Part 45 (2/2)
Little by little their plans took shape. They were to go--Heaven knows how!--to find the Emperor. Into his hands they would give the box with its secrets, then turn again, always together, ready for their work, wherever it might be.
Towards mid-afternoon Lorraine grew drowsy. There was a summer warmth in the air; the little forest birds came to the spring and preened their feathers in the pale suns.h.i.+ne. Two cicadas, high in the tree-tops, droned an endless harmony; hemlock cones dropped at intervals on the dead leaves.
When Lorraine lay asleep, her curly head on Jack's folded coat, her hands clasped under her cheek, Jack leaned back against the tree and picked up the box. He turned it softly, so that the bullet within should not rattle. After a moment he opened his penknife and touched the broken fragment of the key in the lock.
Idly turning the knife-blade this way and that, but noiselessly, for fear of troubling Lorraine, he thought of the past, the present, and the future. Sir Thorald lay dead on the hillock above the river Lisse; Alixe slept beside him; Rickerl was somewhere in the country, riding with his Uhlan scourges; Molly Hesketh waited in Paris for her dead husband; the Marquis de Nesville's bones were lying in the forest where he now sat, watching the sleeping child of the dead man. His child? Jack looked at her tenderly. No, not the child of the Marquis de Nesville, but a foundling, a lost waif in the Lorraine Hills, perhaps a child of chance. What of it? She would never know. The Chateau de Nesville was a smouldering ma.s.s of fire; the lands could revert to the country; she should never again need them, never again see them, for he would take her to his own land when trouble of war had pa.s.sed, and there she should forget pain and sorrow and her desolate, loveless childhood; she should only remember that in the Province of Lorraine she had met the man she loved. All else should be a memory of green trees and vineyards and rivers, growing vaguer and dimmer as the healing years pa.s.sed on.
The knife-blade in the box bent, sprang back--the box flew open.
He did not realize it at first; he looked at the three folded papers lying within, curiously, indolently. Presently he took them and looked at the superscriptions written on the back, in the handwriting of the marquis. The three papers were inscribed as follows:
”1. For the French Government after the fall of the Empire.”
”2. For the French Government on the death of Louis Bonaparte, falsely called Emperor.”
”3. To whom it may concern!”
”To whom it may concern!” he repeated, looking at the third paper. Presently he opened it and read it, and as he read his heart seemed to cease its beating.
”_TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN_!
”Grief has unsettled my mind, yet, what I now write is true, and, if there is a G.o.d, I solemnly call His curses on me and mine if I lie.
”My only son, Rene Philip d'Harcourt de Nesville, was a.s.sa.s.sinated on the Grand Boulevard in Paris, on the 2d of December, 1851. His a.s.sa.s.sin was a monster named Louis Bonaparte, now known falsely as Napoleon III., Emperor of the French. His paid murderers shot my boy down, and stabbed him to death with their bayonets, in front of the Cafe Tortoni. I carried his body home; I sat at the window, with my dead boy on my knees, and I saw Louis Bonaparte ride into the Rue St. Honore with his murderous Lancers, and I saw children spit at him and hurl curses at him from the barricade.
”Now I, Gilbert, Marquis de Nesville, swore to strike.
And I struck, not at his life--that can wait. I struck at the root of all his pride and honour--I struck at that which he held dearer than these--at his dynasty!
”Do the people of France remember when the Empress was first declared enciente? The cannon thundered from the orangerie at Saint-Cloud, the dome of the Invalides blazed rockets, the city glittered under a canopy of coloured fire. Oh, they were very careful of the Empress of the French! They went to Saint-Cloud, and later to Versailles, as they go to holy cities, praying. And the Emperor himself grew younger, they said.
”Then came the news that the expected heir, a son, had been born dead! Lies!
”I, Gilbert de Nesville, was in the forest when the Empress of the French fell ill. When separated from the others she called to Morny, and bade him drive for the love of Heaven! And they drove--they drove to the Trianon, and there was no one there. And there the child was born. Morny held it in his arms. He came out to the colonnade holding it in his arms, and calling for a messenger. I came, and when I was close to Morny I struck him in the face and he fell senseless. I took the child and wrapped it in my cloak. This is the truth!
”They dared not tell it; they dared not, for fear and for shame. They said that an heir had been born dead; and they mourned for their dead son. It was only a daughter. She is alive; she loves me, and, G.o.d forgive me, I hate her for defeating my just vengeance.
”And I call her Lorraine de Nesville.”
XXVI
THE SHADOW OF POMP
The long evening shadows were lengthening among the trees; sleepy birds twitted in dusky thickets; Lorraine slept.
Jack still stood staring at the paper in his hands, trying to understand the purport of what he read and reread, until the page became a blur and his hot eyes burned.
All the significance of the situation rose before him. This child, the daughter of the oath-breaker, the butcher of December, the sly, slow diplomate of Europe, the man of Rome, of Mexico, the man now reeling back to Chalons under the iron blows of an aroused people. In Paris, already, they cursed his name; they hurled insults at the poor Empress, that mother in despair.
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