He wondered still when whispers reached him how Maire and priests, confident almoners of her bounty, were softly complaining of an inexplicable parsimony in a hand once lavish to munificence in charity. His wonder increased to hear the charge substantiated by her husband.
He had never avoided Louis-Marie; nor had ever put himself in his way. He had held his deed justified, and had told him so. For the rest, he was no precisian in matters of conscience; and if Saint-Péray could reconcile his marriage with his (as, by his growing air of resignation, not to say, of self-complacency, he appeared to be able to do), he had no mind to deny him his lovely provocation. He had never referred to the subject on their meetings—which were rare, because Louis was a dutiful husband. But once, to his surprise, his friend opened upon it voluntarily.
They had chanced upon one another on the road, when each was unattended. Something of an ancient warmth spoke in Louis’s greeting.
“Gaston,” he said: “we see so little of one another now. Is it because you blame me?”
“Si on est bien, qu’on s’y tienne,” said the other chauntingly. “Why allude to it?”
“Because I cannot bear to think I have lost your respect. Gaston, I must always hold that of more worth than—than some others do.”
Cartouche smiled.
“You are looking very well under the infliction, Louis. That is the moral of your loss.”
The young man broke out eagerly,—
“She was losing her faith in God: only I could restore it. I have always so longed to tell you. You know it was not the money! The first condition of our union was that it should be given all away—that curse turned to a blessing. I have never touched a penny of it—have never claimed the right to; only as her almoner. And now! O, if that dead man’s hand should still be on it, buying her soul to his in vengeance!”
“What do you mean?”
“I think I must always have someone to hold to, Gaston. You were so strong. I don’t know what I mean. Only now, when I ask her, for my own charities—often—Gaston, she says she has none to spare—no money—she!”
“She is a better business-man than you, that’s all. It doesn’t surprise me.”
“Perhaps. God bless you, Gaston!”
“Certainly, if He will. But I haven’t many dealings with Him.Bonne chance, old friend!”
Cartouche set his private agents to work; but the information he sought was long in coming to him. And in the meanwhile the tide rose up and up, under an ever more lowering sky, and the snarl of coming tempest shook the black waters. But, slow as the years drawled on for those up at the Château, to Cartouche they racketed past like a Dance of Death.
Atthe lower end of the Via del Po, where it debouched upon the river, stood, nicked out of the north side of the street, a little Square of houses known as the Court of Doctors. The buildings in this Square—for the most part unoccupied—were very high, very narrow, very crazy, and so few in number that no more than two or three of them counted to any one of its three sides, the fourth lying open to the stream of fashionable traffic which flowed by it all day.
Quidnuncs had always been a power in Turin; whence this one-time appropriation of a niche to their worship. The Court of Doctors, in its present aspect, was said to date from the Regency of Madame Reale—daughter to the fourth Henry of France, and wife to the first Victor-Amadeus of Savoy—to whose politic superstition it had been indebted for a sort of unofficial charter. For what destinies foreshadowed, for what poisons brewed, for what villainies set bubbling in crucible and alembic within its precincts its past history was responsible, only its own dark heart might know. To this day the atmosphere of that sunless well of brick seemed brassy with chemicals; its doorways emitted a faint stale scent of drugs; an air of stagnant mystery overhung its pavements. But it was mystery grown unnegotiable. The moon of its prosperity had set; black decay hung brooding on its roofs; the ministers to its former notoriety were flown. Not that empirics were fewer than of yore in Turin, nor less potent in their persuasions. But traps for credulity, like traps for mice, miss of their efficacy after a few score, or a few hundred captures; and the bait must be laid down in some other place and form.
There was one building in the Square, however, which of late years had been infinitely successful in reclaiming to itself a full measure of its own past fame, or infamy. This house stood, on the north-east side, one of three compact whose rears were to the river, from whose swift waters only a rotting wharf, sinking in sludge and slime, divided them. In front, panels of starry devices—suns and golden orbs, reeling in strange elliptics on an azure field—betokened the particular business of the house’s master, while they gave the building itself a meretricious distinction over its frowsy neighbours.
This was, in fact, the mystic abode of Spartacus, the famous seer—to whoseséancesall Turin was thrall in these days—and of his lovely Sibyl Cassandra. They did a roaring business between them there—if any such term may be applied to methods quite cavernous in their secrecy.
Thus, anyone seeking converse with the soothsayer, must commit his destinies to darkness from the outset. He approached the black Egyptian door, and, after a pause to rally his sinking heart, knocked thereon. No sound of footstep answered him from within; but all in a moment the door itself gaped an inky mouth, engulfed him, and closed again noiseless on his entombment. He strained his eyes through pitch—in vain. Not one tiniest theft from darkness could they compass. Suddenly a label sprang to light on a wall—“Ascend.” He saw a stairfoot; stumbled upwards between bat-wing hangings; the light shut behind him. At the turn of the stair another glowed out suddenly—“Ascend”—directed him on and vanished. A third time this occurred, committing him to a short passage, along which he slunk, until, lo! “Greeting!” flashed out an instant before his eyes, was as instantly extinguished, and, halted with strained breath and prickling skin in a close vault of night, he realised that he had gained to the inner Arcanum—the unholy of unholies.
That was a lofty attic room, panelled all round its walls (to confess its properties) with tall mirrors hidden behind black curtains; but those were so controlled, that all or any one of them, answering to a noiseless drop and pulley worked from without, could be made to gather softly away, revealing, unrecognised by the fearful visitor, the lustreless glass behind. One curtain, however, concealed a mid-wall alcove, a cimmerian cavity in which stood a tripod of cunning construction. For under its chafing-dish burned perpetually a concealed lamp, which kept the metal above it at a heat sufficient, at need, to ignite spirit cast upon it, or even gums and aromatic resins, the effect being as of a very immaculate conception of fire. But the dim blue flame thus evoked was of a luminosity just enough to reveal to the terrified observer the pale shadows of misbegotten horrors about him—his own reflection, if he had but known it, in such uncurtained mirrors as were not exposed to the direct rays of the burning naptha; but, so it seemed to him, a film had been withdrawn, in the silent rising of the draperies, from his own mental vision.
Crystal globes there were, moreover; strings of phosphorescent balls, which could be made to travel hither and thither on invisible wires; webs of luminous thread; entanglements of all sorts at command, the wizard himself, like a livid spider, poised in their midst. But, even so, great Spartacus despite, his skill and compelling magic, it is doubtful if, with all, the abode of mystery had won for itself any exceptional notoriety, had it not been for its loveliest mystery of all—that Hebe, who called herself Cassandra, and dropped flowers of prophecy from sweet lips, offering, it might be, asps in roses. She it was that, like a caged nymph butterfly, brought the males to beat their wings upon her crystal prison, scattering about it an incense of golden meal.
One dark evening, in the Spring of 1790, two gentlemen, coming rapidly down the Via del Po, turned into the Court of Doctors and stopped before the Wizard’s door. They wore masks and dominoes. They were both small men, one lean and the other plump. The plump man was by many years the junior of the lean one. He was also by several social degrees his inferior, being no more, indeed, than our friend Caius Sempronius Gracchus (aliasthe Vicomte di Mirobole) house-steward to his Majesty; while the other was his Majesty himself, no less.
“Is this the place, then?” muttered Victor-Amadeus, drawing a step back. He looked pinched and harried, like some littlepetit-maîtreof a Frankenstein pursued by a monster of his own creating. “My heart beats, Mirobole,” he said. “I think I fear the test.”
M. Mirobole clasped his fat hands and opened remonstrant eyes.
“Ah, sire!” he said. “Condescend to deem one truth better than a multitude of conjectures. These hundred shadows on your heart! What if he show you how one tree may cast them all—branches of a single hate, which, if severed at its root, the sunshine shall be yours again without a fleck!”
“You have certainly a reassuring confidence in your Magician, Viscount,” said the King with a smile. Then he sighed. “Well, I have only to reveal myself if he presumes too far. Lead on, my friend.”
M. Mirobole knocked instantly, and softly, on the tomb-like door. It answered with a startling unaccustomed promptitude to his summons; but his Majesty, never having visited here before, was without suspicion of any collusion implied in that show of eagerness to secure him. Forcing himself to resolution and treading on the heels of his companion, he stepped within the black jaws, which snapped immediately on their prey.
Almost simultaneously the tablet on the wall shone out. Craving his royal charge’s close attendance, the Viscount led the way upstairs. He was familiar with the mysteries of the place; though, to be sure, there was no mystery in it all to be compared with that of his own blind faith in the charlatan its master. Presently the two were committed, scarce breathing, to the dark “operating” room.
“I do not like it,” whispered the King suddenly.
There was certainly nothing very likeable in that profound gloom. It was so dense, so gross, as to appear palpable to him; sooty cobwebs seemed to stroke his face; he swept his hand over it disgustedly.
“Understand,” he muttered, in angry agitation, “that you are my mouthpiece; that I will not be betrayed; that—Ah!”—he gave a little jerk and shriek—“something touched me!”
On the instant, light glowed out in the room—or rather diluted darkness than light—and in the same moment an apparition showed itself.
Bonito, in black skull-cap and black skin-tights, his unearthly face and long white hands showing in the gloom like detached members, made a sufficiently ghastly spectacle. Even the little Vicomte, accustomed initiate, could never surmount a certain terror of him under such circumstances. And the present ones found him exceptionally nervous.
“Hail, Spartacus!” he whispered, his voice fluttering like a leaf. “Thou seest before thee a petitioner.”
“For what?”
The soothsayer’s face seemed to hang, a livid intent blot, in the darkness, its lips alone alive.
“For the truth.”
“Canst thou not, then, conceive it save out of Magic? The truth walks in the sun.”
“Nay, but if the sun’s eclipsed? We come to thee to light a candle to the truth obscured.”
“We, sayst thou?”
“I speak for him beside me here.”
“What is his name?”
“Why, were not to withhold it to honour best your skill? Shall Spartacus show no better than the Egyptian’s guile, fitting his prescience to his subject once identified. Name him, quotha! What need? Wiser is Spartacus.”
“Yet not so wise, it seems, as M. Mirobole.”
The King started violently.
“Knowest thou me, too, Magician?” he muttered.
“Ay, Monarch,” answered the pale lips; “and thy purpose in seeking me.”
“Sancta Maria! Tell me, then, what is that.”
“For light on an ancient prophecy.”
“It is true. God in heaven! What prophecy?”
“It occurs in the Almanac for 1700 by Duret de Montbrison; wherein it is stated that in the year 1792 the Monarchy of Sardinia shall suffer an eclipse.”
The King was trembling violently. He regarded the soothsayer by now with a fearful reverence.
“Tell me, Magician,” he said. “The courses of the heavens are, I know, inexorable. Yet may not the results of their forecastings, where directed upon perishable things, be nullified, if those objects be withdrawn? The shadow of its ages ceases from the felled tree. May it not be so?”
“It may be, King.”
“Fatality creeps on me. The land is thick with threatening voices. I am like one in the dark, hearing whispers all about me—not knowing where to strike and where to withhold. If I could but tell the shadow—where it lies—and uproot the tree! Whence threatens this eclipse? Show me the place, if thou lovest rich reward.”
The Wizard, looking upward, raised both his white hands. There floated into the dark above him luminous twin spheres attached, like a two-fold bubble.
“Seest thou those?” he said. “The one is Piedmont, the other is Savoy. So are the hemispheres of the human brain—of which one is dedicate to the fiend, and one to God. Between them is that eternal strife for precedence which we call man’s dual personality. But in the encroachments of either upon either, who is to distinguish between the sources of good and evil. This tree may stand in Piedmont or Savoy. Answer for which, Cassandra!”
With the word, she was there before them. The curtain over the alcove had silently risen and revealed her. The flame in the tripod, going up like a blue draught, shot her tawny drapery with streaks of emerald. A broad cincture, heavy with large green stones, was looped about her hips. Her bare arms and bosom rounded into soft violet shadows. Amid the chestnut loopings of her hair a coil of little jewelled serpents shone entangled. She was lovely in her face—life blooming out of death—her lips incarnadined with lust of sorrow—large eyes of tragic blue. The King looked on her, fascinated.
“Priestess,” said the Wizard, in a hollow voice: “answer, if of thine inspiration thou mayest, whence threatens the shadow of this Kingdom’s foretold eclipse?”
As he spoke, there came out of the darkness a string of little stars, of softest radiance and many colours, which took noiseless flight about the Sibyl’s head, and circled there in wondrous convolutions, faster and faster, until they seemed to whirl like lashing snakes. Then, in a moment, one of a red tint poised itself above her brow, and the rest fled away and were extinguished.
His Majesty, flaccid with awe, was by now in a condition to believe anything. And the priestess answered—in that old soft English voice. Poor Molly’s broken “Frenchings” had by now mended themselves wonderfully; but no call to shriller accents could spoil the quality of the throat which uttered them.
“I see a figure down in Faissigny,” she cried—“the figure of a man. It standeth in the sun like other men, and like other men doth cast its shadow. But, lo! the shadow of this man swells outward from his feet, onward and ever onward, until it engulfs the whole Province, laying it under tribute to his darkness.”
“The Prefect!” muttered the King. He saw his confirmation here of some black suspicions.
“Ask her,” he said, trembling, to the Wizard; “is the figure that of mine own Prefect of Faissigny?”
“Thou hearest, Cassandra?” said Bonito.
“Ay,” she answered; “it is the man!”
The King uttered an ejaculation, and lifted deploring hands.
“What motive in this monstrous thing?”
“The motive,” said the Sibyl, “of resentment, for a reward once promised and withheld; the motive of man’s ambition, which is ruthless; the motive of one whose nature it is to betray all trusts confided in him.”
She really believed, poor girl, on the misrepresentations ofheremployer, that Cartouche was conspiring to overthrowhis.
The King smote his thigh.
“He shall die,” he cried.
Bonito saw, though he did not, how Cassandra started at the word.
“Nay,” he said hurriedly; “the Fates are not to be propitiated with blood. Uproot the tree—not fell it.”
“But the shadow, Magician,” said the King peevishly—“how it hath spread already, sowing the ground with insurrection!”
“That crop would but grow lusty with his blood. Nay, I know not but that only to uproot him might not precipitate the eclipse.”
“My God! You falsify the parable.”
“The parable was thine own, King.”
“What am I to do?”
He was jerking and mowing in a fever of petulance.
The Wizard turned to his priestess.
“Shall nothing, then, arrest this darkness, stunt its growth, and nullify the prophecy?”
“One thing—one man alone,” she answered impassive. Indeed she was only repeating a lesson.
“What thing?” he said.
“To plant another instant in his place, while yet the ground gapes wide from his uprooting.”
“What other?”
She held her hands palm downwards over the chafing-dish. Instantly a lurid smoke rose from it, and in the midst appeared upright letters of fire, which spelt the name Léotade. She raised her hands, and the letters sunk and disappeared (in one piece).
The King muttered the name, evidently at a loss. But the Pythoness, with tranced eyes fixed upon some imaginary figure before her, pointed, her shoulder level with her chin, and spoke its qualifications,—
“I read a healing sweetness there, as of a pine tree taken from some harsh plantation, and put to root within its native soil. The man is of that Province, strong and honoured—no stranger from beyond its bourne, like him that hath planted its pastures with dark hate and shadow, looking to reap the storm. O, name! in thy bright influence I see the clouds dispersing, the darkness leave the land, the eclipse become no more. Pass on in silence!”
The final words seemed as if addressed to some ghostly scene-shifter. She had vanished in their utterance, and the chamber was recommitted to its shadowy glooms.
Shaking with agitation, the King turned upon the Magician.
“Let this Léotade, this sound health-giving tree, supplant the other. I say it, and will see it done. I know him not—what matter! Truth shall be vindicated.”
Bonito laughed grimly.
“Not so easily, O, King! are the powers of darkness despoiled. This Prefect will not budge at thy command.”
“He will not?”
“Why, of what texture, think you, is this same shadow that spreads from before his feet—this shadow of thine eclipse? Is it not woven of black sedition, which ever answers slavishly to him its master, obedient to his least gesture? He’d have a fine dark following, did he once turn him to the sun of monarchy, and march to overwhelm it. Why should he budge? And yet maybe I could induce him.”
“How? Your words fall on me like a pitchy rain, heralding that Egyptian darkness. Before God, how?”
“I’d put a spell on him, a loathing of his office. I care not. Go thine own ways, for me.”
“Nay, good Spartacus, wise Spartacus—thou must help me here indeed.”
“I care not, I say. I say, strike at him openly, if you will, and see him bristle through all his hulking shadow like a boar.”
“I will not. I will have it your way.”
“Well, if you like, give me the warrant to dismiss him, and appoint this Léotade in his place—him or another; what concern is it to me? Only I could so take him with mine art, he’d greet this chance as of a release from bondage—construe it into his resignation offered and accepted—abandon his following, leaving it to die of an atrophy, like a body whose brain is withered.”
“If you could do this thing, and earn my lasting gratitude!—dispel that darkness, and be like Moses honoured with burnt-offerings. I’ll send thee on the warrant. In the meanwhile, take this in earnest of my debt to thee.”
He threw a purse upon the floor—it struck weightily—and turned and left the room with Mirobole. A minute later the door below had shut upon them.
Bonito, with a loud snigger, touched a spring in the wall which acted on the curtain of the alcove, folding it up and away; and, striding to the tripod, took some hidden powder from beneath it, which he cast into the pan. A glowing flame shot up immediately, lighting the whole place, and he called out in ecstasy: “Cassandra, ma belle prêtresse, ma petite!”
She came out from a little room hidden behind the further curtain, and stood up motionless between their inky folds.
“We have won!” he cried boisterously: “we are partners in this triumph! Ministers of Fate, what a triumph! Mine own nominee elected; the other deposed and disgraced. Savoy is ours: we will cross the Alps ere long. Rejoice with me, child! Thine enemy lies low—thou art avenged.”
“Yes, I am avenged,” she answered dully.
He looked at her shrewdly.
“Art thou not satisfied?”
“You will not hurt him else, Bonito?”
“Why should I? He stood in my way; he will stand no longer. That is enough for me.”
“But you will not hurt him?”
“Hurt him, hurt him? Thou art tenderer of him than of his doxy. Look how you smile on while I bleed her—no pity there. And she’ll have to bleed the more for this—we take new life of it—no bottom to our need for funds. She’ll have to bleed again, I say, and make you fresh sport. No tenderness there.”
“You will not hurt him?”
“Plague on the parrot! Why should I hurt him?”
“Swear it.”
“Why, I will. Let him go free, for me, to beggary. I swear it, there.”
“Remember that.”
She dropped the curtain, and was gone.
Hehad done this thing for her—had stained his hands with blood to keep hers clean—had darkened his own soul that her soul might shine the purer for that shadow. What was her debt to him for this great self-sacrifice? How could she pay it, and not condone his sin?
So we pass to Yolande and her mortal problem.
Poor child so straight in candour as she was, no compromise with facts seemed possible to her nature. She must tell him all or nothing.
And if she told him all—revealed her knowledge of his crime—made herself its accessory thereby? He’d answer, would he not, “That leaves me no alternative. Sweet love, for sweet love’s sake, I must acquit you of this shadow of complicity—give myself up, and vindicate your spotless fame before the world”?
Would he not? She told herself he would; deafened her ears to her own heart’s whispered treason; would admit no justification for it in the evidences of a slandered character. Could one so un-self-reliant, so irresolute, so much the whimpering prey to circumstance as circumstance had seemed to paint her Louis, have braced himself to do that deed? The deed was there to answer her—to answer, triumphantly too, that by very reason of itself that saintly soul was convict of a heroism of which its meek patience had once seemed incapable, and which, in its revelation, had found the woman in her secretly exultant over the angel. Was that so indeed? Had his fall from grace made him dearer to her than ever his perfection could?
A dreadful thought, for which she paid to herself and God with anguishes of penance. But she could not control it, nor lay its unrighteous shadow. How could she, when father to it was the wish that what it implied of manly strength in him would answer to her confession of that dark knowledge, were she to make it, by an instant surrender to the law?
She could not tell him, then; and, so, what other course? No mid-way steering for this whole-hearted heroine—no hints, no tell-tale sighs, no tearful looks askance to haunt him with half-truths; no lagging partner snivelling unspoken resentment of her burden. She’d bear it all and bravely, the weight, the heat and pressure of the day, and cheer him, smiling, on to self-redemption. That be her mission—by ways of healing grace to guide him to that summit he would never attain alone. Man’s responsibility might be to the civil laws; but woman’s was to love. For love he’d saved her; love should save him. The rest was for his confessor.
Conceive this poor soul, then, with her monstrous self-imposed burden—never to be put down—facing the steeps of life! If her feet would sometimes falter, her eyes grow strained with agony beneath it, her heart never admitted by one false beat a sense of disproportion in their loads. To fend him from the truth, while hiding from him that she knew it; to pay his debts to vile extortion, and suffer the stigma of a parsimony which appeared to grudge him the means to realise their compact of a boundless charity; worse, to suspect sometimes that he guessed her knowledge of the truth, and was content to build upon her loving hypocrisy his house of later peace, was content to let her live the lie while he enjoyed its fruits—these things were the hardest of her task.
Another grief she suffered; but that, she told herself, was in heaven’s withholding of a greater. She was thankful for it—thankful as a martyr, whom great pain has numbed from further feeling—thankful that in all these years no child was born to them to bear the heritage of its father’s sin. And while she praised heaven for its mercy, the starved woman in her hungered for the milk of motherhood, and, fading on that deprivation, made her task of youth a burden. Yet she must bear that too, or pay the penalty to love estranged, since only the gifts of motherhood could compensate for youth and beauty bartered against them.
So she must be young and sweet in spite of ageing conscience; must sing about her duties; must smile away those shadows in her husband’s eyes which she sickened to think were the reflections of her own enforced avarice, her waning beauty, her barrenness.
A sordid destiny for this child of lovely purity; this Yolande of the white hands; this lily light of truth.
And to work out in what unnatural atmosphere—transplanted into what lifeless soil?
She was the mistress of a Golgotha, an old dark windy necropolis, whose massive gates her husband’s hands had closed for ever, shutting her in to consort with its ghosts. In di Rocco had perished the last of his name; in him, the old blotched trunk, his house’s life, slow withering to its roots, had sunk for ever. The branches long were leafless. To her, a stranger, had befallen the heritage of death.
She could have administered it, have justified heaven’s severe choice of her as receiver in that estate such ages bankrupt in charity, have wrung a sombre joy even from dispersing its evil accumulations, had not Fate thus imposed upon her this awful seclusion, paralysing her hands. As antique graveyards are sometimes made the sporting-grounds for little feet, so had she once pictured to herself the joy of budding life at play in these stony corridors and empty gardens, redeeming them from the melancholy of great wrong. It was not to be; and for the withholding of that lovely mercy she could only give heaven praise—give it with weeping eyes in solitude, and, elsewhere, with a bright countenance turned to her husband.
Did he find that inscrutable, nevertheless? Was he so far from sharing her thankfulness for that grace denied as that he could visit upon her—in those shades of altered intimacy, those reserves in confidence, those nuances of alienation which only love can detect—his secret disappointment? She prayed that it was not so; prayed, also, that, in the enforced restraints she must put upon his charities, his sweet and reasonable nature would look for no baser motive than necessity. She was always frank with him as to the extent of what she could command (exclusive of Bonito’s periodic drains upon her, and those of her father, a creature scarcely less abominable), and held all within those limits at his pleasure. Rather she should be whispered for parsimony than that his generosity should suffer in its name. He was so good, so bounteous, so utterly improvident for himself. Though he would not claim one penny that was hers, there was no question of his acting as her almoner. Indeed the money was no more hers than his, but in trust to both of them for God’s good business. She was, by heaven’s grace, but the acting paymaster; and so long as she might bear the whole burden of that duty, she was content that he should enjoy its credit. The question was one between her and love alone; its very exclusiveness made its bliss.
Yet sometimes in her moods of desolation, when, for all her prayers and self-reassurances, that sense of their estrangement would glow a more definite gloom, and the problem of her double life smite sickly on her heart, a dread doubt would arise in her as to the sureness of her guidance of this afflicted soul. The physically blind are apt to become the morally blind, intent only on their self-interests, some people say, because of the consideration with which pity hedges them—of the licence which it allows them for their infirmity. What, then, if love in pity had so rallied this stricken life as to lead it to regard itself as a persecuted thing—a thing privileged, through its own helplessness, to presume on the self-sacrifices of others for its sake? Louis’s apparent obtuseness to the meaning of the atonements her sweet example exacted of him, his apparent ignorance of any provocation to them caused by himself, filled her, when in these moods, with amazement. Had he lost all sense of responsibility to his own deed, in her voluntary acceptance of its consequences? That were to assume that he guessed her part, and could justify it to himself on the score of his own infirmity—an obliquity which surely could not be held to vindicate her self-sacrifice before heaven. Yet sometimes the assumption would arise, to hurt her cruelly—even to stingherto a momentary revolt. Hecouldnot be really ignorant of her burden—musthave surmised some coincidence between Bonito’s visit and the instant restrictions she had been forced to put upon their expenditure. His terror of the man’s presence on that day; his slow and shaken convalescence from the date of it—these were evidences of his knowledge hard to be discredited. And that, in the face of it, he could expect of her a pledge of their full confidence; could imply a reproach of her for her barrenness!—O, that were an addition to her load beyond her human endurance. The mere shadow of its oppression killed her heart—drove her in her agony to blow cold upon the little chill which already spoke their differences. And then the reaction would come.
He had done this thing for her; and she had accepted the burden of its consequences. She had prayed, prayed that even as he had saved her out of silence, so might she save him. And this was her heroism—to deprecate his blindness as a wilful vileness.
Then, poor child, she would call herself a wicked traitor to her lord, blame her own foul suspicions, and seek by loving demonstrations to atone. Her wistful guiles to win his favour, her rehearsals for his sake of that old forgotten part of tranquil innocence, her gratitude for only half-thawed acknowledgments, were moving things to witness. How could she dream her Louis guilty of this monstrous meanness—the man who had dipped his hand in blood to keep hers white? His first terror of that apparition had been real; he had afterwards accepted her word for its being an illusion. He always trusted others’ assurances: that very weakness it was which made him so lovable. So lovable, so lovable; and she had let her wicked heart condemn him! Could he have recovered from the shock of that visitation so utterly as he had, if he had seen in her the ever-present hostage for his immunity from deadlier hauntings? Her whole protecting knowledge of him was to answer; and it answered piercingly remorseful. No dear soul, it said, had ever less power than Louis-Marie for affecting to ignore the influences of a present depression. Yet Louis-Marie, the terror once laid, had rallied—had even come to recover something of the serenity of his earlier innocence. Why should he not, indeed? She thought, with heart-felt joy, it spoke his peace made with God; and, so justified of her burden, was more frenziedly determined than ever to hide her bearing of it from him, while she smiled and smiled under its load, impersonating out of torture her own untroubled youth. Alas! blind Love—who yet perhaps deserves scant pity! For did he not put out his own eyes!
Now she saw, and was rejoiced to see, as the months drew into years, his soul relax upon an ancient sweet security; the spectre of his fear grew less and less; his natural goodness mature into the full fruitage of its blossoms’ promise. So peaceful did he grow, so seemingly unvexed by apprehensions, so confident in his demands upon her charity for others’ sake, she was sometimes moved to wonder if, after all, she were not being made the victim of a hellish conspiracy—if he had really committed the crime with which villainy had charged him. But as often she recalled Bonito’s words—“Ask him, if you doubt me”—and that she dared not do. The answer might destroy at a blow the whole structure of his soul’s redemption, which her self-obliterating love had patiently built up for him year by year. Fruitless all her devotion then; useless that cementing of its bricks with her own heart’s blood. He had come to be nearer heaven now than she, raised on the altar of her sacrifice. She had lied to save him. Should she risk his soul at the last to save her own?
Divinely steadfast to her purpose, she kept her way. Her sweet eyes shone inspired to it. Though she were lost by holding to it,heshould win to harbour. What greater love could woman show? If God would forgive her for that—concede her the mercy to creep into heaven, lost in her dear saint’s shadow! For he was her saint again—twice beatified through his fault. He had been guilty of his one worldly lapse for her—had done outrage to his nature that hers might suffer none. Was not such sin the prerogative of consecration?
So, with an unfading resolution, through days of exaltation and depression, through drear heart-burnings and the agonies of misunderstandings not to be explained, through poignant ecstasies and thorns of non-fulfilment, she strove unfaltering—until, lo! there came a time when all her struggles seemed in vain; when, bursting from the thicket, her bleeding feet stood halted in an instant, not before the dear meadows they had hoped, but at the base of a monstrous God-veiling cliff.
That year, the heavens themselves had seemed to speak the omens of disaster. From its opening they had poured down incessantly from sooty reservoirs a torrent like the deluge. The season was an abnormally mild one, if any such term could be applied to tempests of wind and water, overwhelming, inexplicable. The ice in the mountains, cracking and answering under the assault, boomed an unceasing cannonade; the land slid down in continents; trees were tossed in flood-water, like sprouts boiling in a saucepan. And to all this descending hubbub the rising of a human tide seemed to leap sympathetic. The waters of unrest were gathering force and volume; the dark hour of Savoy was drawing near; the Prefect had hard ado to keep his feet.
Then at last came a period of respite, when the powers of darkness seemed to sleep exhausted; and the sun came out, and the waters sounded peaceably on the hills, and Spring opened its drowned eyes and preened its draggled plumes.
One day, when all the land was glowing in a noontide rest, a servant came to inform Madame Saint-Péray that his excellency the Prefect of Faissigny craved the honour of a word with her alone. She opened her eyes in amazement.
The Prefect! Impossible! The man could not have heard aright.
But the man was not mistaken. M. le Préfet, it would appear, had foreseen this reluctance on Madama’s part to grant him that honour, inasmuch as he had impressed very earnestly upon the messenger the importance of an occasion which could thus excuse his presumption in calling upon one with whom he was unacquainted.
Madama’s cheek flamed as she rose; her lips set tightly; she looked an inch taller than her wont.
“Thank you, Benoît,” she said. “I will go down to him.”
Hebowed to her gravely as she entered. She responded with the iciest salutation. Throughout their interview they both remained standing.
He noticed, with dark ruth, how wan her face had grown, how sharpened from its blunt youthful curves, how prematurely aged even—like a late-blown lily, shrunk, in its first lovely opening, to a freezing wind. The nearer thereby, the more pathetic, to his own barren passion. He could claim his pallid kinship with this sorrow, as never he might have done with insolent felicity. He was so changed by love, he could have prized dead beauty in this woman above all the living graces of her happier sisters. Had she waned like the moon, his arms had lusted for the last shred of her.
His heart beat thickly. For whatever reason, he was to have speech with her once more—was to reclaim her to some interest in his own. So that that might be, he cared little how she wounded him.
“You asked to see me, Monsieur,” she said frigidly. “I am here. To what importunate circumstance, may I ask, do I owe this—yes, this insult, Monsieur, of your visit?”
She had hardly intended to be so explicit; but her indignation took her, irresistibly and on the instant, off her feet. Cartouche slightly shrugged his shoulders.
“Importunate, Madame?” he said. “You shall judge. I come as Prefect. The insult is official.”
His eyes, fastened on her, feeding gluttonously after their long abstinence, saw how she started slightly at his words—how she looked at him in sudden fear. To whatever offensive motive she had thought to attribute his visit, the possibility of its impersonal character had evidently not occurred to her. He was become master by that disillusionment; and would have been less than human not to have recognised it—not to have held her frightened heart fluttering for one moment in his hand. It was fierce ecstasy to feel it beat—to have it own him lord of itself through terror—if only he might reassure it in the end, and release it to fly away on wings of poignant gratitude!
She struggled for the self-composure to answer him after his kind.
“I have no right, then, Monsieur, to resent it. The law exacts its privileges, however represented. You come, I am to understand, on business. Business, Monsieur, demands the fewest words to be effective.”
“That is perfectly true, Madame,” he said quietly. “This of mine, though its processes have extended over years, is summed up in a sentence. You are in the habit of sending, periodically, large sums of money to one who is well known by me to be conspiring against the Government.”
She stood as rigid as stone. Every atom of colour had fled from her face. He longed to cry out on its moveless agony, “O, woman! on the merit of my hopeless passion, believe in me, trust in me! I am here to save, not ruin!” But he must strike deeper, before he could seek to heal.
“This fact, Madame,” he said, “has been made known to me through the ordinary secret channels of my office. It is indisputable. I do not ask you to dispute it. I ask you simply, I give you the opportunity of answering privately, a single question. Does M. Saint-Péray, who is my friend, identify himself also with this movement? Is he, in short, in your confidence in this matter of your supplying it with funds?”
She tottered towards him, holding out frenzied hands.
“O, no, Monsieur! O, no, no!”
He knew it all now; he had her at his mercy; for one moment this soft cruel thing should yield herself to his will, its abject slave. He lingered out the rapture, as one condemned to death might hang on the lips of his soul’s love. His dark cheek flushed; he backed before her approach, unresponsive.
“You reassure me, Madame,” he said coldly. “I had been concerned for him, I own. It is enough that friendship has helped to exculpate, where a closer relationship, it seems, had found its better interest in deceiving. For the rest, you are doubtless prepared, for yourself, with a sufficient answer to the law.”
“The law!”
She whispered it, aghast.
“As its representative, Madame,” he said, “I have no choice but to demand one of you. You can refuse to give it, referring your defence to a public occasion.” (He would not see how her anguish entreated him.) “In that event, I make my bow, my apologies, and I withdraw. The issue then is very simple. You will be called to account for your subsidising of a dangerous conspirator against the State, and will probably be put on your trial with him. As Prefect of this Province, I can guarantee the case at least an impartial hearing. My presence, Madame, does not insult the law, however offensive it may be to the criminal.”
She hurried nearer to him—broke out, and down, in an instant.
“Before God, Monsieur! You must believe me—you must. I know nothing of this man’s use of what he wrings from me; I am not his confederate, but—”
He interrupted her, sharp and sudden,—
“But his victim.”
She cried: “O, Monsieur, Monsieur! O, my God!” and buried her face in her hands.
Now at that his gluttonous moment passed. Henceforth his heart was hers to sport with. It had only played the tyrant hitherto to nurse to ecstasy its own compunction. He spoke in a strangely softened tone,—
“He is black-mailing you?”
“No!” she cried, looking up in quick miserable panic. “I have not said it.”
He smiled slightly.
“No need to. Well, I suspected as much.”
She seemed to strive to speak; but nothing came from her.
“I say,” he repeated, “I suspected it. Do I not know this man of old, his craft, his villainy—how he will go long ways about to reach an end—traverse the world to stab an enemy in the back? Most to be feared when most he feigns benevolence—Bonito—that old dreary misanthrope to play the Benthamite! Why, I never doubted but that he had his deep reasons for scheming to marry you to—I never doubted it, I say, Madame; and here’s the proof. He was playing for hush-money.”
She stared at him, as if her very soul were paralysed.
“How he discovered the truth?” he continued—“by cunning or coercion?—” He paused, questioning her at a venture with his eyes. She made no answer; and he went on, shrugging his shoulders: “Like enough ’twas he himself who laid the train—who first supplied the insidious damning information to my friend, and—but it matters little; he discovered it.”
He questioned her face again. Still she was silent.
“If I had guessed in time,” he said, in a deep passionate voice, “this should never have been. It shall be no longer. Madame, I have twice before offered you my services, and twice been rejected with scorn. Once again I lay them at your feet. It was for this, in truth, I sought you. I entreat you, do not refuse me.”
It was not in her nature to do justice to this man. So far as his devotion touched her, it was to nothing but a sense of humiliation. The thought uppermost in her mind was of his cognisance, not his chivalry.
“You know?” she whispered. Her white lips could hardly frame the words.
“I know,” he answered. “He had confessed to me before you married him.”
An irrepressible moan came from her, pitiful, heart-rending. He broke upon it passionately,—
“I told him, what I tell you now—that, on my soul, he had done right; but that, having done what he had done, the prospect of his union with you had become impossible. To me, though what I am, the thought was horrible. Believe me, Madame—before God, believe that I had no thought of myself in so urging him.”
She drew a little away. Her eyes were already freezing to him. But his emotion made him blind.
“I am not to blame for what followed,” he hurried on. “The villain—that same dog Bonito over-reached me. He took advantage of my absence to practise on one—there I will not pain you with the record. You know who came to you. She had been warned by me against abetting him she nursed in any designs upon your ignorance. I do not blamehim. If you can do me any justice in your woman’s heart, you will guess why. He staked his soul against a chance for which I would have sacrificed a thousand heavens. But, with her—it was different. She paid for her temerity with my curse.”
He ended, greatly agitated. His eyes were lowered before her. He did not see the new abhorrence of him spring and flame in hers. He did not see how the majesty of her womanhood rose to answer and reject him.
“You cursed her for my sake, Monsieur?” she said quietly.
“If you will have it so,” he answered low.
“And this, her suborner, her confederate;—you say he shall trouble me no longer?”
“Not while I have hands to strike, and teeth to hold.”
She sprang away from him.
“That I have fallen to this!” she cried—“To be asked to approve myself the instrument of that poor creature’s ruin! to applaud the wicked deed and crown the doer of it with my gratitude! Would you murder also for my sake—smear the feet you profess to worship with a fellow-creature’s blood? O, go from me, go from me, Monsieur! you are horrible in my sight. We take the burden of our sin—will atone for it as heaven wills. Better a hundred cruel witnesses than one advocate like you. She thought to save your soul, poor child, by winning it to justice done to hers. ‘One marriage brings another’—those were her pretty words—and so for your requital of her love. Love! O, I am fouled in having heard you—humbled myself before you. Go—say—do what you will, Monsieur. We refuse your help! Why will you for ever impose your hateful favours on me?”
He listened to her, standing quite still and ghastly pale. Then he bowed slightly, and walked to the door. Turning at it, he spoke,—
“I have made it my mission in life, Madame, to protect the shrine of my devotion from sacrilegious hands. No scorn, no misconstruction, no wounding hate will deter me from that purpose while I live. The idol of it shall owe me, at least, that debt of fidelity. If she hungers for the opportunity to retaliate, as debtors will, there is the precedent of Lazarus in heaven to reassure her. I will be sure to call to you for that drop of water, Madame.”
He opened the door, and was gone.
She stood quite motionless for minutes after he had left her; then suddenly flung herself, exhausted, into a chair. No grace, no pity towards him was in her heart. If they had been possible to its pure narrow code, his parting words, in which she read a scoff at religion, would have alienated them finally.
For hours she lay in wretched thought, half-hypnotised by misery. No tender sprig of hope could ever again be hers. Her uttermost fears were confirmed. He had confessed his guilt. The road stretched dark and endless now before her.
The house was deadly quiet. She was quite alone, and very desolate. Louis-Marie had gone into France, on business concerning his patrimony, and would not be back for some days. She had not even God to help her.
With dusk, as she still lay unstirring, came a quick step, which she recognised, in the hall outside. She caught herself up, making some effort towards composure, as it hurried towards the room in which she sat; and the next instant young Balmat entered.
He shut the door upon the servant who had announced him. He was so agitated, so breathless, that he could scarce stammer an apology for his freedom. He came towards her, hat in hand, at an eager run. His eyes were shining, his chest heaving in the prospect of some wonderful announcement.
“Mon Dieu!Madama, Madama,” he whispered excitedly: “What news! Christ in heaven, what news!”
She rose, trembling. Her heart, she felt, could not bear much more.
“What is it, Jacques?” she said faintly.
Balmat, iron-nerved, made but a sorry Mercury.
“It is only,” he said, “that the Marquess your husband was murdered—that is little—there was more than one of us had suspected it—but by whom? God be praised for enlightening us—for vindicating the innocent—it has all come out; and who do you think is the guilty one? No other than M. le Préfet himself, who is lying at this moment under arrest. Ah, ah! what have I blundered, great oaf! Madama, Madama!”
* * * * * * * *
That same night an express was despatched by Madame Saint-Péray to her husband in France, bidding him, for reasons of her own, not to return until he heard further from her.
Thatsunny forenoon on which Dr Bonito (carrying the King’s Commission in his pocket, and M. Léotade, whom he had taken up by the way, on the seat of the chaise beside him) came posting down the valley into Le Prieuré, found the whole village in a flutter of excitement, which the apparent opportuneness of his arrival was presently to inflame into a fervour.
Alighting at the doors of the Prefecture, and conning, acidly sardonic, the perturbed faces which, gathered about him, sought to reconcile this frowzy magnifico with an earlier familiar figure, he was conscious of a moral agitation in the atmosphere, which at first he was inclined to attribute to some shadow of the truth having run before him. But in that he was wrong. The announcement of his mission, when it was made, took the populace like a clap of wind at a street corner. The village staggered in it; then rallied hurriedly to appraise its significance. For the moment the fact was important only in its relation to another more instant and insistent. The two combined ran up the public temperature to fever-heat.
M. le Préfet, it appeared, was absent at the time—opportunely for M. le Préfet, in the light of a certain amazing discovery. There were those, indeed—a boon friend, a sympathising official or two—who would have liked to urge, by secret message, upon M. le Préfet, wherever he might be found, the wisdom of confirming his own absence, practically and for ever. But no one knew where he was. For the rest—M. Léotade being long identified with the popular movement, and personally a local favourite—the change,per se, was accepted with an easy resignation. Events, to be sure, had made such a change problematically inevitable. The wonder was that it had come to occur at the intensely psychologic moment. For how could a Prefect, shown guilty, though on circumstantial evidence, of a startling crime, be made to bring about his own arrest? The advent of the newcomers had resolved that difficulty. Mr Trix was M. le Préfet no longer.
The story, as poured by agitated officialdom into the ears of Dr Bonito and hisprotégé, was soon related. That very morning, it appeared, a goatherd, emerging from the woods over against the ice-fall of the Glacier of the Winds, had been halted petrified before a sight, the like of which had surely never before astounded human vision. For there, embedded in one of the toppling glassy pinnacles, hung poised, before the very eyes of the man, a human body.
Dumbfoundered, he had presently taken out his spyglass, to inquire more closely into this wonder—only to recoil aghast before the revelation it brought him. The obscene thing, huddled in semi-transparency, appeared squatting like a great toad. There was something horribly unseemly in its attitude—an extravagant pose of limb, which in a mass of its bulk was sickeningly abnormal. It might have been an arm flung over its head, until one saw that it ended in a boot. Its face, twisting from under anywhere, came very close to the surface of the ice. It looked as if flattened against a window, grinning out on the observer. As he, that observer, had brought its features into focus, he had uttered a startled cry, and leapt back.The face was the face of Augias, Marquess di Rocco.
There was no mistaking it, by anyone who had once been familiar with its loathed enormity. The man had stood staring and trembling before it, in a deadly fascination. Possibly it was due to the phenomenal weather that the glacier had thus early yielded up its secret. At any rate it had yielded it—the murder was out.
Yes, and literally murder, it appeared. The dead, slowly travelling down through these years, had claimed at last to be his own damning witness. Even while the onlooker gazed spell-bound, the great ice-turret had tilted over, sunk, torn away, and, still holding to its secret in the main, had gone shattering and waltzing down the slope until it had brought upon against a heap of brash. Whereupon, seeing it settled for the time, the peasant had girded up his terrified wits, and pounded down into the village, half-demented with his news.
He had been heard with incredulity; his urgency had compelled his listeners; in a little, half the village was trooping up the moraine. One of the party, the place being pointed out to him, had descended hurriedly upon the glacier to investigate. The venture was not without peril; death was for ever thundering down in the wash of that icy weir. But he had succeeded in reaching the spot in safety; and the next moment a strange cry was carried from him to the watchers on the moraine. Then they had seen him running furiously back to them.
Young Balmat it was. His face was death-ashy; there was an exultant fury in his eyes; his breath hissed from his lungs.
“It is true,” he had gasped: “and he was murdered! The knife is still sticking in him.I know that knife well—it was M. le Préfet’s.”
It was this news which had run down into Le Prieuré, carried by those who were despatched thither for ropes. Within the next hour or two, the block containing the body, like a hideous mass of spawn, had been salvaged and drawn to the edge of the moraine. Then all, who had the stomach to look, might satisfy themselves.
Even as the tale was ended into the ears of Dr Bonito and the other, there came down the village street a hushed and solemn company bearing its awful burden. Silence sowed itself before them, even as if Death walked there, scattering his grain. They carried it to the Church, and laid it on the stone floor of the vestry. There it rested alone, like an infected thing shut away into quarantine. Not a soul would approach it, when once it was delivered to the law.
And how did the law accept its trust? Sourly, as represented by Dr Bonito. This ugly visitation, indeed, was the least agreeable to his schemes. He saw on the instant how, were Cartouche to stand convicted of the crime, his own hold on Madame Saint-Péray would be loosened for ever. If, on the other hand, he were to reveal a certain secret, of which likely only he and the deposed Prefect were cognisant, the indictment of the actual murderer would end, only the more certainly, his chances of extortion—perhaps, even, would be used to claim him as an after accessory to the deed. He was in a villainous quandary, that was the truth. This accursed accident had confounded all his plans.
And to increase his perplexity, the new Prefect—who once secure in his promotion, was already showing an aggravating tendency towards self-importance and independence—betrayed what he thought was an unwarrantable officiousness in taking the matter promptly and masterfully into his own hands. He had Jacques Balmat brought before him at once.
“You have no doubt,” he demanded, “that this body, so astonishingly brought to light, is the body of the late Marquess di Rocco?”
“No doubt whatever, Monsieur.”
“Nor that Monsignore met his death by foul means?”
“Not even he, Monsieur, could resist the full length of that blade. It lies buried in him to the hilt.”
“And it is by that hilt that you identify it?”
“Precisely so, Monsieur.”
“How?”
“It was familiar to me of old, as to many others, in the hand of M. Trix, Monsignore’sprotégé. The haft was of jade, surmounted by a golden rat’s head. It was Monsieur’s hunting-knife, well-known.”
“Granted that the knife was Monsieur’s, there remains the question of a motive.”
“It is not for me to suggest one. Monsieur, at least, it is to be believed, foresaw no advantage to himself in the event of hispadrone’smarriage. It was whispered, indeed, that he had every interest in preventing it. The two came to words, it was reported, on the subject of a settlement—compensation—what you will. That was just before Monsignore’s disappearance. M. Trix also had disappeared—it would seem opportunely. I know nothing more than that. I repeat only to Monsieur the common gossip.”
Gossip, to be sure; but quite reasonably damning. That evening, Monsieur the ex-Prefect, returning unconcerned to the village, was arrested in the street, and conveyed to the prison of the Belfry. He had still friends; there had been voices timely to warn him; he had laughed them away unheeding. Here, perhaps, was to end his part in that pantomime of necessarianism which men played to the gods. He hoped, in the transformation, that he would be found worthy to be made a harlequin. But he was not sure, judged by his present fooling at Fate’s hands, that he was not destined for pantaloon. He took his deposition and the rest with an imperturbable coolness and good humour.
And apart in the dark church lay the body of his father—a hideous thing. Yet there was one, as inhuman though living, who, moved by a sardonic curiosity, could be found to dare the terrors of that mortuary. In the dead of the night Bonito, candle in hand, stood to look upon the corpse. What he saw is not to be described. The ice had preserved it as whole as when, seven years before, it had plunged into the crevasse—as whole, but—It had enclosed as it had caught it—a thing writhed and racked obscenely—a horrible thing like a Guy-Fawkes. They had chipped its glassy prison away from the dead form. In the warmer air, the frosty glaze remaining had already melted, and the body lay in a pool. It looked as if it were struggling to relax its contortions; to settle into the lines of an ancient repose. Sometimes it actually moved. The terror of the suggestion woke no responsive thrill in the watcher’s nerves. He was as stoic, as callous as a Mongol—not unlike one, indeed, in feature and temperament. He bent down, searching with his candle flame. Yes, there was the rat’s head fastened into the shattered breast—gleaming on it, like Death’s own order. There was even a stain of red about its teeth.
He stood up, frowning, grating his chin.
“The same,” he thought—“No doubt about it. What am I to do?”
The lines on his harsh face deepened.
“If I were to see her—bid her a last price, a great price, a fine sufficing price against my keeping silence at the trial? Would she agree—close—see him condemned unwinking—damn herself tothis? Is the venture worth? How now, di Rocco?”
The dead man seemed to nod up his head.
“Theyhad exchanged tokens. He had parted with this knife to your husband. It is the damning link, to which I’ll swear. The Court is my Court, and my testimony will be final. I hang your Louis, Madame—twist a saintly neck to save a rake’s. Well, let it be. Women have thesepenchants.”
His vile innuendoes passed her by. White, withered in the scorching blast, the exaltation of her purpose kept her still erect, and steadfast to the end on which she’d staked her soul. Herself, in that foredoom, counted no longer for anything. She would save her love, her saint, though all the dogs of hell combined to pull him down.
Dusk was trooping up from the valleys. The sun-lit distant peaks budded from it like flower-spires in a fading paradise. As point by point they misted into vapour, so eternal darkness seemed to claim her to itself. In a little she would be quite alone. A child’s laugh, coming up faintly from the road below, smote on her heart like a death-cry. She started involuntarily; then stood stone-still. It was fearful to see tears running down a stone face. But each syllable of her voice, when she spoke, was as if carved and rounded.
“A worthless life; but innocent of this. He will not speak, you think—reveal the truth?”
“Not unlessyoubid him.”
“Ah!”
Even her loathing of that emphasis—of all that it implied—could wring no more from her. He conned her pitilessly.
“But say that he did—a palpable subterfuge to escape the halter. I’ll swear I saw the knife on him that very day.”
She hardly seemed to hear him.
“Worthless,” she continued lifelessly; “but I would not have him suffer—not for—you say he may be saved, once sentenced—given the means to escape?”
“I say I can procure one an order to visit him—no more. Appearances must be kept. The Government still counts, though in Savoy. What then! ropes are cheap; nights dark; the window of his prison is unbarred. They reckon on a precipice to hold—safe enough, not counting helpful friends—and lovers. Once over the border and in France, he’s safe—may snap his fingers at us, so long as he stays there. Give me what I ask, and you shall have the order.”
“O, not for me!”
“For whom, then, mistress? No, no—none else. I wash my hands of all collusion. You entreat me for a friend—or better; my kind heart yields. The permit shall be an open one—made out to bearer. I’ll promise that much. Confederate with whom you will. I’m not to ask nor know. Those are my terms. Take or leave.”
“My ruin.”
“Well, it’s a large sum, I confess—worth a saint’s ransom. If you think not, you needn’t sign the covenant. It’s true your estate’s of a constitution to heal itself of even such a wound; and there’s no heir for you to nurse, or nurse it for. But please yourself.”
“Give me the paper.”
With a hand stone-steady she put her name to it.
“And here’s in acknowledgment for need—signed Léotade, and countersigned,” said he, and held the order out to her.
She made no movement to take it; he threw it at her feet, and, without any sign of triumph or emotion, left the house.
She heard the door clang on him. The sound seemed to snap some fibre in her brain. Suddenly she was hurrying up and down, laughing, weeping, imploring,—
“No, no, it was a jest—I have let myself be frightened by dreams—the sky is all full of laughter at me. They don’t do these things—not to the very young. O! little baby! Why didn’t you come?—my little unborn child—I was too young to bear even a little child—too easily deceived—it would have killed me, and I should have gone to heaven. Such a jest!—heaven for me?—Children, children, don’t laugh! I heard you down in the road—Look, though I’m not a mother, I can bear secrets—monstrous, horrible things. Don’t come near me—I should cry and cry to see your terror. I said, Don’t come near me—don’t—My God! they are not children at all! Louis, Louis, save me! I did it all for you!—Louis!—”
She struck blindly against the wall, and sank down moaning at its foot.