Monsieur Maurice Part 14

"Hartmann saw nothing but the reflection of his crime upon the mirror of his conscience."

I was silenced, but not convinced. Some minutes later, having thought it over, I returned to the charge.

"But, Monsieur Maurice," I said, "it is not the first time he has been here."

"Who? The King?"

"No--the brown man."

Monsieur Maurice frowned.

"Nay, nay," he said, impatiently, "prithee, no more of the brown man. 'Tis a folly, and I dislike it."

"But he was here in the park the night you tried to run away," I said, persistently. "He saved your life by knocking up the musket that was pointed at your head!"

Pale as he always was, Monsieur Maurice turned paler still at these words of mine. His very lips whitened.

"What is that you say?" he asked, stopping short and laying his hand upon my shoulder.

And then I repeated, word for word, all that I had heard the soldiers saying that night under the corridor window. When I had done, he took off his hat and stood for a moment as if in prayer, silent and bare-headed.

"If it be so," he said presently, "if such fidelity can indeed survive the grave--then not once, but thrice.... Who knows? Who can tell?"

He was speaking to himself. I heard the words, and I remembered them; but I did not understand them till long after.

The King left Bruhl that same afternoon _en route_ for Ehrenbreitstein, and Monsieur Maurice went away the next morning in a post-chaise and pair, bound for Paris. He gave me, for a farewell gift, his precious microscope and all his boxes of slides, and he parted from me with many kisses; but there was a smile on his face as he got into the carriage, and something of triumph in the very wave of his hand as he drove away.

Alas! how could it be otherwise? A prisoner freed, an exile returning to his country, how should he not be glad to go, even though one little heart should be left to ache or break in the land of the stranger?

I never saw him again; never--never--never. He wrote now and then to my father, but only for a time; perhaps as many as six letters during three or four years--and then we heard from him no more. To these letters he gave us no opportunity of replying, for they contained no address; and although we had reason to believe that he was a man of family and t.i.tle, he never signed himself by any other name than that by which we had known him.

We did hear, however, (I forget now through what channel) of the sudden disgrace and banishment of His Majesty's Minister of War, the Baron von Bulow. Respecting the causes of his fall there were many vague and contradictory rumours. He had starved to death a prisoner of war and forced his widow into a marriage with himself. He had sold State secrets to the French. He had been over to Elba in disguise, and had there held treasonable intercourse with the exiled Emperor, before his return to France in 1815. He had attempted to murder, or caused to be murdered, the witnesses of his treachery. He had forged the King's signature. He had tampered with the King's servants. He had been guilty, in short, of every crime, social and political, that could be laid to the charge of a fallen favourite.

Knowing what we knew, it was not difficult to disentangle a thread of truth here and there, or to detect under the most extravagant of these fictions, a substratum of fact. Among other significant circ.u.mstances, my father, chancing one day to see a portrait of the late minister in a shop-window at Cologne, discovered that his former visitor, the Count von Rettel, and the Baron von Bulow were one and the same person. He then understood why the King had questioned him so minutely with regard to this man's appearance, and shuddered to think how deadly that enmity must have been which could bring him in person upon so infamous an errand.

And here all ended. The guilty and the innocent vanished alike from the scene, and we at least, in our remote home on the Rhenish border, heard of them no more.

Monsieur Maurice never knew that I had been in any way instrumental in bringing his case before the King. He took his freedom as the fulfillment of a right, and dreamed not that his little Gretchen had pleaded for him.

But that he should know it, mattered not at all. He had his liberty, and was not that enough?

Enough for me, for I loved him. Ay, child as I was, I loved him; loved him deeply and pa.s.sionately--to my cost--to my loss--to my sorrow. An old, old wound; but I shall carry the scar to my grave!

And the brown man?

Hus.h.!.+ a strange feeling of awe and wonder creeps upon me to this day, when I remember those bright eyes glowing through the dusk, and the swift hand that seized the poisoned draught and dashed it on the ground. What of that faithful Ali, who went forward to meet the danger alone, and was s.n.a.t.c.hed away to die horribly in the jungle? I can but repeat his master's words. I can but ask myself "Does such fidelity indeed survive the grave? Who knows?

Who can tell?"