Monsieur Jonquelle (12 page)

The face of Von Gratz, framed in the narrow
aperture of the oak door in the dim light of this garret, appeared fantastic and ghostlike.

“I came here. When I reached the border of the wood I was seized by two men, the sleeve of a blouse stuffed into my mouth, and carried into this house and up the stairs to this room. I was thrust in and the door locked.… Yes, the men were the two old peasants out there.… They told me that from the day their brother was shot against the door they had never ceased to pray to God to bring me back here; and they had never ceased to watch for me. They had abandoned the house as a sort of trap. They gave me precisely what I had given my own prisoner—a jug of water, black bread and a Bible. And they told me they would keep me a prisoner for five days, as I had kept the brother, and then shoot me against the door as I had shot him.”

Banutelli was appalled.

“Great God!” he murmured. “What a revenge! What a revenge!”

And he continued to repeat the word, as though the very sound of it projected before him all the faith and patience and barbarity of these two terrible old men. Then he turned as though to descend the stair.

“I will bring the gendarmes. The French officers, at least, are not savages.”

Von Gratz stopped him.

“No, my friend—that will not do. You would get me out, to be sure, but not alive, Marquis. Do you think a German officer could be rescued by gendarmes to-day in France and not somehow lose his life in the engagement—especially if that officer was Ulrich Von Gratz? Besides, how should I be regarded by the Emperor if I were found on French soil under such conditions? What explanation could be given? What international complications would follow? … I have thought the whole thing out. I must depend solely on you, Marquis. My brother Rudolph is now in Basel. Go to him there; tell him this thing in person and he will come here with his servants and release me. There is time enough. You will reach Basel to-morrow; these peasants will not murder me until the five days are up, and Rudolph will act swiftly.”

“But, Prince,” interrupted the Marquis, “how will your brother know that I come from you? There is nothing here with which to write a message. Suppose he should refuse to believe me—or take me for a madman?”

“I have also thought of that,” replied Von Gratz.

He went away from the window and presently returned with the Bible of which he had spoken— a small, thick old book with a leather cover.

“During the Franco-German War,” he continued,
“the officers of the division to which Rudolph and myself belonged made use of this simple device. If a messenger bearing a dispatch brought with him any sort of book, no matter what, marked with a fingerprint on any three of its successive pages ending in seven, the dispatch of that messenger was to be taken as of the most urgent necessity. I have thus marked this Bible on its seventh, its seventeenth and its twenty-seventh pages. Show it to my brother, and he will not only believe what you say but he will also know by this sign that I am in the most desperate position.”

And he handed the thick old book through the opening in the door.

“You will find Rudolph Von Gratz at the Hotel of the Three Kings. And now farewell, my friend! My life will depend on your devotion! Go out of the house on the side you entered so that the peasants cannot see you from their field, flank the woods round them and return to Geneva, on the road from Ferney, as you have been accustomed to do.”

The Marquis put the book into his pocket and left the house. He entered the woods and made a détour round the little meadow, keeping well within the cover of the trees; but when he came opposite to where the peasants worked he stopped.

The afternoon was entrancing; a warm vitalizing sun lay upon the earth; a breath of balmy air moved; the sounds of men and horses came to him from the distant fields; away in the blue sky the lark trilled. The mood of the world was a benediction. And the Italian shuddered!

It was the custom of poets in their tragedies to make the aspect of Nature symbolic of their motif, and it was thought that this relation struck the human mind with greater terror; but the exact reverse of that conception was true!

Under the gray roof of the distant farmhouse, peaceful in the sun, a human soul, entrapped by a supernal fantasy, awaited a doom as tragic as any in the Book of Kings! And before him, to the eye, two gentle old men digged a field that they might cultivate the fruits of the earth—while, in fact, they pursued an appalling vengeance.

The Marquis lifted his hat and wiped the sweat from his face. He looked at the two peasants, their bodies awkward and uncouth, their faces stolid; and he thought how he would have passed them by on his quest for the fierce old passions of the race. And yet these simple creatures had conceived and carried out a thing unequaled even in the Wars of Yahveh.

And this big, vivid, hideous tragedy went on, invisibly and without a sign, at the heart of this perfect day!

The man could not escape from the dominion of this oppressive idea; he continued to consider it as he crossed the fields and on the road from Ferney to Geneva. But out here in the sun, as he approached the voices and activities of men, as he observed the children at play and listened to the peasants calling in good will to one another, he found it difficult to accept as one of the realities of life the thing he had just experienced. It seemed now—here—like the grotesque fancies of a nightmare. And unconsciously, as a sort of verification, the Marquis took the Bible out of his pocket and began to look at the pages Von Gratz had named. Yes; they were marked as the German had said, with a sort of smear, as though by a finger blackened on the hearth.

He was about to return the book to his pocket when he realized that the road before him was barred by a gendarme. He looked up. He had come to the line where the road crosses out of France. On a bench before the door of the bureau of police a thin, gray man, who looked like a gentleman of leisure, sat reading a journal. The Marquis stepped back and put the book into his pocket. At the same time a second gendarme came out into the road.

“Monsieur,” he said, “we are compelled to detain you.”

“Detain me!” echoed the Marquis. “For what reason?”

“Monsieur will doubtless learn that later on,” replied the gendarme.

The Marquis was indignant.

“I protest against this outrage!” he said. “I am a subject of King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, and I demand instant permission to proceed!”

The gendarmes did not reply, but they now advanced as though they would take the Italian into custody. At this moment the man who sat on the bench before the door put down his journal, rose and came out into the road. As he approached the Marquis he bowed.

“Pardon, Monsieur,” he said, “I have some trifling influence with the authorities here and I shall be charmed to be of service to so distinguished a personage as the Marquis Banutelli.”

The Italian was at a loss to understand how his name and title should be known to this stranger; but he observed that the man was a gentleman and he was grateful for any means that offered him an escape from the gendarmes.

“I thank you, Monsieur!” he said. “I shall be obliged to you—or to any one—for permission to continue on my way to Geneva. I cannot understand why this indignity is put upon me.”

The stranger made a slight conciliatory gesture.

“Ah, Monsieur, nations will have their little
foibles.” He looked at his watch. “And, now, if the Marquis Banutelli will do me the honor of drinking a cup of tea”—he indicated a neighboring villa—“I think I can promise him safe conduct to Geneva within the hour and the end of his anxieties.”

They entered a gate of the villa and ascended a long garden that gained the summit of a hill toward Lake Leman. Here was a view unexcelled in the environs of Geneva. In one direction lay the ranges of Haute-Savoie and the White Mountain in the sky, and in the other the Jura and the incomparable valley beneath it.

At a table, on the summit of this garden, the stranger placed a chair for the Marquis facing the panorama of the Alps, and himself sat down beyond him, where he could look into the French valley and the great road. Tea was brought and while he poured it and added a bit of lemon the stranger addressed the Marquis.

“Monsieur,” he began, “I esteem myself singularly fortunate in this honor. I have long wished to have your opinion upon the structure of the German opera.” He made a gracious gesture, as though in deference to so distinguished an authority. “It has always seemed to me that the machinery of German tragedy is unnecessarily ponderous, weighted down with the clumsiest devices and demanding at every turn heavy, lugubrious
effects—as though the mystic German mind moved always in a dense, almost palpable atmosphere of romance. Or am I in this, Monsieur, merely misled by prejudice?”

The tea was excellent, the stranger had an engaging manner, and the question was launched upon the very sea the Marquis sailed. He was compelled to consider it; and he found his host following his words with so close an interest, such intelligent comment and so high a regard for the speaker's opinion that the Marquis was charmed.

A quarter of an hour—a half—three-quarters of an hour—fled. The Marquis was deep in the subtleties of his critique when suddenly his host pointed down to the road from Ferney.

“Pardon, Monsieur,” he said, “but is not the person yonder, at this moment crossing out of France, the Prussian general, Prince Ulrich Von Gratz?”

The Marquis sprang up and turned about so quickly that he almost overthrew the table. The gendarmes were standing stiffly at attention and the big military figure of the German was striding past them into Switzerland. The Marquis caught his breath with a hissing murmur through the teeth.

“Thank God!” he cried. “He is safe!”

“Safe!” echoed his companion as though in astonishment
“How could a distinguished stranger be other than safe on the soil of France?”

“But he is free! He has escaped!” continued the excited Banutelli. “He goes safely into Geneva! And I left him but now a prisoner awaiting death!”

Hurriedly and with gesticulation he recounted all the details of this sinister trap in which Von Gratz had been taken, with the supernatural pressure that had forced him to enter it, the fatal patience that received him, and the diabolic vengeance that awaited him—together with the part he had played and the message that he now carried to Prince Rudolph, in Basel.

The tall, gray man standing before the amazed Italian stooped and lighted a cigarette, striking the match slowly and with deliberation. Then he held it up, watching the flame die out, with a gentle, whimsical smile.

“Ah, Marquis,” he said, “as you so aptly remarked but now in your discourse, the Germans are incurably romantic!” He threw away the bit of match with a little fillip of the fingers. “Who but a Teuton, if his object was to get something taken out of France, something he feared to carry himself and which was to be placed by his agents in an abandoned house, with the signal that the door, usually closed, should be open when the thing was ready … what intriguer, Marquis,
I ask it of you, but a German, to accomplish that simple end, would resort to all these involved and ponderous properties of the tragic poets, including dreams and visitations, an imaginary execution and a secret cipher, and involving an empty house tied up in a French lawsuit, and two simple old peasants who never harmed a creature in this world!”

“But, Monsieur,” cried the astonished Marquis, “what thing could Prince Ulrich Von Gratz wish carried out of France, and who are you to know all this?”

“If you will permit me to examine the Bible in your pocket,” replied the stranger, “I think I can undertake to reply.”

The Marquis handed the man the book. He put it down on the table and, slipping the blade of a pocketknife along the edges of the leather cover, ripped it open. Within, making the thick back, were two closely folded packets of glazed cambric, crowded with drawings.

“These,” he said, “are the plans of all the French forts along the range of the Vosges.… And I, Monsieur, am Jonquelle, the Prefect of Police of Paris!”

It was impossible to believe that this was war.

The little village lay white in the sun; dogs idled on the doorsteps; children were in the road. The place was only a handful of cottages lying along the ridge of the hills beside the feudal château; an oasis in a Sahara of ruin.

The fight arched over it. That never ending duel of field guns. The Germans were entrenched west of this high ground and the French southeast of it. Neither could advance. The French had control of the village but they did not occupy it. The science of artillery fighting had changed. Field batteries were planted under hills now and not on the crest of them.

The struggle here had a certain aspect of permanence of which the French Captain of Artillery took advantage. He came from Tarascon and when the sun was out nothing could depress him. He hummed a song as he moved along the road. It was a song with a soft, haunting refrain:

“
Ah, qu'elle est belle La Marguerite
!”

His voice would go up strong and full on the opening word and down soft and sensuous on the “Marguerite.” He was on his way to lunch at the château with its American owner, Marmaduke Wood.

Monsieur Wood had servants and a cellar and he sat tight with them in spite of the advancing Prussians.

For all his joyous aspect the Captain of Artillery was very much disturbed. Some one in this village was in communication with the German lines. He had tested the thing out, and he knew. Every time he moved his battery under cover of the high ground, the enemy immediately changed its fire. There was no
Taube
about. Some one signaled the range, that was the long and short of it. He had sent word to the war department in Paris and asked for a secret agent. But he watched himself as he swung along through the village.