The Son of Clemenceau Part 13

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

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

"Walked half a mile?" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Hedwig, who knew that the speaker had been vigorous enough at Munich, but, since her marriage, and living at Montmorency, she had a.s.sumed the popular air of a semi-invalid, "So you are strong in health again?"

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

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

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

"Your uncle?"

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

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

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

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

"Complete as all believers should make when on the brink of the grave,"

replied Madame Clemenceau, in her gravest tone to repress the tendency to frivolity, for she had not resented the incredulity as regarded herself.

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

"He gave me very good advice."

"Which you are following, madame?"

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

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

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

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

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

"I see that madame has indeed not altered," remarked Hedwig, plentifully adorned with smiles, as the sunshine streamed into the grave apartment.

"You have fresh projects of captivating the men!" Cesarine smiled also, and nodded several times.

"Here?" cried the girl, in surprise.

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

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

"Ordnance, child," corrected Madame Clemenceau.

"And the house is sealed up, as you found it, against all comers. We have n.o.body here for you to try graces upon except Mademoiselle Rebecca's papa--and he being a Jew, you must not go near him, fresh from the confessional."

Madame Clemenceau seemed to be musing.

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, madame, a husband never counts."

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

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

"Oh, what do they say?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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