“O, leave me not in this eternal woe,For if thou diest, my Love, I know not where to go.”
“O, leave me not in this eternal woe,For if thou diest, my Love, I know not where to go.”
“O, leave me not in this eternal woe,
For if thou diest, my Love, I know not where to go.”
She moved, and was kneeling by him, pleading with hurrying sighs,—
“The sin was mine—the sin was mine! And, O! a fruitless sacrifice! So pale, so worn—O, thing without a heart, to have caused this cruel sickness in my love!”
“Yolande!” A wilder thrill gave out the word.
“Louis; if thou couldst still find that in me worth living for! Ah, do not die! I would be so loving and so penitent. Not forward—no. The shame in me’s an ecstasy. I cry to have you humble me.”
“Lily of Savoy—the white lily—and mine!”
A gloating transport whispered in his voice.
“Thine still, dear love; and, for all her shame—inviolate.”
She hid her face to speak it. This was no swooning vision, but reality. No matter whence she had come, or at what instigation—the death-warrant was cancelled. Life at her words flowed back to him, lapped in a sensuous dream. Doubts, fears, proscriptions were all forgotten. His pulses beat to madness: a delirious hunger of her swelled his veins. This sweet fruit of his desire! It were as if the heavy-bosomed grapes, made animate by Love, had drooped of their own pity to the lips of Tantalus. Should he not crush them in his mouth? unquestioning, praising the heavenly mercy, not abusing it with one self-scruple as to his deserts? It was characteristic of him, at least, so to surrender his will to circumstance. He flushed as if intoxicated. He leaned impassioned towards her: “My wife!” he whispered, and drew her to his heart.
She raised her streaming eyes,—
“What you have suffered for my sake—and not the least to find you here.”
“Here, Yolande? the best that could have happened to me.”
“O, my love! you must not say it. It is a wicked house.”
“Yolande!”
“O, God! my saint is innocent! Louis! this man, your friend, and the poor girl—!”
“What of them?”
“They live in sin together—O, my lamb among the wolves!”
Old tremors, old lost scruples seized him at the words. He clung to her.
“Take me away, Yolande. I am so sick and helpless.”
“Yes, yes, my love, my husband! Come with me.”
“No, I am too ill. To-morrow. Don’t leave me, now you’ve come.”
“O, I must! Louis!”
“Then I shall die. ’Tis only you can save me—make me a man again.”
“O, love! you kill my heart!”
“To save me, Yolande! To save yourself that new self-reproach if I died without.”
“And if you were to die in spite?”
“O, love! that cried to me to humble it! We will be man and wife to-morrow. I shall live for that—I must. The thought will lay the spectres that would kill me else. Yolande! you will not let me die?”
“O, Louis! let me rather.”
“Come to me, my dear, my love, my wife—there, sweet, mywife, this seal upon your lips!”
* * * * * * * *
In the grey of the dawn, cold and austere after tempest, the signorina Brambello hurried forth to procure an accommodating priest. He was easily found, easily bribed, easily persuaded into quick conclusions. The two were joined before the altar of San Maddalena, a dingy chapel in an obscure neighbourhood, and Molly and Fiorentina were the witnesses.
At the end, in the sombre porch, the pale bride turned upon the English girl.
“God, in His mercy, so give thy sin to mend itself—my sister!”
She hesitated an instant, then threw her arms about the other’s neck, kissed her on the mouth, and hanging her sweet head, went with her husband down the steps into the silent street. And his face also was bowed, as he walked feebly beside her.
Cartouche, released, at the end of a week, from his inaugural business in the Le Prieuré Prefecture, returned forthwith to Turin—and to the re-encountering a problem, whose difficulties, one had thought, he might have studied more profitably at a distance. But a characteristic precipitancy, in deed and word—as much acquired as born of self-reliance in him—compelled him from hesitating on the brink of things. When angels and devils were at contest in his interests, he was not going to miss the excitement, nor the chance of applauding, or perhaps damning, the victors.
But he had had a more wearing time of it than he would have cared to admit, even to himself. He was not apt at moral conundrums; and one had come to consume his peace confoundedly. He felt it always smouldering in his breast, ready to break out into flame at any moment.
And he had really laid out its premises very impartially for his own consideration. He was an eclectic by nature; as, alas! is the case with a number of naughty people. It is unfortunate, indeed, that righteousness so often lacks the sense of humour, which is the faculty for seeing both sides of a question. The want seems to give obliquity such a superiority—though it is a specious one, of course.
He could admit, then, the inevitableness of a deed, which had preserved an honour most dear and sacred to himself. He could not admit a claim to that honour personified, as the price of blood. Louis, the slayer of a woman’s husband, could not take that husband’s place. Were she, knowingly, to let him, her honour would be forfeit: were he to take advantage of her ignorance, he would be doing a vile thing. She was not for Louis: could never be, in any scheme of moral purifications.
For whom, then? Why, scarcely less vile were he, Cartouche, to seek to take advantage of his friend’s hard fortune (It will be observed that he somehow inferred for that problematic vileness its problematic opportunity—the ineradicable instinct, perhaps, of anamoroso, experienced in the ways of audacity, to whom a rebuff had always stood, and likely been always justified in standing, for an incitement to fresh aggression).
As to another question, that of his own relationship to the dead man, he utterly declined to recognise it as one involving his personal interdiction. The marriage had been a mere conditional contract, of the essence of a betrothal, and the conditions had not been observed. No moral prohibition, such as touched upon the forbidden degrees, was implied by it, he told himself: and told himself so, he insisted, merely to emphasise the singleness of his renunciation. He would have the full credit for his self-sacrifice. His responsibility was not to a sentimental scruple, but to his ideal of an immaculate honour in the woman he worshipped.
Remained the question of his attitude towards the murderer of his father, and of his royal commission to hunt down that unknown assassin. Well, he had both discovered and exonerated him; but the offence was still officiallyun crime qualifié. To condone it were to make himself an accessory.
He would condone it, however, since by so doing he testified to his loyalty to his ideal. Yolande’s eternal fame should owe him that sacrifice of his duty to his nobler conscience. By so little, at least, he would justify himself in the thankless wardenship of her honour; by so little he would make himself the right to claim her into an association with himself.
So far and so good for his solution of the problem. This dear prize was not for Louis; it was not for him. What, then, was to be its destiny?
There was his ideal. Eternal maid, by virtue of her deathless bondage to the past, she was to exist the unattainable goddess of all desire. He might not reach to her; but he might enforce his own precedence in her worship. He would be the high-priest of that altar, winning to his place by heart’s-devotion. He pictured her, a virgin for ever unfulfilled, the flying figure on the vase, and himself, the passionate shepherd, stricken to an endless rapture of pursuit. What sweeter, more idealistic heaven?
“She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss;For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.”
“She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss;For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.”
“She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss;
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.”
A pretty, pretty romance! But was it practical?
His soul, at least, flamed out to it. It gave him a mad wild joy to think that circumstance, and by no contrivance of his own, had removed the one mortal bar to its attainment.
Whence, now, and wherefore, his return to Turin—to make himself secure of his transfigured idol—to confirm Louis-Marie, if necessary, in his renunciation of an untenable claim. For knowing the man, he could not but have his doubts of his resolution. So much of him was based on emotion—a treacherous foundation.
And, for the rest—his own title, by way of redemption, to that priesthood? Why, Molly, of course, was to be included in the transcendent scheme. She was to share his atonement, and be appointed a vestal to the altar of his love. He would pension her off for that purpose; he would—
O, “a mad world, my masters,” where love could not legalise itself without making a scapegoat of somebody!
And there was even another flaw—his promise to Yolande. But he had been obliged to forget all about that.
As he walked, in a sort of sombre self-complacency (as of a martyr about to testify) through the streets, his mind was busy over those first practical solutions of his problem which he was about to face. It would be necessary, he had decided, to inform his friend—restored, he hoped, by now to reason—of the impossible situation which his appointment had brought about, and to urge him to resolve its insuperable difficulties by instant flight. That must be the first step. And, afterwards—?
Alert, perspicacious by instinct, his eyes had become aware, as he moved on, of something oddly inquisitorial, something droll and furtive, in the glances of friends and acquaintances whom he met, whether directed at himself, or slyly interchanged. He affected to pass all by unconcerned, nodding brightly here and there without stop or comment; but he made mental notes, abstractedly stroking his sword-hilt, as if it were a pet terrier’s head. He felt, quietly, a little wicked. His theory of self-reforms, it would appear, halted yet something short of meekness and the second cheek to the smiter. At the corner of a street he ran plump upon Dr Bonito.
The adverb is figurative. The Doctor was always as shrewd an encounter as an edge of north wind. He cut into one’s meditations like a draught. On the present occasion, it seemed, he cut to get home into an adversary unprepared. His lean face kindled to the unexpectedness and opportuneness of the meeting.
“Hail, hail, M. le Préfet!” he croaked, in hoarse glee. “Here’s a magnetic conjunction! What man so much in my mind!—and, lo! I look up; and the man himself! Have you despatched both rogues and measures in your new Province? But doubtless you are returned betimes to assay the truthfulness of the great report. Well, be satisfied; it is true.”
Cartouche balanced on his heel, imperturbably conning the face of his old familiar. He saw enough there to detain him a reflective moment. The two had not met since their parting “Under the Porticoes.”
“Father Bonito,” said he; “I do not want to possess your mind. You can stick up a bill for a new tenant. I have grown a little particular in my tastes. In the meanwhile, I am only this hour returned to Turin, and greatly pressed for time. What, in a word, is this report, of which you speak and I know nothing?”
The doctor sprawled up his hands in feigned astonishment.
“Gods! I believe he really hasn’t heard it! and the very stones of the town babbling with it these days past. Not to have heard it—the one most interested, with myself—he hasn’t! I’m my own first suitor to his gratitude for this.”
“Well; the devil give you brevity!”
“No, no—one moment—stop! The Marchioness di Rocco, Mr Trix—ah!”
He withdrew a detaining hand, grinned, took off his hat, and mopped his forehead with a ropey clout, eying his halted prey the while.
“A long throw that, Monsieur,” he said; “yet it hooked you. But, to be sure, she’s a killing bait.”
Cartouche, just lifting his eyebrows, vouchsafed him no other answer. He knew his man—was steeling himself quietly against some blow which he felt was preparing, and which he saw would be designed to take him off his guard. Let Bonito, in that case, extract what satisfaction he could out of his manner.
In fact, when the stroke actually fell, his reception of it was so apparently unconcerned as even to deceive the doctor into a doubt of the effectiveness of his own home-thrust, and to aggravate his malice proportionately.
“Yes, a killing bait—a—killing—bait,” he said; and threw his handkerchief into his hat, and covered himself—all deliberately. “Well,” he said, “congratulate me, Mr Trix. He was shy; but—he’s taken her at last.”
Cartouche yawned.
“In the name of patience—who’s taken whom?” said he.
“Who? Why M. Saint-Péray has taken his Marchesa, that’s all.”
“Well, those are news, to be sure.”
“Are they not—eh? He-he! You are looking worn, Mr Trix. I’m afraid you take your new duties too seriously. You shouldn’t forget that all social office is a compromise—a figure representing the balance between good and evil, to lower one of which unduly is to exalt the other unduly. Yes, we’ve married our couple.”
“Have we, indeed? And who are ‘we,’ my Bonito?”
“There! these low levels tell on one coming from the heights. You must be careful of your throat. I notice a huskiness in it already. Why, indeed, save for a natural diffidence, I might say, Monsieur, that ‘we’ stands for ‘I’; seeing that, as a fact, the initiative was mine. In any case, what we were one in desiring is, at this moment, an accomplished thing. The two are married—not, as you may suppose, a union regarded with favour in certain quarters.”
“No; I suppose not. And how did you bring it about?”
“Ah—ha! there’s the marrow! Why, how you flush and pale! I doubt the prudence of exciting you, Mr Trix, in this present turbulent state of your blood.”
“Exciting me? What do you mean? Why should I be excited? Have I been hanging rogues so few as to start at the mention of a noose? Tell me how you managed it, my dear excellent old devil.”
“Well, I will. There are points you mayn’t approve; but the end must justify the means. Listen, then. I could not make our friend eligible in the way I proposed. But still I was his matrimonial agent—you remember the term, it was your own? As such my duty to him, my duty to myself, demanded renewed enterprise on my part. You, who have expressed an eagerness no less than mine to secure this match, will, I hope, condone, even approve, the advantage I took of a report concerning yourself to realise our common wish.”
“A report? What was that?”
“Why, that you yourself was a suitor for the hand of the lady.”
“Yes? and the advantage you took of that same veracious legend?”
“It may have been a legend: it was certainly an opportunity. What did I do? Why—forgive me, sir—I simply went and repeated it, for what it was worth, to the Signorina Brambello, and left the leaven to ferment. The result was quite astonishing. She ran straight off, it appears, in a pet of jealousy to the lady; induced her to return with her to the bedside of her stricken gallant (by which, or thereabouts, it seems our Madam spent the night), and married the two incontinent the next morning at a neighbouring Chapel (called, somewhat appropriately, la Maddalena), giving herself and another for witness. Now, am I to be congratulated or not? A word in season hath accomplished what all your theories of pretty heartenings and reassurances had failed to. You appealed to the signorina’s sympathies; I to a baser but more practical sentiment. Acknowledge who was the better sophist.”
Cartouche clapped him on the shoulder.
“You, you, my Bonito. The credit is all yours, and the triumph. I will not forget it. I will not overlook your part in this happy consummation.”
Bonito grinned.
“Nor yourinnamorata’s, eh, Mr Trix? Egad! she’s a name in Turin to-day. She might command—but, there! these reports are not for my lips.”
“Her price, you mean? Well, she shall have it. Now I must go. I have business which can wait no longer.”
He went off, humming a little song. As once before, the doctor stood conning his receding figure, until it had vanished round a corner. Then he gave a short sudden laugh, and turned to his own way.
“Well acted,” he thought; “and well out of the reckoning, he; and well saved, my own skin—for the present—I’m a little afraid at the expense of the dear signorina’s. But, bah! if the wind were to hold its breath for fear a leaf or two might fall, there’d be no clearing the air in this world of scruples.”
* * * * * * * *
Cartouche walked straight to the little villa in the Lane of Chestnuts. It was a glowing, lustful day. The white curtains in the windows bosomed out to him like love’s own welcome; lizards basked on the walls; the flowers in the garden hung sweet drowsy heads. He was singing still when he reached the door: singing when he greeted Fiorentina with a chin-chuck: he walked, with a song on his lips, into the parlour. She was there, sure enough—a flushed palpitating beauty, with a brave front of greeting, and a quaking heart behind it. He had no idea of making many words about the thing. He stopped in the middle of the room, smiling at her.
“What!” said he: “no kiss for me?”
She had never realised until this moment the fulness of her daring, nor its madness. She gulped sickly, as she crept up to him without a word, and put her lips to his cheek.
He had a purse of gold ready, and held it out to her.
“There are your wages, Judas.”
As if her legs had been knocked from under her, she went down at his feet.
“No, no! He was dying, Cherry!”
“Better he had died.”
“O, don’t condemn me unheard!”
“Did you disobey me?”
“Yes; but—”
“That is enough.”
“O, my God! Am I to go?”
“Yes.”
“Think what it means to me?”
“I am thinking.”
“And you can do it?”
“And I can do it—a hundred times. And worse than that, if you tempt me. Take your price, and go—back to England, if you are wise. Do you see this in my hand? It’s my last mercy.”
He drew away from her, where she lay, cast upon her face and moaning.
“I am going,” he said. “But I shall return in the afternoon at three o’clock. If then I find you still here—understand what I say—your chance to save yourself is past. I’ll kill you on our bed—I mean it.”
A wild desolate scream broke from her throat. He threw the purse down beside her on the floor, and left the house without another word.
At three o’clock to the minute he returned. Not till he had searched into every corner of the villa, would he question the red-eyedcameristas, huddled awaiting him in their kitchen. Then he learned that she had gone indeed. They would have besieged his heart with tearful clamour, telling of the scene—its rending piteousness; but he stopped them peremptorily, paid them their wages, double and treble, and dismissed them.
He had already seen that the purse of gold lay untouched where he had thrown it down upon the floor. For all his gripping will, that gave his heart a wrench. He stooped and took it in his hand—hesitated—then, with a curse at his own weakness, thrust it into his breast. He went from room to room, bolting the windows. In one upstairs he paused—so long that ghosts began to stir and whisper in the empty house. Something, he thought, was moving the curtains of the bed to which his back was turned. Little slippers stole from underneath a chair and walked without sound upon the floor. He heard a sigh—it was himself sighing. With a mad oath, he turned and tramped downstairs, resolutely, making all the noise he could. The next moment he had clapped to the door behind him, and was in the open air.
That night, pacing the streets, he passed a hospital for Magdalens. A box, beseeching charity, was in the wall. He stopped, and taking the purse from his breast, dropped the coins from it, one by one, into the slit.
Then he turned and disappeared into the darkness.
Wemortals discuss the world as a subject of our common understanding, and no two of us see it with the same eyes. To Victor-Amadeus the third’s, for example, it was a stage forfêtes galantes; to the Chevalier de France’s a ball fettered to the ankle of an heir-at-law, infamously kept from his inheritance; to those of a certain “little corporal,” as yet unaccredited, it was a potential family estate; to Yolande’s and Louis-Marie’s a reformatory for original sin; to Bonito’s it was a footstool to the stars, to Cartouche’s an absurd necessity, to Jacques Balmat’s a glorious field for adventure.
In 1786 Jacques was the most famous man in Le Prieuré, and for long distances beyond it. In notability he had outstripped all these other claimants to our attention. For he had won his mountain and his wife, and basked in the lustre and the reward of a great enterprise greatly accomplished. Yet he took his reputation modestly, as became one who had looked on Death too often and too close to boast himself superior to that God. He’d propitiated, not defied him. There was something very solemn, very sobering in having gained that awful shadow for one’s friend. So he accepted his part without arrogance, but without hypocrisy.
“Ah! monsieur,” he said to Saint-Péray, lord-consort to his lady of the Manor: “you should have held on; you should not have lost heart; you should have been with me. There are no heights so inaccessible but that the good God will surrender them to our trust in Him as the first guide of us all. There is no corner of His world of which He hath said, ‘Faith shall not enter here.’”
Madame Saint-Péray (she had dropped—flung away, rather—her title) looked up from her needle-work, with a little frown, like an acute accent, nicked between her eyes. She was conscious, on this occasion as she had been on others, of that half protective half accusatory note in the young mountaineer’s respectful addressings of her husband, which somehow touched a corresponding chord in herself. It vibrated on a thought of weakness; it was the tremor in the heart of dying dreams; its first movement in her had been co-instantaneous with the fall of her saint from transcendent to merely human heights. Something of discharm spoke in it; a sense as of an idol convicted of petitioning his worshipper; a sense as of an unwilling accessory to another’s secret sin; a sense as of a responsibility incurred where help had been expected. These several emotions she found suggested somehow in young Balmat’s tone. Were they common to all sympathetic spirits brought into whatsoever relations with her husband? She feared so. She feared, more, that Louis-Marie liked it to be so. His caressing confidence in all others than himself constituted at once his strength and his weakness. He ruled by sweet dependence, and was satisfied to rule.
There were hints of a certain change in her in these days—signs of an enforced self-emancipation, which, in its process, had a little chilled the texture of her faith. It was, in its moral, like that hardening of the grain which only a close observer can detect in the “fixing” of a pastel. The bloom was a thought less virgin; the eyes less liquid-clear; the lips had tightened to a scarce perceptible primness. Her love was as single, as great, as self-sacrificing as ever. Only it had altered its habit to a sterner garb. It ruled where it had served; it had made a subject of him who had been its lord; it justified itself by every concession to the loved one but that of self-abandonment. And in such implied reproaches as those of honest Balmat’s it felt its attitude vindicated. “You should have been with me,” he had said. He should. If he had, if it had been in his nature to be, this twin history of theirs, she believed, had never come to find its tragedy and redemption. Louis at this moment had been her king—her tyrant, even; their parts had never of necessity been reversed.
Of course, in all this, she only skimmed the truth. There was more to be inferred, even than she supposed, from the young mountaineer’s tone. It implied, in fact, a troubled conscience, seeking to allay its own suspicions on the strength of a serenity in their object which must surely, it told itself, be incompatible with guilt.
For, indeed, a certain serenity had come to succeed in Louis-Marie the storms and anguish of a former state. His wife’s tender ministrations; a year of utter peace, of utter immunity from disturbance in their retreat, had restored him to a measure of self-confidence—even to a point of view something broader than that in which Cartouche had confirmed him. Now he was inclined to think that his deed had been not only righteous, but heroic; that his bearing of its burden in silence was a saintly discipline; that, in any case, his confiding of his awful secret, like King Midas’s barber, to the reeds, had acquitted him of the first responsibility to it. And the last was, after all, his most characteristic comfort. He grew well on it, as a worried schoolboy, quit of his imposition to a merciful parent, forgets his troubles in a moment.
There remained only, to disturb his conscience, the question of his conditional absolution, as decreed by Cartouche. Well, as to that, he had assured and reassured himself, his friend was scarcely matriculated in moral philosophy. But, even were he called upon by him to answer for his act, he had still this to plead—that he had not married Yolande, but Yolande him.
For the rest, slow growing sense of security had come to mend his sickness of another shadow. A year had passed, and it had not yet pursued him to his fastness in the Château di Rocco. He hoped now it never would. He hoped he read, in the social exile which their own mutinous act had decreed upon himself and Yolande, an abandonment of any interest in their further fortunes. God grant they might be permitted to make out their days in peace, justifying—as they for ever strove, and intended for ever to strive to do—in their devotion to their church, in a wide and noble beneficence, their inheritance of a wicked man’s possessions. For to this end only had they decided to take up the burden of an estate otherwise hateful to them.
It was a mellow September noon. The three sat under the front of the grim old Château in the quiet sunlight. Far off across the valley, on a level with their eyes, great flakes of silver-white, spangling a golden haze, were the huddled masses of the Alps, no less. Soft and unsubstantial in appearance as the floating iridescences one sees in water, they were still the native home and most austere dominion of primordial rock and ice. It seemed impossible to realise it. The very shadows on their slopes were traced so soft, they were no more shadows than the blue veins in marble, than the blue inter-webbings of running surf. Surely that mist of peaks must be descended cloud, and the changing colours of it the bloom of angelic wings beating within!
Below the sitters’ feet terrace declined upon terrace, until, halted against a buttress wall, the cultivated land gave place beyond to stony pastures, which descended to the lower verge of the estate and the great wrought-iron gates of the entrance.
And between, poised high in the mid-ether of the valley, a watching kestrel floated like a leaf.
Madame Saint-Péray, looking up, answered for her husband. Her recognition that neither high achievement nor great failure was ever for this dear weanling of her passion was not to find her loyalty to him at fault—rather to confirm her jealousy for his reputation.
“That is a very right sentiment for a guide, M. Jacques,” she said; “but there may be nobler conquests for duty even than those of mountains. Monsieur owed his life tome; and he sacrificed his ambitions to that debt.”
That was the thorn. Then she offered the rose.
“For you, you owed that conquest to your love; and bravely you strove and gained. I hope the dear father recovers himself of your naughtiness?”
Jacques laughed; then essayed his little gallantry. No Frenchman, however primitive, lacks that essential grace,—
“I said, Monsieur should not have lost his heart for the enterprise. I was a dog, an imbecile. What summit could equal that to which his heart attained! I thought myself near heaven as I stood up there alone—the first to get so near. Alas, Madame! Monsieur staying on the ground had already gained it.”
Monsieur, lying comfortably back in his chair, smiled kindly.
“That is very true, Jacques; and I wish I could take credit for the best deserts. But you have not answered Madama’s question.”
“Of Dr Paccard, Monsieur? The old man is almost himself again. He can see his son-in-law at last.”
“It was cruel of you to force him to the summit,” said Madame.
“Why, what would you?” answered the mountaineer. “He would never have believed else; and upon his belief depended my reward.”
“But, by all accounts, he could not see, even then.”
“That is true; but others could. My faith, he was bad! But it was his bargain, not mine, that he should accompany me to witness. He would have given up before we slept the first night on la Côte. There had been enough and to spare already to terrify him. With dusk had come an oppression of the air. Our axes sang like flutes. Suddenly, as I climbed, holding my staff by the middle, it had a knob of light for head—a thing like a luminous bladder, that palpitated, and swelled, and shrunk and swelled again; till, in a moment, it detached itself and floated away, far, far into the shadows, where it burst with a clap like thunder. Then came the lightning, above, everywhere. One blaze struck the ground, right in front of us. It was as if a bucket of fire had been emptied from some window of the rocks. It splashed up and was gone, leaving a stench—Mon Dieu!the fish they had been gutting up there were not very fresh.”
“O, horrible, horrible!”
“Better than that our heads had received it. But I am fatiguing Madame?”
“No, no. Go on. I have wanted so much to hear it from your lips.”
“He slept exhausted, for all his fright, wrapped in my blanket, and moaning for the good roast chicken, which he had ordered at home against his soon return. When he awoke, it was bright calm sunlight, and he had gathered new heart of rest. We went on and up; but his courage soon ebbed, running out at his heels, until,Mon Dieu!he was crawling on his belly like a mole. That was laughable enough; but even so, my merriment could urge him no further than the Dôme du Goûter, where he sat down and refused to move a step further. I gave him my glass, and told him to look how the villagers watched us from below, and at Martha herself, the brave child, waving to us with her handkerchief. It was all of no use. I had to leave him and go on alone. The thin air suffocated me. The wind shaved my cheeks, drawing blood from them like a clumsy barber. Every sweep of its razor was a gash. But by then I was mad to conquer or perish. Though it strip me to the bone, I thought, my skeleton shall stand on the summit. And presently, all in an instant, I was there.
“O, Madama! It is something, that, to have seen the stars by daylight. They were all about my head, crowning me. Perhaps their glory intoxicated my brain. In any case, I was fierce now to go and fetch my comrade, and force him to come up and believe. And I went down to him again, and roused him from his stupor, and drove him before me up the heights. He was quite dumb and silly, like a drunken man; but my will was great, and I got him there. He could see nothing; the snow-blindness was in his eyes; he would hear nothing. ‘Take your Martha,’ he said, ‘and let me sleep.’ That was all. How I got him down and home is known to none but God; it is not known to me.”
Louis-Marie, listening in a glow, had caught something of the speaker’s transport. He turned, with kindled eyes, to Yolande. “See,” his looks confessed, “what I have foregone for your sake!” She gave a sudden cry “Ah!” and pointed down. The hawk had swooped into a tree, and re-emerged with a little fluttering life in its claws.
“That is very pitiful,” she said. “I had heard the poor thing singing to his mate but a moment ago.”
Balmat took up his hat.
“He sang of himself, by the token, Madama,” he said—“of what a fine fellow he was. It is the way with cock-birds. That was a good lesson to me. Be sure, it said, before you start to blow your own trumpet, that an enemy is not within hearing.”
As, having made his respectful adieux, he went down the hill at a swing, the lodge gate clanked at the foot of the drive far below. They saw his diminishing figure halt against another which was approaching. The two appeared to exchange greetings and a few words. At the end, Balmat resumed his way down, and the stranger turned again to the ascent. As he came on, the cuttings of the hill path swallowed him, and he disappeared from view. In the same instant, Yolande, bent over her work, heard her husband get hurriedly to his feet, and glanced up at him. Silks and needles went to the ground. She was by him in a moment.
“What is it—Louis! Louis!”
He was deadly pale; he was holding his hand to his forehead in a lost way.
“Take me in, take me in!” he muttered. “I—I think the sun—ah!—it was perhaps too strong for me.”
He was wild over her momentary hesitation.
“I would not stop to question if you were sick,” he said. She put her arm about him at once, and guided him into the house. Entered into its refuge, a little reassurance, as of a sanctuary gained, seemed to brace him. He moved of his own accord, and towards the stairs, making for the upper rooms. She never released him, until he was lying back on his own pillows. Then he seized her hands and kissed them as she knelt beside him.
“Dear wife,” he said, in great emotion. “I think, perhaps, the sun—and the excitement—of listening. There; I shall be well in a little—only rest—utter rest—I can see no one—no one: Yolande—it would be very bad for me—it—”
She soothed him.
“Why needst thou, most sweet, with me to stand between? If visitor there be, sleep here in confidence; thou shalt not be disturbed.”
A servant’s voice at the door announced that a stranger craved a word with Madame. Madame answered that she would be down in a minute. The invalid uttered a little tremulous cry.
“No, no, at once, in a second,” he urged in extremest agitation. “Think if he were to anticipate you by mounting to this room! My God! I have known him do it!”
“Him!” she exclaimed astonished. “Whom?”
“I have known people do it,” he responded in tremulous irritation—“ill-mannered people. Why do you delay? Do you want to drive me mad? If he comes in here, I will not answer for myself.”
Seeing him so wrought up, she felt it the wise policy to obey. With a last word or two of assurance, she went quickly from the room and down the stairs.
The old corridors, the old house, the old chinks piping-in the draughts which swayed the old tapestries, the old dust which seemed to crawl upon the floors, as if the swarming of their slow decay were for ever being disturbed by ghostly footfalls—in all, this dark old habitation, with its stony echoes, had never before seemed to her so instinct with the spirit of a watchful secrecy. Wickedness hung somewhere brooding in its vaulted silences. The air was thick with omen.
She had to pause a moment to recover herself, before opening the door of the room into which the visitor had been shown. But at last she turned the handle, and entered—and there was Dr Bonito facing her.
Shehad seen something of this man before; had heard—to loathe—more of him than she had seen. He was not one to be forgotten, once encountered—least of all by gentle souls. Only her memory of him could not somehow reconcile his past and present habits. A threadbare pedant, dull-eyed and malefic; a godless truckler to the vicious, prostituting his learning for a dog’s wages, abject while starving—that was how knowledge and report had painted him to her. Here, indeed, was the frame, but how reinvested! Snuff as of old, seamed the wrinkles of the jaw; but now that wagged upon a lace cravat. The hands were as skeleton and unclean; but rings sparkled on their frowsy knuckles. The brown mouldy duds had given place to a gold-laced coat and breeches of black velvet. There was something evilly potential, something suggestive of chartered mischievousness in the change, she thought: so instinctively do we estimate all human authority by the quality of its cloth.
She curtsied, and stood up frigidly to await his explanation. This sinister vision did nothing to allay the tumult of emotions which had accompanied her from the bedroom. Her heart was foreboding she knew not what; the chill of her manner hid a nameless fear. She could not analyse its nature, nor trace it to its source in herself. She did not know how, during all these months, it had really existed in her as a germ, which had shrunk from its own quickening to some unspeakable disclosure. Whispers, perhaps, half heard and put away; shadows in conscience-troubled eyes, cast down on half-betrayals of their secrets—to the faint record of such faint percussions on her soul, maybe, was due that vague sense of uneasiness. And here, all in a moment, the seed in her was stirring—swelling—touched into life by what? and to what monstrous birth? Was this ominous presence accountable for the change—this dark spirit, associated solely in her mind with a dead and gone abomination? What spectre could he be, risen from that grave to curse her later peace? What power in his hand, to have struck her love with terror through that far recognition? For to that recognition, she could not doubt, was due her husband’s state.
He did not keep her long in suspense. The old dreary wolf in him was quick to sharp conclusions. His tooth was his special pleader, and he showed it at the outset, without a thought of compromise.
He just essayed to make a responsive leg to her; but, even in the clumsy act, grinned in derision of his own mockery, and flung his hands behind his back, humping his shoulders bullyingly.
“You know me?” he snapped.
“I have seen you, Monsieur,” she answered.
“I was physician,” he said loudly, “to your late husband. That is something to you. You owe me your present one. That is more to you.”
She held on to herself, bravely, a little longer.
“You asked to see me, Monsieur,” she said quietly. “I desire you will state your business.”
“You or your husband,” he answered. “It is all one to me. Thank my gallantry alone for this precedence. If you scorn it, send forhim.”
She trembled, in spite of herself.
“Did he see me coming?” he continued. “I have reason to think so. He is shy of greeting me, no doubt; though, to be sure, we are quite old friends and confidants. It is not possible that you are his confederate?”
He saw her, poor helpless quarry, look towards the door; and he laughed out.
“Yes, summon assistance, if you want the truth blazoned. Many or one—it will not change my purpose.”
Then, in her fear, she became the serpent. Her eyes glittered; her lips parted in a conciliatory smile.
“Ah, monsieur!” she pleaded; “you rebuke me rightly for my cavalier reception of a guest. But there are memories—associations—cannot you understand it? that one would fain forget. Yet, if you were my husband’s friend—?”
“And yours, and yours, mistress,” he broke in violently. “Don’t overlook that. You owe one another to me—why should I conceal it? If I had not blown into flame a little spirit of jealousy in the bosom of a certainchère amieof—but you know his name—our admirable dear Prefect down yonder—”
She stopped him, flushing intolerably.
“Spare me that mention, at least, Monsieur. It is my humiliation ever to have been associated, even indirectly, with that infamous man.”
He sniggered hatefully.
“Why, it is true, by all reports,” he croaked, “that he has not taken salvation of his disappointment. Knowing him of old, as I do, that miracle, if it had happened, had converted even me, I think.”
“Monsieur!” she entreated, half weeping—“I beg you—”
She checked herself; disciplined her anguish anew; held out fawning hands to him.
“If you want thanks—recognition of that service—O, Monsieur! I am prepared to give them, to make it, to the utmost of your desire.”
“Are you?” he said. “We shall see. Perhaps your gratitude may take something less than full account of my claims on it. We shall see. For there is a deadlier claim yet to come.”
Her tears, her innocence, her beauty, moved him no more than a poor calf’s sobbings might move a butcher. Baiting made meat tender, in the opinion of his day.
She drew back a little.
“A deadlier claim!” she said faintly.
He looked about him a moment, then approached her closely. His evil eyes, his acrid tongue took instant command of her.
“Di Rocco was murdered,” he said.
She uttered a weak cry; caught at a chair to steady herself; stood with closed eyes, and her head fallen back a little.
“Murdered,” he repeated—“only I, and one other, know by whom.”
“What other?”
She did not speak it; but the horror of the question took shape on her lips.
“Your husband,” he said.
She never stirred nor cried out. In the crash of that agony her first instinct was not to betray her love.
He let the thrust sink home, watching, with some diabolical curiosity, the settling of the flesh, as it were, about that cruel wound. Suddenly she moved, and came erect, hating him, his inhumanity.
“Base and wicked! you say it to torture me, because to torture is the lust of devils. I will not listen to you. I will not even understand what you imply. Go, before I have you scourged out of my house!”
He never moved an inch.
“Your house!” he sneered. “Well bought at the price; only you left me out of your calculations—you and your confederate.”
She came at him then, this piety, with set teeth and clinched hands. She was like a tigress in that instant. But he waved his arm disdainfully, and she stopped.
“Are you not?” he said. “Then the other’s my sole quarry. I’ll make my terms with him.”
“No, no!”
The cry broke from her instinctively; and, having uttered it, she knew her own surrender. Pale and broken, poor lily, she drooped before him.
“Very well,” he said; “then with you. I care nothing for the deed; the terms are my concern. I’ll not be diffident about them. I’ll justify them, on your invitation, to the utmost of my desire. Your husband, mistress, killed di Rocco.”
“O, my God!”
“Why, he had his provocation. The man meant lewdly, and he knew it—knew of his intent, its method and occasion. Ask him, if you doubt me. Ask him what he was doing that night, crouched hidden by the glacier where the other was to cross. Ask him why he followed in di Rocco’s tracks, down upon the ice and further. Ask him why he returned alone, later, and slunk home in the storm and darkness, the brand of that on his forehead which he’ll never rub out to the end of time. O, believe me, I have a hundred eyes for things that touch my interests. This did, and closely. He murdered di Rocco. Ask him, I say, if you doubt me.”
Her ashy lips moved, but no sound came from them.
“Or ask him nothing,” the beast went on. “He did it for you; and maybe you’ll think you owe him that silence. Let him live on in his fools’ paradise, taking beatitude of grace, winning his redemption, as he views it. I’ll not interfere to damn him, so you gild my tongue from speaking.”
“He did not do it.”
“Ask him.”
“What do you want of me?”
“Money. Do you understand? Money. Why, as it is, I’ve arrears to make up. You’d have seen me before, if circumstances hadn’t interfered.”
“If I give you what you want, will you—will you take it in discharge of—of this fantastic—of this debt you say I owe you—now and for ever?”
He leered derisory, crooking his jaw to rub it back and forth with deliberate fingers on which a dozen gems sparkled.
“Will I? This fantastic debt?” he said. “Do you think there is any end to that, whilehelives? No, no, mistress. I commute no pension paid to my silence. Why, I’ll be frank with you. I’m no common blackmailer for a personal gain. My vileness, as you deem it, aims at a world’s redemption. This Augean stable—filth of rotten governments—there’s no way to cleanse it but by flood. Pour socialism through the stench. But funds are needed to divert a river. You shall contribute—be great by deputy. I’ll not be hard. I’ll spare you what I can, so you’ll be amenable when I can’t.”
“You’ll come again?”
“Why, I understand you. Better risk all, you think, than face that prospect. No need to. Send when I ask, what I ask, and forestall my visitations. Money’s what I want—not lives. I’ll not kill my goose with the golden eggs unless I’m driven. You can keep me away.”
“Tell me, now, how much you want,” she said, like one half lifeless.
* * * * * * * *
It was dusk when, lamp in hand, she stole up the stairs to their bedroom. He was lying asleep, sunk in the reaction from emotion. But the light on his face awoke him. He opened his eyes, drowsily, without speculation at first; but in a moment wide apprehension sprung to them. He half started up.
“Yolande!”
“Hush!” she said. “It was nothing—somebody who had come on business, and is gone. Think no more about it. Husband—dear husband, have you prayed to-night?”
He whispered a negative. She threw her arms about his neck.
“O, Louis, we have been happy during this year, have we not?”
He returned her caresses. But his hands were damp; his throat was stiff; he could not answer. She released him feverishly.
“Get up and pray now,” she said. “We have forgotten God in our deep content—forgotten, in our bodies’ loves, the blows and anguish which His flesh suffered to redeem them.”
He rose, unquestioning, and knelt by the bedside. He prayed that she might not know, that his suspicions might be unfounded, that the burden of that knowledge might never be hers—not that he might find strength to ask her if it were. He prayed and prayed, until the chillness of the night air seized his frail body with a very ague of shivering. Then she, kneeling beside him, was smitten with remorse, and blamed her thoughtlessness, and got him into bed again with all speed, and watched beside him till he was once more warm and restful. Then, his comfort was so great, her beauty so pitiful, he held out rapturous arms to her, and wooed her to his heart. Shrinking, reluctant, she surrendered passively. Had he not wounded his soul to save hers? How could she deny him the fruits of that wild sacrifice. She was a murderer’s wife.
There was even a thrill of ecstasy in the delirium of that thought—a spark of new life struck out of a dead delusion. He could answer to a provocation, after all—forher!
But later, when he had fallen into a deep sleep, she rose softly from beside him, and crept to her oratory, and, kneeling on the icy stones before the statue of the Holy Virgin, broke into prayer, and a passion of tears,—
“O, Mother! show me how to love, and yet be clean!”
Ona flat open width of the Argentière road, a mile or so to the north-east of Le Prieuré, a little company of astronomers was gathered to gaze at the moon. They carried glasses and instruments; there was not the least air of privacy about their proceedings; the spot selected was open to all. There was an extension in the long tear of the valley in this place, the increased interval between the mountains being occupied by a humpish land strewn with boulders.
About eight o’clock of a September evening, this group of enthusiasts—drinking in lunar obfuscation; its telescopes, like so many glasses brimming with moonshine, tilted to its eyes—was joined by a single individual, whose approach from Le Prieuré, it seemed, had occurred unnoticed by it in its preoccupation. Nor did his arrival affect it now, further than to its tacit acceptance of his company as of that of a recognised kindred spirit.
The newcomer, taking a short tube from his pocket, applied the smaller lens to his eye, and joined in the general scrutiny of that placid orb, which floated over the mountain tops in a liquid mist. Gradually, and scarce perceptibly as he gazed, the others edged about him, until all were within a common focus of hearing. Then one, who appeared to have some precedence of authority, opened his lips, but without removing his instrument from his eye.
“The oracle, great Spartacus—hath it worked?”
“It is working, Ajax.”
“And Paris shall be deposed?”
“In time, in time. We move swifter to that end.”
“Swifter, swifter? But while we gather speed, he strikes like the lightning.”
“Defy him. Art thou not Ajax?”
“Ajax defied the gods. He had a quicker way with mortals.”
“What words, what example are these from a Regent? Is not the dagger alien to our policy? Hast qualified in the tables of our law to no better end than this?”
“Forgive me, Spartacus. I spoke in heat. But this man, he harasses us; drives us from point to point; forestalls our meetings with his devil’s wit, and rides the country like a scourge.”
“A faithful Prefect.”
“An Alva sunk in vice.”
“He shall be deposed. I say it: Cassandra hath prophesied it: Priam inclines our way. We’ll find a substitute anon more to our tastes. In the meanwhile, the sinews, the sinews, Ajax—they gather in strength—they—”
With the word he was gone—had dropped, slunk like a shadow behind a roadside boulder. The others, inured to all quick evasions and surprises, stood like voiceless statues, conning the moon. The next moment, a little company of horsemen, the hoofs of their beasts muffled, came picking their way out upon them from the black glooms of the stone-strewn hillocks. They drew up in the road, their leader foremost.
“A fine moon-raking night, gentlemen,” he said. “By my faith, a very constellation of enthusiasts! What! is that you, M. Léotade? and armed with nothing more defensive than a telescope? Why, my friend, you can hardly realise the danger of these valleys. I’ll see you home, with your permission.”
Laughing, urging, persuading, deaf to their explanations and protests, he got them apart, and invited each to take the road to his separate destination, while he made M. Léotade his own especial care. In a minute or two the place was deserted. Only Bonito crouched, undiscovered, behind his rock.
“Too good a servant to your master,” he muttered. “But the rod is already in pickle for you, Mr Trix.”
Thatrod, nevertheless, was not to come out of pickle for some six years yet. And, in the meanwhile, Cartouche remained Prefect of Faissigny. For one thing, King’s favourites are not easily deposed; for another, the light seat in the saddle is the sure one. Cartouche rode his duties springily, and appeared to take them with only a shade more seriousness than he took himself.
During all this time he ruled his Province with agile, nervous young hands, asking no favour and giving none. An easy subject for defamation, the malignity of his enemies missed no opportunity of distorting in the public view the most harmless motives of his actions. He might, he thought, have cared, under impossibly different circumstances. It mattered nothing to him now. He admired his own character too little, was too little impressed with the disinterestedness of most others, to resent aspersions on it. It would give a certain lady great satisfaction, he was sure, to have her opinion of him so confirmed. That was the only way left to him to prove his regard for her. Truly, life for the future was to be an upside-down affair—a test of wit, not principles.
He had no principles, he told himself; but only a commission—to administer the law, in the first place; to root out disaffection, in the second. He had a whimsical idea of confounding equity with justice, and making an elegant Sancho Panza of himself. As to the other task—that of combating the spirit of an age bent on immense social displacements, on the reconstitution of States, on the launching of democracy’s huge engine “down the ringing grooves of change”—he accepted it as airily as if it were one involving just a disputed question of etiquette.
It suggested a gallant picture—that of this slim rake (with death at his heart all the time) facing the rising tide of revolution with not so much as a Mrs Partington’s mop in his hand, but only a ribbon of steel there, and a song of gay contempt on his lips. He had little doubt but that the red waters were destined to submerge all Savoy in the end, and beat their crests against the Alps. Well, though he were but a coloured pebble in their path, he would delay them by that microscopic measure. He owed it as much to his own constitution as to the State’s.
In the meanwhile slander, nursed by deep policy, convicted him of the seven deadly sins and more. Advoutry, barratry, crapulence, debauchery—one might run down the alphabet of infamies, and leave the tale incomplete. There is no need to. It would be unedifying, and, as a fable, unnecessary.
Alas! that as such, it could even be held plausible in the district; but experience in Savoy put no limit to the infinite rascalities of Prefects appointed to represent a despotic government. As tyranny’s proxies, district autocrats, they were potential as Roman Tetrarchs for good or evil. They might honour their offices, and sometimes did; but more often they abused them. The enforcement of conscription, of the imposts, of the many heart-crushing taxes was all in their hands. They controlled thegendarmerie, and could substitute a military for a civil jurisdiction on slight provocation. They could hang, fine, imprison, whip, brand, bleed, and grow rich on extortion if they chose.
In Cartouche’s time, the Prefect of Faissigny, it was to be observed, did not grow rich. He expended his shameful gains in riotous living, said scandal. Such gangs of chained convicts, again it remarked, had never yet been encountered on the public roads, wending their way to Chambéry and the state prisons. Such a healthy moral condition, it might have added, had never yet obtained in the Province. The majority nevertheless thought him a strong Prefect, if privately a bad man. The evidences for the former were unquestionable, and rather admirable; for the latter, not even circumstantial—but they were admitted. It is the human way to require convincing proof of a man’s virtues; but to accept his wickedness on hearsay. There was a vile story—of the Colonel Kirke order—which related of a father’s life sold to a child at the price of her honour, and the contract repudiated after receipt. The facts lay in the unconditional offer of herself to the young autocrat by a bold-eyed jade, who had been smitten in Court by thebeaux yeuxof her parent’s judge, and of his answering by impounding her for a time, while he despatched the old miscreant to his deserved ending on the gallows.
The truth is that this fable, with others as odious, was no more than a political expedient for procuring the Prefect’s downfall and removal. Mr Trix had proved himself an annoyingly sharp thorn in the side of Illuminatism, and that body was for ever wriggling and twisting to get rid of him. It was, as a matter of fact, in a particularly sensitive state during the first years of the young man’s ascendency, owing to an unhappy determination on the part of the Elector of Bavaria to put his heel on its head, which lay in his dominions; the result being that that same head—Weishaupt, by name, general and brain of the Society—had flicked itself away, none exactly knew whither; leaving to the corporate rest of it the solution of the problem as to how a body was to continue to answer, as a compact international entity, to an unlocalisable brain.
That bitter stroke was, indeed, the beginning of the finish with Illuminatism. The Society survived for some years longer; but more as a local than a universal power. It retained for a time a certain mystic influence on events, until in the end that influence, with many another as inherently socialistic, was absorbed into the elemental energy of the revolution.
A significant revelation, on the seizure of its papers in 1786, was itsrôleof names. They included “princes, nobles, magistrates, bishops, priests and professors”—men of a condition weighty enough to carry them and their occult propaganda into the very heart of society; to bring their suggestions to bear, even, upon some heads that wore crowns.
There was one of those, pretty vain and silly, which did not fail, you may be sure, to make itself a subject for their practices. It had looked out of the windows of Piedmont on the tide rising down there in Savoy, and, with all the first tentative assurance, and none of the after humility of Canute, had commanded the waters peevishly to retire. They had not: on the contrary they had come determinedly on, until they threatened to find a way through the passes into Piedmont. The King was disgustedly amazed. He heard of peasants refusing to pay their lawful taxes; he heard of bread riots; he heard of a dissemination of pernicious doctrines, such as those which spoke of commonwealths, and the right of the many to exist other than by sufferance of the few. Was this the way to realise his ideal of a piping Arcadia? What were his provincial viceroys doing, so to let corruption over-run his duchy?
Innuendo whispered to him of one of them, at least. His Prefect of Faissigny, it murmured into his ear, was as responsible as any for the subversive creed that justice, to be effective, must be impartial. That gave him thought. He had made rather a pet of this man; although, it was true, his plans for his aggrandisement had fallen something short of their intention. Was he, this Cartouche, making his disappointment the text for a popular dissertation on the fallibility of Kings? He began to wonder if he had misplaced his confidence.
And the gay Prefect himself—the bright siderite of all this conspiracy? Something conscious of the forces at work against him, indifferent to results and for himself, he continued to administer his office in the way most characteristic of him. He had no ideals nor delusions. Equality to him, in a world nine-tenths asses, was a vicious chimera. He was a magistrate of the crown, and he simply sought to make that respectable in the popular view. The rights of man, in his, were solely to be governed justly. Roguery, in whatever form, must be suppressed. No man should be privileged to tyrannise. He gave practical effect to the loose tenets of reformers, who, obsessed with a personal vanity, could see nothing in them thus presented but a hide-bound reactionism. Many people, it is certain, think less of their own ideals than of the credit they may gain in pursuing them. They are quite blind to them when achieved by others.
Mr Trix’s Prefecture in Le Prieuré was a very Court of Barataria. It was flanked by a lofty stone tower, known as the Belfry, which had once formed part of a long-vanished monastery of Benedictines, and was now used as a lock-up, for those condemned to walk the long road to Chambéry. The committed to it seldom had reason to question the justice of their convictions, or to complain of consideration of extenuating circumstances having been withheld. Cartouche, proclaimed a libertine and martinet, had nevertheless a happy wit for justice. He could tell a rascal under a silk frock.
So much for his public life. What surcease of private pain he sought in its incessant action, in that airy yet vigorous administration of his office, might not appear. He was always reckless for himself, for his reputation. He walked like one gaily damned, conscious of his own bond to the devil. What did it matter whatshethought of him now? What did anything matter in a world where man was held responsible for the resolving of irresolvable ethical problems. He supposed, and rightly, that she felt his mere presence in her neighbourhood to be an insult to herself. What if she were to be told the truth? It could never cleanse her of an indelible stain: it could never restore her to him for what she had been. Sometimes he told himself now that he hated her—that the proof of it was in his indifference to such reports of himself as might reach her ears. Was that a proof? He took pleasure, on her behoof, in refraining from forcing his slanderers to disgorge their lies. Did not she want him wicked? Every nail knocked into his character was a fresh vindication to her of her self-sacrificial love for another.
And there was a worse true story of him, after all, than any his enemies could invent. It was part of the irresolvable problem; but he believed she would answer it, if she knew, with a more utter condemnation of him than any he had yet suffered at her hands. That he had cast the girl away, because her disobedience to him had wrought an irremediable wrong to another, herself—would that appeal to her, even if in the hot blaze of the truth, for righteousness? She would answer, he knew, that he himself was the one solely responsible for the situation which his double-dealing with the woman most entitled to his candour had created. What justification had she herself ever given him for submitting her to the chance assaults of jealousy? If he had been honest with the wretched child, this climax had never reached its period. And, instead, he had made her the scapegoat of his own deceit.
He had. And yet, if he had not, if he had confessed the passion of his soul to her the victim of the passion of his body, how would that have bettered things for the victim? Would she, made vestal to that altar of his idol, have thought herself well compensated for her jilting? He mocked now at the absurdity of his old conception—Cartouche’s was it? or some sick neurotic monk’s? High-priest, he? What a figure of elegance, in urim and thummim and with a thing like a flower-pot on his head! He laughed tears of blood, recalling the ecstatic vision. Better to be accursed than ridiculous. Better Louis-Marie should have her, than she be made the sport of such a mummery. He did not blame his friend, week-knee’d robber as he was. He rather admired him, for his unexpected part. Would not he himself have dared all hell to win the passion of those lips—O, God! the passion! Would he not? had he not? He had at least bargained with the devil for her, and had prevailed just so far as that it was made his privilege at last to serve for deep contrastive shadow to that idyll of their loves.
For shadow: and for shadow within shadow? For all this time he knew he was a haunted man. That spirit of lost love betrayed—poor Molly! The blackest gloom in him was due to it. Not the way, he thought defiantly, to light him back to love. He wearied of its eternal presence; yet he could not shake it off. It leaned out to him from the dusk of mountain passes; it flitted before him through the sorrow of infinite woods; it cried to him for help from the hearts of squalid tenements, where villainous deeds were enacting. He had done that thing. It was past remedy—not past clinching his damnation. Why not then rest on that assurance, and cease to agitate both herself and him? Yet, step warily as he might, he could never escape her—that desolate phantom. Crossing beds of gentian, he would tread upon her eyes; the little freshets which he spurned from their wreathings about his feet, were her white arms; the low wind in the pines became her low English voice. Always faithful, weeping, appealing—never rebuking. God! was not this insatiable hunger in him enough anguish, without the eternal memory of that fruit, which he had plucked in his wanton appetite, and thrown away, just tasted, for the shadow of a sweeter! Not enough, not enough? Then to her hands be it after death to heap the coals upon his breast! He owned their right; would submit to them, and face the eternal ordeal. Only let them refrain now! Was he so prosperous, so happy, as to invite their vengeance prematurely? Torture too exquisite, it was said, became a transport. Did they want to qualify him for that balm in hell?
He execrated the shadow in his thoughts—its endless, voiceless weeping. He told it that he hated it. Let it take solace of his hate, as he of another’s. He meant it. Yolande hated him, and that she did was a wrung rapture to him at this last. By so much he had a place in her passions, where any other was impossible. He would never imperil it by controverting his slanderers. Let her think of him as wickedness incarnate, if only she would think of him.
Thus was the last state of this love’s agony; while he laughed, bleeding inwardly, and met his traducers on a hundred points of wit.
He had thought, now and then in his prostrate moments, that if he could only once trace home the shadow, he might find it to be, after all, no better than a black-mailing ghost. Supposing good fortune had attended her dismissal? It might; and he have saddled his conscience with a self-invoked incubus. Why not set himself to discover?
He dared not—that was the truth. He was a coward there; he feared the answer. Better even the shadow, than the revelations possible of the thing that cast it. He dared not.
For this reason, and others, he avoided Turin in these days. He was in the city only at rare intervals of time, when officialdom compelled him. Once or twice on these occasions he happened across the Chevalier de France; heard him rail to others of the ingratitude of children. The man had never forgiven his daughter hermésalliance; but, nevertheless, in repudiating her, in refusing to visit her, he was only, had the truth been known, making a virtue of necessity. Madame’s self-emancipation had taken strict account of his share in the events which had made it peremptory. He had to answer for it, to a daughter strangely converted to new conceptions of duty; strangely altered in many ways. She made him a princely allowance—which he spenten prince; she would accept him at di Rocco only on her own terms, and to those he refused to subscribe. He would not submit to the part of a mere honoured dependant on her bounty, franked by her husband’s grace. She denied him any closer rights. Therefore he kept away—it was best for both of them—and maintained his individual state in the Via della Zecca, sneering to intimates of the niggardliness which any promotion to affluence was sure to find out in women, posing as an injured father, enjoying his independence arrogantly in his dull selfish way.
Cartouche longed to insult him—could, indeed, have found plentiful opportunity to do so, had not the fact of his beingherfather withheld him. The Chevalier, on the few occasions when they met, always scowled at him askance, as if to imply how he knew very well that to this bastard, thisfaux enfant, this royal favourite disappointed of his daughter, was to be attributed his own disfavour with the King. But he was let live, for the sake of her whom he traduced.
* * * * * * * *
And so the gay Prefect, with that death always at his heart, and the tongue in his mouth a sword to wound, stood up against the rising tide, fearless before its roar and babble. He was well served by his police—admiring thralls to his courage, his quick wit, his retentive memory. In these days there was not much of secret information, touching the moral health of his Province, which did not reach his ears. Thus, he early learned of Bonito’s visit to the Château, and to draw some odd conclusions from its sequel. Their fruit will appear in the course of things. In the meanwhile, it was observed by him that some curious retrenchments reported up at the great house dated from that visit, and were seemingly coincident with a look, as it were also of retrenchment, in Madame Saint-Péray’s beautiful face. It had to happen occasionally that he encountered the Lady of the Manor in the exercise of his duties; and, inasmuch as she always disdained at such times to acknowledge, or even to see him, he had ample opportunity for studying her expression. That was beginning to shape itself, he could not but think, on the lines of some gripping inward reserve. It were too much to say that it betrayed any confirmation of the Chevalier’s coward accusation; but certainly it looked pinched and drawn, as if the sweet sap in it were somehow souring from its freshness. He wondered.