

With that, the door closed, and François marched off cheerfully with
his jailers to another cell in which he was to spend the three hours of
life that remained to him. The cell was much larger and brighter than
the one he had left, but cold and damp, in spite of the May heat and
the fiercely burning city.

Of this, François complained bitterly.

“What do you mean,” he said, “by putting me in this place where I shall
be certain to catch cold?”

The jailer, who had a rudimentary sense of humor, grinned at this.

“I have heard a good many condemned persons grumble at their fate, but
you are the first one I have seen who is afraid of catching cold three
hours before he is introduced to a firing squad.”

“My friend,” replied François, “I am a gentleman, although somewhat in
eclipse, and I want a fire made in this place, because I wish to be
comfortable as long as I live.”

The jailer, still laughing, opened the door and called to a colleague,
who brought a brazier and some charcoal, of which François secured
several lumps.

“I feel in the vein for poetry,” he said, “and I wish to write some
verses on this wall.”

While the jailer made a little fire in the brazier, François stood
in meditation before the whitewashed wall, writing a few words, then
rubbing them out with his sleeve, sometimes finishing a whole line
with many corrections, just as poets usually do.

He was so absorbed in his composition that an hour passed, and he was
surprised by the jailer bringing in supper at five o’clock. The jailer,
who was more and more disposed to be friendly with his prisoner,
laughed at the way in which François drew up his stool, surveyed the
rude fare, and turned up his nose at it.

In the crises of life, men revert to their original type; so François,
who called himself Le Bourgeois, suddenly and naturally became an
aristocrat, such as he had been thirty years before. He tasted some
potatoes, and then eyed them disdainfully.

“It isn’t the fare I mind, my good friend,” he said to the jailer, “nor
yet the austere simplicity with which you serve it, but these potatoes
are only half boiled, and will certainly make me ill. You should have
some care for the health of your prisoners.”

The jailer sat down and laughed with unrestrained enjoyment.

“I swear,” he said, “you are such an entertaining fellow, it is a
shame you are to be shot this afternoon.”

“So do I think,” responded François, attacking a morsel of very tough
beef, “and I am very much surprised, too; but it is the unexpected,
you know, which happens. Life is made up of one infernal blunder after
another.”

The jailer was so pleased with his prisoner, he put his hand in his
pocket and drew out a little flask of brandy.

“Here,” he said; “it isn’t much, but it is enough for a swig.”

“Now, this is the first satisfactory thing I have known you to do since
our acquaintance began,” said François, putting the flask to his mouth
and draining it dry.

“It was not indeed much,” he said, “but it was a great deal better than
nothing. It will give me inspiration to finish my verses. Excuse me for
hurrying through with this luxurious meal. I don’t suppose you would
serve any better to Lucullus himself.”

“There is no person by that name in this prison,” replied the jailer
with simple good faith, “and the same food is served to all. That poor
bishop has evidently been accustomed to a good cook, and prison fare
goes hard with him.”

The jailer found the conversation of his prisoner so agreeable that he
remained until François had finished the beef. The potatoes he refused
to touch.

“I am taking a great risk of indigestion in eating this tough meat,” he
said, “but it would be tempting fate to touch those potatoes.”

The jailer went out, repeating that he was sorry that six o’clock would
end their acquaintance.

Through the small, heavily barred windows looking westward, François
could hear the roar of the battle in the city, the distant, incessant
thunder of the guns, and see the great waves of flame and smoke from
the burning city drifting slowly in the stagnant air. A dun light that
was not day nor night lay over Paris, and, although it was but a little
after five o’clock, the whitewashed cell was dusky.

François continued cheerfully absorbed in his poetic composition. When
he reached the fourth line and made a period, he stood off and read his
verses with even more than the average satisfaction of a poet.

“There may be time,” he said to himself aloud, “to write another
verse, so here goes.”

He then began another line, and wrote three and a half lines more. At
this point, while François was deeply reflecting on a word, the key was
turned in the door which was flung open, and the jailer, with a couple
of deputies, was standing outside.

“Very sorry, sir,” said the jailer, “but the time is up.”

“I can only say,” replied François, “that your visit is most
inopportune. I am just in the midst of the best line in my poem. Like
everything else, the Commune annoys everybody. Seven o’clock for my
exit would not have hurt the Commune, and would have enabled me to
finish my poem. Listen, and if you have any poetic instinct, you will
agree that this is the finest thing since Rouget de Lisle.”

The jailer knew no more about Rouget de Lisle than he did about
Lucullus, and frankly said so.

“Great poets,” complained François, “are as scarce as seventeen-year
locusts--and when at last I develop into a great poet, the Commune
proceeds to shoot me. If I were a bad poet now, shooting would be too
good for me. Listen.”

Then standing a little way off, he read his poem with all the force
and feeling of an actor. These were the lines--ordinary enough, but
François’ reading made them respectable:

  “We dream a turbid dream, all strife,
    Full of sharp pain and ecstasy,
    Pale ghosts of Love and Joy we see,
  And call our dreaming, Life.

  “We waken in the darkling hour,
    The last before the dawn appears,
    Shuddering, we see the Gate of Tears,
  When lo! Immortal Light--”

“If I had a little more time,” said François, “I could finish the
thing.”

The jailer and his two deputies had but a dim understanding of
François’ verses, but his practised and musical voice, his eloquent
eyes, made them feel something, and the jailer, who had a streak of
humanity in him, suddenly began winking his small, dull eyes.

“Excuse me,” said François, putting on his hat, “for wearing my hat
in your august presence, but I am determined not to catch cold. And
remember, I am Jean Leroux, the descendant, as the name indicates, of a
family of Spanish hidalgos with large possessions in the Philippines.”

The jailer knew enough to understand that this was a joke, and he said,
trying to laugh:

“Oh, yes, Jean Leroux, I won’t forget you, and I shall tell everybody
who asks for you, ‘That fellow Leroux was a cool hand.’”

The jailer then produced a rope and proceeded to tie François’ hands
behind his back. He was gentle about it, and asked François if it hurt.

“No,” replied François, “but I hope it won’t take the skin off.”

Then began a march through the dim corridor at the end of which were
found half a dozen other unfortunates to be stood up against the wall
before a firing squad.

All were calm except an old priest, who said with a tremulous smile to
François, standing next him:

“I don’t see why I should tremble so, because I am already
seventy-seven years old, and could not live much longer.”

“Well, then,” answered François, “you should not mind a little thing
like a bullet, which will send you to heaven.”

“True,” said the old man, suddenly straightening himself up; “your
words are words of wisdom.”

“Now,” continued François, ranging himself by the side of the old
priest as the sombre procession marched two and two down the stone
stairs, “I have a great deal to answer for in the next half hour, but,
I tell you, I believe God is a good deal easier on His poor children
than men are to each other. The devil is a _sans culotte_. I chummed
with him, but I never mistook him for a gentleman.”

“Really,” said the old priest as he clumped feebly down the stairs worn
by the feet of many prisoners, “you do for me what I should do for you.”

The grewsome procession, headed and flanked and enclosed by guards and
jailers, passed through the courtyard until they came to a garden. On
one side was a long, lately opened trench.

Around them, afar off, was a gigantic circle of leaping flames. Over
them hung the greatest smoke bank the world ever saw, while the stench
of powder and blood polluted the soft May air. The place was full of
National Guards, many of them drunk, all of them bewildered, stunned,
and terrified by the cordon of fire and steel that was tightening
around them every hour. But they were murdering to the last.

When the procession was halted, and the prisoners were stood up against
the stone wall of the garden, the officer in command was the Marquis
Egmont de St. Angel. He grinned when he saw François.

“Here you are,” he said. “Come now, before we spoil your beauty, give
us a song and dance.”

“My regular price for a performance,” said François, “is five hundred
francs, and you probably have not that much about you. Besides,
although, like you, my Marquis Egmont of the Holy Angels, I have not
lived as a gentleman, unlike you, I mean to die as a gentleman.”

“Forward!” cried Egmont to the firing squad, which marched out and took
their places.

The old priest lifted his bound hands and blessed and absolved them
all, prisoners and murderers alike. Egmont laughed loudly at this,
but François bent his head. Then he raised it and fixed his bright,
dark eyes full on Egmont. The gaze seemed to fascinate, to accuse, to
condemn, and to terrify him. Just then, a sudden, sharp, vagrant wind
cleft the dun cloud of smoke, and a ray of pale splendor shone for
a moment on the face of François. Egmont, in desperation, to escape
the piercing eyes of François, shouted, “Fire!” A straggling volley
rang out, and François and the old priest and the other four men fell
forward prone to the ground. The little spark of life left their
mangled bodies and sped with ever increasing light and glory to the
other world.

The bodies were rolled in canvas, and thrown into the trench and
hastily covered with earth, but the jailer, who had seen it all,
observed that François was laid at the head of the trench.

Then was heard a quick, wild thunder of guns as if coming from the
ground under their feet, and from two streets they saw a disorderly
multitude of National Guards being driven before two red-legged columns
of soldiers. The jailer, who was not without sense, saw that all was
over. He ran back to the prison, raced up the stairs, and along the
corridor, unlocking every door. Some of the prisoners, he thought,
would save his life for that one act.

When he reached Diane’s door, it was the last, and he flung it wide.
She was standing calmly in the middle of the cell, and asked:

“Have you come for me?”

“No,” replied the jailer. “The soldiers are here; listen to the wheels
of the mitrailleuse down in the courtyard. I am trying to turn these
prisoners loose before a fire breaks out.”

The man’s face was deadly pale, and with his hand he wiped drops from
his dirty forehead. He had seen enough of the death of others not to
like the prospect for himself.

“Such a pity,” he mumbled nervously; “not ten minutes ago six prisoners
were shot, one of them an old, tottering priest, and another, Jean
Leroux, the bravest--”

“Jean Leroux, did you say?” asked Diane, coming up close to him.

“Yes,” replied the jailer, “an actor and singer, and Colonel Egmont,
as he calls himself now, though he was a marquis the other day, taunted
Jean Leroux thirty seconds before he was shot.”

“Where is Colonel Egmont, as you call him?” asked Diane, still calmly,
and without a tremor in her voice.

“God knows,” answered the jailer. “He was in the courtyard a moment
ago.”

Diane rushed by the jailer, and ran along the corridor, down the
stairs, and bareheaded into the courtyard. Egmont was there trying to
subdue the panic among his men and to induce them to make a last stand,
but no one heeded him. There was running to and fro and throwing down
of arms and the steady cracking rifles of skilled soldiers.

Egmont, cursing and swearing, turned, and was faced by Diane.

“So,” she said, “you have killed the man I love. Well, then, I can love
him just as much dead as when he was living. Did you not know that?”

“I know,” responded Egmont, “that women are great fools where men are
concerned. I didn’t know that Jean Leroux had been shot, but I am glad
of it. François le Bourgeois has just been put to sleep.”

Behind them a string of prisoners was trooping out. One of them, a big
man, came up and caught Diane around the waist and began dragging her
down the steps and into a blind alley that opened upon the courtyard,
for bullets were now flying and cracking, and a gun was being trained
down either street.

As Diane turned and saw that it was Jean Leroux whose arm was around
her, she suddenly became as a dead woman in his arms. She was so slim
that it was easy enough for Jean to pick her up and carry her into the
blind alley, where he was about to lay her flat upon the cold stones
when she revived and stood upon her feet, for Diane was a strong woman
and not given to fainting.

“They told me you were shot,” she said.

“Not yet,” answered Jean. “Come, let us find a cellar. We have been in
cellars before, and found them pleasant enough.”

The soldiers did not make as short work as they expected of Egmont
and his crew. For an hour, Jean and Diane, listening in a black and
slimy cellar, heard desperate fighting going on around them, the few
wretches who remained dying hard, like wild animals at bay. Half a
dozen smouldering fires were put out in that time, and the soldiers, at
their leisure and without burning anything, finally got possession of
the prison of the Mazas.

It was black night, but the sky was still illuminated with a dreadful
and appalling glory when Diane and Jean finally crept once more into
the blind alley. The soldiers were carrying off a badly wounded man,
cursing and denouncing all men and their Maker. It was he who was once
the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel.

The officer in command was surprised, if anything could surprise one in
those frightful hours, to see a woman in such a place. Diane showed an
admirable calmness, and Jean, as usual, had little to say. The jailer,
hovering around and seeing Diane, came up cringing.

“This lady will tell you, sir,” he said to the officer, “that I opened
the doors of all the cells as soon as I could, fearing a fire.”

“True,” answered Diane, “but why did you tell me that Jean Leroux was
shot?”

“Because he told me so himself,” cried the jailer, nervously. “When I
showed him the warrant for the shooting of Jean Leroux, he said, ‘I am
Jean Leroux,’ and he told me so a dozen times. The Bishop that was in
the prison knows the man who was shot. The Bishop has gone back to his
cell, because he has nowhere else to go until to-morrow, and if this
officer will let us, I will take you to him.”

Ten minutes later, Diane and Jean were in the Bishop’s cell, which was
lighted only by a lantern carried by the jailer, for prisoners were not
allowed lights.

“Will your Grace bear me out,” said the jailer, who had decided to
recognize the Bishop’s dignity, since the Commune was at an end, “that
the man who was shot this afternoon gave his name as Jean Leroux?”

“Did he?” cried the Bishop with animation, rising. “Well, then, that
man, whatever his name may be, or whatever his life may have been, died
nobly.”

A silence which the jailer could not understand prevailed in the
cell. The two men and the woman looked at each other with a strange
understanding and eloquence in the eyes of all.

The jailer, very anxious to make favor for himself, continued:

“If you will come with me to the cell that the dead man occupied, I
will show you his handwriting on the wall.”

Still silent, the Bishop walking heavily, they went down the corridor,
and the jailer opened the door of the cell, large and with many
windows, and swung the lantern so that its yellow gleam fell upon the
whitewashed wall.

The Bishop read the first two lines, and then his voice broke. Neither
Diane nor Jean took up the reading.

The jailer, still obsequious, chattered on.

“He was the coolest hand I ever saw, and making jokes until the very
last, complaining that he would catch cold if he didn’t wear his hat
on the way to be shot. He was very proud of his poetry, and complained
only that he had not time to finish the last verse.”

The Bishop, a man of simple mind, went down on his knees, and Diane and
Jean knelt, too. So did the jailer, who did not mind a little thing
like that in order to keep the good-will of his recent prisoners.

The Bishop made a prayer for the soul of François, known as Le
Bourgeois, a prayer that came from the heart of an honest man.

When they rose, Jean said to the Bishop:

“Now we know that François, whom the world reckoned a rapscallion, was
a better man than most. He stood up against the wall, and was huddled
into the trench in my place, not so much for my sake as for this woman,
whom, I know now, he loved well.”

“Is he then buried in the trench?” asked the Bishop. “He must be taken
out this night and given Christian burial.”

A heavy silence had fallen over the quarter where lately there had been
the shrieking of bullets and the thunder of guns. Still the city was
burning and shrouded in smoke, but the Commune was throttled and dead.

In finding François, everything was done quite as informally as
shooting him. The Bishop stood by the trench in the darkness, which was
lighted only by the jailer’s lantern.

The trench was the last one dug by the Communards, and was so hastily
filled that the dirt was easily thrown aside by a couple of soldiers
hired to do the work, Jean helping with a spade. They lifted François
out, looking strangely young and natural when the canvas in which his
body was wrapped was removed.

Diane was a little way off,--it was no sight for a woman,--but at that
moment she entered the garden in the dusk, carrying something in her
hand.

“Here,” she said, “is something in which to wrap François. I went to
the officer commanding at the jail, and told him that François was a
soldier of France who had died bravely, and that he was entitled to
have the tricolor laid upon him dead.”

It was a small flag, such as batteries of artillery carry in case they
should lose or be separated from their colors.

Diane, kneeling on the ground, wrapped François’ body in it, and then
leaned over and kissed his dead face.

There was a little half-wrecked church in the neighborhood, and
there François was carried by the soldiers, with the jailer and Jean
assisting, and followed by the Bishop. They laid him down on the
pavement before the desecrated altar, and there Jean watched by him the
whole night through.

The church was dark, although the windows were broken out and a shell
had made a great gaping hole in the roof, but the light of the moon and
the stars was quenched by the great pall of smoke that enveloped the
vast city.

Occasionally Jean would rise and go near the altar and look down at
François, mute and meek, for even François le Bourgeois was meek in
death.

Jean’s memory, travelling back slowly but accurately to the beginning
of things, recalled that François had loved Diane from the first, but
had been clever enough to keep the preposterous thing to himself. Well,
François was ever a mystery and a contradiction, and so his death
contradicted his whole life, and atoned for it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Two weeks later, on a beautiful June morning, the Bishop had what was
left of François le Bourgeois interred close to the walls of the little
old cathedral of Bienville.

“Because,” said the Bishop, to Diane and Jean Leroux, who were
present, “when I die, they will put me in the church on the other side
of the wall, and I think I should like to be near François, for, to
tell you the truth, I loved him better than I ever acknowledged. He was
such an amusing fellow, you know, and I had known him when he was the
child of greatness and I was the boy who tended the cows. François and
I, having been together in our boyhood, will be close together at the
end, and I am sure when the last trump sounds, François will rise with
a joke upon his lips; otherwise, it would not be François at all.”

After François had finally been laid to rest, Diane and Jean went into
a side chapel of the cathedral, and were married by the Bishop. When
the ceremony was over, the new-made wife of Jean Leroux went out and
laid her bridal bouquet upon the grave of François; who called himself
Le Bourgeois.

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Emboldened text is surrounded by equals signs: =bold=.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.





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