The World Masters Part 7

"Bon soir," replied the prince, as he pa.s.sed on to his room. "Le chocolat a huit heures."

But Xavier de Conde, Prince of Bourbon, would never drink another cup of chocolate. As soon as his door closed behind him, a sternly-repressed flood of pa.s.sion broke out, and he spent half the remainder of the night walking, in his stockinged feet, up and down his big bedchamber, with clenched teeth and tight-gripped hands, his brain seething with a thousand thoughts of pa.s.sion, and his white, twitching lips shaping unspoken words of rage, bitterness, and despair. It was a cruel irony that Fate had wrought on him and his ancient house. The possible sceptre of the world had been offered to his hereditary enemies, the Republicans of France, and, if Fargeau had held to his compact, the compact for which he had given his daughter to his son, he would have been master of France; and Fargeau would have kept it, for he was a loyal Frenchman; and his son would have married a future Queen of France! And now not only had France refused the sceptre and s.n.a.t.c.hed the crown from him, but the sceptre had pa.s.sed by some bitter caprice of Fate into the hands of France's hereditary enemies. What could he say or do? Nothing. It was maddening--worse than maddening. He had pledged his honour, and could tell no one--but even if he could, what then? The secret was out--worse--it was in the hands of men who could make the ideal a reality. They could not even give him back the power if they would, for the knowledge was theirs already, and they could act on it while he could not.

The more he thought the faster the fever that was burning in his blood increased. His lips and tongue grew parched. His steps grew irregular and faltering. The veins in his head were beating on his brain like sledge-hammers. The lights began to waver before his eyes. He felt instinctively that madness--that long-inherited curse of his race--was coming. What if he should really go mad and babble not only of this great secret, but also of all the plots and intrigues of which he had been the centre! How many devoted friends and adherents would be consigned to prison and exile--perhaps even to the scaffold! The very thought chilled him back into sanity for the time being. He rapped sharply at the wall, and presently Felix appeared, half-dressed, and doing his best to stifle a yawn.

"Felix," said the prince, who was now sitting in his arm-chair with his head between his hands, "bid Marie arouse mam'selle immediately, and request her to dress and come to me. I am unwell--another of my attacks, I fear--and she only knows what to do for me. Quick--I need her at once."

Felix vanished, and within ten minutes the marquise was in her father's room; but by this time the blood was beating on his brain again, and the fierce light of insanity was beginning to dawn in his eyes.

With the valet's help she partly undressed him and got him to bed.

Then she locked the door and braced herself for what she instinctively knew must be a terrible ordeal.

She saw at a glance that some terrible shock had thrown his brain off its balance. She had plotted with him and for him, and she knew why it was her duty to lock the door. But what was this? Whence had come this blow which had struck him down so swiftly? She soon learnt, as the disjointed words and fragmentary sentences were shaped in the struggle between sanity and delirium for the command of his brain. Hour after hour it went on, a piteous jumble of the memories of a long, busy life; but in the end, out of the mental tangle she was able to unravel one clear thread of thought. Emil Fargeau had given his secret to the sea, and the sea had given it into the hands of the English, the ancient enemies of her country and her race; and it was the son of this Lord Orrel, the brother of the haughty English beauty sleeping here, under the same roof, who had re-discovered it, and they were even worse than English, they were half-American; and England and America would between them share that empire of the world, that mastery of the human race, which should have been her father's and hers. She had even permitted her troth to be sold to a simple officer in the German army, a spy in the enemy's camp, in order to purchase this new sovereignty for her house.

The prince was rapidly sinking; she could see that, and yet she was helpless to save him, for she had promised that no one, not even a doctor, should be admitted into the room. She gave him a dose of an opiate which he always carried with him, and about dawn he was sleeping, but every now and then talking in his sleep more coherently.

At sunrise the effect of the drug wore off, and delirium resumed its sway for a few moments. His eyes opened, and with a sudden jerk he sat up in bed, his eyes glaring at the opposite wall, and his fingers clutching and tearing at the bedclothes. His lips worked convulsively for a while, then, with a hoa.r.s.e, croaking scream he died.

"France! O ma belle France, maitresse du monde--et moi ton roi, ton--ah----!"

His voice dropped suddenly in a low, soft sigh, his eyelids fell, and his arms shrank to his sides, and he rolled back into his daughter's arms. The fresh rush of blood to his head had broken a vessel on the brain.

Adelaide knew instinctively that the dead weight in her arms was not that of a living man. She laid him back on the pillows, called up Felix and sent him for the resident physician. When he had made his examination, he said, in his guttural French:

"Mam'selle la Marquise, there is no hope. The prince is dead. If I had been called earlier I might have done something. I will make an examination afterwards and certify the cause of death, according to law. Accept my most respectful condolences."

That evening Shafto Hardress arrived from Paris at the Hotel Wilhelmshof.

CHAPTER IX

In the midst of the desolation which had so swiftly and unexpectedly fallen upon her, the help and solace even of those whom she now knew to be her enemies--enemies perhaps to the death--were very welcome to Adelaide de Montpensier. Every sort of trouble that could be taken off her hands they relieved her of. Hardress travelled to Vienna, which the prince had made his headquarters, to interview his man of business and to escort back the prince's sister, Madame de Conde, Princess of Bourbon, who was now, save Adelaide, the only representative of the older branch of the ancient line. The younger had bowed the knee to the Republican Baal in France, and they were not even notified of the prince's death.

Lord Orrel undertook the arrangement of the funeral and all the legal formalities connected with it, and Lady Olive was so sweet and tender in her help and sympathy that, in the midst of her grief, Adelaide began to love her in spite of herself.

The funeral was without any display that might have signalised the rank of the dead man, and Louis Xavier de Conde, Prince of Bourbon, was laid to rest in an ordinary brick grave on the hillside under the pines of Elsenau. Both Adelaide and her aunt would have applied to the French authorities to permit his interment in the resting-place of his ancestors, but the old prince had given special instructions that while the Republican banner waved over France not even his dead body should rest in her soil, and so his wishes were, perforce, respected.

The night after the funeral the marquise was sitting at her writing-table before the window of her private sitting-room. The window looked put over a vast expanse of undulating forest land, broken here and there by broad gra.s.sy valleys through which ran little tributaries of the Weser, shining like tiny threads of silver under the full moon riding high in the heavens.

She had drawn the blind up, and for nearly half-an-hour she had been gazing dreamily out over the sombre, almost ghostly landscape. The deep gloom of the far-spreading pine forest harmonised exactly with her own mood, and yet the twinkle of the streams amidst the glades, and the glitter of the stars on the far-off horizon, were to her as symbols of a light shining over and beyond the present darkness of her soul.

The night had fallen swiftly and darkly upon her. First the vanishing into impenetrable mystery of the man upon whom rested her hopes and dreams of one day queening it over France as her ancestress Marie Antoinette had done, and not only over France as a kingdom, but as mistress of the world. And now the veil of mystery had been rudely torn aside, and showed her these English and Americans, the hated hereditary enemies of her house and country, in possession of the power which should have been hers. Then, last and worst of all, her father and her friend, the only real friend she had ever had, the only human being she had ever really loved--for she barely remembered the mother who had died when she was scarcely out of her cradle--had been stricken down by the same blow that had fallen upon her, and lay yonder on the hillside under the pines, all his high hopes and splendid ambitions brought to nothing by the swift agony of a single night.

There was an open book on the table before her--a square volume, daintily bound in padded Russia-leather, and closed with a silver spring lock. A gold-mounted stylographic pen lay beside it, and she held between her fingers a little cunningly contrived silver key which she had just detached from her watch-chain.

"Shall I write it," she murmured, in a soft, low tone, "or shall I keep it hidden where no human eyes can read it? But who can ever read this?" she went on after a little pause, letting her hand fall on the square volume. "After all, are not all my secrets here? and is not this the only friend and confidant that I have now left to me? Yes, I am a woman, when all is said; and I must open my heart to someone, if only to myself."

She turned the little shaded lamp by her side so that the light fell on the volume, and she put the key in the lock and opened it. About half the pages were filled with writing--not in words, but in a kind of shorthand which could only be read by her father, herself, and three of the most trusted adherents of their lost cause. Her eyes ran rapidly over the last few pages. They contained the last chapters in the book of her life which was now closed. Before she reached the end a mist of tears was gathering in her long, dark lashes. She wiped it away with a little lace-edged handkerchief, and took up her pen. She scored two heavy lines across the bottom of the last written page, turned over a fresh one, and began to write.

"My father is dead, and with him the dreams which for years we have dreamt together. Was there ever a more cruel irony of Fate than this? Was Fate itself ever more unkind to man or woman? Only a few weeks ago, and I had sold myself, with his consent, so far did our devotion go to serve the sacred cause of our house, to this big, handsome Alsatian--a servant of the German Emperor, the arch-enemy of our country, the owner of the two provinces which my ancestor Louis tore from Germany. I did it because in high politics it is necessary sometimes to sacrifice oneself, partly too because no other man had appealed to me as he did. I knew that he was running tremendous risks; I believed--yes, and I still believe, that he was risking everything--rank, honour, liberty, even life itself, by wearing the uniform of his country's enemy so that he might learn his enemy's secrets.

"He loves me--yes, if ever man loved woman, he loves me--me, Adelaide de Conde, Marquise de Montpensier; and I--ah, mon Dieu, is it possible that the daughter of Marie Antoinette has sunk so low?--I allowed him to believe that I loved him too. He believes it now. I suppose he would still believe it, even if he knew what I know now--that his father is dead, that the secret of the world-empire which he could have given us, that power for which I promised myself to him, so that I might share it with him, has gone, that it is worse than lost, since the Fates have given it into the hands of the enemies of our house.

"And so it is gone--worse than gone--and so, my friend Victor, I am afraid you will have to find out in the course of circ.u.mstances that a woman's smiles do not always mean a reflection of the light in her lover's eyes, and that her kisses do not always mean love.

It is a pity, because, after all, I believe you are a true Frenchman, even if you wear a German uniform; and if that dream had become a reality, and you and I had shared the throne of France, perhaps I should have loved you as well and as truly as most queens have loved their consorts.

"But, alas, my poor Victor, the sceptre has pa.s.sed away--for the time being, at least--from the House of Bourbon. It is given into the hands of our enemies, and so you, by force of fate, must stand aside. I shall not tell you this yet, because afterwards, perhaps, you may be useful. I wonder what you would think of me--even you, a man who in the old days would only have been a sort of slave, living or dying socially as the great Louis smiled or frowned upon you--I wonder what you would think if you could look over my shoulder and read this writing and see a woman's soul laid naked on this page. Perhaps you might think me utterly mean and contemptible--you would if you didn't understand; but if you did, if you could see all and understand all--well, then, you might hate me, but I think you would be man enough to respect me.

"At least you are diplomatist enough to know, after all, in the great game of politics, a game that is played for the mastery of kingdoms and peoples, to say nothing of the empire of the world, women have to count themselves as p.a.w.ns. Even the cleverest, the most brilliant, the most beautiful of us--that is all we are.

Sometimes our beauty or the charm of our subtle wit may win the outer senses of the rulers of the world; they may admire us physically or mentally, or both, but even at the best, it is only the man that we enslave. The man goes to sleep for a night, he dreams perhaps of our beauty and the delight of our society, but in the morning it is the statesman that wakes, and he looks back on the little weakness of the night before, and thinks of us as an ordinary man might think of the one extra liqueur which he ought not to have taken after a good dinner.

"And now these English--these people into whose hands Fate has given my heritage! Ah, cruel Fate; why did you not make them hateful, vulgar, common--something that I could hate and tread under foot--something that I could think as far beneath me as the bourgeois canaille of Republican France? But you have made them aristocratic! Lord Orrel's lineage goes back past the days of St Louis. His ancestors fought side by side with mine in the first Crusade. True, they have mixed their blood with that American froth, the skimming of the pot-bouille of the nations, but still, after all, the old blood tells.

"Lady Olive--how I wish that she were either vulgar or ugly, so that I could hate her!--is a daughter of the Plantagenets fit to mate with a Prince of Bourbon, if there were one worthy of her.

Lord Orrel might have been one of those who went with the Eighth Henry to meet Francis on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, patrician in every turn of voice and manner and movement. And Shafto Hardress, who will be Earl of Orrel some day, and master of the world: yes, he is a patrician too; but with him there is something a little different--the American blood perhaps--keen, quick, alert, one moment indolently smoking his cigar and sipping his coffee, the next on his feet, ready to a.s.sume the destinies of nations. A man, too, strong and kindly--a man who would risk his life to save a drowning dog, and yet strike down an enemy in his path, so that he might rise a foot or so on the ladder of fame or power. But he is more than that, he wants far more than the empty fame of applause. The fame he wants is that which comes from acknowledged power. You can see the dreamer in his eyes and on his forehead, and you can see the doer on that beautiful, pitiless mouth of his and the square, strong jaw which is under it.

"What a man to love and to be loved by! What would he think, I wonder, if he could read what I am writing here! And yet, are not all things possible? Is it not the unexpected that comes to pa.s.s?

Why not? Behold, I am left desolate, the garden that I called my heart is a wilderness--a wilderness ploughed up by the ploughshare of sorrow and bitterness, and so it lies fallow. Would it be possible for him to sow the seed for which it is waiting?--and then the harvest would be the empire of the world shared between us! Well, after all, I am not only Adelaide de Conde, daughter of a lost dynasty. I am a woman, with all the pa.s.sions and ambitions of our race burning hot within me. If I cannot sit on the throne of the Bourbons, why should I not be empress-consort on the throne of a world-wide empire?--why not? It would be a magnificent destiny!"

When she had written this she laid her pen down, put her elbows on the table, and, with her chin between her hands, looked up in silence for some minutes at the moon sailing through rank after rank of fleecy clouds. Then she took up her pen again, and wrote:

"I wonder if there is another woman?"

She looked at the last words for a moment or two, then put down her pen, closed the book and locked it, and, as she put it away into a drawer of her writing-table, she murmured:

"Ah, well, if there is--if there is----" She caught a sight of herself in the long gla.s.s of one of the wardrobes, and she saw a tall, exquisitely-shaped figure of a beautiful woman clad in the plainest of mourning. She looked at herself with eyes of unsparing criticism, and found no fault, and she turned away from the gla.s.s, saying:

"Ah, well, if there is--we shall see--and, if there really is, I wonder what she's like."

CHAPTER X

Within a week after the funeral Adelaide and Madame de Conde returned to the late prince's hotel on the Ringstra.s.se in Vienna. They had taken most cordial leave of Lord Orrel and his son and daughter, and, in spite of all their prejudices of race and nation, Adelaide de Conde had brought something more away with her than the memory of a great sorrow tempered by the kindness of those whom a strange freak of fortune had made friends as well as enemies.

Even the two or three days that she had spent in his society had sufficed to show her that Shafto Hardress possessed in an infinitely greater degree those qualities which go to make the rulers of humanity than her big handsome Alsatian, whose utmost ambition was the command of an army corps. He had the hard, keen, unemotional common-sense which enabled him to see even the tremendous possibilities of Emil Fargeau's discovery in a purely practical and even commercial light, but at the same time he possessed sufficient imagination to enable him to see how far-reaching the moral and social effects of the working-out of the scheme would be on the peoples of the world.

She had herself said nothing of what had pa.s.sed during that terrible night. For all they knew, the prince had taken the secret with him to the grave. Once Lord Orrel had very delicately led the conversation up as near to the edge of this supremely important subject as his instincts would let him go, but he had learnt nothing, and an hour or so later he said to his son:

"My dear Shafto, it is perfectly certain that my dear old friend the prince died without giving her any inkling of the great secret which he took to the grave with him."

"Either that, dad," he replied, "or she is the most perfect diplomatist in Europe. I think I have heard you say that the first essential of diplomacy is the ability to a.s.sume a perfect counterfeit of innocence and ignorance--in other words, to convey the impression that you know nothing when you know everything."

"Well, if that is so in this case," replied his father, "the mask which mam'selle wears is as impenetrable as it is beautiful. Really, Shafto, I think that rumour did not exaggerate when it called her the most beautiful woman in Europe."