When Monsieur François Jusseret, the cleverest unattached ambassador of
France's Cabinet Noir, had first met the Countess Astaride, his
sardonic eyes had twinkled dry appreciation.
This meeting had seemed to be the result of a chance introduction. It
had in reality been carefully designed by the French manipulator of
underground wires. Louis Delgado he already knew, and held in contempt,
yet Louis was the only possible instrument for use in converting certain
vague possibilities into definite realities. Changing the nebulous into
the concrete; shifting the dotted line of a frontier from here to there
on a map; changing the likeness that adorned a coin or postage-stamp:
these were things to which Monsieur Jusseret lent himself with the same
zest that actuates the hunting dog and makes his work also his passion.
If the vacillation of Louis Delgado could be complemented by the strong
ambition of a woman, perhaps he might be almost as serviceable as though
the strength were inherent. And Paris knew that Louis worshiped at the
shrine of the Countess Astaride. The Countess was therefore worth
inspecting.
The presentation occurred in Paris, when the Duke took his acquaintance
to the charming apartments overlooking the Arc de Triomphe, where the
lady poured tea for a small salon enlisted from that colony of
ambitious and broken-hearted men and women who hold fanatically to the
faith that some throne, occupied by another, should be their own. Here
with ceremony and stately etiquette foregathered Carlists and
Bonapartists and exiled Dictators from South America. Here one heard the
gossip of large conspiracies that come to nothing; of revolutions that
go no farther than talk.
In Paris the Duke Louis Delgado was nursing, with lukewarm indignation,
wrath against his royal uncle of Galavia who had fixed upon him a sort
of modified exile.
Louis had only a languid interest in the feud between his arm of the
family and the reigning branch. He would willingly enough have taken a
scepter from the hand of any King-maker who proffered it, but he would
certainly never, of his own incentive, have struck a blow for a throne.
Sometimes, indeed, as he sat at a café table on the Champs Elysées
when awakening dreams of Spring were in the air and a military band was
playing in the distance, dormant ambitions awoke. Sometimes when he
watched the opalescent gleam in his glass as the garçon carefully
dripped water over absinthe, he would picture himself wresting from the
incumbent, the Crown of Galavia, and would hear throngs shouting "Long
live King Louis!" At such moments his stimulated spirit would indulge in
large visions, and his half-degenerate face would smile through its
gentle but dissipated languor.
Louis Delgado was a man of inaction. He had that quality of personal
daring which is not akin to moral resoluteness. He was ready enough at a
fancied insult to exchange cards and meet his adversary on the field,
but a throne against which he plotted was as safe, unless threatened by
outside influences, as a throne may ever be.