The Lighted Match

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.