“I learn it, for the first time, of your Majesty.”
“A convenient observatory, M. Trix, for the studying of systems—wild, remote, high-lifted—a place for storing thunderbolts, and launching them. It would need a man, to circumvent and storm it, almost as courageous as he who should aspire to the priceless. Well, di Rocco—though terribly ugly—was that man, on both counts, and he is dead. But Nemesis, if we are not mistaken, bore a child to him. Will you be our Prefect of Faissigny, M. Trix?”
“My God, Sire!”
The offer was so sudden, so unexpected, that he could utter no more on the instant. The King—a disciple, perhaps, of Walpole in the baser part of his policy—hastened to clinch an appointment he had set his heart on. Munificence happened to be the price he could bid for it, and without his being a penny the poorer thereby. He spoke on eagerly, eschewing hyperbole.
“We are not unacquainted, Monsieur, with the minutest circumstances of that tragedy, or of some local meetings of the Brotherhood which, in our opinion, were responsible for it. The Marquess was, of all men, calculated to be abhorrent to these would-be subverters of the constitution, whose aims are by no means so astral or so harmless as you would appear to believe. That they, and their pernicious doctrines, are not unrepresented in Faissigny I can well tell you. From the Col-de-Balme to Bonneville they have their secret rallying-points. The place is blotched with corruption. It needs a strong man, a man of local knowledge, whether inspired by vengeance, or by duty, or by both, to put his knife to those tainted parts. I had thought of M. de France in my difficulty. Bah! he is an old pompous vanity. I will quiet him with a little portfolio. In the meanwhile—”
“But, Sire!”
“In the meanwhile, I say, we can conceive of no better man than yourself to instruct vulgarity of the fallacy of ugliness. We do not expect M. Trix, the exquisite, the man of the sword, to condemn himself, unrewarded, to a virtual exile from life, as he regards it. We have had a little bird to whisper in our ears; and, as a consequence, we propose to endow our Prefect of Faissigny with a fine local estate, and a fine fortune, encumbered only with the condition of a wife. In short, Monsieur, we offer to bestow upon our faithful lieutenant the hand of the widowed lady di Rocco.”
Cartouche dropped his hat, picked it up, straightened himself, laughed a little laugh, and answered. His face was white and his lips were trembling.
“Pardon me, Sire; but that is impossible.”
Victor-Amadeus stared a little; then spoke drily.
“You may misconceive our prerogatives, Monsieur. Or, perhaps, you are married already?”
“No, Sire.”
“It is well, then. We have commanded the lady and her father to Court—a little prematurely, maybe; but, what would you!” (he shrugged his shoulders). “A loveless marriage makes a short mourning. In the meantime—”
“I will be your Prefect, Sire—if not for vengeance’ sake, for duty alone.”
“You do not believe he was murdered?”
“The suggestion shall at least stimulate me.”
“And nothing else? But we will see. A stake in that country would afford you a strong personal interest in its cleansing. We will see, we will see.” He turned to his secretary. “Make out M. Trix’s patent as Prefect of Faissigny, my dear Polisson,” he said; “and, for heaven’s sake, straighten your stock.”
Withina stone’s throw of the royal Palace, under its usurious eye, as it were, stood the Palazzo di Citta, the headquarters of the Banco del Regio Lotto. There, every alternate Saturday at noon, the drawing of the numbers took place, and the impoverishment of a few thousand King’s subjects, guilty of nothing but fatuity, was decided by lot.
It was a recurrently mad time, whose agitation was transmitted to remotest parishes all over the country—only with this distinction: the Piémontais, watching the central game, was held hostage to its excitement; the poor Savoyard, ruined out of sight, cursed himself for a blockhead victim to fraud, and, with the common inconsistency, vowed hatred against a Government which could thus rob him of his mite.
That was inevitable. Gambling in cold blood can only breed usurers where it succeeds, and desperadoes where it fails. The Turinois possessed the glitter of the table. It was not he who was to fail the Monarchy in the dark days to come.
He was as fevered, as voluble, as gesticulatory, as seething in his numbers on this particular occasion of the drawing, as he had been any time since M. D’Aubonne first brought his damnable invention of the lottery-wheel from France some fifty years earlier. His cheek was as glowing, his heart as fluttering with a sense of novelty, as if he had never before seen a hundred or two of butterflies broken on the wheel. Even Dr Bonito, standing amidst the pack with a young friend, felt the infection of the occasion, and bit his blue lips with that sort of agonised transport which makes men under the lash set their teeth in whatsoever they encounter.
He had had that vanity of his qualities, the old grey rat, to hold by an independence even to the last capacity of the gutter for yielding him one. The stars, the cards (a greasy pack), the astrolabe and divining rod, had procured him thence, latterly, an obscene living. In taking it, he had had at least the justification of his own superstition. If he sold immortal truths at a halfpenny apiece, it was only because necessity obliged him. They had all the value of genuineness in his eyes, and to “fake” antiques would only discredit him with the gods, upon whom was his ultimate reliance. What he had borrowed from Louis-Marie had been a loan to conviction—a last ounce of metal needed to insure his winged feet to the Perseus of his destiny. That he fully believed. Beyond it—it was a fact—he had not asked, nor accepted, a farthing from the young man.
But superstition, as a one-devil possession, prevails only through its plausibility. Let its dupe once be disillusioned, and all the moral obliquities, out of which it had shaped its pretence, confess themselves the owners of the mansion. The maggots which devour a dead faith were bred in it living. Superstition, cast down, becomes the prey of what it had entertained. Dr Bonito, a Rosicrucian by conviction, had never perhaps been really dangerous until the stars came to prove themselves impostors. And then he delivered himself wholly to corruption.
In the meanwhile, bond-slave to his faith, foreseeing nothing so little as the imminent disruption of that faith’s particles, or articles, he cherished for the moment no particular thought of rascality towards anyone. He may even have felt a little cold thaw of emotion towards the human souls about him, as towards beings predestined to witness in him alone, conversant with the hieroglyphics of fate, that apotheosis which they all desired vainly for themselves. Smugly self-conscious of his frowsy coat and broken shoes, he likened himself to Elijah, on the banks of the Jordan, awaiting, an unconsidered prophet, the descent of the fiery chariot. His eyes travelled incessantly, feverishly, from his companion—poor Louis-Marie, the dull, apathetic soul—to the steps of the Town-hall, on which was displayed—under guard, but for all to see—the wheel of Fortune.
Suddenly a sound went over the vast throng, like a sweep of wind over a bed of rushes, bowing all heads in a single direction. It wailed, and passed, and died, and was succeeded by an intense hush. The wheel was seen to turn—and stop. Bonito clutched his voucher, holding it under his nose for identification.
The number, large and white, cynosure of a thousand eyes, went up on a black board—61.
A thin wheeze, such as strains itself from lungs winded by a blow, came from him. Then he gasped, and, twitching in all his features, nudged his companion, and set his finger on the card—61, sure enough. The sigh, the wail, rose again over the throng, and died down—11. Bonito, for all his faith, was shaking as if palsied as his finger travelled to the number. Even Louis-Marie, standing staring in his place, felt in his veins a sluggish thrill of excitement. Again the wheel turned, and again the card duplicated its record—81; and then once more it revolved and disgorged a single number—9, and the quatern was accomplished.
Bonito looked up. His forehead was wet; his lips were dribbling and smiling in one.
“Quantum fati parva tabella vehit,” he said crookedly. “And there are those who mock at astrology!”
A roar, instant, overwhelming, heart-shaking, broke upon his words. It greeted the appearance on the board of the fifth and final figure—a zero!
The gods had laughed.All stakes were cancelled, and forfeit to the Government.
Dr Bonito stood quite still. The sweat dried from his forehead. Slowly his face seemed to turn into grinning stone. The surge of the crowd roared round him, like fierce water about a pile. He heeded nothing of it. He only grinned and grinned, until his grin became a blasphemy, a horror. Then he recognised that he must stir, speak, do something human, to cheat the hell to which his looks were claiming him. He was conscious of a rigor enchaining his flesh; his feet seemed locked in the jaws of a quicksand; a little, and he would be under.
At the crisis, the card in his hand caught his attention. Very stiffly, moving his arms mechanically, he tore it into halves, folded, quartered, requartered, and, at a wrench, divided and sent those fluttering piecemeal. The act spoke an inhuman grip. It had hardly been possible to him a minute earlier. But its madness rent the veil.
He twisted awry, and glared up at his companion. Louis-Marie remembered that night in thecafé. He recognised well enough what had happened. The calamity might have stirred him little on his own account, had it not been for this look in the ruined face turned to him. He shivered slightly.
“So much for the Taroc Mysteries!” whispered the doctor, “chaff of the gods! But I forgot that nought stood for the Fool.”
His tongue rustled on his palate like a dry scale.
“He hunts butterflies,” he said. “Why, you cursed owl, what are you staring at? Have you never seen him, with his net, on the cards? Nought is the Fool, I say, and I am nought—the butt of the gods. I’ll pay them!”
He took a frantic step or two, returned, seized his companion’s arm, and urged him from the press.
“Come,” he said hoarsely; “you lent me the means to it—I owe this to you—I’ll not let you go now.”
All his tolerance, it seemed, was turned to hatred. He regarded the young man as the instrument, however contemptible, of his undoing. The worse for the poor tool of Fortune! He would have to act whipping-boy to her ladyship. And serve the weak creature right for his flaccidity. He sneered horribly at him.
“Faith’s dead in me,” he snarled. “You’ll have to serve her turn.”
Quite stunned and helpless, Saint-Péray let him lead him whither he would. As they crossed into the Via Seminario, a royal carriage, making for the Palace, was brought to a stand against a gabbling stream of pedestrians, and stopped across their very path. They faced direct into a window of it;and there inside was Yolande.
Pale, agitated, her Dresden-shepherdess eyes glanced to and fro, and, all in an instant, caught that vision of other two, other four, fixed upon them.
We’ve heard of faces stricken into stone before some Gorgon apparition. Love’s severed head converts to softer stuff. His art is the plastic art, and answers to his dead hauntings in features stiffening into wax.
So seemed Yolande’s features in that moment. Her breath hung suspended on her lips, the colour in her cheeks. She had procured Love’s death, and thus was Love revenged upon her. Like a thing of wax she confronted the sweet cruelty of his eyes.
There sat a thin grey gentleman by her side, of a very refined and arrogant mien. The Chevalier de France had never encountered Louis, nor Louis him. Suddenly the former projected his head from the window, and demanded in haughty tones the reason of the delay.
“Monsignore,” said a postillion, “it is the Lottery.”
The Chevaliersacre’d.
“Does that concern a minister of State, puppy? Drive through the rabble.”
The carriage jerked forward, and rolled on its way. Saint-Péray stood motionless, following it with his eyes. A touch on his arm aroused him. Acrid, vicious, fearfully expressive, the face of Dr Bonito peered up into his.
“Monsieur,” whispered the Rosicrucian: “there goes Madame Saint-Péray.”
Louis-Marie gave a mortal start, and put his hand to his forehead.
“There is something weaving in my brain,” he muttered. “Look, look—shake it out! My God, it is an enormous spider!”
ThePrefect of Faissigny, commanded, for the second time within a week, and with a flattering grace of intimacy, into the King’s presence, discovered an exquisite butterfly where he had left a chrysalis. The royal head—erst as round and blue as a Turk’s—was adorned with a bob-wig in buckle, from whose toupee a couple of pearl pins stuck out like clubbed antennæ; the royal limbs and body were glossy with embroidered silks; on the royal coat of maroon-coloured velvet sparkled a diamond star. Twin satellites of this sun, moreover, twinkled, like new-discovered planets, in the royal ears—a sincerest flattery, which his Majesty did not grudge to pay to so unique a pink of the elegances as M. Trix.
As he advanced to greet his visitor, he held a wisp of point d’Alençon a little raised between the finger and thumb of his right hand, while his left poised a gleaming snuff-box at a like angle. His manner was as charmingly playful as his “style” was unexceptionable. As a monarch he had no rival to challenge his pre-eminence in the Kingdom of puffs and patches.
“Welcome, my dear Prefect,” he said. “You come as irresistible as Apollo in Arcadia. I vow I am jealous of you, since seeing our adorable Daphne. Alas! that Fate hath imposed upon me therôleof Father Ladon. But it is some compensation to have a god for suitor.”
“Your Majesty flatters and confounds me in one.”
Cartouche’s eyes were bright and nervous. He had not a full command of his lips.
The King smiled.
“Confounds you, Monsieur? How is that?”
“Daphne, Sire, if I am not mistaken, took refuge in a laurel tree, rather than suffer the god’s pursuit.”
“Bah!” The King shrugged his shoulders. “And she bewailed, I’ll swear, her foolish precipitancy for ever after. But the laurels in this case, Monsieur, are for your brow.”
“I do not feel like a conqueror, indeed.”
“Fie, fie, Monsieur! Is it necessary to remind M. Trix of his Cervantes? Faint hearts and fair ladies, forsooth. O, you have a character to maintain, I assure you! But certainly such beauty cuts the sinews of self-confidence. Well, it is no matter. You have only, as it happens, to receive the keys of the capitulated citadel.”
“I do not understand your Majesty, I declare.”
“Our Majesty, Monsieur, has already thrown the handkerchief for you, and one without a crown in its corner. That was a self-denying ordinance, for which we will not altogether insist on your gratitude. But, in plain language, sir, we desire this union, and have made no secret of our desire.”
“Sire!”
“Hush, Monsieur, or she may hear! You would not damn your reputation with a show of diffidence? Hush!”
Cartouche looked at him aghast.
“She is present? She—Sire, Sire!” He made a hurried step forward.
The King, smiling, motioned him aside, and tiptoed to a door. The two were quite private and alone. The royal closet was destined, for the moment, for Love’s confessional-box—ordered with a view to the stimulating of emotional disclosures and throbbing confidences. It was evening, and the tapers, shrouded in their silver sconces, diffused a soft motionless glow over a piled luxuriance of stuffs and cushions; over a carpet tufted thick as turf; over hangings of purple velvet. They woke slumberous gleams in furniture; flushed the drowsy faces of satyrs on polished bureaux; creamed the bare legs and breasts of nymphs; touched the cheeks of grapes, piled in a gold salver on a table, with little kisses of light; slipped into the warm depths of decantered wine, and hung tiny crimson jack-o’-lanterns there to lure the already half-drunken senses to red ruin. No drugging pastille ever vulgarised the air of that enchanted chamber; but a sweet and swooning perfume was contrived to steal all over it, as if a bed of lilies of the valley lay beneath the floor.
And, in a moment, she was there, before Cartouche’s eyes—the loveliest, most lovable shape to be conceived in such a setting.
For an instant desperate and defiant, he feigned to himself to claim her appropriately to it—its sensuousness and artificiality. Her lily complexion was toilet cream; her lips, too startlingly scarlet, were painted; the flowers in her cheeks were well assumed, since they owed to the rubbing of geranium petals. All these, with that gleaming gold for crown, that spun starlight of her hair, were but so many modistic arts, to which her simple dress of black supplied the clue. Out of that dusk sheath her shoulders budded with a double emphasis of whiteness—a cunning scheme of contrasts.
And so he lusted to slander her to his own heart; and would have cut that same heart out only to lay it at her slender feet and feel them trample it.
And she could be so stately, though a child. Giving the King her hand, she held him vassal to its whiteness, and smiled a gracious smile when he raised and kissed it reverently. She had become woman at her tender years—but through the hate and not the love of man. She had borne sorrow and was a virgin still. Passion fell dumb before that poignant motherhood: desire slunk ashamed before her eyes.
The King handed her forward, with a sort of consciouschassé. He was at pains to practise every punctilious elegance in his reception of this untutored girl. He looked even nervous and a little inferior. But custom gave him command.
“There are occasions, Madam,” he said, “on which even the King isde trop. I leave it to a lovelier monarch to reconcile the parties in this suit, sure that my affection for both, their sense of duty to the State, their own passions and interests, will move them to a compromise. Respect that Judge, my children, for whom I dethrone myself; and accept his ruling on a cause which I have very much at heart.”
With that, he released the Marchesa’s hand, and bowed profoundly, and withdrew. She made no gesture to retain him. The two remained standing as he had left them, silent and far apart.
A storm of emotions swept through the chambers of Cartouche’s brain. He shook in its thunder. What was the power in this child, this white-and-pink wax doll, to humble mighty worldlings in her presence, bring them to her feet—not to sue, but to deprecate all suit of her as guilt—not to pray; only to adore, and own themselves unworthy?
She had beauty; and it was not a snare. She had virtue, and it was not a pose. ’Twas her inaccessibility made her covetable, O thou fond Ulysses!
But he did not desire her for himself, he thought. And yet, after all, why should he not? She was unattached; fair quarry to the free-lance; no other man’s preserve. He had the right of chase with the whole world—no bond to honour, even, since she had let another cross the claim of his friend.Hewould never have suffered that for himself.Shewould never have dared that sin against Cartouche. He gloried suddenly in his name. If he could only have met her first—a man worth a woman’s modelling, not a saint invertebrately blessed—a passion, not a sentiment! Was it too late even now? To gain the whole world in her and lose his soul! She could make an immortal lust of damnation—cancel eternity to a moment. He thirsted for that moment almost beyond endurance.
What was her power? He had accepted this interview, when thrust upon him, with a cynic mock for its pretence, a tolerant anticipation of the moral drubbing it was to procure him. He knew that, in her regard, not all his brilliant worldly gifts and qualities weighed as one grain in the balance of good things. A word from Louis’s lips, a look from Louis’s eyes, would have sent him and all his vanities kicking the beam. He could not get behind that essential righteousness. It was impervious to all cleverness, all intellect, all reason even. She was a fool; but a beautiful unattainable fool is as transporting a siderite as any other. Wisdom loved a fool—not for the first time in man’s history: he loved her, because her folly was inaccessible by him.
Some say that sex is accident—a chance development; that we are all bi-sexual within. Woman, prescriptively, is the one to covet most the unattainable, to pursue the most where most scorned, to love most the partner who most abuses her love. But what, if you please, does man? It all turns, in fact, upon the ineradicable human lust for adventure, the weariness of the rut, the reach at something out of reach. Yolande, as virtue, was forbidden fruit to this vice. Therefore he desired her, madly, fiercely; but, at the last, with a saving grace of humour.
He found himself, out of that, presently, and moved towards her, very formal and demure, though his heart was on fire. At a pace or two distant he stopped.
“Madam,” he said, “the King wishes you to marry me.”
He could see a shadow flutter in her white throat.
“I ask myself, Monsieur,” she said softly, “how I have offended the King?”
“Madam,” he rejoined quietly, “I told him that you would not marry me.”
“I ask myself,” she went on, seeming to ignore him, “what I have ever done to justify these shameless solicitations by the shameless.” Her frigid self-possession, as a quality of sixteen, was a quite pitiful abnormity. “You are by all accounts, Monsieur,” she said, “a student of the world. What is it in a woman that seems to mark her down your legitimate sport? Have I these unconscious attributes? Tell me, only in your own excuse.”
“I have said once before, Madam, that you are an angel.”
“Then do angels beck, like wantons, at the street corners? I am no angel, Monsieur, and your assurance proves you know it—claims me, through my own act, to be the butt of your scorn and mockery.”
“If you could see into my heart—”
“It professed to speak once of loyalty to a friend. Hold by your plausible surface, Monsieur. I would not stir those depths, if I were you.”
“Then, Madam, would you leave truth to perish in the mud. My heart is foul, maybe, but there is that to redeem it at the bottom.”
She stirred a little, turning on him.
“Truth, sir! Has it lain buried there since that time when for once it rose to foretell an outrage, which—O, Monsieur! I have not forgotten your words—your last, when you parted from me on—O, indeed, it is possible to accommodate a prophecy—to verify through a confederate a villainy which one has foreshadowed—my God! ifthatis Truth!”
He went as white as stone; he looked as petrified.
“What! Madam,” he said, in a quick, whispering voice; “do you pretend to deem me capable of that baseness?”
He gripped her hand suddenly, so as to make her wince; then flung it from him.
“I scorn you not for your act,” he cried, “but for your cowardice in striving to make me its scapegoat.”
He stepped back in great emotion; and she herself was agitated only a little less. Her young breast rose and fell in hard pantings: the force of her self-control revealed itself in this sudden struggle for breath: and in the end her passion mastered her. She turned a face of lovely fury on him.
“You, Monsieur! the scapegoat?—so wronged and misunderstood?—the poor innocent bearer of other people’s sins? Tell me, are you not that man who came and offered his services—O, God! the slander of that word!—to a soul most wounded in her faith, and therefore, as he thought, most susceptible to the sweet druggings of dishonour? Are you not that man who would have had me break my vows, stultify all that tragedy of renunciation, on the strength of a wicked sophistry? A noble friend to Honour—that man, who, baffled in his devil’s purpose, must revenge himself by instigating another to desecrate the shrine he could not force himself! A friend—”
He put out his hand, and touched her once more—quite gently this time. But there was some quality in the touch the very antithesis of that which had impelled his former violence. The girl faltered under it, and her speech shivered into silence.
“You are mistaken, Madam.” He measured out his words with a soft and painful accuracy. “If I proposed to commit you to what convention styles dishonour (forgive me for using the word once more) it was in order to save from worse defilement that very shrine at which I worshipped.”
She started, and flushed.
“Monsieur!”
“Nay, hear me out,” he said, in the same quiet tones. “Even the first of Tabernacles is not soiled in the poor sinner’s worship. My heart has always held your image, Madam, the loveliest of its possessions—and not the less because it cherishes a hopeless dream. I would have served that dream loyally for love’s sake: I would have given my life and soul to keep it pure. If I thought to persuade it to fly to its natural sanctuary, there was a priority in vows to vindicate my daring. Have you ever considered, Madam, how you broke one oath to love to swear another to dishonour?”
She uttered a little cry—moved a step forward—clasped her hands to her bosom.
“Understand clearly, Madam,” he said: “I loved you, and would have yielded you to my friend. I had no alternative, indeed; but that is not to justify your slander of a renunciation, which was at least as holy, according to its lights, as yours. I did not urge your husband to that wickedness. If I hinted to you of its possibility, it was to open your eyes to the truth—to save my dream from a last contamination—to confide it to the shrine the most meet, and the most entitled, to hold it perfect for my adoration. There was no selfishness in that sacrifice. Though it closed the gates of Paradise upon me I was content, so long as the vile thing was shut out with me. I could have heard the singing of your loves within, without a bitter thought. But that you cannot understand. No virtue, in your narrow standard, can exist in worldliness. It must be all one or all the other—vice or sanctity.”
She was pale and trembling. She made a little involuntary gesture of her hands, half pleading half deprecating, towards him. He was cold as steel.
“As to this royal crochet of our union,” he said quietly—“it turns upon some fancied policy of State, to which I am no partner. I am as innocent of its instigation as of its methods or mistakes. It hinted, a moment ago, that you might be kind to me. I was as incredulous then, as I am convinced now that no tolerance towards sin is possible to your nature. I have worshipped at an exclusive altar, and my faith is construed into a sacrilege. You are insensible, Madam, to the exaltations of a great passion. I do not plead to you: I reject you. Even the weakness of my friend—for he is weak—raises him in my eyes above your cold, methodic virtue. I do not think you are worthy of him.”
She bowed her head, weeping.
“I know it,” she whispered.
And at that he was disarmed. He stood in great agitation a moment; then burst out suddenly:—
“Madam, Madam, if it is any consolation to you to know, such passion brings a self-redemption. I am not, cannot be the man I was—never again. Spare me that gentle association with yourself—your memory—I’ll persuade the King—Madam, it shall all come right—it—”
His voice broke; he hesitated a minute, struggling with his emotions, then hurriedly left the room.
And Yolande of the white hands hid her face in them, and for long remained shaken with sobs.
Louis-Mariewas really ill, though his complaint, it seemed, baffled diagnosis. He was sunk in an extreme debility, which from a moral had become a physical one. There appeared nothing wrong with him constitutionally; but he dreamt, and saw vampires, and the substance of his eternal illusions figured in “blood-boltered” forms. Nightly they sucked him, and daily his increasing wanness testified to their inhuman appetites. He faded to a frail image of himself, very pitiful in its suggestion of a sick prince of porcelain. Any sudden noise, like the opening of a door, was enough now to make him start and shake with terror. A footstep outside the window vibrated in his nerves for minutes after it had passed. His heart was become a very seismograph to record alarms. But the unexpected entrance of anyone into the room most perturbed him. A furtive aghast look, an artificial rally and instant physical collapse, were the almost certain consequences of such an intrusion. Once, at a chance mention of Bonito’s name, he sunk back in his chair as if under a stroke. Cartouche, who was present and distressfully concerned, attributed his state to a sort of hysterical resentment against that minister of ill-luck, and struggled to overlay some conscious contempt of it with a real anxious commiseration.
“Have you soothed him, reassured him?” he asked of Molly Bramble, when that frail sweet of Nature came down to him to report upon the invalid.
“I have left him asleep,” she said.
He tramped to and fro in the little room, pondering a psychologic problem.
“He fainted when I told him of another loss—a real poignant one that time. Here’s a mere slip of Fortune—a few ducats rolled into the gutter. He’s already recovered more than their equivalent in abstinence. Are these good people so utterly wanting in a sense of proportion?”
“Think what it meant to him, Cherry!”
“And what did it mean, Mollinda?”
“Why, to go a-courting, to be sure, with that in his hand to recommend him.”
“Does he think she needs that form of persuasion? I would not condescend to breakmyheart on such a mistress. He’s no worse off than he was.”
“Well, he mayn’t be.But how about her?”
Cartouche stopped, and took the girl’s soft chin in his hand.
“Talk about what you understand, you little village wench,” he said. “You was bred in a cottage, and think in pence. A guinea is your standard of corruption. Noble natures are not bought with gold.”
She did not move: but her eyes, unwinking, filled with tears.
“Thank you for reminding me,” she whispered.
Remorse smote him; but still an angrier, or a worthier, feeling made him stubborn.
“Pish, Mollinda!” he said; “we’ve agreed to compromise there on a better sentiment. That proves you noble too, my girl.”
She looked him fearlessly in the eyes, though her own were like wet forget-me-nots.
“Do you know she’s here—in Turin?” she said.
“No.”
“Well, she is. You needn’t start and let me go. She’s nothing to you.”
“Why should she be? Who told you?”
“He did.”
She gulped, but did not stir.
“Tell me honest,” she said. “Is it for my sake, or for hers, that you’re so anxious all of a sudden to be good?”
He delayed to answer. She gripped him, quickly and fiercely.
“If I knew for certain what I’ve feared,” she cried low, “I’d kiss and cling until you gave me back what I’ve lost—I would, for all it damned us both together.”
She broke from him, and went hurriedly out of the room. Reaching the invalid’s door above, she paused to the sound of a little cry within, hesitated, and entered.
Louis-Marie was sitting up on his bed. His eyes were wide with fever. He greeted her appearance with something like a sob.
“Who is it?” he whispered. “Has he come? My God, don’t keep me in this suspense!”
She hastened to comfort him—the more emotionally; perhaps, because her own heart was very full.
“There’s nobody—indeed there isn’t.”
“I heard voices.”
“It was only ours—Mr Trix’s and mine.”
He sank back, with the sigh of a reprieved soul; but was up again almost immediately, stroking and fondling the girl’s hand. His eyes had grown flushed and maudlin out of relief. The sensuous fever of him was uppermost.
“Dear little nurse!” he murmured; “dear kind little Molly! You never fail to frighten the dreams away. I think you could cure me altogether if you would.”
She sat on the bed, suffering his caresses, because, as she wilfully told herself, they were lavished on her as another’s proxy. Would she could act so indeed, in the manner of those Eastern enchantments of which she had read, and secure that other’s compromise without hurt to herself! He was emboldened by her passiveness.
“Molly,” he whispered: “if you would only put your face—here, down by mine, on the pillow.”
She did not stir. He stole an arm about her.
“We could make it all right afterwards,” he said, with a thick little laugh. “If I once had that reason, as I have the power, to mend something I’d done, I think I could face the world like a giant. It’s only shadows that upset me. Perfection, I’ve come to see, was never meant for men. It’s better to sin a little, if one does penance for it—better than being a saint. We know that on good authority, Molly, don’t we? I’ll promise amendment—I will, on my honour—and—and—are you fond of jewels, Molly?”
She slipped from him, and to her feet.
“Are you dreaming still?” she said. “Do you take me forher? We don’t do these things in our class.”
She had had her little revenge, and flushed triumphantly to it. It were supererogation to confess—what he did not know—that she was engaged in these matters to another. But, after all, the creature was a man, and his offence therefore nothing very terrible. Of course, if it had signified treachery to his blood-brother, that were another pair of shoes. But, inasmuch as only the betrayal of his fine lady-love was implied by it—why, the Marchioness di Rocco might very well profit by learning that her supposed pre-eminence in men’s hearts was at least open to challenge. A light sentence—as she considered it—was enough to meet this case.
She stood away, panting—a very ruffled littleamourette, and thrice desirable in those plumes.
“I wouldn’t promise on my honour, if I was you, my good gentleman,” says she. “’Tisn’t much to trust on, when you can speak to me like that, and you sworn to another. I wonder what she’d think of it all. You’d best go to sleep, and get the better of yourself.”
He caught at her, the poor devil, as she was going, all his gauche libertinism snubbed out of him at a breath. The loss of his self-respect was nothing to this sudden realisation of his contemptible immaturity in vice, and of her recognition of it. There is no such crestfallen dog in all the world as your seducer held up to ridicule by his intended victim. He appealed to her abjectly:—
“Don’t go—don’t! I am so ill. I didn’t mean what—what you suppose. My brain is all on fire. He wouldn’t allow for that!”
“He? Who?” she demanded, withdrawing from him. He still pursued her with his hands, distraught, half frenzied:—
“You’re going to tell him, I know; and he so believes in me. It would be cruel, wicked, to shatter his faith. You ought to think of the demoralising effect on him—and—and I’m not myself, you know that perfectly well. I say and do things I had never thought of once.”
“Do you mean Mr Trix?” she said.
“You know I do,” he cried. “It would be wicked to tell him!”
She stood conning him gravely a little. There had been no thought of tale-bearing a minute ago in her liberal heart. But now, for the first time, it began to consider that policy, in the light of a possible retaliation on a suspected rival. The “demoralising effect” onhim, her Cherry, quotha! What, indeed, if she were to try that effect, with the result that it evoked jealousy there, anger, indignation, a declaration of his exclusive and never-foregone property in her, his Molly’s, person? It might serve for the very means to dissipate this sad veil of continence which had come to fall between them, and which, only out of the inherent purity of her love, she had agreed to respect. For spiritual relationships, it must be admitted, were water-gruel to this poor Mollinda, and tinctured with wormwood at that, when, as in the present case, they carried suspicions of the disinterestedness of the party suggesting them.
Should she go and tell him in truth? No, it wasn’t fair to this other fellow, for all the exhibition he had made of himself. But her conscious prettiness was something to blame, no doubt, in that matter; and, after all, he had been guilty of no disloyalty to his friend. Her ethics of the heart were Nature’s ethics, founded on a frank recognition of the logic of feminine lures, and the reasonableness of wanting to pluck inviting fruit when one was thirsty. A parched man could not be expected to drink water when wine was going.
Nevertheless, he deserved a measure of punishment, less for his fault than for his mean attempt to escape its consequences. A little suspense, she decided, just a moderate spell on the rack, would do him no harm—might even prove salutary.
“I’ll promise naught,” she said. “It would just amount to my allowing a secret between us; and you aren’t the man for my confidence—no, nor for any part of me. Besides, if you didn’t mean nothing, why should you be afraid? I’ll do as I think fit, and speak or hold as it suits me.”
She whisked away, leaving the adorable fragrance of a dream unfulfilled to clinch the poor creature’s damnation. She did not know, could not know, how thorough that was at this last. She would have been horrified, kind heart, to realise how her balmy breath had blown a smouldering fire into devouring flame; how it had sentenced this victim of “little-ease” to be transferred to the pillory. For indeed in that sorry yoke did she leave Louis-Marie exposed to himself, and, as he thought, to all the world.
There is a form of morbid self-consciousness which is characterised by a perpetual turning inward of the patient’s moral eye. The man subject to it sees—especially during the wakeful hours of the night—his own past deeds and words imbued with a meaning of which they had appeared quite innocent when acted or spoken. He writhes in the memory of mistakes of self-commission or omission, which no one other than himself, probably, is troubling to recall, or is even capable of recalling. What an ass somebody must have thought him under such and such circumstances, is the reflection most distressingly constant to his mind. Nevertheless, while eternally holding himself the irreclaimable fool of untactfulness, he remains to his own appreciation a thing of price, which he himself is for ever giving away for nothing Modesty is no part of his equipment though he is so sensitively conscious of his own failings. He cannot detach himself from himself, in fact, or, even once in a way, realise comfortably his own insignificance in the serene philosophy of the Cosmos.
So far for his tortured memory of solecisms, real or imaginary, committed by himself. When it comes to the question with him of a genuine conscience-stricken introspection, his reason is in the last danger of overthrow.
Now, Louis-Marie’s was a temperament a little of this order. It was the temperament of a man at once thin-skinned and bigoted, righteous and passionate. It had all the conceit and the sensitiveness of conscious virtue. The fellow could never forget himself, in the abstract sense—believe that people were not incessantly thinking and talking of him. A morbid diathesis is the inevitable result of such self-centralisation. Acutely sentient, it will learn to inflame to the least thrust of criticism, and to brood eternally over the pointlessness of its ownripostes. Then, at last, when it comes to sin, as it is bound some time to do, it will take its lapses with a self-same seriousness as it took its merits. It is always, in its own vanity, a responsible example; people are always regarding it. Its attitude, as a consequence, will become a pose; but by now it is a fair rind hiding a rotting kernel. The devastating grub has entered, and it dare not reveal itself by expelling it. It hugs its disease in secrecy, hoping against hope for some interior process of healing. How can self-centredom heal itself? There comes a day when the last film cracks, and its emptiness stands exposed to the world.
Louis-Marie, abandoned to his reflections, thought that that day had arrived for him. His hollow pretence was on the point of being laid bare; he was to be made the subject of a universal contempt and execration. A moment’s temptation had revealed him to himself for the sham thing he was—would reveal him to Gaston—would reveal him, in the certain course of scandal, to Yolande. For ever more now he must be an outcast from social respectability. His life, for all that it was worth, was virtually at an end.
Practically, too, it seemed almost. He fell back on his bed in a death-sickness, and lay there without movement, without conscious thought, for hours.
Cartouche, returning, very quiet and sombre, from his interview with a great lady in the Palace, heard him moaning to himself, as he passed his door, and went softly in. The room was in darkness; only a faint light from the lamps outside fell spectrally across the figure stretched on the bed. He crossed hurriedly to it and bent over.
“What is it, brother? Are you so ill?”
Saint-Péray uttered a little weak cry between terror and rapture.
“Gaston! is it you? I believe I am dying.”
“No, no.”
“I have so waited for you, sinking and struggling to keep above. This load! I can endure it no longer. You are so strong—I seem always to have clung to you—my brother—and you will take some of the burden? Yet how can I ask you! O, my God, my God! to what can I appeal!”
“Why not to my love, Louis?”
“Ah! your love!—there were older claims to it. You don’t know—you know nothing of it all—of what I am and have been—of what I am capable, even, when tempted. Or do you? are your eyes opened a little since—but what does it matter! I will confess everything; I—O, my Yolande! my Yolande!”
“Now hush! and listen—do you attend? I am but this moment come from her.”
“You—O, Gaston! fetch me a priest—I am going!”
“She loves you still—I say, she loves you still. Is not that the best priest—and doctor, too? I will go and fetchher.”
The sick man clutched at him frantically.
“And confirm my sentence? You shall not. Though it parts us for ever, I must speak. I could live, I think, if once this load were thrown. Gaston!—”
“I am listening.”
“It was I murdered di Rocco!”
Theburden cast, the released soul ran out and on, babbling, half-delirious, growing in noise and volume, until, flowing to waste, it sunk into the silence of exhaustion.
“I knew—as you all know now—what he intended, and where he was going. I had been informed secretly, and I set out to waylay him. Coming to the point from which he was to cross the glacier, I hid among the stones; and presently I saw him approach. There were great clouds, but a little starlight between—enough to make him sure. On the slope of the moraine a drunken scoundrel, who carried a lantern, veiled till then, rose to greet him. He was the other’s guide and pander—and for whose undoing? O, my God! O, my God, Gaston! Think what it meant—to me! to heaven! and heaven was the coward at the last. It was all for me to do alone—prevent this horror, if I could not persuade it. God sleeps, I think, when the riddles of mortal wickedness get too much for Him: and then He wakes, and chastises weak Nature for its false solutions. It is so easy to say This must not be, and ignore the circumstances which will makethis, and no other, inevitable.
“I saw them meet, I say; and even then I could scarcely believe that upon me, and me alone was thrust God’s responsibility to the maze He had permitted. Yet I had no thought at the first, I swear, but to prevail through gentleness. As I followed them down upon the ice, a prayer was in my heart that, seeing itself discovered and exposed, this sin would come to own itself—would at least deprecate my worst suspicions of it, and, if for policy alone, go the practical way to allay them. I did not know the man—no spark of decency or honour left to leaven his vileness—a liar without shame. How I came upon him is all a dream in my mind. I had pursued the light, now here, now gone, but always rekindling somewhere in front; until in a moment it stopped, and I had overtaken it. He was alone; had just, it seemed, re-lighted the lantern, and was taking breath from the exertion, while it rested near him on the snow. The other had disappeared, and we two stood face to face and alone in the heart of that desolation. I don’t know what I said to him, or he to me—things, on his part, monstrous beyond speaking. His tongue lashed me like a flame—drove me to madness. God should have torn it out; but God was sleeping. He would scourge me, he said, before he crucified. For he meant to kill me for my daring, and cast my body into a crevasse he pointed out hard by, and whistle up my ghost to follow and witness to his filthy triumph. He was a great man, a great power, a giant of strength and wickedness. But, as he came at me, he slipped, as even a giant may, and I put my knife into his heart.”
The voice, in the dark room, shrilled into a febrile transport; the weak hand was re-playing its ecstatic deed. And the watcher sat without a word or sign, and listened—listened.
“I heard his soul go from him like a hiss of fire—and then the storm burst upon me. It flogged me in a moment into reason; I saw the crevasse stretching at my feet; and I heaved him towards it, and heard him go down. Knife and all he went; and after them I cast the lantern, and then there was nothing more—only my love, my love’s safety, the guerdon of my red hands.
“It was that one thought which saved me, while I cowered and let the storm roll over. Then I returned by the way I had come. I don’t know what guided my footsteps: I knew nothing more until I awoke in my bed to light, and the blast of that mad memory.”
He paused a moment, while his soul seemed to fume on his lips: then burst out once more:—
“A curse upon those who forced the deed upon me—who would have made a wanton of my idol! They are to blame—they are to blame, not I! I struck to keep God’s law immaculate—I was all alone, while He slept; and I struck to vindicate His law. And He awoke, and damned me for my deed—no palm of martyrdom; but torture, the endless torture of a haunted wickedness—agues of sickness and terror—threats, menaces—a guilty conscience. Am I guilty? O, Gaston! where is heaven? ... I lost her that I might save her: her shrine was my heart, and I bloodied it. What she had been to me, not you nor anyone can realise—saint, sweetheart, loveliness—too divine for passion, and too passionate for heaven—God’s earnest to me of immortal raptures. Why, I lived in her—worshipped her. O, my God, my God, Gaston! If she was more to me than heaven, was that a just rebuke tometo makeherfoul? ... You all know now, I say, what I knew then. Put yourself in my place—that man—filthy iniquity—no grace of truth or honour—a ruttish beast. O! he was your friend, I know—forgive me—what a friend! I had been stone till then—till it was whispered to me what he designed—stone, with a heart of fire. Perhaps I had built a little on the thought of that year’s respite—a year in which to hold him at bay while we prayed and prayed for God to intervene. O, a cry to stone!—no hope, no response. When I killed him, I plucked the dagger from my own heart to plunge it into his. Was not that good, even then—to send him to his account, saving his soul those last two mortal sins? Tell me, Gaston, was it not good?”
“It was good and just, Louis—to lose her for ever that you might save her for ever.”
The wild shape on the bed ceased its convulsive transports, while it seemed to meditate the answer. Presently it spoke again, but feebly, as if in a gathering exhaustion:—
“Yes, I have lost her for ever—you mean it, indeed, Gaston?”
“He was her husband, Louis. Will you confess to her? Could she marry you if you did? Could you marry her if you did not? You did right, I say. I take the burden of your conscience as a light one, and commit you to rest.”
“Gaston!”
The poor wretch struggled to express his gratitude and relief. In the midst, his voice trailed into incoherence, and ceased. Cartouche, looking at him, saw that he had topped the crisis and was asleep.
* * * * * * * *
Self-composed, an exquisitesans reproche, carrying, sword-like, a sort of sombre blitheness in his speech and mien, the Prefect of Faissigny descended to his duties on the morning succeeding that poignant interview. These were prefigured for him in the shape of a waiting chaise and postillions, bespoken overnight, and attending now in the street outside his windows; and, more intimately, in an early bird of domesticity, who was busying herself with the preparation of some worm-like sticks of bread, and the fastidiously-exacted proportions of a cup of chocolate and coffee. He greeted her with a half-remorseful, half-irritable allusion to her swollen eyes.
“My faith, girl! You look as if you had been fighting in your dreams, and got the worst of it.”
She faced on him bravely.
“And so I have, and so I have—been fighting with my thoughts, and got my punishment. Won’t you kiss them well, Cherry?”
“Put a blister to a blain, child! That would never do.”
She held up her sweet soft lips to him.
“Put it there, then, and show you’ve forgiven me.”
“Forgiven!” he cried cheerfully, and moved away. “I’ve nothing to forgive but a rogue to our compact. Come, bustle, girl, bustle! I must be off.”
She flushed, as if she had been stung; but she obeyed, entreating no more.
“You must go, then?” she said presently—“for real and true, Cherry?”
He shrugged impatiently.
“Haven’t I told you that I’m to receive his keys of office to-morrow from the old Prefect at Le Prieuré, and thecongésof his staff?Morituri me salutant. Shall I be Cæsar and subject to an apron-string? There are rogues waiting to be hung, and conscripts to be plucked and dressed. Be quick, child, be quick, or di Rocco’s murderer may escape me!”
“Cherry!” she cried out aghast—“was he murdered?”
He gave a curious violent laugh.
“The King says so: and the King can speak no lie. Come, I must go.”
She busied herself about his needs and comforts. Once she paused.
“When will you be back?”
“How can I tell!” he answered hurriedly. “What a drag on a restless wheel! There! don’t cry. I shall come again, never fear. I shall—”
He was suddenly ready, and standing fixedly before her, his hat on his head, a heavy cloak over his arm. His voice, his manner, had all at once taken on a tone significant, forceful, imperious.
“I have a thing to say before I go—one last thing. Attend to it well. M. Saint-Péray is asleep this morning. I think he is better now, and will recover. But from this moment the treatment is to be changed—no mending of an idyll any longer; no leading of him that way to hope and sanity. What I set you to do I set you now to undo. The end we once designed has become impossible. Do you understand?They cannot ever marry now.”
“Why not?” Her voice was like a death-cry far away.
“She’s not for him, I say. Let that suffice. If he is weak—he may be—be strong for him. He’ll thank you some day. For the rest, bear what I say in mind—they must be kept apart at any price.”
He gazed at her earnestly a minute, pressed her hand, and was gone. She did not follow him to the door. She stood as he had left her, quite silent and motionless. A bee, a whiff of apples were blown in together at the open window. The sing-song of a bell, high up and distant somewhere, rippled in soft throbbings through her brain. A crow cawed in the trees opposite. There was a chair near her, a plain Windsor cottage chair, which Cartouche had bought at a sale to please some whim of hers. She threw herself down at its feet, and prostrate, as if praying, over the hard wood, fell into a convulsion of crying.
“O, mammy! Come and take your bad girl home to England!”
Dr Bonitosat isolated at a little table in the self-sameCaféwhere he and Louis-Marie had once before consorted. The table stood well in the middle of the room, and under an uncompromising glare of candles. Thus, and in public, your wise plotter will station himself for security. It is a mistake to suppose that, because his plans are obscure, he will seek obscure corners for developing them. Panels have ears; and even a tree, however solitary on a plain, may be hollow. Dr Bonito sat, for all his stale and fusty exterior was worth, in the light.
Judged by it, he seemed, indeed, too spare a vessel to contain much worth discussion. He was like one of those little sticks of grassini, all crust. Each of the tiny sips he took from a tiny glass of vermouth at his side suggested the threading of a needle. There was no question of breadth or openness in him anywhere. Shrewd, wintry, caustic, he was just as cold, as sharp and as bowelless as a needle—a thing all point and eye.
The latter, visionless as it appeared, never lost account of the minutes ticking themselves away on a dingy clock on the wall. They were Destiny’s forerunners to the doctor, few or many; but he had too much wit to question the delays of Destiny. She had to travel by roundabout roads very often.
And she was pretty punctual on the present occasion, arriving in the person of a small, child-faced gentleman, so pacific in expression, that the cloak and brigand’s “slouch” he wore were nothing less than an outrage on credulity. He came up to the isolated table, and claimed its tenant in a voice so little and soft that at a yard distant it might have passed for a purr:—
“Greeting to thee, Spartacus, Provincial of Allobrox!”
Bonito’s acknowledgment was in like tone, but surly and between his teeth—half purr, half spit:—
“Greeting, Maître-d’Hôtel-in-Ordinary to King Priam—or, greeting, Caius Sempronius Gracchus, illuminatus minor!—whichever you like best to be called by.”
“Can you doubt, master?”
“I give myself no concern about it. Sit down, schoolboy.”
The little man obeyed, meek and deferential. Bonito cast a supercilious look at him.
“You grow sleek on plenty, Maître d’Hôtel. Beware! Do you not see the walls of Cosmopolis rising inch by inch to the clouds? We shall put on the roof in a little, and hang our flag from it. How about your office then? There will be no fat sinecures there for such as you.”
“Master, I desire no greater privilege, now or ever, than that of following your footsteps.”
“A pampered pug; a greasy, royal lick-platter. Look at me—Spartacus, Provincial of Allobrox—to thee, as Jupiter to a call-boy! My footsteps, quotha! Art thou not Apicious, pug?”
“No, indeed. My gluttony is all for knowledge.”
“Wouldst be content to dine with me day by day on the liberal air?”
“Ay, assuredly, if I could come by it to thy greatness of vision.”
“Wise Sempronius! How, then, am I great to him?”
“How but in all that he lacks—wisdom, precognition—great in everything.”
“Save in my midriff—as I were a King, great in all possessions but that of a Kingdom.”
“The universe is your scroll: the water is your mirror: the wind is your subject.”
“Yes, I am full of that subject.”
“Your mind can traverse empty space.”
“And does every day, I assure you, thinking on my stomach.”
“To me—little catechumen of our order—you figure for Omnipotence.”
“Alack! and I cannot command a meal. Set all this wisdom against one smoking dish, the scrolls of heaven against a bill of fare, and observe my choice. Beef and ale are the Fates we gods are subject to. You fly too high for us. Why, look you, little man, I am so empty sometimes I could think of insulting a swashbuckler, only that he might force me to swallow my own words.”
“Master, if I might—why will you never let me—?”
“What! Omnipotence stoop to be treated by its scullion!”
“The Pope takes Peter’s pence.”
“The Pope?—swine of Epicurus! No more, Sempronius. At least I’ve learned to walk on air—by so much nearer godhead—go great distances on it too—from Epopt to Regent, from Regent to Magus, from Magus to Areopagite. Nay—let me whisper it—in moments of thrilling venture, even into the heart of the Greater Mysteries, where, supreme and invisible, I take my throne as lord.”
“What! of us all—General of the Illuminati?”
The little man whispered it awestruck, then twittered into ecstasy.
“And why not, great Spartacus, mage and mastermind? What should keep you from even that stupendous goal?”
“Why, indeed, child, I know of no worse obstacle than my poverty. Nor is that to question the pure altruism of our Creed. But promotion to great offices must necessarily depend on one’s material capacity to support them. Reforms, whether to practical republics or moral communisms, require financing; and the long purse will naturally grudge the first credit for that to the short one. To be supreme lord of self-sacrifice, one must be able to exhibit supremely one’s title to the distinction. If that were to be gained by no more than making nobly free with other people’s money, I should have ten thousand rivals to dispute my right to the pre-eminence. And justly. It’s reason, I say, and I don’t complain. Still, the time may come—”
“It must, master; it shall.”
Bonito pondered, with some indulgent condescension, the other’s mild, fanatic face. The creature was but a “minerval”—an Illuminatus, that is to say, having his foot on the lowest rung of that ladder on which he himself stood relatively exalted. But it is pleasant to be apotheosised, even by an insignificant groundling; and the pleasure, though to a philosopher, may lose nothing from the fact of that groundling’s social superiority. For, indeed, if Caius Sempronius Gracchus was not the rose, he could say, with Benjamin Constant, he lived near it. He was a house-steward in the royal palace, in fact, and, as such, a useful humble auxiliary to these forces of anti-monarchical transcendentalism, whose policy it was to titillate the ears of their neophytes with a jargon of classical pseudonyms, and, by endowing mediocrity with resounding titles, to stimulate it to a fervid emulation of its prototypes. Caius Sempronius Gracchus, an enthusiastic, well-meaning little rantipole, could conceive for himself no more flattering destiny than to be some time Tribune under this omniscient Praetor in the coming Cosmopolis. He lived for ever, for all his little albuminous brain was worth, in that cloudy castle. And Bonito found him useful.
This strange man, indeed—who let himself be supposed of the Rosicrucians, a discredited sect, merely to cover his connection with the later and much more formidable Society of the Illuminati—desired wealth only as a means to his personal advancement in his own mysterious Order. All his plans were directed to that end and to none other. Money, for its own sake, he despised; but money alone could direct his line of curvature towards the heart, the holy of holies, of that great centrifugal force, which, under the name of Illuminati, or the Enlightened, was destined—in its own conception, at least—to revolutionise the political systems of the world.
And what was that heart? And why did its attainment figure so covetable to this close-locked, thin-blooded misanthrope? It represented to him, one must suppose, an ideal of power to which no existing autocracy could afford a parallel—a power to be likened only to the sun of one of those starry systems which his brain had warped itself in considering—a power, the focus of countless satellites humming harmonious worship about it in revolving belts of light—a power, in short, which was vested, solely and indivisibly, so far as mundane affairs were concerned, in the person of theGeneralof all the Illuminati.
Well, as to this General, this veiled prophet, “old nominis umbra,” mystic, unapproachable. A plain word in season, as to him and his system, must suffice for an irreverent generation. He was a stupendous mystery to his creatures; and was designed to be. Like an unspeakable spider, he commanded, from their middle point of contact, the radiations, with all their concentric rings, of a vast web of political intrigue, every touch on which was communicated to, and answered by, him automatically. He was elected, in the first instance, from amongst themselves, by a council of twelve, called the Areopagites. These were the virtually absolute, analogous to the Roman Decemviri. Thence, in successive gradation, extended the inferior orders: the national directors, each, also, entitled to his council of twelve; the provincials, or magistrates of provinces, having their courts of regents; and the deans of the Academies of priests, or epopts, who were seers and star-gazers to a man. Beyond these, the Mysteries diffused themselves by way of the Chevalier ecossais, or first initiate, to the noviciates of illuminatus dirigens, illuminatus major and illuminatus minor, until they touched limit in the simple proselyte or freshman, of whom is a boundless credulity in the forces of secrecy.
That was exacted of him, as were also an unquestioning obedience and inviolable devotion to the mandates of his order—blind faith, in fact. He took an absurd name, foreswore his will, and mastered the calendar of the brotherhood—if he was wise enough. Great folly, to be sure, but folly is wisdom’s catspaw. The gods know the value of gilding a fool’s eyes. These Asphandars and Pharavardins, these pseudonyms and Allobroxes (which last, by the way, meant the Province of Faissigny), were only so much harlequin tinsel irradiating the body of a stern purpose. Behind all the glittering foppery was existent a very resolute and far-reaching design—one no less than the universal decentralisation of governments, and the qualification of the world-citizen. It was no small ambition, perhaps, that of aspiring to the generalship of the Illuminati.
And, if Fortune had fooled Dr Bonito by a quibble, money still remained to him the sovereign test of truth. The stars had read him his destiny, for all that that earthly goddess, being earthy, had delighted to falsify their calculations. It was her way. It was his to trust a higher ruling, and to have faith in its verification by the way the stars had pointed. Money, money! by whatever means he must obtain it. His present interview was only a step in that direction.
“Well, well,” he said, “the future’s in the womb of Destiny. Enough, Sempronius—say no more; but deliver your report. We treat of Paris and of Helen in the Court of Priam.”
The other looked cautiously about him before he answered,—
“She’ll not have Paris, master: she has refused him.”
“What!”
“Yes, yes—the King despite; and out of favour, by the token—she and her father—and retired to her own villa in the Via della Zecca, while Paris has taken his outraged heart to Allobrox, there to vent its dudgeon in our suppression.”
“We’ll see to that. A fine Prefect! Worthy of such a Priam! But, for the other—she has not refused him, I say.”
“She has, indeed.”
“Yet he proposed for her?”
“That’s certain.”
“And enough for me. Acute Sempronius, thou little wise and worming man! We’ll have thee on the Council some day. Now, go; I have my cue. Refused him, has she? Well, he’ll be gone indefinitely—and time to act.Vale, Sempronius!”