“Yes, to think, Yolande. I would carry you by force if driven to it.”
“Would you? O, I am helpless!”
“But not unless all else failed. To prevent one outrage by another! God would not love us any longer, Yolande. We must try all juster means first.”
Cartouche, wincing, ground his heel softly into the boards where he stood. The girl was weeping very hopelessly.
“You wring my heart,” said Saint-Péray, sobbing himself. “What am I to do? What think? I would pray for light before I act—pray for fortitude and reason. Precipitancy makes self-martyrs, Yolande. Our cause is better won by moderation.”
She turned from him. “Yolande!” he cried in agony. “You love me best?”
Cartouche uttered a very wicked oath under his breath. But the white lily was in her lover’s arms.
“Yes, yes,” she said. “You are always right, dear Louis. Only tell me what I am to do.”
“Supposing you went now to your father, Yolande, and confessed the whole truth to him?”
“Alone, Louis?”
“Only for a little, dearest. I will follow when I have prayed for guidance. Would he know my name even?”
“I have done very wrong.”
“Hush! the blame is mine. But we will mend it—start afresh. He must be broken to my idea—learn my deserts before he sees me. I’ll trust to you to speak them, sweetheart, better than myself. We must not descend upon him with flags flying, daring his enmity.”
“You’ll not be long?”
“Yolande! do you doubt me?”
“I only doubt myself, Louis. If he appeals to me by all I owe to him!”
“You owe God your soul, Yolande.”
“Yes, yes. Pray to Him for me, Louis. I am so weak alone. Good-bye, Louis.”
“Au revoir, Yolande.”
She did not mend her term, however, and they parted. Cartouche turned his face away. When he looked again they were both gone—Yolande down the hill, Louis-Marie to the chapel.
“I have seen an angel,” thought the watcher. “Henceforth I am in love with chastity.”
He lingered long in his eyrie, waiting for Saint-Péray to go. At length, restless beyond endurance, he decided to take the lead in the descent. As he went down the hillside, the mist was already retreating before the onset of the sun. It was the dawn of mid-day. Cartouche looked over his shoulder towards Le Marais.
“Will that bring him out?” he thought, “or will he always put off making his hay until to-morrow?”
Coming out into the road below, he ran suddenly upon Bonito. The physician sprang back and stood breathing at him, grinning horribly.
“Ha!” he cried. “Well met, fellow-disinherited!”
He champed like a rabid dog. He was woefully unclean and disordered. Cartouche fell severely calm.
“What is the matter?” he asked.
“The matter!” cried Bonito. “Enough and to spare for us. Go and hear it in the village. Thou hast sped, if thou hast sped, to great purpose indeed. Le Marais was already bespoke, it seems. They are man and wife this hour.”
Cartouche did not move.
“Who are man and wife?” he said.
The other raved.
“Who but the dog that hath disowned us, and the—woman that hath replaced!”
“The woman! she of the white hands? Why, she was up yonder not twice as long ago!”
“I cannot help that. You should have kept her there. If you let her go, you were the fool.”
“I had nothing to do with it. She went down to plead for her lover.”
“A pretty pleading! I don’t doubt she’s like them all—caught by a title. Anyhow springed she was and is, and held at this moment as fast as Church can bind her.”
Cartouche laughed recklessly.
“Well,” said he, “man proposes, but woman disposes. Our best-laid plans are nothing without the collusion of the party planned against. We must carry our wits to a fresh market.”
Bonito, with a fearful blasphemy, hit out into the air.
“I know my market!” he screamed, “I know my market!” and ran raging up the road. Cartouche turned his face to the hill once more.
A little way up he met Saint-Péray, pale and exalted, descending at last. He stood in his path.
“Louis-Marie,” said he, “you have delayed too long. It does not do to give the devil tether while you pray. Mademoiselle de France is at this moment the Marchesa di Rocco.”
He owed the young man no mercy, he thought. His own heart, for all his cynic exterior, was burning between contempt and anger. But he was hardly prepared for the blighting effect of his own words. Louis-Marie fell at his feet as if a thunderbolt had struck him.
Yolande de Francewalked straight down the hill to her doom. She had no Spanish silk umbrella, like Cartouche’s, to shield her head from the tempest, nor any strength, like his, to dare orthodoxy. She wore only a simple cloak and hood, like “Red-riding-hood the darling, the flower of fairy lore;” and that was quite insufficient to protect her from the wolf.
At the door of the “Hôtel” her father met her, distraught and nervous. He led her, his lips quivering, into the little side study which he called an ante-room. He was obviously, pitifully, agitated.
“Where have you been?” he said. “But no matter, since you are here. Yolande, the moment has come when you must decide.”
“Decide, father?” She trembled.
“Whether,” he answered, “you will bow to my earnest wishes, or commit me to dishonour and the grave.”
She felt suddenly faint, and sat down in a chair.
“Father!” she whispered; “I don’t understand you.”
“I am only too easily understood,” he said. “The Marquess di Rocco, who holds my very existence in the hollow of his hand, renews his suit at this moment, and peremptorily.”
“I cannot marry him.”
“Wait, before you condemn me, me, your father, to worse than death. I must be plain with you, Yolande, in this terrible crisis. I do not plead my word to him, although you as a de France should appreciate its inviolability. It is associated with other pledges which, in default of your consent, would mean my instant ruin. I owe him money, Yolande, which it is impossible for me to repay—money borrowed chiefly to enable you, my daughter, to maintain the condition which is your due. You alone have it in your power to liquidate that debt.”
She did not speak. She could not, indeed. But he gathered a little confidence from her silence.
“And after all,” he said, with a sickly smile, “one can conceive a less attractive way out of animpasse. Riches, position, a princely jointure, an alliance with the most powerful house in Savoy, whereby our own would be enabled to recover its lost influence—are these small considerations to be discarded for a personal sentiment, which a month of such devotion would cure?”
She shuddered, repeating, “I cannot marry him.”
“On the other side,” he hurried on, ignoring her words desperately, “utter material ruin and, what is worse to me, my word, my honour foresworn. Listen, Yolande. In that very hour when you become, if you will become, his wife, he settles his entire property upon you by will. You will be the most influential woman in the duchy, a force for the good which is so dear to your heart. Is to put this in your power the act of a libertine, or of one rather who yearns to find his redemption at the hands of a virtue which he holds so inestimably dear?”
She cried out at last, rising from her seat and staggering as if she were blind.
“Father! father! give me time at least!”
Even in her despair she knew that it were useless to plead how her heart, her soul were engaged elsewhere. The shock, at this pass, would have driven him to a very frenzy of cruelty. As it was, he leapt to the little concession implied in her appeal, and sought to improve upon it instantly.
“Impossible. He is on the very eve of a journey. He demands the ceremony at once—this moment.”
“The ceremony? O, mother of God!”
“A formal one only, conditionally, for a year. Not till that time has elapsed may he claim you for his wife in fact. It was my provision, made in consideration of your youth and inexperience.”
She stared at him as if mad.
“You are my father,” she began. He interrupted, to better her,—
“Your dead mother’s trustee for your welfare, Yolande. As I hold that charge sacred from abuse, believe at least in the sincerity of my desire to urge, impartially, upon you the wisdom of a step which I am sure she would have approved.”
The girl gave a little rending laugh—horrible—in a note quite foreign to her.
“Is he—M. di Rocco—in the house?” she asked.
“He is in the next room awaiting us. The Maire, the notary, and the good Father of Le Marais are also there, attending on your decision.”
“Only my mother is wanting,” said Yolande. “Call her to this conspiracy against her child, and see what she answers to the impartial head of it.”
He had turned his fine eyes from her, even as, it is said, the royal despot of beasts will cower under the fearless human gaze; but at this the goaded fire flashed into them.
“She would answer,” he cried, “cursing the graceless offspring of our house, who could so misread a father’s tender love.”
“No, father, she is in heaven. The secrets of our hearts are bared to her.”
He cringed before her for a moment, defeated and exposed. Looking in her noble eyes, he knew that his moral tenure of her heart, her duty, hung upon a thread—knew that nothing but the last poignant threat of self-destruction could restore them to him. His stately cowardice had even foreseen this contingency.
“You leave me no alternative,” he said, his face as grey as ashes. “I cannot survive dishonour and my broken word. Thus, Yolande, do I take your message to her!” and with the word he fetched a pistol from his pocket and put its muzzle to his temple.
She uttered a fearful scream, and flew to him—wrenched down his arm, cried, and fondled him with inarticulate moans. He stood quite passive.
“Give me time!” she could only sob at last.
“I can give you nothing, Yolande,” he answered. “Yours is all the gift. I am a bankrupt but for you.”
He made a movement as if to break from her. She held him madly. In that minute the whole joy of life drained from her veins and left them barren. At length she released him, and stepped back.
“Father,” she said, “in all your life never mention my mother’s name to me again. When I die, bury me away from her in another grave. I am only worthy to be your daughter. Deal with me as you will.”
A double rose of colour had come to his cheeks. He made an eager step towards her, but she retreated before him.
“It is enough for me that you have vindicated your name,” he said. “It is enough that I am not mistaken in you.”
“Spare me that comment on my shame,” she said. “Why will you keep me in this torture?”
But he must still hunger to justify his self-degradation by enlarging on it.
“Hush!” he said. “It is a sacrifice, I know; but perhaps, Yolande, only a provisional sacrifice. Dare I whisper my own expectations? You will be free for a year—a wife in nothing but the material endowments of wifehood; a—a prospective dowager, Yolande. The Marquess is much shaken—a prematurely old man—a—”
She turned from him, feeling sick to death.
“I am waiting,” she said icily.
* * * * * * * *
That was how the Marchese di Rocco gained his wife. For the rest, the priest, the Maire and notary were creatures of his own, and among them soon accomplished the ceremony and settlements. At the end, monsignore offered to kiss his newly-made bride; but she backed from him.
“Is this in the bond?” she asked coldly of her father. He was very righteous and peremptory at once.
“It is a breach of it,” he said. “I must ask you, monsignore, to observe our compact to the letter.”
The old libertine grinned.
“A pledge only, to be redeemed in a year,” he said. “But it will keep, sweet as roses in a cabinet. In the interval, I hope the Marchesa will honour my poor abode, during the absence of its master.”
“No, pardon me,” said de France. “She will continue in her father’s house.”
“I shall do neither,” said the lily.
“How!” cried the Chevalier.
“I am my own mistress,” she said. “From this moment please do not forget that—” and she swept from the room.
He stared after her, dumbfoundered; but di Rocco burst into a great laugh.
“By God, I like her spirit!” he said. “She is a prize worth the winning.”
Therewas a littleaubergeon the Montverd, kept open during the summer months for the benefit of those (not many in 1783) who came to enjoy the view. There, in a green oasis, planted amongst the stupendous buttresses of the mountains, lived Nicholas Target and his daughter Margot, the latter a good sensible girl and the responsibleaubergiste. The father was a drunken scamp, a guide by profession, but long discredited as such in the eyes of all but his daughter, whose faithful heart continued to make its compromise with the self-evident. The fellow spent his days, of slouching and soaking, mostly at the foot of the steep path which descended from the inn to the moraine of the Winds, where, in a tiny shed, he kept a store of woollen socks for the feet of those who desired to cross the glacier. This at least left theaubergefree of his presence, and Margot to the peaceful entertainment of her guests.
Amongst these, on a certain tragic day, came to be included Yolande, new Marchesa di Rocco. Only the wonderful visitor came to stay, it seemed, and not merely to gather Dutch courage for the passage of the glacier. She took a bed at the inn, and cold command, as by right of her husband, its rent-lord, of its general conduct. She had always had an affection for Margot, the good girl, and this was her way of showing her confidence in her discretion.
“I want to be alone,” she had said; “and hither none comes but the stranger who cannot know me or my concerns. I look to you to secure me utter privacy—from man, from woman, from child, from the whole world. Only if my father comes must I see him, for I am his daughter. For all else be my true and faithful watchdog, Margot.”
Margot had of course heard of the tragic ending to that idyll on Le Marais. In common with her fellow-women she had deplored the finish to a pretty romance; but then, when one’s feudal lord stepped in at the door, love must fly out at the window. It was pitiful, it was sad, but it was inevitable. She promised with all her heart to contribute what gentle salve was hers to that open wound.
She said it with fervour, but in a panic. It was difficult for her to reconstruct, from this figure of bloodless hauteur, the sweet and kindly patroness of yesterday, who had never held herself other than such a simple girl as she was herself. Could shock so turn to stone? It was a catalepsy of the soul.
And Yolande made her home there in theauberge. With all Le Prieuré at her feet, she elected for this chill small refuge of the hills. She felt she could breathe there—was nearer God and her mother. She felt she could pray a little even, and with more chance of being heard in that austere silence. There was no sound of waterfalls in all the vast valley to strike between her and her isolation, rushing down into the hateful plains where men dwelt, dragging her thoughts on their torrents. What voices reached her came from above—the whisper of avalanches, the echoing crack of ice-falls in those enormous attics of the world. She was alone with her desolation among desolations.
Once, and once only, her father visited her there. He was very humble and deprecating. He had come to remonstrate, and he remained to weep. She saw his tears without emotion, and bid him kindly to the descent, lest the mists should rise presently and give him cold. He went without a word.
Did she ever think of Louis and that dead idyll? A will of self-reticence had so been born in her that perhaps she was able to hold his figure from her mind. If she had not, the memory of the cruelty of her part to him must have driven her mad. Not to think at all was her hold on reason—not to think what he was thinking, suffering, designing. That he could come to claim her yet, in defiance of law, orthodoxy and every right but the right of human nature, she could not believe, nor wish to believe. He was not so to be dethroned from her worship of him past. It would be another Louis than the Louis of her knowledge who could so dare. Yet was she not another Yolande? An awful rapture, should outrage have conceived a wicked will in him like hers! But Louis would not come. He was a purer soul than she, and prayed, always prayed, before he committed himself to action.
The far unconquered heights above her were her reassurance, she told herself, that he was of those who accept repulse unquestioning. His faith was always first in heaven, and its high reasons for baffling high achievement. Christ’s creed, and he a Christian. He could not love her so much, “loved he not honour more.” She bowed to that higher rival, and believed that the thing remotest from her wishes was to see her ousted. And her brain reeled to the sound of every footstep which came up the mountain.
Among them all she never dreamed of listening for her husband’s. That di Rocco had kept his word and left Le Prieuré on the morrow of the tragedy she never doubted. It was not he, but the interval which was to separate her from him which filled her thoughts. Nebulous, unformed, the idea was still never less than a fixed one in her mind that any consummation to that tyranny but Death’s was unspeakable. Whether his or hers it mattered nothing. The knot must be cut before it was double-tied; and in her heart she rejoiced to think of his succession to an empty bed. She did not suppose she could possibly survive the year—twelve long months of suspension between torture past and the prospect of the living “question” to come. She had only to be herself and die. “Duty” could not traverse that decision. Her heart was cold already.
Rare and alien the footsteps came up. One day it would be a traveller, one day a goatherd. The world went by her thinly, and vanished into the mists. She remained alone, and fell, after each interruption, into her old communing with Death. He was the only understanding friend left to her.
One day, as she was in talk with him, high on the hill where no one usually came, a stranger suddenly stood before her. Either the watchdog had been slack or the interloper cunning. He doffed his hat to her with the most sympathetic grace imaginable.
“You seek theauberge, monsieur?” she said haughtily. “It lies below. You are off the road.”
“And mademoiselle also?” he asked. “But supposing we each undertake to put the other on it?”
She had been seated on a stone. She rose hurriedly.
“The road lies down, monsieur.”
“As I would convince mademoiselle,” he said. “I have just come up it from a stricken friend.”
Her intuition touched some meaning in his words. She looked breathlessly at him.
“If you know me, monsieur, as your manner seems to imply, you will know that I am out of love with subterfuge.”
“I know you, mademoiselle, by sight and reputation.”
“Scarcely, monsieur, if you so address me.”
“Ah!” he said. “I do not hold by orthodoxy. And yet there was a time when I was tender of it. You would be madame on a surer title had I had my way.”
“Tell me who you are?” she demanded icily.
“It can hardly interest you. They call me Cartouche.”
Her face fell frowning.
“I have heard of you. I would not be ungracious, sir,” she said. “You saved a life that was once dear to me.”
“I wish I could say I saved itbecauseit was dear to you. I had not seen you then.”
“You can dispense with your compliments, sir. Your reputation is sufficiently well known to me without.”
“Then doubtless mademoiselle is aware that disloyalty to friends is not a part of it. Moreover, it is a human eccentricity to love what we have saved.”
“It is easy to love some people.”
“It is easy, though our natures may be the remotest from theirs. Verjuice loves oil in this queer salad of life. But where I have come to love through saving, I would save again and yet again.”
“You speak a good deal of yourself, monsieur. Forgive me if I cannot quite share your interest in the subject. No doubt your friend appreciated your assistance in saving him a second time from destruction. It is fataller, I am sure, in such eyes as yours, to fall in love than into an abyss.”
“You misunderstand me—I hope not wilfully. I did not mean to speak of saving my friendfromyou, butforyou. I do not mean it now. I am here to offer you my services.”
She drew herself up magnificently.
“I thank you, monsieur. I was to be excused perhaps, for wishing to read on the better side of an insolence. You had done well, according to your lights, I am sure, to strive to keep us apart—well to your worthy patron; well for your worthy self. I could have respected you at least for that consistency. But to offer to mend what you have helped to mar! I am at a loss to understand how I have invited this insult.”
A dark flush rose on Trix’s cheek. What was this new-born perversity in him which made him not only bare his heart to this sting of words, but, like a very anchorite of love, take pleasure in his chastising? Her frost fired him.
“You are bitter, mademoiselle,” he said. “I could answer, very truly, in self-defence that I was so far from choosing to have a hand in this business, as it has sped, that I foresaw from the first what has actually happened—that your exaltation would spell my ruin. I would answer that, I say, but that I own to no man’s power to ruin me.”
She was quite unmoved.
“Those who serve evil must bide evil,” she said. “If, as you would seem to imply, monsieur, your employer has made you the scapegoat of his reformation, I can only regret, very sincerely, my involuntary part in your dismissal. Believe me, I would give all myexaltationto reinstate you.”
“I used the term unthinkingly,” said Cartouche. “It was the formal phrase of a worldling. Will you persist in thinking me too bad to be moved by the distresses of virtue hard beset?”
“And how would you propose to help that poor virtue, sir? For what are your services offered? I will not even sully myself by understanding—unless to suppose that you design to make me an instrument of your revenge on one who has wronged you.”
The flush on his face deepened.
“You are an angel, madame,” he said grimly. “You claim your full prerogatives. I can never please you better, I see, than by avowing my knowledge of the gulf which separates us. I, too, will be myself, flagrantly and without compromise. My affections are all earthly. Very well, I love the man I have saved, because I saved him. I see him stricken down—helpless—his very reason threatened under a calamity worse than death.”
Her face had gone bloodless; she answered, faltering,—
“As to that, monsieur, assure yourself, assure him if you please, that nothing but a convention separates us now, nor ever will.”
He looked wonderingly at her. Did she mean to kill herself? He could quite believe it, as the more pardonable of two self-offences Then he breathed and laughed.
“A convention!” he cried. “I am nearer you by that admission. There is no moral bondage in conventions. Let me bring my friend to you and save him.”
She reared herself like a very snake.
“I would you had never saved him,” she said deeply; “I would you had never laid that claim on his regard. My only regret in dismissing you is that I re-condemn him to this corruption. Go, sir, and insult and trouble me no longer!”
He had lost, and turned to leave her. But for a moment he paused, in anger and confusion, to fire his final charge,—
“Very well, madame! Only be quite sure of the strength of that convention—as sure as your husband may be of its weakness. I do not think he will wait a year for the test. Farewell!” and he went.
And no sooner was he out of sight and hearing, than Yolande bent herself face downwards on the rock, and delivered her soul in a cry of agony,—
“Louis! my Louis! so ill, so broken! and I may not help thee, nor think of thee!”
Ifall the rest of feminine Le Prieuré was agreed in accepting Louis-Marie’s discomfiture with regretful resignation, Martha Paccard was certainly not going to number herself of that complacent sisterhood. She was hot with pity and indignation, and, because vexed, illogical of course.
“What did the man seek?” she asked sharply of Jacques Balmat, referring to the Chevalier de France. “Honour, renown, riches, through this connection with adébauché? Our monsieur had provided them all, and with a better savour, if only you had spurred him timely to achieve the ambition of his life. But how was the poor boy to accomplish that ascent, with you and your wisdom for ever at his elbow persuading him from it? You men are all alike—great promises, and little reasons for not performing them.”
“No later than the day of the marriage, Martha, I urged him to come and try once more.”
“Then you did very wrong. What title had you to demand that risk of him, when all his happiness was at stake in Le Prieuré?”
“To increase the odds in his favour, to be sure.”
“Favour and odds! Has he not his patrimony, enough to frank a presence less angelic than his?”
“I do not see how to ascend the mountain could have added to it, certainly.”
“Don’t you? But there is money in fame, let me tell you, even if it is achieved ultimately through a book. As for you, you may ascend Mont Blanc, and nobody will believe it, because they will have to take your word, which is nothing.”
“They will take my word, nevertheless.”
“They will be more credulous, then, than I. I have long lost faith in it. And if I still doubted, there is that poor sick boy at home to confirm me. By this time, if you had done as you promised, not fifty di Roccos could have equalled him in reputation.”
“Is he very ill, Martha?”
“He wrings my heart. Why are you so strong, Jacques, and so honest and so resolute? I cannot conceive my father partingusat a blow. And yet I am a dutiful daughter too. I think we love weak men like mothers. I am glad you are not weak, Jacques.”
“So am I. So shall your father be some day.”
“You must learn modesty, Jacques. Poor M. Saint-Péray is a model of it.”
“And he has been jilted.”
“So he has; that is the truth. He still sits as if stunned. I don’t know what will happen when he recovers himself. Jacques, for pity’s sake watch him when that happens—for pity’s sake, Jacques.”
“I will be his shadow, Martha.”
“But not for him to know. I dread the time terribly. I think there is often no such fiend as a good man wronged through his goodness. And there has been an evil one whispering in his ear, I am sure.”
“An evil one?”
“M. Gaston, the old lord’s black whelp. He brought him home that day—straight from hearing the disastrous news. He has been with him once or twice since. Jacques, I should not be surprised—I should not be surprised, I say, if that devil were urging him to dare all and abduct—her up there.”
“Would you not? I think I wish I could believe it.”
“O, hush! are you all fiends? This Cartouche, they say, is ruined in the marriage.Hemay have his reasons—butyou!”
“Well, good-bye, Martha. I will watch him.”
“That is right; to save him from himself—such a self, my God, as he may come to be! Good-bye, Jacques.”
She went on her way home. It was a chill, oppressive day for the season, with threat of cold storm in the air. Few people were abroad. As she neared her door, she noticed that a man was keeping pace with her. He reached the house as she did, and accosted her as she was lifting the latch. She recognised him for the Dr Bonito whom her father had supplanted at the Château, and her heart gave a little heave.
“Whom do you seek, monsieur?” she said, standing with her back to the door as if to bar his passage. She had not in her heart approved her father’s promotion to that distinction; but to any outer criticism of it she was ready to ruffle like a mother hen at a cat.
The doctor, it appeared, however, was to disarm her with a show of the most ingenuous urbanity.
“M. Saint-Péray lodges here?” he said, with a smile like a spasm of stomach-ache. “I should like to have a word with him.”
She looked at him with her honest eyes. It was at least a relief to find that his visit was not connected with his replacement by her father.
“He is not at all himself, monsieur,” she said. “Will not a message suffice?”
“Doubtless,” he answered. “Only I must deliver it myself.”
“A message?”
She questioned his face searchingly. Whose possible delegate could he be? Certainly he and M. Louis were at one in the question of their discomfiture by di Rocco. There was that much of sympathy between them. Besides, it was known that this man dealt in the occult—could cast nativities and foretell deaths. His message might be one of comfort and reassurance. Things were already at such a pass that no conceivable evil could congest them further. A certain awe awoke in her eyes. The neighbourhood of mountains engenders superstition.
“Is your—your message, monsieur,” she said, with a little choke, “from someone—somewhere that only such as you can understand?”
He chafed his bony hands together, leering at her wintrily.
“Yes,” he said. “I think it may interest him.”
“Wait, then,” she answered, deciding in a moment, “while I ask him if he is willing to receive it.”
She had intended to leave him on the doorstep while she went, but he followed her in closely, lingering only at the foot of the stairs while she ascended.
Louis-Marie sat in a little room which overlooked the hills. His ambitions and their unfulfilment were eternally symbolised before his vision. He was not much changed outwardly; only his eyes appeared physically to have shallowed. A cloud had come between them and the sun, and the transparency of their blue was grown chalky, as if a blind had been pulled down over his soul. And as yet no lights were lit behind, to show the shadows of what moved there. He was as quiet and courteous as ever in seeming; but women are as sensitive as deer to atmosphere, and Martha never saw him now but she quaked in anticipation of a storm to come.
He was reading, or feigning to. He looked over to her kindly.
“What is it, Martha?” he asked.
“There is one come to see you, monsieur, with a message from the stars.”
She trembled a little. He laughed.
“That is kind of him, whoever he is. Is it a fallen star, Martha? It can have no message for me otherwise.”
“It is fallen, monsieur, and therefore, maybe, in sympathy with its kind. It is Dr Bonito, the mage and soothsayer.”
“What! is he too the victim of a reformation? Heaven is very impartial, Martha. It condescends to no degrees in its chastisement. As well, after all, to be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.”
“Quite as well, if it is necessary to be hanged at all,” said Bonito at the door, to which he had mounted softly.
Martha exclaimed angrily, but Saint-Péray did not even stir.
“Pray make yourself at home, fellow-asteroid,” said he. “I must not complain if like attracts like. You can leave us, Martha.”
She obeyed reluctantly. Having followed impulse, she retired on mortification, which is the common way.
“What is your message?” said Louis-Marie, impassively, the moment his visitor was left alone to him. “You can sit or not as you like,” he added. “I am master of nothing.”
Bonito, as apparently phlegmatic for his part, remained standing where he was.
“You may think you know enough of my reputation to insult me,” he said. “It is no concern of mine what you or anyone thinks. The surest sign of worth is to be worth men’s slander, as its surest reward is ingratitude.”
“Pardon me,” said Saint-Péray. “I have never thought of you at all until this moment. But I agree with you so far—that to be vile and unscrupulous is, in this world, to be successful. If you are fortunate, we will admit, by antithesis, that you are virtuous.”
“They call me a Rosicrucian,” said Bonito. “I am at least so far in sympathy with the sect as to believe in the universal regeneration and the cosmopolitanism of the intellect. They call me also an alchemist. Certainly I would transmute the dross of life into gold. It is the world’s way to gild the calf and worship it.Wesee below the vile enamel. No idols of wealth or patriotism for us; no states or churches as jealous entities. Base metal is under the skin of all. Into the furnace with the vast accumulation, and there anneal it, with the salt of godliness, into that one and universal benevolence which shall be shoreless, landless, eternal—a single harmonious republic of the entire human race!”
He took breath. Saint-Péray sat as apathetic as a deaf mute. The other never thought to attribute his unconcern to his own uninvited self-exposition. Any propagandist, even of disinterestedness, is always absorbed in the first place in himself. In a moment he gave tongue again,—
“No need to question of the force which is to compel this transmutation. It has been growing consistently with the mind of man. The shame of the dominion of the brute in a world which intellect has shaped for itself; the shame of liberal knowledge lying at the mercy of illiberal ignorance; the shame of the animal coercing the angel, the fool cackling discredit on the sage—these things must cease off the earth at last. For when learning learns to combine, it shall be to ignorance as is the little bag of gun-powder, rammed home, to the material bulk which it is capable of annihilating. This is as certain as it is that the moment of the intellectual renaissance, age foreseen, is at last approaching. Because I, too, hunger and thirst with the fool, am I, Bonito, no better than a fool? The ‘fool’ can make it appear so, because in his numbers he commands the markets. Or has commanded—we shall see. The hour of his disillusionment perhaps is imminent. In the meantime we, who prepare the stage, do not cease of our efforts to divert the paths of evil, to over-reach iniquity, to gather each his quota of dirt and filth ready for the burning.”
He ended on a loud note, and wrung his lips between his thin fingers, leering at the other. If he had been tempted into an over long exordium, the more plausibly, he thought, would its moral “thunder in the index.” His craftiness was not to stultify itself by over-precipitancy.
Saint-Péray discussed his twitching face quite unmoved.
“I am obliged for your interesting message, sir,” he said. “You are reported to be a Rosicrucian? That concerns someone, no doubt; only I was under the impression that that sect eschewed politics. Thank you for putting me right. Good morning.”
Bonito did not stir.
“I aim,” he answered coolly, “in common with kindred spirits, many and potent, at the universal purification. Our politics are no more than that. Latency, cabala—all the rest of the terms which are held by the ignorant to condemn us, are only so many proofs of the divine sympathy with our mission. We can read the stars because we have, so to speak, friends at court there. Woe on him that scoffs at our message! Woe on di Rocco, I say, who heard and would not believe!”
He had shot his bolt, and as instantly saw that he had hit the mark. Louis-Marie gave a mortal start, and sat rigid. The curtain of his eyes was rent; there seemed things visible moving behind it. But not a word came from him.
“My message now is to you,” said the physician, low and distinct, “as to the one most intimately concerned in the scotching or expediting of a half-acted iniquity. I propose no plan; I point out no way. Bear that in mind very clearly.Mytask was accomplished when I warned di Rocco that his horoscope revealed Mars at the conjunction of the seventh and eighth houses, presaging quick death for him to follow on his marriage consummated. I have said that he disbelieved me. Disregarded would be the truer word. Passion in him was desperate enough to dare the test.”
“But not for a year.”
It was Saint-Péray who spoke, though his voice was scarcely audible. Bonito laughed little and low.
“Do you believe it? I know him very well indeed. There is no monster in all the world so self-convinced of his own irresistibility. You think he has left Le Prieuré. As a fact he does not start for Turin until to-morrow morning, when urgency compels him. But he will not fail to storm the coy fortress first—to-night he will do it—either to persuade or enforce!”
He paused, listening for an answer, but none followed.
“You may question how I know this,” he went on. “Be satisfied; we who read the stars command our instruments. He is to go secretly after dark, to-night, I say, crossing the glacier of the Winds from the further side towards the Montverd. Nicholas Target will be there to conduct him; Nicholas Target will have been instructed first to dismiss his daughter from theaubergeon some errand which will delay her. Monsignore will find the Marchesa quite alone and defenceless—nothing to complain of for a wife. He will presently leave her to return, as secretly, by the way he came. What then? There are pitfalls on the glacier, and Target will likely be drunk. Perhaps Fate will choose to verify its prediction during that passage. I cannot tell. For me, I have done my part. If this act is necessary for his destruction, a young widow will be ensured in Le Prieuré before long. That is my message to you; I speak it, with absolute conviction of its truth, for your consolation. If the marriage is consummated, the man must die. On the other hand, if one would save a threatened honour, balk by a timely abduction the hand of Fate, one would certainly procure a renewed lease of life for a villain, and a villain, one might be sure, who would not accept his despoliation with meekness. It is a nice point in ethics, upon which I will not presume to give an opinion. It had occurred to me once, I admit, that a revelation of the plot to the father would be the proper course. Reflection, however, convinced me that he would be only too glad to sanction, indirectly, the most treacherous of means for breaking down the barrier which his daughter had raised between himself and a potential greatness. In the end, monsieur” (he prepared to leave), “I resolved to confide the issue to the hands the most strong, in faith and godliness, to direct it—to your hands, in fact. You have my sympathy and good wishes. I have the honour to bid you good morning.”
He might have been speaking to an apparition for any response he could extort. Only Saint-Péray’s eyes were fixed upon him with a greed more horribly eloquent than words. He felt them following him as he left the room—clinging, it seemed, like the discs of tentacles to his back as he descended the stairs—pursuing him, silently, deadlily, through all the convolutions of his way, however he might twist and turn to elude them. He was not a fanciful man for all his mysticism; but the impression of this unwinking pursuit haunted his soul into the very dominion of sleep. The eyes followed him upstairs, in the little inn where he was sojourning for the moment, and lay down with him on his pillow.
* * * * * * * *
On that same day Mr Trix received his finalcongéfrom his patron with the most serene good temper.
“Rogue, rogue,” said the old devil—“though I have loved a rogue, we must part. There is no place in this reformation for a Cartouche.”
“You have taken good care of that,” said the young man, pleasantly. “It is very natural you should not wish to be haunted by your past. Besides, I can foresee all sorts of complications if we remained penitents together.”
“Don’t tell me that you also are a penitent—no, no,” said the Marquess, with a nervous chuckle.
He was fumbling at a cabinet against the wall.
“See here,” he said; “I wouldn’t do the graceless thing by your mother’s graceless son. If this hadn’t happened—had redemption been denied me, I won’t say but that it might have been my intention to make you my heir—an evil inheritance. That’s past, that’s all over. Better to lose the world than your soul, eh? But I should blame myself to deprive you of the means to honesty. Take my advice, rascal, and live cleanly for the future. We’ve sown our wild oats, you and I. We must both be out of the house by to-morrow, and leave it clear to the sweepers and garnishers. In the meantime, here’s to commute your expectations. Money I can’t command, without abuse of the marriage settlements, but its equivalent lies here—take it.”
He held out a handful of jewels, of ancient setting and indiscriminate value. Cartouche received the heap passively.
“It would be false modesty in me to refuse my wages,” he said.
“Yes, yes,” said the other, returning, still agitated, to the cabinet. “There may be another trifle or so. There—”
He paused, holding a ring in his hand.
“This is your mother’s hair,” he said, suddenly and sharply. “You can have it also, if you wish.”
Cartouche received the ring from his hand.
“Thank you, father,” he said quietly.
“No such thing!” began di Rocco, loudly; but his voice broke on the word. Cartouche stepped forward, and kissed him on the cheek.
“Goodbye!” he said. “I wish you had made a good man of me.”
Di Rocco turned to the wall. When he looked round again, Cartouche was gone. Then the old libertine sat down and wept. But tears in such are nothing but the provocation to fresh evil emotions.
Therewas a night of hurried storm long remembered in Le Prieuré. All during it the wind drove up in squalls, like the thunder of passing artillery, unlimbered over the mountains, crackled into brief tempest, and swept on. Billows of black smoke marked its passage, each in its retreat leaving a vacuum of dense silence, until the next, rushing in to occupy it, awoke the echoes with new uproar. The roofs smoked under the cannonade of hail; the glaciers foamed like torrents with the dancing pellets; the brows of the hills seemed to melt and flow down. Everything would be sudden, stunning, overwhelming for a space; and then—exhaustion, and the drip of wounded trees alone breaking the quiet.
Le Prieuré, weather-hardened, inhabiting under the sky-light of Savoy, thought nothing of all this, sleeping with its face to the clouds. What made this night of many nights notable to it was the period it marked in the course of a human tragedy, which had certainly seemed to cry to heaven for some such solution of its riddle. For, so it appeared, out of all the dogs of storm unleashed to hunt the hills, one had found the quarry sought by many; and had dragged him down, and torn and devoured him, so that not a bone remained to mark the spot of his undoing—di Rocco’s.
The morning succeeding opened chill and austere—a brave day for a journey. Monsignore’s equipage, ordered overnight, was ready betimes to convey him to Turin, whither urgencies State had called him. The lean horses champed their rusty bits; the lean postillions whoa’d, and cursed their cattle sympathetically for their ill-lined stomachs. When mid-day came and with it no di Rocco, they dared the devil for the sake of a toothful of oats and polenta, and drove back grumbling to the stables.
Monsignore did not come, then or thereafter. Monsignore was never to be seen in life again. At first the story of his disappearance was received with utter incredulity. One could not conceive a figure so potent, so absorbing, the sport of any such casualty as might overtake a little soul in its little pride of doing. He must be keeping out of the way intentionally—watching, from some cunning eyrie, to pounce upon the first self-committing wretch who should venture to presume upon his supposed removal from the board.
A hope, in that case, predoomed to unfulfilment. For, even when curiosity woke on surprise, and gossip on curiosity, and emphasis on gossip, his name was never bandied about but with decency. Le Prieuré, rough as its rocks, was too manly to flog a dead lion, or even a dead boar. There were no unworthy comments on the snatching of that terrific presence from its midst—not in the first surmise, nor in the last moral certainty. For so at length it came to be.
How the whisper grew, the shadow thickened, one might scarcely tell. It took form, no doubt, in the winks and becks and exaggerated secrecies of a sot, too brain-sodden himself at first to grasp the full significance of his innuendoes. But as a word or two, caught from the blabbings of sleep, may linger suggestively in ears that listen, so Nicholas Target’s tavern maunderings came presently to be suspected of embodying in their text a very momentous cypher.
The fellow, bewildered between apprehension and vanity, was unable, nevertheless, to forego that hint of his marketable values, nor his intention to negotiate them when his way became clear to him. It became clear, brilliantly clear, all in a moment, when he felt himself nipped by the scruff, and, twisting about, saw that the law had got hold of him. With whine and collapse, then, he let full daylight into so much of the mystery as it was in his power to resolve.
On that night of rapid storm, ran his confession, he had been engaged by Monsignore to bring him secretly into the presence of the Marchesa, where she had sought refuge in his littleaubergeon the Montverd. The lady was to be taken by surprise; for which reason his daughter Margot had been despatched into Le Prieuré on the pretext of some business which would detain her. For the same reason of privacy, Monsignore had elected to avoid the popular route up the hill. He, Target, was to meet him at the place called themauvais pasopposite, and conduct him thence across the glacier to his own side. He had known nothing of any engagement on Monsignore’s part to hold himself aloof from the Marchesa; or, if he had, it was none of his business to cross the caprices of his over-lord; nor could there be any real sin in procuring a wife for her husband. His conscience was as clear on that matter as on the question of his sobriety, which at the time was absolute.
So he had met Monsignore—with difficulty, for, as it turned out, the night was terrible: he had met him, and was already proceeding with him down the moraine, when he, Target, had slipped and fallen. Monsignore was very furious at that, and had cursed him for a drunken sot, which was quite untrue. They had proceeded, however, and were actually on the glacier, when by great ill-fortune he had fallen a second time. On each occasion the lantern he carried had been extinguished, and had had to be relighted. Monsignore, on the repetition of his mishap, had flown into an ungovernable rage, snatched the light from him, and, driving him from his presence with blows and curses, had bade him seek his own way to the rocks, for that he would trust himself to his guidance no longer. The man was a demon in fact, and he had fled from him. Instinct had guided him to his cabin by the moraine, where he had crouched, waiting for Monsignore to follow. While he dwelt there, there had broken over the glacier one of those furious storms of hail and wind, which for a time had made thought impossible. Its cessation was not followed by the arrival of Monsignore: in fact Monsignore never followed at all. Knowing the resolute cruelty of his passions, he, Target, had not been long in guessing at the reason. He must have foundered in that terrific blast—have wandered astray, with quenched light, and pitched into some crevasse.
Long he had waited for him; and, at last, in an interval of calm, had sought back, so far as he might dare, across the glacier. He had peered, he had shouted. He had left at last no boulder or familiar crack unsearched when the first weak wash of dawn had come to his aid. It was all unavailing. The glacier, it was as morally certain as anything circumstantial could be, had bolted Monsignore; and there was an end of him.
So Le Prieuré agreed, awake at last to the full significance of the shadow which had been stealing in step by step to overwhelm it. Its verdict was untraversable, as plain as reason: Monsignore had perished.
There was no need to question the essential truth of the drunkard’s story. Target could have had no possible interest in committing or leading his patron to destruction. A just retribution had overtaken an illustrious sinner against his word. Di Rocco, the monster, the miser, was a thing of the past. Heaven, in its own stupendous way, had decreed the manner of his death and burial.
Moral certainties are, however, by no means legal. A man is not dead in law without proof of witness, even though his carcase lies on the table before it. Much remained to challenge, to certify, to cite and answer by default, before the widow could come into her own. In the meanwhile the Chevalier de France was not backward in righteous and indignant denunciation of his dead son-in-law’s abuse of faith. At the same time he was even extravagantly exacting in the question of the acknowledgments due to himself in his position of natural guardian to the Marquess’s august “relict.”
The village, perhaps, did not at the outset take him quite so seriously as he expected. It was more curious to learn how M. Saint-Péray accepted this provisional change in his fortunes. But there Martha Paccard proved herself a very Cerberus in guarding the approaches to her charge. She was agitated, but quite resolute about it all. Only between her and young Balmat was there ever an interchange of meaning glances, and once or twice, in moments of emotion, some fearful comment. She cried, too, in private a good deal, however brave a face she might turn to the world. For, as a fact, none but these two knew how Louis-Marie had slipped out alone on the night of the tragedy, and had returned home as secretly by-and-by, death white and drenched to the skin.
Then the next thing Le Prieuré heard about him was that he had left the village and gone none knew whither.
At that, for the first time, men and women united in putting him on one side as an irreclaimable faint-heart.
But, for all the rest,Vogue la galère!Di Rocco was dead, dead, dead!
* * * * * * * *
One summer afternoon a young man stood on a projecting rock which overlooked the Glacier of the Winds at a point, on the north-east side, at no great distance below that whence his patron had, a few nights earlier, descended to his death. Right in front of him the vast river of ice, creeping to its fall over a precipice, was rent and splintered into a throng of monstrous pinnacles, one or other of which would ever and again lean, topple, and go spinning down the shallower bed below in a thundering shatter of fragments. This happened more than once while he lingered, and on each occasion he winced, and stepped back, and then expanded his chest, and watched for the next ruinous downfall. But at length, with a sigh, he prepared to go.
“So breaks away the past,” he thought. “What will the future reveal? Well, I am still Cartouche.”
He turned, turned again, and showed a wicked face to the glacier.
“He was good to me,” he murmured. “If Bonito did it, bad for Bonito. I shall know some day. Goodbye, evil father of a worthless child!”
He went down sombrely into the valley.
END OF PART I.
Turin, wedged into a corner between the Po and Dora, with all its ranks of lines and squares criss-crossing the angle like the meshes of a snow-shoe, was a depressing city to be abroad in on a rainy night. It was characteristic of it, of its unenterprise and unoriginality, that it had never deviated from the pattern set by its Roman founders. It suggested, when the rain poured persistently, a vast congeries of waterworks, with reservoirs and pumping-stations all drawing from the rivers. Its barrack-like uniformity of buildings; its shyness of imposing façade; its system of parcelled-out dwelling-blocks, called appropriately “Islands,” which were ruled, scrupulously rectangular, along the wide channels of its streets; its eternal monotonous brick and heavy porticoes, all combined to produce an effect of unlovely utilitarianism. Artistry, struggling here and there to emancipate itself, and soar above the level roofs on wings of brass and timber, had always halted, in the end, on a blank expression of futility, and retired within doors, there to fulfil its soul of the splendour which it had shrunk from daring without. For some reason, of taste or policy, architectural display was not favoured in Turin. Its fanes and palaces were all so many uncut diamonds—dull surfaces to hearts of fire.
There was something in all this, no doubt, significant of the character of its government; for, as art flowers at its richest under despotisms, so, oppositely, its growth is most stunted in the temperate climate of democracies. Turin, it is true, was not of those latter; yet it was as true that its lords had never learned to rule independently of their people. Even as kings, though when sovereign by a generation or two, they had not come to take themselves very seriously. They seemed to reign, self-consciously, by virtue of a plebiscite; they avoided superficial ostentation; they kept all their grandeurs for privacy.
There had been those among them who had planned, fitfully, to face all this heavy monotony with light and lightness, to overlay it with skin of marble, stone, or even, as a last lame resort, with stucco. Their ambitions had declined upon a policy oflaisser faire; in many buildings the very holes for their scaffolding remained unfilled—ineptitude yawning from a hundred mouths. Turin, under the rule of Victor-Amadeus III., was still Rome before Augustus, lacking its splendid autocrat. At the same time there was this much to its credit: it had never bred, or allowed to self-breed within its walls, a race of tyrants.
The Savoy princes were the militant monks of history, always keeping a reserve of cloister for contingencies. They were recluses by conviction, freebooters by constitution. The first duke of them all had died a hermit. The grandfather of the present King, the “Piedmontese Lear,” had abdicated (prematurely) on a religious sentiment. It had been his pious intent to efface the feudal system, age-dishonoured. It was the policy of his grandson to attempt its restoration. He made a mistake, being a vain, weak man. It is not the wisdom of the proletariat, but the folly of its rulers which opens the ways to revolt. Worse than the grudging of wise concessions is their rescinding when they have become establishments. Victor-Amadeus made much of his army, which was a warlike father’s perfected bequest to him. He also made much of his nobility, with the result that, according to the popular waggery, there was, in his reign, a general to every private. So he consistently favoured birth, ignored intrinsic merit apart from it, alienated the sympathies of his people, and opened his passes thereby to the hordes of the French Revolution. It was always a figure of speech to say that he strode the Alps. He had lost his French stirrup long before he knew it, and was jogging lop-sided to his fall.
In the meantime, lacking the soul of Augustus, he left Turin much as he found it, and, in place of bread and circuses, fed up discontent on the public lottery. His kingdom was rotten when it tumbled.
Montaigne in his time found Turin a small town, situated in a watery plain, not very well built nor very agreeable. Some two hundred years later the ineffable Count Cassanova passed a verdict on it not much handsomer. It was densely populated and full of spies, he said. It boasted, as a fact, at the latter date, a population of some ninety thousand souls. But it was not crowded nevertheless, except to one whosaw eyesat every turn. A city’s numbers are not to be calculated by one who moves exclusively in its markets. Turin’s population, if regularly distributed over its area, would have shown most of its quarters relatively empty.
It looked its best on a moonlight night, when along its canal-like streets the cobble-stones glinted and sparkled like very ripples on water, and the great hulks aligned on either side became shadowy leviathans anchored at rest. Its worst was kept for twilight drenchings, when the mists trooped down from the distant Alps and, blotting out the intervening slopes—the Superga, the hill of the Capucins, and others, a green high-stretching swarm—made one shoreless swamp of all the level town.
On such an evening, a man, going, with humped shoulders and dripping hat, down the Via del Po, which was one of Turin’s principal thoroughfares, cursed the city’s original settlers with all his soul of venom. He was, nevertheless, so bent on a particular errand, that nothing less than a flood would have diverted him from it. Presently he ran to a stop before a dimly-lighted shop window, and peered eagerly up at certain labels and vouchers which were pasted to the glass within. There were other inquisitors at the same business, quite a throng of them, and one and all, including the newcomer, like rude and ravenous poultry.
The shop itself might have been, in its dinginess and gloom, a mere money-changer’s office; which at the same time it was in a measure, only on a national scale. There were pious frescoes daubed on its walls, as if in irresistible association of hucksters with the temple. On either side of its door was hung a slim red board, the one headed “Torino,” the other “Genova.” Each board was ruled into five sections, and each section contained a number. These numbers represented, more or less, the victims of what the wags called the torture of the wheel. The office was, in fact, one of the many bureaux of the never-ending State lottery.
The stranger having examined, to his hunger or satisfaction, the numbers on the boards and the hieroglyphics in the window, stepped back into the rain with a click of his strong teeth together.
“Weeding, weeding!” he thought, exultant and rageful in one. “Next week will reach the grand climacteric—for me. My God! and what then?”
As he reflected, or muttered, chafing like a fettered beast, the form of a man, advancing up the street, came between himself and the light. Instantly he started, uttered a violent exclamation, and quickly pursuing the figure, accosted and halted it.
“M. Saint-Péray!” he cried. “So, after all, you have come into retreat in our capital!”
Louis-Marie regarded the speaker ghastlily. The young man’s face, in the shaking lamp-shine, seemed to twitch like the face of an epileptic. It was white and haggard, and indeed scarcely recognisable for the face which had kindled to the mountains of Le Prieuré a month earlier. He made no answer.
“A la bonne heure!” cried the other, very careful all the time not to let his capture escape him. “I had wanted much to come across you, and never so much as at this moment. Conceive my ridiculous position, monsieur! Realise me, here on this spot, debarred the heavenly mansions for lack of the necessary trifle of gate-money!”
“You are—Dr Bonito?” began Saint-Péray, clearing his throat to the effort.
“And flattered in your memory of me, monsieur,” interrupted the doctor, with a little bow which seemed to creak at the joints. “As you will recollect, I read nativities, I foretell events, however a capricious destiny may alter her tactics to procure them. For instance, you will remember, I prophesied the consequences of a certain achievement, which prediction was none the less verified because, as it happened paradoxically, the consequences anticipated the achievement. What then? It is the end which justifies the seer. The lady, you will scarcely deny, is a widow at this moment.”
Saint-Péray put his hand to his pocket.
“You want money,” he said hoarsely. The other stopped him with dignity.
“A loan is the word, monsieur—a little oil for the lamp; a little grease for the wheel;une épingle par jour; a sprat to catch a whale. You observe where you passed me just now?” (He pointed to the bureau.) “My star culminates there, monsieur, in a week. So surely as the heavens cannot lie, the numbers revealed at the next drawing will spell my apotheosis. In the meanwhile one, even a seer, must buy one’s promotion. The gods are very human. I have only approached this climax at the cost of all my little savings. If you will condescend to drink a glass of vermouth with me, I will explain. There is acaféhard by, and the night is cold.”
Louis-Marie seemed drained of will or resolution—a flaccid, half-dead creature. He followed whither he was told, and drank his vermouth and élixir de China—one glass, then another and another. A spark woke at last in his ash-blue eyes. Bonito, watching it, kindled reassured.
“The Fates, after all, have been kind to you, monsieur,” he said, gently touching the other’s arm with a long thin finger, as a spider experiments with a fly before he rolls it up. “There lives a spotless widow in Le Prieuré, and wealthy beyond words. You could not yourself have managed it better, if you had been a villain.”
Saint-Péray started, half-rose from his seat and sank down again.
“If it is villainous to have lost belief in God,” he muttered, “I am a villain, and no longer worthy to utter her name—nor even to resent its utterance by you.”
“As you please,” said the doctor, coolly. “I served virtue in serving M. Saint-Péray, and so would serve again without asking thanks. But to become an apostate and be damned at the instance of her whose name you are unworthy to utter—that seems to me like meaning heterodox and acting paradox.”
The spark had spread to Louis-Marie’s cheek.
“I desire, monsieur,” he said loudly, but quaveringly, “that you will state what you wish of me without further comment on my affairs.”
Bonito was not ruffled, though immensely dry and articulate.
“Very well, Monsieur,” he said; “though you will forgive my proposing to amend your resolution by inserting the wordpresentbetween the wordsfurtherandcomment. The time will come, perhaps, when you will seemydisinterestedness and your owninterestsmore closely. In the meanwhile I go wanting my gate-money.”
“Well? for your apotheosis, sir?”
“Exactly; by way of the lottery. The last of my scrap-metal, like the sculptor Cellini’s in the crisis of his fortunes, has gone into the mould. It needs but a finishing contribution, a final sacrifice, and the Perseus of my destiny will rise on winged feet. Other men have their systems, worldly and fallible. Mine derives from the stars and isinfallible.”
Saint-Péray laughed shakily, starting to scoff, but compromising with discretion. His soul was always malleable by another’s strong conviction.
“What, then, is this lottery?” he asked.
Bonito threw up his hands in mock-incredulity.
“You have been in Turin this month, and have not discovered its distraction of distractions! Alas! what a comment on your own! The lottery? I can explain it in a word—the very grandeur of simplicity; the art which conceals all art. Imagine, Monsieur, a wheel which contains numbers up to ninety and a single zero within its hollow circumference. Of these numbers, five are withdrawn weekly (in Turin or Genoa, turn-about), recorded and replaced. Well, you or I select five numbers—any, after our fancy—register them at a bureau, and receive a counter-check in exchange. Now, supposing two out of those our numbers shall occur in any one drawing, we score anambo, and receive two hundred and seventy times the amount of our stake: if three, or atern, we receive it multiplied five thousand five hundred times: if four, or aquatern, sixty-thousand times. On the other hand, if no such combination occurs, we forfeit our stake, to renew it, if we please, week by week, month by month, year by year. There is no end and no limit.Enfin, the zero occurring in any drawing forfeits all stakes of that week to the Government. There are complications, such as distributing one’s chances over the five numbers; but the principle is what I say. I throw for a quatern, and I shall gain it. Its sum will be, relatively, the sum which you shall be good enough to advance me. Join with me, if you will, and foreclose on Fortune. You will be rich, presently, beyond the dreams of parsimony. Wealth attracts wealth. You will lose nothing thereby, if I may say it, as a suitor.”
Wise men are often ready to listen to empirics who cite the occult with an air of finality. Louis-Marie was not very wise, and was thereby the nearer superstition. His faith had told him to discredit soothsayers: but for the time he had lost his faith. Like all good men thrown from their self-respect, he greatly exaggerated his own potentialities for wickedness. This man, he thought, had rightly foretold a misfortune. Might he not with equal certainty predict a fortune? There was some material balm in that. If he was to lose his soul, would not to gain the world better compensate the interval than a life of inglorious brooding? As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb: he called the words to memory with a new sense of daring. What a folly was piety—a hair-shirt on a heathen preordained to damnation. It was no God, no Father, who could set snares for the feet of his children. Therewasno God, unless a Prince of evil. Let him serve the chance. Live the world and the lottery!
The spirit he had drunk revelled in his starved unaccustomed brain. He thrust his hand into his pocket, and drawing out all it contained, offered the sum to Bonito, with a half-maudlin laugh.
“Half for myself and half for you, then,” he said. “I make you my broker with Fate.”
The sum was large enough to awaken a glitter in the Rosicrucian’s cold eyes. Something, the nearest approach to warmth which his heart was capable of feeling, tickled in his breast. He showed, for the moment, quite genial, quite impulsive.
“Always understand, Monsieur,” he said, “that I am actuated by the most earnest desire to serve you. We have a point of sympathy in our common wronging by one who shall be nameless. Let me here suggest, with only the lightest touch on a sensitive place, that women generally are not attracted by extreme ethical correctness, nor won by diffidence so much as overbearance. Believe my sincerity when I assure you that nothing would gratify me more than to see the ultimate accomplishment of a union, to which no bar but that of sentiment can ever—”