CHAPTER II

Something, some shadow of reawakening terror in the face opposite him, warned him that it would be present wisdom to pursue the subject no further. He “doubled” instantly.

“But I will say no more there,” he interrupted himself. “It is enough for the moment that I undertake to prove myself” (he touched the pocket of his coat) “your efficient friend and steward.”

An uproar of approaching voices broke upon his word. Thecaféhitherto had been but thinly peopled, mostly by weather-stressed citizens, who had been conversing apart, low and rapid, on the subject of the eternal lottery, while they sipped their liqueurs or bacchierino, and flourished their cigarettes back and forth to their lips. Now, “Cartouche!” exclaimed someone, and the sombre quietude seemed instantly to splinter into light. The mirrors cleared to reflect it; the sensuous figures in the pictures woke to a Bacchanalian dance. Louis-Marie stared, speechless, at his companion, who, for his part, appeared as dumbfoundered.

“Sentite!” he muttered. “Scaramucchio! Si, ê vero!”

The tumult, as he spoke, had broken in, running with the feet and voices of half a score young men, a contingent, truculent and vivacious, of the bellimbusti, or “bloods” of Turin. And in the midst appeared Cartouche, commanding, insolent, policing a captive, a youth of the same guild, but, unlike the rest, in a state of moral and physical collapse. He, the latter, struggled, sobbing hysterically, in the determined grasp of his gaoler, while the others hovered, cackling and circling, about their neighbourhood.

“Listen, my Severo,” said Cartouche; “thou shalt drink first, and destroy thyself afterwards, if thou wilt.”

“He has lost his whole fortune in the lottery,” whispered one onlooker to another.

The wretched boy fought to escape.

“I will drink the river,” he gasped; “no dog shall prevent me.”

Cartouche’s hold tightened.

“Call me not a dog, little Severo,” he said, “or perchance I may show my teeth. Be wise, while there is time. There are beer and grassini still in Turin, and trollops enough at a penny. Beggary will yet buy thee all that Fortune is worth but the silly gilding. Nay” (he darkened), “if thou wilt be stubborn for death, insult me—I am more certain than the river—and save, at least, thy immortal soul.”

The boy, writhing round and sputtering with his lips, managed to strike his captor lamely on the cheek. The next moment he was free, and cowering into himself, the wind all clapped out of his heroics. The whole company stood silent and aghast.

Cartouche unbuttoned and slipped off his surtout, hung it over a chair, adjusted the ruffs at his neck and wrists, smoothed a crease from his slim black undercoat, and shifted the bright steel hilt of his sword an inch or two forward—all quite quietly and deliberately. Then he spoke with a very soft courtesy.

“That was the pious course, little Severo. Now shalt thou compromise with thy Maker for no more than a spell of purgatory. It will not be much, I doubt, with one so excusable for his youth.”

His blade came out with a silk-like swish. Death, in the venomous sound, hissed into the youngster’s ears. He looked up, his face as white as paper.

“I seek the river, not thy sword, M. Trix,” he quavered.

“That is unfortunate; because I seek thy life, little Severo.”

The boy looked round fearfully: his companions, set and terrible, hedged him from the door. He gave all up in a pitiful cry,—

“I was wrong: I don’t want to die! Cartouche, I don’t really want to die!”

“That is sad indeed,” said Cartouche. “You will have to summon all your resolution.”

His face changed suddenly.

“Will you draw, sir,” he said sternly: “or am I to cut your throat like a sheep’s?”

“It is murder,” cried the boy. “I call all to witness it is murder!”

Some exclamations of contempt alone answered him. Rallying, under the shame, to a last agony of resolution, he drew his sword and advanced. His under lip was shaking and dribbling; the bosom of his linen was torn; he looked like a death-sick girl.

The blades crossed. Cartouche held his motionless a moment while the other’s vibrated on it like a castanet. An answering small laugh went up. Then he engaged deftly, in a wicked little prelude of cat’s-play; and then—

It was at least as great a shock to him as to any other to hear a sudden leap and rush, and see his sword torn from his hand and flung to the ground. For the moment, a fury of hell flew to his eyes and blinded them; the next, he saw Louis-Marie standing before him, white, and terrible, and denunciatory.

“Save thou thine own soul!” shrieked Saint-Péray, “nor lose it, saving this child’s. O, my brother! drive me not to this last despair of cursing all I have loved. Give me the boy’s life.”

A stun of utter stupefaction had fallen on the company. For the instant everything stood stricken—a strange and pregnant tableau. But in the still hearts of all was a terror of the inevitable crash which must rend in an instant the appalling hush.

To their confusion, scarcely less astounded, the crash did not follow; but, instead—miracle of things!—the disarmed one drew a deep breath, and smiled.

“It is a trifle; take it, my brother!” he said.

Even with the word he saw Saint-Péray sway where he stood. He darted forward and put a strenuous arm about him.

“What is it, Louis?” he whispered.

Saint-Péray’s fluttering hands went feebly about his neck.

“I have saved a life? O, God, dear Gaston, tell me that I have saved a life!” he whispered in wild emotion.

Cartouche, glaring around, caught sudden sight of Bonito standing slack-jawed in the gloom. The doctor, seeing himself discovered, came forward.

“Hist!” he muttered. “Our friend is in a poor way, Mr Trix, and needs looking after. Get him to come outside with us.”

“You have certainly saved a life, brother,” murmured Cartouche—“though, I am afraid, not a very worthy one.” Then he said aloud: “To pass, by your favour, gentlemen! But deal gently with my character, I beg you. I am still in evidence to answer for it.”

“Underthe Porticoes,” in the thronged fashionable heart of Turin, two men met by appointment before the city was well awake. Their encounter was sharp, to the point, and made nothing of superfluous courtesies.

“By your favour, Mr Trix,” opened one, “we will eschew idle discussion of coincidences. All roads lead to Rome. I am here; you are here; he is here; and we have gravitated naturally into each other’s company. What have you done with him?”

“Why do you want to know, friend Bonito?”

“Is not that rather amusing? I encounter him; we renew an intimacy; in the middle of it you appear, and appropriate him to your exclusive possession.”

“I undertook at the same time to answer to you for my claim. I named the place and hour: I am here to vindicate myself: everything is convenient for a settlement.”

“Bah! will you never learn my indifference to such gasconade? If you had struck me in the face, I would not fight you.”

“No; you would have procured an assassin to murder me, I expect.”

“Certainly I should. My life and reputation are of infinitely more importance than yours. Men of sense have to consider these things. Only fools argue with swords. What a miserable self-confession! You had better call yourself a fool at once.”

“Well, I’m not sure but you are right.”

“Then, if you see it, you are no fool. No more am I. If you admit that, you admit also that you are only withholding from me information which I can, with a little trouble, procure elsewhere. You really may as well tell me what you have done with M. Saint-Péray.”

“Perhaps I will tell you, then; but I should just as really like to be convinced of your reason for wishing to know.”

“For one thing, I am his agent to the lottery, and answerable to him for an investment which, in less than a week, is to bring us both certain fortune.”

“Holy Mother! You are there, are you? I thought, from the look of his face, that you had been painting it with moonshine.”

“You are very welcome to a share of the gilding. If you wish, for old friendship’s sake I will place you too in possession of the winning numbers.”

“No, I think not, thank you. You have put me a little out of conceit with the stars.”

“How! What have I done?”

“Why, I think sometimes they get to depend too much on the human agencies which interpret them—act up to arbitrary prophecies; or anyhow are made to seem to.”

“O?”

“Besides, apart from myself, I fail to see your interest in making M. Saint-Péray’s fortune for him.”

“Things have altered with you, certainly. Did we not once discuss his eligibility as a suitor?”

“Well?”

“What was enough for Mademoiselle de France is less than worth the consideration of the Marchesa di Rocco.”

“What! You propose proportionately to restore to him his eligibility.”

“That’s it exactly.”

“What advantage would success bringyou?”

“I don’t know if I mentioned that I was his agent.”

“O! I see, I see. I beg your pardon—his matrimonial agent, of course. That reassures me. I confess at first I was sceptical of such altruism. But here’s my Bonito. Well, we are one there, if from different sentiments. And does he know of your intentions towards him?”

“The Fates forbid!”

“I understand you. It is quite plain that he wants nursing, reassuring, coaxing back into a measure of self-confidence. He is a desponding spirit, that’s the truth, and determined to read his scrap of purgatory into utter damnation.”

“Well, I have answered you. Will you tell me where he is?”

“Certainly I will, your sentiments being what they are. I have persuaded him to place himself under the healing care of the virtuous Signorina Brambello.”

“Your—!”

Bonito exclaimed and grinned.

“You are certainly very silly or very deep,” he said. “How do you propose to speed his recovery that way?”

“She is a very good and sensible girl.”

“No doubt. And a very pretty.”

“I must use my instruments. They do not comprise many Madonnas.”

“But why—?”

“A woman’s arguments are everything in these matters. She will convince his diffidence, if any can.”

“Of what?”

“That Fortune has been very obliging to him.”

“How? In giving him such a confessor?”

“Well; if you were worth my steel!”

“I am not, I assure you. I wish her the last success, naturally. If she encourages him to the venture, and, better, if he prospers in it, there will be none better pleased than I. Fate, certainly, has already interfered very opportunely in his behalf. It would be criminal to forego that advantage. Believe me, I shall do nothing, for my part, to balk the Signorina.”

“What goodness! But it is not always necessary to give Fate the credit for opportuneness. In this case, for example, one might suggest more than one explanation of a mystery.”

“Of di Rocco’s death, you mean? It is quite true. We should consider the evidence of motives first, perhaps. There is none more powerful than revenge.”

“Or, with an astrologer, the wish to verify the reading of his astrolabes. He had certainly done you a great unkindness, my friend.”

“And you no less, my friend.”

“What! do you suggest thatIkilled him?”

“With a reason quite as plausible as yours in accusing me.”

“I have not accused you.”

“Nor I you.”

“No more you have. There was no need. He died plainly of an accident—of the treachery of the elements. I shall hope to call the elements to account for it some day. Well, if we have no quarrel, seer Bonito—addio!”

He went off, singing lightly. Bonito stood a moment, looking after him, wintry and caustic.

“He thinks I did it,” he muttered. “The fool, not to know me better! Let him beware, if he once goads me to reprisals!”

Therewas a jumble of old streets and buildings in Turin, flourishing out of sight behind the Palazzo Reale—like a scrap of wild thicket overlooked in the reclamation of a waste—which, to the many enamoured of orderliness and respectability, was a scandal, and to the few, having an eye for haphazard picturesqueness, the solitary oasis in a desert of uniformity. This irregular quarter, called “L’Anonimo,” possessed the qualities of its heterodoxy, and was consistent in nothing but its moral unconformableness. It was not so much a rookery as a hive, whence gold-ringeddonnacciasflew to gather their honey, and, having collected, came back to store it, against a winter’s day, in their unconventual little cells. It was always very vivid and very busy—a never-ending fair, full of life and frivolity. Its stalls displayed a characteristic opulence of cheap Parisian hosiery and Genoese jewellery. White ankles twinkled for ever in its doorways. Its stones were dinted with the clatter of little gilded heels. It had its owncafés, and its lottery-office, of course, and its Government shops for the sale of salt and tobacco; for even nonconformity had to subscribe to the relentlessgabelle. Finally, it had its drones; but they for the most part loafed at home.

It was not so very bad, this quarter, even at its heart, and rippled into less and less expression of itself the further one got from it, like the concentric rings extending from a splash in water. At quite a little distance it began to merge into a compromise with order—became a sort of sedate St John’s Wood—until, down by the Dora, it lapped itself away in an unimpeachable colony of washerwomen.

In the meanwhile, flowing down by many outlets, it threaded none prettier than that which was called the Lane of Chestnuts. And of all the whitewashedmaisonnettesin that same fragrant alley, the Signorina Brambello’s was assuredly the whitest and most sweet.

It, this little house, was called the Capanna Sermollino (which means Wild-thyme Cottage), and it looked and smelt up to its name. Its walls were the shrine to a candid heart; its jalousies were of the green of Nature; and its mistress, whose beauty and perfume had come straight out of an English village, was Molly Bramble Bona roba—nothing worse and nothing better.

Poor Molly! once a rustic toast, queen of a single May, and then, alas! stolen—to what? She stood no further from honour now than by the thickness of a screen of convention. Loyalty, faith, honesty—these were all hers unimpaired; you could not look in her eyes and doubt it. Her shame was one man’s possession—near enough to the virtue of wifehood to be forgotten by her, except, perhaps, in the presence of children. Cartouche was to answer for it all.

She was lovely, of course. Her face, like a human face sketched by some amorous Puck, was a little out of drawing—a dear imperfection of prettiness. But the artist had rubbed its cheeks with real conserve of roses, and painted in its eyes with blue succory petals, and scented its rich brown hair with fragrance from the oakwoods. L’Anonimo, even in its purlieus, could hardly have justified a claim to Molly Bramble.

“I never hear your name spoken, Mollymia,” said Cartouche, “but it seems to bring a whiff of blackberries across the footlights.”

She was dressed in a clean lilac-sprigged muslin, with a fichu, soft as “milkmaids,” half-sheathing the white budding of her womanhood. A mob cap sat at grace on her pretty curls. A pity that her atmosphere was all of Spring, which perishes so soon. Molly had no arts to reap love’s winter.

Cartouche spoke, took a pride in speaking, English like a native. Molly’s “Frenchings” were as sweet an imperfection as her lips.

She laughed, busy at the table preparing his breakfast, coffee and chocolate mixed in a little glass and garnished with a number of tiny rolls like pipe-stems.

“And I never hear yours,” she said, “without thinking of a silly fellow.”

She took a chair by him while he ate and drank. He did it all daintily; but she would have watched him with as much delight if he had guzzled like a hog. It is all one to a woman whether her baby is nice or gluttonous. But I have known a man turn disgusted from a ravenous infant.

Cartouche sat preoccupied a long time, nibbling his rusks. Suddenly he looked up, dark and troubled.

“Why have you such a sweet face,ma mie?” he said. “I wish I had never brought a blush to it.”

She started up, and went to the table again, affecting business there. Then she turned, and her lashes were winking.

“Let that flea stick in the wall,” she said. “I’d rather you had its blushes than its frowns.”

Her under lip was trembling a little, as she came again and knelt at his feet.

“What is it, Cherry?” she said, looking wistfully into his face. “There’s something, I know—something different, since you—since you—. Is it anything to do with that fellow you brought here last night?”

“No—yes—” he answered. “Perhaps—I can’t say.”

“Well, I mustn’t ask, I suppose,” she said. “You’ve taught me not to, though its made me cry my eyes out sometimes. If you’re bad, dear, I don’t want you anything else—it’s like a man. He—he doesn’t want to take you from me, does he?”

She nestled her face, willy-nilly, between his unresisting hands.

“To take you?” he said distressfully. “His code isn’t mine, Molly. I daresay he’d like to. Like a man, quotha! It’s like a blockish boy, rather, to make a toy of love—a doll out of a goddess. He wouldn’t have done it.”

She uttered a faint cry.

“Then he does want to separate us!”

“How can he, little fool? He doesn’t know you, even.”

“O, you frightened me so! Love your Molly, Cherry!”

He had taught her early to call him “Chéri,” which, on her sweet fruitful lips, had become Cherry; and so her love had christened him. Kent was her county.

“I have shown my reverence for love,” he said sadly, “by desecrating its Host. I have broken open its tabernacle and eaten the sacred bread because it was forbidden. A greedy, blockish boy, Molly.”

She wrung her hands to him.

“What is it? Everything seems wrong. I saw it in your face last night, the moment you and he came in—and me near crazed with joy to hear you at the door again—O, Cherry! after all these months!”

He smoothed the hair from her temples.

“That’s it, dear heart,” he whispered, “after all these months. Well, rest satisfied; I’d not been in Turin twelve hours before I came to you.”

She pouted; gave a little tearful laugh.

“O, a fine coming! to charge me with a tipsy gentleman.”

“Poor Louis-Marie!”

“Is that his name?”

“Saint-Péray to you, Madam, if you please. I’ll tell you of him in a moment. He’d lost his head, but not his legs.”

“La, now! he won’t bless its finding, I’m thinking. I warrant it aches this morning.”

“You shall ask him. He’ll be down anon to greet his landlady.”

“Let him lie on, for me. It’s only you I want; and a tongue to say ten thousand things at once. Where have you come from?”

“Le Prieuré.”

“That takes—let me see—how long?”

“It took me a month.”

“A month!”

“I came on foot; I loitered by the road; I had ten thousand things, not to say, but ponder.”

“Cherry!”

She looked at him amazed. A shadow of some sick foreboding would not leave her heart. She had never yet known him, her “gentleman,” her fond heart’s tyrant, in this strangely sober mood.

“Go on,” she whispered. “Won’t you tell me?”

“What?” he said. “Of my adventures by the way? I had one or two. Once a thunderstorm overtook me near a village. Some children, hurrying for the church, bade me come and help them ring the bells to keep the lightning off. I smiled the poor rogues away—cried, ‘I should attract it rather,’ and went on. The bells were already clapping behind me, when there came a flash and crash. The tower had been struck and every mother’s infant of them killed. The devil fends his own; or perhaps he is as blind as justice. Well, I stayed to see them put in the ground, and—I cried a little, Molly.”

“Cry now with me, darling. O, Cherry! the poor dears!”

“Another time I passed some peasants preparing to fill in an old well. A little whimper came out of its depths while I watched. ‘Only a cur, Monsieur, that has fallen in,’ they said. They were going to shovel the earth atop of him without a care. I asked them to lower me, and they did, and presently up we came together. He set his teeth in my hand, the little weasel; and I called him Belette for it. See the mark here. It was only because his leg was broken, and I hurt it. There was a bone-setter in the village, an old toothless Hecuba—a lady you’ve not heard of. She could mend bone, if she couldn’t graft it on her withered gums. Belette was made whole by her, and I waited out his cure. When he was done with, the rascal came along with me, eager to show that he had adopted me for ever. He’s thy rival for my love, Mollinda.”

“And I’ll kiss him for it, if that’s all.”

He did not answer immediately.

“Is it not all?” she urged; and, staring at him, sank away, sitting on her heels.

“No, it’s not all,” she whispered, gulping. “There’s more you’ve got to say. Don’t I understand. It’s the old lord has got a match for you, and I’m to go. Speak out, and be a man. Is he here? Did he come with you?”

“He’s dead.”

Cartouche rose, and went hurriedly up and down, a dozen times in silence, before he stopped and spoke to her again where she crouched upon the floor.

“He’s dead, and so my wages end.”

She put out groping hands to find his feet. He heard her sobbing and whispering:—

“I’ll work for you.”

Then he knelt, and touched her, and spoke to her very tenderly.

“Not so bad as that. You shall work for me, indeed; but not with these soft hands. Listen, while I tell you how he died; and why God killed him; and what is the moral of it all to me.”

She turned her ear to him, one arm, like the rustic Griselda she was, bent across her weeping face. But his first words seemed to catch her breath back, and fill out her bosom, holding her dumb from speech and tears alike.

“There was a lady in Le Prieuré called the lily, because she was so sweet and pure of heart. She was of an ancient family, but poor—the child of a proud, cold man. She had pledged her love, unknown to her father, to a stranger of modest means, a soul as good and pious as she. But the man was weak of purpose, and delayed to confess himself to the parent. Then came di Rocco, doating, and asked her hand of her father; and she was given to him on condition that he settled everything he possessed on her, and that the marriage was to be one in form only for the space of a year. And the poor child was forced in a moment into complying, and she became di Rocco’s wife, and a broken-hearted woman. She sought refuge, defying her father, now that it was done, in a littleaubergeon the hills; and thither her husband, scorning his vow, followed her secretly one stormy night in order to force her to his will. But Heaven intervened before he could accomplish his vile purpose, and he went astray on the ice, and fell into a crevasse and was killed.”

He paused. The girl did not speak for a minute. Her mind was still loitering on the road to that tragic conclusion. Di Rocco’s death was only of relative interest to her. Her first word showed it.

“Is she—prettier—than I am?”

Cartouche smiled.

“She is only an angel,ma mie; but eligible—eligible! Have you forgotten her lover?”

She clasped her hands, looking for the first time breathlessly into his face.

“I know now. It’s him there—upstairs.”

“Yes,” he said: “It’shim.”

“Why doesn’t he go and claim her, then? She’s better worth the winning than she was.”

“Soberly, my girl! It’s early yet to rake over the weeds. Besides, there are broken faiths to mend. He took his jilting hardly. An angel himself, she’d been his goddess. He’s down in the mud at present. These sanctities are always for extremes. There’s no middle course for them. The devil’s the gentleman for moderation; that’s why he’s so convincing. We must nurse up this friend of mine between us—restore him to reason. She’s better worth his winning, says you. No doubt: but, by the token, miles further removed from a poor suitor.”

“That’s nothing, if they love.”

She spoke it impulsively; and stopped.

“Poor!” she whispered suddenly. “What’s his ruin to that she’s brought upon my sweetheart! So the old man’s gone and left you nothing.”

“No fault of hers, child. Don’t breathe or think it. Yes, he had to put his house in order; settle old scores before he asked new grace. He parted with me the day before his death. He’d already sent Bonito packing—you know him, the old hungry dog. He got his master’s curse for wages: I, at least, got a handful of jewels. Why should I love his memory? Yet, though he died justly, it was not good that anyone should kill my father.”

Even then, she hardly seemed to listen. But she saw her lover moved beyond her knowledge of him, and put her arms about his neck, and entreated him passionately:—

“Don’t throw me over, Cherry—not altogether. Give me enough to live on, and keep good—for her sake—there, I’ll say it—if she’s shown you what a woman ought to be.”

He sat on the floor beside her, and took her in his arms, pressing her wet cheek against his own.

“You shall understand,” he said, much moved. “This lady’s for my friend—we’ll bring him round to see it by-and-by, we two. But the lesson of her whiteness is for all. Am I Cartouche to own it? I only know she’s taught me to respect something I never respected before. To pay to keep you good, my darling? With a fortune, if I had it. That’s it. Shall we be good together, sweetest—never, never, never sin again? You’ve loved me one way: will you love me better this—own the wrong and renounce it? show—”

“Not her. I’ve been wicked. I’ll pray to God to forgive me. He’s a man.”

His face twinkled.

“Hush!” he said. “Our act of grace shall be to mend this tragedy with love. That’s why I brought him here. You shall teach him the way. Don’t you see, Molly—can’t you see all that that means?”

She clung to him with a burst of tears.

“O, I’ll be good, Cherry! And perhaps—perhaps, some day, you’ll want to learn from me.”

He heard a sound overhead, and, rising, lifted her to her feet.

“Dry your eyes,” he whispered; “he’s coming. He mustn’t find a wet-blanketing hostess.”

“No,” she said. “I’ll get his coffee. Let me go—O, let me go! I shall be right in a minute”—and she went hurriedly from the room.

A minute later Louis-Marie came down, his haggard face bright-eyed out of fever. But there was an expression on it such as one might imagine in the face of a convicted felon summoned to hear his reprieve.

“Such dreams, Gaston,” he said, crossing the room eagerly: “but the dream of all was the dream that went to bed and woke with me. I thought I had saved a life, Gaston.”

“That was no dream, my friend.”

Louis-Marie came and fondled him, smiling all the while. His actions were marked by a curious haste and agitation, as if in everything he were restless to hurry conclusions, to spurn the passing moment, to urge on the hands of time.

“Wasn’t it?” he said. “What a meeting, dear Gaston, my brother! Who would have dreamt ofthat! And the occasion! We are always saving lives between us, it seems—you more than I, I expect. Isn’t it strange? I know so little about you, and you my blood-brother. Do you always lodge here when you come to Turin?”

“Generally.”

“Your life, your habits, your story are all a shadow to me. I—”

Cartouche interrupted him.

“My story is told in a word, Louis-Marie. Would you like to hear it?”

“Indeed I should.”

“Very well. It won’t edify you, I’m afraid; but it’s quite right you should know the truth about me. Innocent souls like you are apt to take too much on trust—to judge all men by their pure self-standards. It’s time, perhaps, you grew up, Louis-Marie.”

“Nay, Gaston,” muttered his friend. “If to be grown up is to be wicked, I’m a giant already. Prove yourself what you like—the worse, the nearer to me.”

Trix laughed.

“Listen to this, then,” he said. “I was born in Mayfair, in London—during the absence of my mother. That was why she would never acknowledge me. My father always believed that I was her son by him; but, as he was not her husband, she had no difficulty in proving analibi. He may have been mistaken,for he had many irons in the fire; but the upshot of it for me was that, as no one would claim me, I was pronounced a changeling and put out to nurse. From that state di Rocco rescued me—for reasons of his own. I was very like him, for one—an extraordinary coincidence. He brought me up, and treated me as if I were his son. Paternity always came easy to him. I grew up under his tutelage. The result is what you see; but, in case its expression lacks eloquence, I may tell you that I am a very accomplished person—a scholar, a wit, a capital swordsman, a rakehell and a star-gazer. There is no folly of which I am incapable but love; no hypocrisy but self-sacrifice. I owe the world nothing but myself: and that is a debt I pay back, with interest, on each occasion of its demand.Enfin, I am your very faithful servant, M. Louis.”

He rose and bowed, with a grace of mockery. His feeling towards this blood-brother of his was always mixed of devotion and contempt. He could resist one no more than the other. But he loved the poor fool: that sentiment predominated.

Saint-Péray looked down and away from him, his jaw a little fallen. At that moment his hostess entered, carrying his bread and coffee. He raised his head and saw her, uttered an exclamation, and then, like a lost child who recognises a friend in a crowd, suddenly burst into tears.

No, it was certain that Louis-Marie would never ascend Mont Blanc.

AndYolande of the white hands! How was it faring with her, the lily gathered to perfume a Saturnalia, the victim of as heartless a casuistry as ever committed a clean virgin to outrage?

When she first heard of di Rocco’s fate, and of the unspeakable treachery on which it had foreclosed, she came for the moment as near a fall from “grace” as Louis-Marie himself. That duty to a father must be held the paramount duty, his will the household law, his judgment the ruling wisdom, nature and religion in her had once held for the first principle of conduct. Honour, self-respect, sworn faith—these, pious recommendations in themselves, were, if pledged without a father’s sanction, vain credentials. His curse could blight them all—convert their virtues into sins. From God, the primal Word, had come, in straight succession, his power to bless or ban. She had believed in this his right so truly as to cede her whole heart to him for immolation on the altar he had raised, letting it break rather than incur his malediction.

But when, having sacrificed these virtues to duty, she saw her moral debasement argued from the act, saw herself claimed, by very virtue of it, to the vile company of the un-self-respecting, held its legitimate sport, her soul stood up, revolting from its creed. She felt like one who, self-destroyed to save her honour, wakes up in hell.

She shook; she shuddered; she went white as death. She felt her feet in snares of celestial sophistry. Heaven had laughed to lure her to a church, which, when she entered it, had proved abagnio. Following God’s lead, she had foundered in a swamp, and cleared her eyes to find herself the scoff of uncleanness, to know herself valued at the common currency of the common road. That this dead beast could have conceived a hope of her argued how, in his eyes, in the world’s eyes, her soul’s dread sacrifice to duty had cheapened, not exalted, her. He would not have dared the thought in the days before she had bared her white bosom to the knife. Her soul for the first time rushed to pity of Isaac on his altar. The father’s tragedy was all in all for history. What of the harmless child—the hideous revelation to him of what love could sacrifice to faith? No after-kindness could blot out that memory.

She hated herself at last, not because she had hitherto been self-absorbed, worshipping her own whiteness; but because she had not considered herself at all until this moment. She hated her body, a shrine on which her mind had never dwelt, until it woke to see it foul, a thing defiled in thought, a prey of beastly dreams. A shadow had dethroned her maidenhood. Henceforth she was Yolande of the soiled hands.

No man, perhaps, could gauge her sense of shame, or understand it. She had suffered no wrong in act. A miss, in his blunt logic, is always as good as a mile. But that in the eyes of woman it is not. She, whose innocence has just shaved a scandal, feels a like grievance against fate with her who has solicited and been rebuffed. In each case it is the outrage upon the woman’s self-respect which barbs the sting.

Unworthy of her lover! But how unworthy she had never dreamt, until she saw herself this lure to low desire. She had not even been coveted for anything she had cherished in herself of moral sweetness. The moral of all sweetness was carnality.

She had walked with uplifted eyes praising God, and had trodden on an adder. For the future she would look down to guard her feet.

It was all a chimera, that figure of a beneficent Father meting out justice and mercy, protection and reward. The lamb in the fold was cherished to make good mutton, and the shepherd’s love watched and warded him to that end. No picture of Christ carrying home the strayed weanling could cover that flaw in its divine symbolism. So with the pious aphorisms which were thrown in the eyes of men by interested priestcrafts to blind them from the truth. God helped those who helped themselves? Yes; who helped themselves unscrupulously to the best and least they desired. A bold thief was always popular in heaven. The Lord was a lord of bandits.

She had but to run upon this blasphemy at last, to recoil, gasping and half-stunned, from the dead wall of it. Whither had her madness led her? into what dreadful wanderings from the fold? She had sped blindly in the mist, and struck her forehead against hell’s gate. O, Father, rescue Thy lost lamb, so bleating to the wolves of her betrayal! Didst Thou not make a pit-fall for the dog-wolf himself, so that her fleece might escape his soilure and her flesh his ravening? And her gratitude was this—to cry out upon Thee because Thou hadst let a beast’s thought expose her to herself for beast. Yet what else, indeed, were she or any other, save for the measure of Thy purifying spirit in her? I have disowned Him, she thought, and by that act alone become the beast His spirit once redeemed in me.

She believed, then, that she had committed the unpardonable sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost. For days she lay prostrated, tended only by the littleaubergiste, poor Margot, who had meanwhile her own difficulties to contend with—gossips to face and baffle; little lungings of innuendo to counterfoil; a drunken parent to answer for. The world was restless about that refuge on the hills: great issues were at stake there: the Law, the Church, the Home were all deeply interested in the potentialities of those white hands. This unattached star of maidenhood had become, at a stroke of heaven, the centre of a system. The lesser bodies, enormously attracted to it, spun and circled round incessantly. But for the present it was obstinate in veiling itself in clouds from their worship.

How long was her “retreat” to last? for how long would it be countenanced by those most concerned in terminating it? No convention of seemly mourning could apply to such a widow—widowed of a love before a husband. Le Prieuré did not expect that hypocrisy of her. But it wanted its Marchesa.

During all these days her father politicly kept aloof, awaiting the first signal of her surrender to him. He had learnt his lesson, and recognised how any approaches from him would but aggravate the malady of her despair. Target kept him, at very little cost, informed of madama’s state; and in the meanwhile he made a judicious ostentation of his poverty, implying, “See me here, the natural trustee of thousands, condemned, by a child’s undutifulness, to go in mended boots!” His patience under suffering made an impression.

But presently, quicker than his soles, it wore out. He would not climb the hill himself, but he commissioned a deputy, in the person of Dr Paccard, shrewd and kindly, to put a case for him. The old man gained access to the patient by a ruse (M. Saint-Péray’s landlord begged a word with her, was the message he sent in), and found her lying like a sweet thing thrown up by the sea, white and just breathing. She saw directly that the mad hope on which her heart had leaped was but another shadow of the shadows which were haunting her. Her eyes absorbed his soul.

He uttered some commonplaces of his craft. She stopped him.

“Why did you send in that message?”

He blushed and stammered: then rushed, characteristically, for the truth.

“I feared you would refuse to see me else. I lodged M. Saint-Péray, it is true, and loved and respected him. We are homely people, I and my daughter Martha. It was that simple quality which most endeared us to him. What he chiefly valued in my girl was the domestic probity which attached her, first of all sentiments, to the sentiment of filial duty.”

“Old man, I will not go home to my father.”

“O, madama! let me speak. One, even a Marchesa—”

“I am not a Marchesa—”

“One, I say, even a high lady, may profit by the example of simplicity. Do I not know, I—yes, very well—that Martha’s heart is engaged outside her duty? What then? She’s loyal to duty.”

“It is young Balmat, is it not? Wed her elsewhere; sell her clean body for a price—then come and tell me what she pays to duty. I was as good as Martha.”

He ignored her bitter words, urging his point across the interruption.

“Even a great thing for her, I’ll say, where duty is so tedious—just a little daily routine, the house, the kitchen, the conduct of small affairs. There might be compensation else in such a state—great compensation, even, where the life, the happiness, the salvation of many souls depended on one woman’s trust and example.”

She held him with her tragic eyes.

“There’s no salvation possible by way of me. Tell the Chevalier, Monsieur, if you speak for him, as I assume is your commission, to charge himself with all that duty—the lives, the title, the estates, the administration of them all—and leave me to give him thanks and die in peace. He’ll find full compensation for duty, I’m sure, in what duty has bequeathed him. Please will you go now, and take him that message?”

“Never—I say never, madama. This is a bad revolt—I am old, and I will say it. Is it, do you imagine in your perversity, to show honour to an honoured memory? If you think so, I will dare to say that I knew a noble heart better than you yourself, and I speak in its name when I mourn your refusal to take up your cross like a Christian, thanking God for having spared you the weight of an irreparable injury to its burden!”

She sat up, with glittering eyes. “You insult me,” she began, and burst into heart-rending tears.

He let the fit run out, before he spoke again gently.

“My old heart bleeds for your young tragedy. But, believe my word, by so much as I am nearer the grey shore which seems to you now so far, it is not measureless. If these thoughts were possible to your heart, the All-seeing was doubtless wise to forewarn it with a chastisement, which even yet was not the worst. Lower your head; come down from this false humility which only mocks at heaven. If your feet—for flesh is proud: who can know it better than I?—falter from the whole descent at once, make your first halt half-way with Martha and myself—live with us a little. I say at least for my own advantage; because, indeed, people would be sure to point at me for a self-interested politician, and that would hurt my honest fame. But come, I say—come down from these heights where your heart is locked in ice, and where the ghost of a dead wickedness holds it frozen with his frozen eyes, looking up through the dark window of his grave.”

She was staring at him, quite bloodless. But her lips whispered mechanically: “I cannot—I cannot come to you.”

“How can you pray or think aright,” he said, “or keep your health or reason, with that horror hidden, perhaps, but a stone’s-throw below you there? Its spirit rises, like an evil emanation; its—”

She stopped him, staggering to her feet. What fearful picture was he conjuring? In all her stunned misery, her mind had never once turned to the appalling thought of her close neighbourhood to that baffled evil. It had dwelt and dwelt, in mad iteration, on an earlier figure, on the tragedy of a fruitless sacrifice, on death, as it might find her in the hills.

But now!—to find her, perhaps—trip her on the thought, and entomb her! Was there, in all that vast cemetery of ice, a corner remote enough fromhimto keep their souls divorced? Horrors thronged into her brain once breached. What if her clinging to this spot were construed into devotion to his memory? What if he were not dead, after all, but were slowly toiling upwards to the light from some pit into which he had fallen? She had heard of things as strange. What—wilder terror! if he had never even suffered such a catastrophe, but were hiding somewhere out of knowledge, to descend presently upon his traducers and blight them with his mockery? It had always seemed inconsistent with his character, as resourceful as it was wicked, to let itself astray in the little confusion of a storm, instead of crouching while that passed.

She thought no more—tried to shut out all thought, shuddering with her hands against her eyes. The doctor saw his advantage.

“We have an empty room,” he said, “endeared to us by a memory. Come down, madama, and take possession of that memory.Hewould have wished it.”

She went with him. That marked the first step in her surrender.

The next was inevitable, fruit of a royal commission. It was not to be supposed that a wealthy and powerful noble of the State, new reconciled with its Government, too, could be allowed to disappear thus mysteriously and no inquiry held. Turin sent itsjuges d’instructionand officers of probate and verification to look into the affair. They examined innumerable witnesses, and into as many as possible motives. Cartouche they would have liked to question; but he was gone, none knew whither. So also was Louis-Marie; so also was Bonito. The thing might have taken an ugly turn, so far as any of the three was concerned, had not Nicholas Target been opportunely “pinched” at the psychologic moment. He focussed the mystery for them, brought it into form and coherence. It appeared, after all, to be one to be hushed up rather than ventilated. The matter ended for the widow with official sympathy and congratulations.

And she? how had she stood the long ordeal? They said her bearing was the very majesty of pathos—like Dorothea before her judges again. One can keep one’s countenance under torture, as the statistics of martyrdom prove. But every allusion to her assumed acquiescence in her own tragedy had been a white-hot rake to her side. They imagined her stately fortitude was a pose, a compromise between decency and the exaltation her heart could not but feel over the thought of what she had escaped and the prospect before her. That she must not undeceive them, must suffer the onus of coveting a position which her whole soul loathed and rejected, was not the least part of her anguish. Even if she had ventured to assert herself, to call them to witness to her renunciation of all which they held so covetable, her father was there to stultify her protests. She saw him daily—spoke to him, even. But there was a gulf between them. The atmosphere it exhaled was felt by the commissioners, and felt to be inexplicable. Some commiseration was shown for the victim of so unnatural a misunderstanding. His noble candour in giving evidence, his dignified endurance of that implied slander on his disinterestedness, excited a measure of sympathy—even of sympathetic indignation. Yet, for all his public vindication as a father, the triumph of his child’s cause seemed only to deepen the abyss which separated him from her.

Well, a thing grown past bearing is a thing ended. The torture consummated itself at last in anti-climax—in the official citation of Augias, Marchese di Rocco, to the Court of Inquiry, there to answer and show cause why Yolande di Rocco,néede France, should not enter into possession of his estates as his widow and sole inheritrix. Which summons the appellee having failed to answer, the Will was declared proved, the lawyers returned to Turin, and the lady to the privacy of her lodgings at Dr Paccard’s. And so the matter ended.

At least, so it seemed to. It was a unique situation: on the one side great houses, great wealth, great stakes in the country, and a fluttering crew of prospectors waiting to negotiate their values for the benefit of a mistress who disregarded them all; on the other the mistress herself living in humble lodgings on a few centesimi a day. And this state of things held for quite a month after the inquiry.

“It makes you an important person,” said Jacques Balmat to Martha. “You are approached and courted like a queen’s confidante. I hope your silly little head will not be turned by it all.”

“Jacques, she is dying of love, and what right have you or I to say that she ought to live?”

“The right, my girl, of dutiful children to uphold the natural law. She, too, is not so independent but she must owe her father a life. It makes no difference that he crossed her plans for herself. Besides, are we so certain that one we will not name has made himself unworthy of her? It rests on our conjecture, and that is the devil’s word for scandal. They whisper that the old man is dying.”

“My God! what is that you say?”

“I only repeat what I have heard. It is that madama’s obstinacy is slowly killing him. It is certainly aggravating, when one is starving, to see a fine feast spread just out of one’s reach.”

Martha went with her information straight to Yolande. That Marchioness of shadows was a good deal altered during the last month. Grief, where a flawless constitution defies its corrosion, retaliates by turning all into stone. She was white and unimpressionable as a statue. Martha dared an ultimatum.

“You would blame yourself, I am sure, my lady, if death were suddenly to end the misunderstanding between you and your father.”

The blue unearthly eyes were turned swift upon her with a look of horror.

“Death!” she whispered.

“O!” said Martha, weeping, “chagrin will kill a cat. What is it, do you think, to lie starving and abandoned outside the walls of the paradise you have staked your soul to win?”

“Abandoned!” repeated the other. “It is all his—he knows it—to do what he likes with.”

She had assumed, indeed, that all this time her father was established at the Château. Martha threw up her hands, protesting.

“Do you pretend to believe that he, so proud and stern, has accepted a trust bestowed on him like that? But believe it if you like. He will not be long in unconvincing you.”

“Give me my cloak. Do you hear? My God, how slow you are!”

* * * * * * * *

Thus was negotiated Yolande’s third and final step to self-surrender. She hurried through the familiar streets, a reincarnate ghost, shocked from her grave by a cry as superhuman as the one which stirred the dead in old Jerusalem—a cry of mortal desolation. God spare her the revelation which might have come to them—the knowledge that she had out-died her welcome!

The place seemed strange. There was an air of dust and neglect about the “hôtel.” The face of the woman who answered her summons was unfamiliar—a smug, frowzy, “laying-out” face in suggestion. The girl could hardly articulate the words which strove for utterance on her lips. But, commanding herself, she asked at last, and was a little reassured.

Yes, the Chevalier was in bed, in a poor enough way; but curable, no doubt, by one who knew the secret of his disorder.

She hurried upstairs to him, entered his room with a choking heart. He was lying back, propped on pillows. His face was stern and wintry, with a rime of unshorn hair on its jaws. His eyes, cold and unscrutinising, were like globes of frog-spawn, each with a black staring speck of life for pupil.

A withered crone, ostentatiously unclean, was dishing up for the patient a thin broth of herbs. Reason might have questioned of the meaning of her presence, or of the soup’s poor quality. De France was under no necessity for retrenchment just because he had been disappointed of a handsome legacy in trust. But remorse has no reason. Yolande saw nothing here but the tragic figure of an ambition her perversity had doomed. A dignified presence may command so much more than its due of sympathy for the common crucifyings of circumstance. Majesty covers a multitude of meannesses. She fell on her knees by the bed.

“Father, I have come to make my peace with you!”

The pupils of the Chevalier’s eyes, turned darkly on the suppliant, dilated imperceptibly.

“Who is this who enters to disturb my resignation? I have mademypeace with Heaven.”

“No, no, father! No, no! I am Yolande, thy daughter, thy one poor child. Know me and forgive me. I have done wrong. O, my father, I have been wicked and undutiful, but God has cleared my eyes!”

His own were brightening wonderfully; the specks were grown to tadpoles. He snapped at the wheezy beldame with a sudden viciousness that almost made her drop the dish.

“Begone, thou old prying gossip! What dost thou here, pricking thy mouldy ears?”

She scuttled. He held out a waxen hand. Yolande imprisoned and devoured it.

“Art thou my child?” he said. “I had thought she had abandoned me indeed.”

She wept, bowing her head, and mumbling:—

“Not abandoned—only to that I thought your soul desired; the place, the riches, the—the honour. I had never supposed but you possessed them all—managed—administered them—”

“For you, my daughter? Evenmylove must reject a trust so offered. What honour could survive that imputation of self-interest? I would have consented to be your steward else—faithful on a crust, if love and confidence had sweetened it. But it does not matter now. Nothing matters any longer, since my child is here a penitent to reconcile me with the thought of our separation.”

“Father! O, my God! I have not deserved it. Look, I will nurse you back to health and peace of mind. I will be so humble and so loving. Father, do not die!”

He questioned her face searchingly. He saw her heart was his so surely, that any further fencing before he pierced it would serve but to prolong his luxury of triumph. Yet he fenced.

“To nurse me?” he said, smiling weak and saintly. “A simple task, Yolande. Even the remnant of fortune left me, after my debts are paid, might crown my few last days with feasting, if I wished it. But my wants are soon supplied.”

“Only live, dear father, and your fortune—”

She stopped, shuddering, and buried her face in the bedclothes. He scanned the back of her head curiously.

“My fortune!” he echoed. “Ah! I had once dreamed my fortune might have lain in helping to turn great evil into a blessing. I had seen, in my fond imagination, churches enriched, charities endowed, all that wealth and power had used to evil ends converted to measureless good. But it was a fantastic dream. We exalt ourselves, no doubt, in planning for the human emancipation. God has rebuked my vanity.”

She lifted her flowing eyes to him.

“Had you had such dreams? O, father! be my almoner, then, and letmelive on the crust.”

He stroked her hair rapturously. Murder would out at last.

“You put new life into me,” he murmured. “You shall live on what you like. Only, for appearance’s sake, my child, make yourself the nominal minister of that atonement.”

And on these terms he carried her off to the Château.

TheRoyal Palace of Turin, situated off the Piazza Castello, in the east, or distinguished quarter of the city, epitomised in itself the policy of the Savoyard rule. Externally it was as unpretentious a pile as any brick-built factory—or, shall we say, for the sake of apt analogy, as our own original South Kensington Museum. For, in like manner with that illustrious emporium, did the utilitarian face which it turned to the street afford no clue whatever to its inner meaning. It was just a countenance dressed for the demos—a sop of unostentation offered to that triple-headed sleuth-hound.

It was certainly unelating as an architectural composition; but then we know, by the story, that the plain pear is often the most luscious. Beauty, saith the sage (a plain fellow himself, no doubt), is but skin-deep. That is an aphorism as untrue as many another. But, take it for what it is worth, and ugliness, by the like measure, is also skin-deep.

The Palazzo Reale, at least, was, like its later South Kensington parallel, a very museum of treasures contained within a mean casket. They were of all sorts, from a Benvenuto salver, or a suit of mail worn by an enormous armiger at the battle of Pavia, to the individual “kit” of M. Dupré, who had been “le Dieu de la danse” in the supreme days of Turin’s gaiety. Those, perhaps, were fled for ever, as a characteristic and prerogative of “privilege”; but their reactionary spirit lingered on, awaiting revitalisation in the dumb strings of the great dancer’s fiddle.

I am not sure but that the present representative of the house did not hold this instrument among the first of his treasures. It symbolised for him his beautiful ideal of humanity frolicking in an Arcadian estate. Watteau, Gillot, and thefête galantewere always figured in the dim backgrounds of his policy. He yearned to educate democracy with a harpsichord, and pelt it into silence with roses. He was not altogether a bad little fellow, for his fifty-seven years, only his ideals were expensive, and of course supremely unpractical. While seeing very clearly that Arcadia was only to be reached through education (he endowed and encouraged learning quite handsomely), he stultified all the effects of his liberality by conceding to hereditary prejudice the whole conduct of his government. He did not walk with the world, in fact, and so it walked into him.

The Palace, in the meanwhile, was as sumptuous within as it was bare without. Mr Trix, entering towards it, one fine September morning, by the gates opening from the Piazzo Castello, tasted, in some curious anticipation, the possible flavour of the fruit hidden behind that uncompromising rind. He was “waiting,” by private “command,” on his sovereign, and the occasion (the first of its kind to him) found him by no means so possessed by its importance as that hisself-possession was moved thereby to yield an iota of its serenity. He was received, with consideration, at a private door to which he was directed, and, after the slightest delay, ushered straight into the presence of Victor-Amadeus.

The monarch was seated at a secretaire, heavily gilt and with painted panels, talking or dictating to a little fat, bedizened aide-de-camp, who wrote apart at a littered table, and who was so buried in bullion that he might have been taken for the First Lord of the Treasury just emerged from a dip into one of its coffers. The royal toilet itself was anégligé—dressing-gown, embroidered slippers, and bare close-cropped head—all very gimp and finical. Shrewd, wizened, narrow, Victor-Amadeus’s face—a dough-white, flexuous-nosed, long-chinned, under-jawed little affair—perked up from its collar of white ermine like a beedy-eyed condor’s. Thought was engraved on it in a number of thready wrinkles, like cracks in parchment. The deepest owed themselves to profound self-searchings on such questions as the conduct of Court precedents, of royal hunts, of ceremonial and pageantry. The slightest might record some difficult moments accorded to the size of a button, or the claims of the subversive shoe-tie over the constitutional buckle, To find the royal countenance simply vacant was to know the royal mind concentrated on affairs of State.

Those might include the potentialities of the Lottery, the friendship of Cousin Louis of France, a new uniform for the army. It is certain that they never excluded the necessity of some new drain upon the exchequer. Victor-Amadeus recognised very clearly that the true evolution of man is in his clothes. And he was right in a way. It seems impossible to advocate even so much, or so little, as a return to Nature without wanting to dress up to the part. He was apetit-mâitre, in short, of the first rank and the most fastidious taste, who had spent his reigning life in offering himself a leading example of refinement to his subjects. He was something better than a benevolent Caligula.

He went on dictating now, while Mr Trix, standing just within the doorway by which he had entered, awaited passively his royal pleasure.

“Write, my dear Polisson,” said the King, “that, as regards the Pont Beauvoisin over the Guier, we cannot consent to the abolition of the double toll. To leave Savoy may be a necessity; to enter France may be necessity; but two necessities do not make one privilege. On the other hand, two privileges make a certain necessity—that of paying for both.”

The gilded scribe raised his head and little screw-eyes. M. Polisson was terribly short-sighted, but was forbidden the use of spectacles because of their ugliness.

“I must recall to your Majesty,” he said: “that the petition dates from Dauphiny.”

“Chou pour chou,” said the King. “Would it rob me the less, because it would also rob King Louis of his half of the perquisites? To concede it would be to concede the first principle of theoctroi. The keystone is a small part of the arch; but remove it, and what then! Tell me that, M. Polisson.”

The secretary still ventured a deferential protest.

“Your Majesty’s duchy of Savoy is ultramontane. It is perhaps infected a little through its contiguity with revolutionary doctrines. Its predilections, as your Majesty knows, have always been for French arms, French arts, French sentiments. It may happen to have imbibed some of the worthless with the sound. A little concession to unrest would not make unrest more unrestful.”

The King took snuff from a jewelled box.

“That was a clumsy iteration, my charming Polisson,” said he. “But all concessions are an admission of weakness. If we slacken the curb, we shall presently be run away with. Be careful of that pouncet-box, or you will spill it on the carpet and make an unpleasant dust. Besides, it was given me by a very pretty child, and I love children.”

“But, sire—”

“Say no more, M. Polisson. Is the document prepared?”

All the while he was talking, the corner of his eye was given to Mr Trix. Now he turned a little, and said quite suddenly, “That is a very pretty idea of the earrings, Monsieur.”

So he would pass, butterfly-like on unsteady wings, from blossom to blossom of a flowery mind. There was some purpose, no doubt, ahead of his irrelative flittings, but it seemed for ever the prey to distractions by the way.

His allusion was to a certain novelty in dandyism, it appeared—to a couple of little diamonds which were let into the gold earrings worn by his visitor. For the rest, that visitor, it was obvious, attracted his most flattering regard. He observed, with admiration, his coat and breeches of fine buff cloth and fastidiously elegant cut; his tambour vest of white satin sprigged with silver, and his white silk stockings; his mushroom-coloured stock, and solitaire of broad black silk which was tied in a bow at the back of his natural black hair, and brought over his shoulders to hold a miniature framed in diamonds and turquoises; his silver-headed Malacca cane looped to the right wrist, and the tiny Nivernois hat held under his left arm; the slim steel-hilted sword at his hip (for continental “bloods” still held to a fashion which was grown out-of-date in England); his neat black pantoufles fastened with little gold-tagged laces—and only as to these last did his countenance express any doubt or qualification.

Still admiring, he arose from his chair. At the same moment M. Polisson skipped to his feet and fell over a stool. The King glanced at him vexedly.

“You are always the one, little Polisson,” he said, “to cough in the exquisite moment of the opera.”

Then he advanced to the visitor, very winningly.

“It is all a triumph of taste, Monsieur,” he said. “Accept the congratulations of a sympathetic spirit.”

Cartouche bowed profoundly.

“I have the good fortune of seeing M. Trix?” said the King; “theprotégéof our late lamented Marquis? It is a pleasure of which I have often dreamed, and now realise to my instruction. You were very attached to your patron, Monsieur?”

“I returned his regard for me, Sire, with duty and affection.”

“He is a great loss to us. We had looked upon him as a bulwark against the licentious encroachments of the age. He would have found for your modern Rousseaus poor quarters at Chambéry—or at Le Prieuré, for that matter. No question of subversive petitions, had he remained alive. It was a pity he was so appallingly ugly. I am not sure about the laces, monsieur. They are a little democratic.”

“They have gold tags, Sire,” was all that Trix could find to answer.

“True,” said the King, “and that perhaps redeems them, like the jewel in the toad’s head. I understand, Monsieur, that the widow is as great a beauty as she is a fortune.”

Cartouche sniggered to himself, dogging these apparently inconsequent “doublings” of the royal mind.

“She is priceless in every way, Sire.”

The King looked at him rather keenly.

“It would want a courageous man,” he said, “to aspire to the priceless.”

Cartouche smiled, in a state of inner astonishment. To what end, of favour or correction, was all this irrelevance of the royal flibbertigibbet addressed? Knowing his own reputation in Turin, he could hardly flatter himself with a thought of promotion. And the next remark of the monarch only deepened his perplexity.

“Have you ever heard, Monsieur,” said Victor-Amadeus, “of a secret society calling itself the Illuminati?”

“Surely, Sire,” answered the visitor, profoundly bewildered. “It is, by general report, a fellowship of star-gazers, who, consulting the heavenly systems, flounder among the earthly.”

“Ay,” said the King: “and they meet at night, as astrologers should—here and there, on dark hill-sides, on remote roads, on lonely wastes. But doubtless you know that?”

“I know nothing whatever about their habits, Sire.”

“So?—I think, Monsieur, but I am not sure, that these ruffles might be doubled. Perhaps, however, it would vulgarise, in the tiniest degree, the exquisite simplicity of your conception. My faith! what Goths we have to educate, artists like you and me! Hopeless to expect their appreciation of these delicatenuancesof taste and selection. The many-flounced flower is always foremost in their approval. Sometimes, in despair, I feel that I must yield the eternal conflict—go mad in pea-green stockings and a scarlet wig. But then I think how Nature, in her inaccessible eyries, continues to produce, without a didactic thought, her tastefullest forms; and I am comforted, because I recognise that the final appeal of elegance is to the gods. Has it ever occurred to you, Monsieur, that your patron was murdered by these Illuminati?”

The sudden swerve and swoop brought a gasp from Cartouche, verily as if his Majesty had whipped a hand from behind his back and struck him in the wind. He was, momentarily, quite staggered.

“No, never,” he could only ejaculate.

Victor-Amadeus conned him curiously.

“Admit, Monsieur, for the sake of argument, that it were so,” he said. “How, then, would you regard this Brotherhood?”

“Sire, as your Majesty regarded the Jesuits.”

“What! as a canker to be cut from us, lest it should come to corrupt the whole body of our estate?” The King scraped his chin thoughtfully. “I have heard said,” he murmured, “that of all compelling personalities, that of the fire-eaterdilettante, the truculent wit, thegaillardwith his tongue in his scabbard and venom at its point, is the most to be admired for its penetration, since it will pierce through both steel and brain. (I shall certainly adopt this inspiration of the earrings, Monsieur.) We are fortunate, at least, in recognising in M. Trix—with whose exploits in Turin report has made us familiar—the qualities of his reputation. Courageous, brilliant men, men of resource and daring, men even remorselessvengeursat discretion, are not to be gathered like edelweiss at the expense of a little risk and trouble. And so La Prieuré has its Illuminati, Monsieur?”

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