The Project Gutenberg eBook ofA rogue's tragedyThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: A rogue's tragedyAuthor: Bernard CapesRelease date: August 2, 2022 [eBook #68667]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United Kingdom: Methuen & Co, 1906Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A ROGUE'S TRAGEDY ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: A rogue's tragedyAuthor: Bernard CapesRelease date: August 2, 2022 [eBook #68667]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United Kingdom: Methuen & Co, 1906Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer
Title: A rogue's tragedy
Author: Bernard Capes
Author: Bernard Capes
Release date: August 2, 2022 [eBook #68667]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024
Language: English
Original publication: United Kingdom: Methuen & Co, 1906
Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A ROGUE'S TRAGEDY ***
A ROGUE’S TRAGEDYBYBERNARD CAPESMETHUEN & CO.36 ESSEX STREET W.C.LONDON
First Published in 1906
Matteris but the eternal dressing of the imagination; the world the unconscious self-delusion of a Spirit. Everything springs from Love, and Love is the dreaming God.
Two figments of that endless sweet obsession stood alone—high on a slope of Alp this time. Born of a dream to flesh, they thought they owed themselves to flesh—a sacred debt. Truth seemed as plain to them as pebbles in a brook, which lie round and firm for all their apparent shaking under ripples. There, actual to their eyes, were the white mountains, the hoary glaciers, the pine woods and foamy freshets of eighteenth century Le Prieuré. Here, actual in the ears of each, was the whisper of the deathless confidence which for ever and ever helps on love’s succession. They loved, and therefore they lived.
Man has been for ten thousand ages at the pains to prove love a delusion, and still he greets a baby, and a kitten, and the nesting song of birds, and a hawthorn bush in flower, as freshly as if each, in its latest expression, were the newest product of his wisdom. But love is no delusion, save in the shadows which it builds itself for habitation. “Of dust thou art,” said the older God, “and unto dust returnest.” Yet man does not inherit from the earth, but from the imagination of that which created the earth and its life—the brain of the dreaming Love. Nor has he once, in all his æons of sequence, touched or borrowed from the earth. The seed which is himself was his mother’s seed, herself the seed of another who contained his seed within his mother’s seed within herself—a “nest”ad infinitum. Womb within womb, myriadfold, he proceeds from Love, his flight a heavenly meteor’s, his origin the origin of the star which has never been of earth until it falls extinguished on it. He draws from the eye of the dawn. He is the top section in a telescope of countless sections, each extending from the other, and all from all, and the last from the first. Close it, and it is he. Open it, and it is he. He helps to Love’s view of the dream of which he is a part. He is Love’s heir in dreams.
Or call him a bubble which rises in deep waters, and floats a moment on the surface and breaks. Whence came he? Whither vanishes? He is a breath; the expiration of a dream. The spirit of him looks out upon its phantom journey, as a traveller gazes from a coach window on the landscape. He is within it, but not of it. His destination is death, which is Love’s sleep. He is reclaimed to Love, of whom he was always a thought. As a thought he can never be launched again. He has played his part and is at rest in Love.
But his part, while he played it, was Love’s part. It was when he realised this most that the palpable world became a shadow, the solid ground a cloud, the sun and moon and hills but figments of a rapture of Love’s dream. It was then that he stepped exalted, knowing his fair succession—knowing of whom he was born and for what reason. He had been accredited Love’s representative.
So the man felt it here, walking on air. The mountains were more real to him than the rock he stood on. He dealt in dreams’ paradoxes. “I have never lived till now,” he said.
There was a little wind abroad which fluted in the pines, making sharp notes of their fragrance. One’s ears and nose were always at a conflict in the matter, whether to claim music for perfume or perfume for music. It was the same as to the battle between sun and snow, which fought to a compromise on the terms of chilly warmth or glowing coldness. Yet the name was of no importance in the bracing sweetness of the atmosphere they contrived together. One could not breathe there and think of breathing as a condition of life. The temperature was the temperature of a neutral ground between earth and heaven—of a present unreality and a real distance.
The two had just issued in company from a hillside chapel, a little lonely ark stranded on a shelf of rock hung up in a pine thicket, with rills of water tinkling all about it like the last streaks of a receded flood. They had sent forth their unreturning dove, and had followed it to find their phantasm of a new world budding in green islands from a lake of mist. Their feet seemed to sink in eternity. Only the bright heavens above them were actual.
A butterfly, like a flake of stained glass blown from the robe of the Christ in the little painted window within, came wafted after them as they emerged. From a loophole in the presbytery above, the face of the old sacristan leered out secretly, and, marking their going, grinned and apostrophised it in a fit of silent laughter. “You sha’n’t have him; you sha’n’t have him!” thought he, like the very sacristan of St Anne’s Chapel under the Hinne Mountain, of whom children read. Then they vanished in the mist, going upwards, and he sat down to chuckle.
As they ascended, the vapour sank beneath their feet, or was rolled away like bales to topple over the precipices. It had all been clear enough, bright palpable fact, before they entered the chapel. The swift change was nothing surprising in these resting-places of the clouds. Yet it seemed to them as if, returning to their world, they found it transformed beyond all precedent. But then, was not their rapture beyond all precedent? None had ever before loved as they loved—and that was true, because there is no such thing as a stereotype in Nature.
The whistle of a marmot straight ahead on a boulder startled them suddenly as into a self-consciousness of guilt. They saw an atom of mist cleave and close to the red flick of him as he vanished, and then the phantoms of mountains looking in upon them above the place where he had sat. It was like a priestly summons to love’s shrift. They stopped, as by one consent, and stood in scarlet confusion to falter out their confessions.
First love, I think, must reveal itself to fervent Catholics, as these two were, in a more poignant form than to most others. The wonder of it, as a divine absolution for shamefaced thoughts, as a divine authorisation of those thoughts’ indulgence to a natural end, must thrill their most sacred traditions of virginity to the marrow. Then they must first realise, on its human merits, the sacrifice of the Christ who died that men might live. They have worshipped the transubstantiation apart; now they are bidden to an intimate share in it.
That, perhaps, was why this man and woman were justified in feeling their state an ecstasy unparalleled. Love to them was a transubstantiation, such as no heterodox soul could ever know. They, to whom flesh had been a shame, were authorised, in a moment, of nakedness; they were surrendered, for their faith, to the paradise of mortal raptures. Henceforth, dear incarnations of a dream, they believed they owed themselves to flesh—while they trod on air.
Young god and goddess certainly they looked, poised on their misty Ida. The man was cream-pink of face, sunny of hair, blue and a thought prominent of eye. A fervour of soul perpetually flurried his cheek, flushing or paling it in flying moods. He had the air and appearance of an eager evangelist who had a little outgrown his spiritual strength. He would sometimes overbalance on self-exaltation, and pitch into an abyss of depression. He was tall and well-moulded as a whole; but his hips were unduly feminine. His colour, too, erred on the feminine side of prettiness. But he looked, all in all, a fit bright mate for the happy figure beside him.
She, as like a Dresden china shape in melting demureness, as sunnily contrived in pink and blue and gold, was only the other’s better partner by reason of eyes slightly bluer than his, of hair a shade more golden, of lips of a rosier dye on the soft pallour of her face. By the same token she stood as much nearer to womanhood as he stood from manhood—a step either way. It swelled in her, though she was but fifteen, as the milk-kernels swell in nuts. I think she was at the perfect poise, largeness in promise waiting on performance, shapely as Psyche when first stolen by love—a covetable bud, whom no mortal man could be above the desire to open with a kiss.
As this man, this good man, in a fury of love sanctified, desired suddenly and uncontrollably. She stood before him, her face a little raised, her lips a little parted—the prettiest figure between tears and rapture. Her hat hung on her shoulders by a blue ribbon looped about her neck, leaving her hair loose-coiled to snare the sun. Her dress was a fine smock, having half-sleeves tied at the elbows with ribbons, and a low bodice of rich blue velvet, open and laced in front, to clasp it about the middle. From her hips fell, in a fluting of Greek folds, a white skirt just long enough to show her ankles and silver shoe-buckles, and there were blue velvet ribbons fastened with diamond studs on her wrists.
So she stood gazing up at him, tremulous and fearful, unknowing but half guessing what she had brought upon herself, what outrage on her meek decorum. The shrine she had most cherished, held most sacred, was threatened somehow; and God, it seemed, was on the side of the enemy. For had not this man’s piety, sincere beyond question, been his passport, a divine one, to her heart? How could she have allowed his advances else? They were friends of but a few weeks; had met first in the chapel hard by, bent upon a common worship. Some accident, of stress in storm, had been his pretext for a self-introduction; and she?—she had loved the pretext because in this figure she had come to picture her ideal of virtuous manhood. And then words had wakened knowledge, and knowledge admiration, and admiration rapture—the desire of the moth for the star.
He had not spoken of love till this moment; he did not even speak of it now. But all in an instant he leapt to the appeal of her lips, and was fighting for their surrender to him. She struggled a little, uttering no sound. And presently he conquered. Then speech came, breathless and imploring,—
“Forgive me. What have I done? I have done wrong! My God! I couldn’t help it!”
He was the one to break away. She stood motionless, white as a figure of wax.
“Yolande!” he cried, “don’t look at me like that! Say you forgive me!”
She did not stir, but her lips moved.
“Did you do wrong? O! and I thought you knew!”
“I knew?”
He caught at his storming pulses and took a new step towards her. But at that she backed from him.
“No,” she said, “if you have done wrong, if for one moment you think you have done wrong, you must not stay here, not with me, any longer.”
Understanding came to him.
“No, I do not think it,” he said. “Why should I, unless to dream of my being worthy of you was a presumption? But that is too late an apology now. Yolande, will you marry me?”
She gave a sigh of heavenly rapture, and came and put her sweet hand trustingly into his.
“O, yes, Louis, if God will let me!”
He cried “Amen!” and caught her to him again in an ecstasy.
“Why should He not, my bird, my love, my dear, dear angel?”
“He must speak through my father first.”
He laughed in triumphant confidence.
“Your father? Ah, yes! But I do not come empty-handed—not altogether. It is little enough, dear sweet, to pay this debt; but in the worldly view such bargains are relative, and the world—forgive me—has not treatedyourfather according to his deserts.”
She conned his face with trouble in her eyes.
“No,” she whispered. “He is poor, but he thinks so much of me. What if he and you were to disagree as to my value?”
“Impossible. I will admit at once that you are priceless.”
He saw her distress, and tightened his hold.
“Little rogue,” he said playfully, “whatisyour value in your own eyes? What do you put it at?”
“The money in your pocket,” she said, smiling faintly.
“I believe that is no more than a couple of soldi.”
“I am yours for a penny, then. Give it me. Do you think I hold myself very dear? With that in my purse, yes. If the King wooed me with half his kingdom I should say, ‘Not even with the whole. I have a greater fortune in Louis’s penny.’” Her lip quivered. “But, alas!” she sighed, “it is not kings I dread!”
Moved beyond expression, he could only strain her to his heart, murmuring and adoring.
“Look,” he said presently, “you are trembling. Come and rest with me on this stone, and set your feet with mine at its base and say to me, as I shall say to you, ‘Here on a rock I plant my love, never to be displaced.’”
He helped her to the seat, then threw himself down beside her, and, raising his arm, was beginning in perfect gravity, “Here on a rock I plant—” when, without the least warning, there came a snap, and he went backwards heels-over-head into the grass, and lay there kicking like a delirious acrobat. Some demon of perversity, working with a wedge of frost, had once split a section of the stone near through, and he had sat upon that section.
The girl shrieked and ran to his help.
“O, Louis!” she cried, “art thou hurt?”
He did not answer with the poet, “I have got a hurt o’ the inside of a deadlier sort!” It is to be feared that both he and his lady were entirely lacking in the sense of humour. He arose crestfallen, but more mortified in his faith than his vanity. The two looked at one another tragically. Then Yolande suddenly burst into tears.
“O!” she sobbed, “what were we, to liken our love to God’s Church! He has answered our arrogance with a thunderbolt. Louis, you are all dusty and covered with prickles! Something in my heart tells me that I can never, never marry you!”
“Hush!” he said desperately. “We will go back to the chapel and pray for pardon. I ought to have looked to the stone first.”
But she only sighed miserably. “That would have made no difference. Do you think you are more foreseeing than He?”
He put his hand in his pocket.
“I have lost my soldi!” he said faintly.
That was the culmination. For an hour these two ninnies of a dream sought vainly in the grass for the missing coins. Then, together but apart, they went like lost souls down the mountain.
Verily, the laws canonical, like the lawyers of Westminster, “thrive on fools.”
Onthe day when Augias, Conte di Rocco, was raised to the Marquisate and made a member of the Government of Victor-Amadeus III., titular King of Sardinia and Duke of Savoy and Piedmont, an express was despatched from Turin by that newly-aggrandised nobleman to the Chevalier de France in his Hôtel Beausite at Le Prieuré, demanding in marriage the hand of the Chevalier’s only child and daughter, Yolande of the white hands.
No more than a day later the brass-new Marchese in person came treading on the heels of his amorous cartel (for, indeed, that seems the word for it), and had his formal interview with the solitary parent—for Yolande was long motherless. This happened in the year 1783, when a certain democratic simplicity was beginning to temper the extravagances of fashion. Monsignore di Rocco, therefore, had that much excuse for his rusty buckles, his cheap wisp of a cravat (in which a costly diamond burned), his hired equipage and single equerry, orvalet d’écurie, who was literally his stable-boy. Otherwise, as the great man of the neighbourhood and a suitor to boot, he might have been accused of that sorriest form of ostentation, which is for rank to parade its independence of recognised convention.
On the other hand, M. de France’s “Hôtel” was just a decent abode at the southern end of the village, rich in nothing but the magnificence of the view from its windows.
The Marchese was already expected, and certainly with no delusions as to the manner of his appearance. M. de France gave no thought to anything but his visitor’s expression as he advanced to meet him in the little “salle d’audience” into which di Rocco had been ushered. Of the two, even, the bearing of the Chevalier, though he was no more than a simple gentleman of Savoy, was the moreoverbearing in its self-conscious vanity.
He gave the other stiff welcome and congratulations on his exaltation. One would never have guessed that he knew himself very plainly for the mouse, sweating and desperate, in the claws of the great cunning cat which he took and pressed.
But the Marchese, with a high little laugh, broke through the proffered formality.
“Here, here, to my breast, father-in-law!” he cried, and seizing, strenuously kissed the Chevalier on both cheeks, verily like a cat in a sort of blood-lust.
The thin white face of M. de France pinked as he stepped back. His hollow eyes glared, his stern lips trembled, every fold of his threadbare dressing-gown seemed to flatten, as if the wind had been taken out of it. But an habitual self-discipline came to his aid with an acid smile.
“Pardon me,” he said. “You take me by surprise. The term is premature. You young men are so impulsive.”
The enormous sarcasm was in itself a confession of surrender. He would never have essayed it, save in the knowledge of the price he had at hand for acquitting himself of any and all such debts. For di Rocco was, as a matter of fact, old as times went, a scarred and puffed ex-libertine of sixty—a monster of unloveliness, moreover.
He was hideous as Dagon, in truth, half man, half fish, with strained cod eyes, a great wobbling jaw, and lips which had shaken themselves pendulous on naughtiness and laughter. Sordid, slovenly, unclean in mind and body, inordinate as a drayman in bulk and physical strength, a voluptuary, miser, and a fecundraconteur, his rank and wits had, through a well-filled life, been procurers to his inclinations at a nominal cost to himself. His parsimony, not his vices, had alone debarred him from taking that position in the State to which his wealth and social talents had else easily exalted him. At the same time it had always made of him a slumbering force, full of interest and potentialities.
The real power of wealth lies, indeed, not in expenditure but in possession. There is a sacredness about the crowded granary which affects even the starving. There is no fool so despised of the democracy as the spendthrift fool; and, when its time comes, it is the plutocrat it bleeds with an apology.
The Conte di Rocco possessed the tastes of a sybarite with the soul of a usurer. He lit his debauches with candle-ends, and could singe the paws of his tame cats with a most engaging humour whenever he desired chestnuts for nothing. The army of pimps, followers, led-captains and parasites which had always attended his ignoble career, cursed him eternally through jaws as lank as those of Falstaff’s ragged company. But it served him, nevertheless—on the security, it would appear, of phantom post-obits. Everyone hoped some day to have his picking from the carrion of that great carcase—even, it may be supposed, his physician Bonito, whose face in the meanwhile was like a cheese-paring.
And it was this paragon,grandissimofor all his imperfections, who had nominated himself to be the husband of Yolande, the loveliest young lily of Savoy.
How it came about was thus.
Sated, or merely whimsical, or, perhaps, as some said, in a sudden mood to withdraw himself timely from the world in order to “patch up his old body for heaven,” the Count had, about the end of 1782, retired upon his estate and grand Château di Rocco on the Flegère, with the intent, it seemed, to make it thenceforth his permanent abode. Here, having cashiered, or temporised or compromised with, or anything but paid off, the bulk of his disreputablevaletaille, he resolved upon the simple life—of candle-ends. And here he made the acquaintance of M. de France and his lovely child, with the former of whom he was able, moreover, in some fits of moral reactionism, to play the effective usurer.
The Chevalier was a creature of enormous pride, though of fortunes fallen to the lowest ebb. But he could never forget that his ancestors had lost Chambéry to the Dukes of Savoy, nor his present despicable position in a State whose highest attentions to him might hardly have compensated for the dignities of which it had deprived his family. He had served with credit, under the reigning King’s predecessor, in the wars of the Austrian succession, yet not with such compelling brilliancy as to enforce recognition from Victor-Amadeus, when that prince came to succeed his father. Neglected, impoverished, De France had withdrawn from a Court whose master was always more concerned with problems of ceremonial than of statecraft, and had retired into necessitous oblivion. Debts, contracted in the days of promise, came winging paper billets after him, and his situation was soon fairly desperate. His wife died, and he gave her grand-ducal obsequies. His child must always go attired in the right trappings of her rank. He called his villa an hôtel, and his parlour an audience-room. Through everything he was gnawed with an eternal hunger for the recognition which would not come his way. He loved his daughter as vain men love their rank, holding it supreme above emotion, humanity, a thing untarnishable but by contact with the base. The possibility of a consort for her in Le Prieuré was a thing not to be thought of. The fact that she was only fifteen and dowerless was inessential. She was Yolande de France.
And then one day old di Rocco asked for her hand.
M. de France was not so surprised as sarcastic. He knew all about the Count and his supposed reformation.
“You would do a final act of atonement, monsignore,” said he, “and dower a penniless girl?”
“I would do more,” answered the Count. “I would burn those bits of paper of yours.”
The Chevalier’s eyes glittered, but his face remained like hard ivory.
“Pardon me,” he said, “there is a difference in your ages.”
“Ah! monsieur, it would be obliterated when the rivulet mingled with the river.”
“You have lived fast.”
“The sooner to reach my redemption.”
“You are out of favour with the Court.”
“Pouf! Call it what you mean—black disgrace—and yet I tell you that I hold its favour in the hollow of my hand.”
The Chevalier’s eyes glistened more.
“I do not doubt your powers of propitiation; else, with grateful thanks for the proffered honour—”
“Exactly—you must decline so sinful a connection. Make it a condition if you will: reconciliation with the Government, and Yolande; or failure, and no Yolande. I am confident. I know myself and others. I will be Marchese in a week, and M. de France will have won his first step towards the position from which he has been too long excluded.”
“H’m!”
“Moreover, he will have acquired a devoted and generous son-in-law” (the Chevalier smiled), “whose first act will be to settle the reversion of his entire property on his own widow.”
“You are serious? And if I decline?”
“I shall leave everything—including bills, acceptances, securities, all the little pigeons waiting in mycasierto be plucked—to M. Gaston Trix.”
“Who is he?”
“I am very fond of him. They call him also Cartouche. What does it matter? The hawk is not named hawk in every country of the world. Here he is this—there that. Trix was Cartouche in Chambéry, Scaramuccio in Turin, anything elsewhere. His mother was English; he was born in London; his father forgot to leave his address. Yes, I am very fond of him.”
“Count, you have never yet honoured one of the sex with your hand?”
“Alas! it has lacked cleanness.”
He held it out. It was obvious he spoke the truth.
“I have been a sad rogue,” he said. “It would be useless for me to deny it.”
The Chevalier put the confession by rather hastily. It would appear that his conscience may have resented its intrusion. It is such an advantage, after having realised a personal ambition, to be able to say, “I knew nothing of any moral objection until too late.” But that is just what some queer providence or fatality will never give one the opportunity of asserting. He flushed a little and said, with a stiff air of demand,—
“Monsignore, what attracts you in my daughter?”
The powerful oldroué’sface became a mere leering slop of roguery. There was the picture, for anyone who cared to consider it, of concupiscence in its dotage. He had come, in the very exhaustion of his faculties, upon an unheard-of stimulant of loveliness; but sacred, and the more appetising for being so. Any sacrifice was worth to gain this ante-room to heaven. He felt once more the poignant ecstasies of hunger and thirst, he whose sense of surfeit had seemed confirmed to everlastingness. There is no need to enlarge upon his state.
“Ah, monsieur!” he said, “can you, who live in daily contemplation of such perfection, ask? Believe me, the question alone is the riddle; the answer possesses a thousand tongues of rapture and adoration. Would I could speak in them all, that I might ease my breast of this load of undelivered homage which stifles it. I swear, on my honour, there is no interpreter between earth and paradise but Yolande. You will bestow her on me—conditionally?”
M. de France didn’t see, or wouldn’t see, that he was being bribed. There is a point of magnificence, perhaps, above which corruption is elevated to sublimity. What earthly sacrifices can approach the gifts with which the gods reward them? He actually smiled, wintrily but condescendingly, on the other’s enthusiasm.
“Well, well, monsignore,” he protested; “what would your ardour say to a compromise?”
“There is none possible.”
“A betrothal, for instance, on the conditions you were good enough to suggest? I am flattered—it goes without saying—by your proposal. I admit myself distinguished, actually and potentially, in the connection. But the child is but fifteen.”
“I can never consent to it. It puts ten thousand obstacles of accident and caprice between me and my attainment of beatitude. Mademoiselle to-day is an angel, but every feather of her wings, so tied, would invite the cupidity of worldlings—those robbers of the heavenly roost. I know them well. I must, indeed, have the first and last right to protect her.”
“Must, Count? Is she yours or mine? I have said enough, and you, I think, more than enough.”
His brows and his mouth closed down. His vanity could be a very obstinate devil. Di Rocco felt that he had touched his limits.
“Ah! my friend,” he pleaded, “love’s best proof of itself is in outrunning discretion. I went, in truth, too far. Let me hark back to reason. I pledge you my credit that within a month my father-in-law shall be War Minister. Di Broglio wearies of his office, and waits but for an efficient successor. Give me, I entreat you, that warrant to enlarge upon your claims.”
“No, no, the poor child—scarce arrived at woman’s estate.”
“Then let her come to it, for me, unabashed. Make her mine ceremonially, and I swear on my honour to postpone the consummation for a year.”
“Ah! And if you fail?”
“I ask no pledge until my success is assured.”
The Chevalier gnawed his lip, looking on the suitor. He saw an old, fat, unlovely man, scarred by the claws of depravity (one of his eyes was bulging askew, as if actually half torn out by them). But the indelible stamp of rank and wealth redeemed the worst that could be in him. He told himself that it would be a high mission for his Yolande to make of herself the instrument for this monster’s salvation. It had come to be her only chance—and his. Besides, she was a de France, and surely eager for the restoration of her family’s rights.
He stopped there, by a strong effort of will, and pronounced—on his word of honour from which there could be no receding—his inexorable fiat.
“Accomplish what you promise, signore, and she is yours on the condition you propose.”
Nevertheless, he felt something as nearly approaching meanness as it was possible for his pride to feel when the Count returned triumphant with the glad tidings of his success.
“Bid mademoiselle attend me here,” he said coldly to the servant who waited on his summons.
Di Rocco rubbed his dry palms together, tingling through every nerve of his dishonoured old body.
And in the doorway, like Dorothea the martyr, stood the white lily of Savoy, wondering with wide eyes on her judges.
TheChâteau di Rocco stood well back, among pine woods, from the little village of Les Chables on the Argentière Road. Above it sloped the stony steeps of the Flegère; below were huddled neglected terraces, like dams to check the further descent of the house into the valley. It might, in its relation to the huge quarry which contained it, have been part of the mountain itself, a vast boulder torn away from its parent rock, and retaining in relief the form of the socket from which it had parted. Towers, pinnacles and walls, heaped up like an enormous ice-mould, seemed to have shaped themselves to the uproar of avalanches, and falling torrents, and the thunder of the wind which uproots whole hill-sides. Yet it was so old itself as to have withstood a legion of assaults and survived unshaken. It had been the stronghold of the di Roccos from the days when the passes of the Alps were a very active trust in the keeping of the border lords, and was still a formidable veteran of its stones.
Within, a world of sombre and tarnished magnificence witnessed to the hands of great mechanics of the past generations. Only the spirit which could minister to such traditions was debased beyond recall. What strain was responsible for its existing lord’s, who could say? The miser, like the comet, is a recurrent phenomenon, eccentric in his orbit.
The Château, all in all, was a savage, stone-locked, cold-harbour of a place, the teeth of whose very ghosts chattered as they walked its vaulted corridors. It was haunted throughout by sounds and whispers of cold—the boom of subterranean waters; the high rustle of snow; the growl of ice splitting in the great glaciers opposite. The wind whistled in its halls, lifting the skirts of the tapestry in a sort of stately dance, as if the phantom figures thereon were at a minuet to warm themselves. There was not a closet in all its recesses which might have been called cosy, nor a rat behind its wainscoting which had grown sleek on plenty.
Dr Bonito, private physician to the Count, was himself as waxy a spectre as any which inhabited there. His face was like a topographical map, with all its features in low relief—wrinkles for rivers, dull eyes for lakes, a nose like a rudimentary volcano. There was no expression whatever on it but what seemed to derive from drought and starvation, and no colour but a bilious glaze, which pimpled here and there into red. A death-mask of him might very well have stood for a chart of the dead moon.
The doctor was said to be a Rosicrucian, a member of that queer sect (then somewhat out of date) which mixed up alchemy with ethics, and thought to coin a millennium out of the alloy. Or it had thought to once. Rosicrucianism was not founded, professedly, to interfere with the polity or religions of States, but simply to pursue the True Philosophy—to “follow the Gleam.” Yet no secret society, I suppose, has ever failed, when success has brought it self-conscious of its power, to abuse its mission; and certainly Dr Bonito, as a latter-day Frater Roseæ-Crucis, distilled other and less perfumed waters than utilitarianism from his alembics. He was an empiric, in fact, and lived on the gross superstition of his employer—barely, it is true, but resignedly, since Di Rocco had promised him a legacy proportionate with his services in keeping him alive, and a very bonanza should he conduct him well over the Biblical span. For which reason Bonito scarcely resented his present treatment, because he counted every penny now withheld from him as a penny invested against his future.
Plumpness, under the circumstances, was hardly to be expected of him; but the doctor was so very thin that, when he hugged himself, his elbows seemed to meet in his waist. Mr Trix (as he liked to be called), sitting opposite at a little table, with a solitary candle burning between, laughed to see him so caress himself.
“You have no bowels,” he said, “consequently no hunger. What is the matter with you then, old Bonito?”
The physician, who, in order that he might cherish his numb fingers, had put down on the table an instrument which he had been engaged in correcting—an astrolabe so antique in construction that it might have dated from Hipparchus—answered, with a peevish wince of his breath,—
“Hunger, child? What dost thou know of the hunger of the soul?”
“Something,” said Trix.
“Something!” echoed the other. “Ay, the baffled appetites of one whose sensorium is but a mirror to reflect back into his brain the visible lusts of the flesh.”
Mr Trix laughed again, pulling at his long pipe. He had a reckless young dark face, jet-eyebrowed, winsome out of wickedness, and handsome enough to be a perpetual passport to his desires. His form, properly slim and elastic for the “blade” that he was, was “sheathed,” quite elegantly for di Rocco, in cloth of a fine black, and with a ruff of Valenciennes lace at its breast. A glass and a bottle of old wine stood at his elbow.
“True,” he said, “I deplore the loss of our late good company. And so do you, my Bonito, if for a different reason. I miss its penny-wisdom, and you its penny-fees. But however our respective souls may feel the present pinch, they would do well, it seems to me, to prepare for, even to provide against, a worse. I think Di Rocco looks very bloated and shaky of late, don’t you?”
“Ah! you wish him to die first!”
Bonito rose to his feet and went pacing vehemently up and down. Trix, watching him, said quietly,—
“You are very wrong. I wish the padrone no harm whatever—least of all the harm of this ludicrous misalliance.”
The physician stopped suddenly.
“It is quite true,” he said. “I know the conditions. We should both be disinherited—taken by the scruff and kicked out. The notary has already been advised.”
“What then? The stars are always common land.”
“Do you think so, my friend? There are no pastures so exclusive, nor so costly in the grazing. Why else have I served parsimony these long years, as Galeotti served Louis Gripes, if not for promise of the late means to their attainment. Let us be frank; why have you?”
“For fun,” said the young man, “or my duty to an older scapegrace. I don’t see the possibility of either in aregimenof Mademoiselle de France.”
Bonito, sitting down again and leaning his elbows on the table, searched hungrily the brown eyes which canvassed his imperturbably. Suddenly he dealt out a question,—
“M. Louis-Marie Saint-Péray?”
“Well?”
“Have you come across such a gentleman here?”
Trix nodded.
“Eh! you have?” said the other. “Well, what do you know of him?”
“That he is a young gentleman of France, of slender means, which he expends largely on impracticable enthusiasms.”
“Anything more?”
“That he is in Le Prieuré for the second time, to attempt the assault of Mont Blanc.”
“Ay, and what else?”
“Incidentally, that he will never conquer anything.”
“Why not?”
“Because he is a creature of fervid aspirations and lame conclusions.”
“Has he taken you into his confidence?”
“More; into his arms.”
“How was that?”
“He would cross the Glacier of the Winds without a guide; he fell into a crevasse which, luckily for him, his alpenstock bridged. But he could not get out until I pulled him. There’s the thing in the corner. Do you see it? I gave him my hunting-knife for it, the one with the jade handle and little rat’s head in-gold. Nothing would satisfy him but that we exchanged blood tokens.”
“I don’t doubt it. A fair exchange, and M. Cartouche all over.”
“Why, thou unconscionable hunks! didn’t he give me, for his part, what he had reason to value most in the world? ‘Use it for my sake,’ says he, ‘so that I may dream always of my two best friends going hand in hand.’ There were tears in his eyes. Do you think he will ever ascend Mont Blanc?”
“Maybe not. But his aspirations mount higher.”
“You mean to the de France. Ha, ha, old fox! you have not had me, you see.”
“He has confessed to you?”
“No, I swear. But the sacristan of Le Marais is an exuberant toss-pot, and apt to overflow in his cups. My information is from him.”
“What information?”
“Why, that miss and my friend have very much the air of being lovers secretly pledged to one another.”
“It is a fact. But how does he know it?”
“His chapel is their pious rendezvous, sweet souls. There they met first, and there they meet still.”
“It is well they take their loves to church—a good sign. He will want to make an honest woman of her.”
Cartouche grew suddenly and fastidiously articulate.
“I will beg you to bear in mind, Dr Bonito,” he said, “that M. Saint-Péray has made his honour my own.”
“That is admirable indeed,” answered the physician. “But has he introduced you to the lady?”
“No,” said Cartouche, irresistibly tickled for the moment. “There are limits even tohisfriendship.”
“You do not know her?”
“Not even by sight.”
“She is very pretty, Mr Trix.”
Cartouche, staring at the speaker a moment, took his pipe from his lips, which as always, when his mood grew ugly, seemed to thin down against his teeth.
“What are you hinting at?” he demanded low. “A pox on your innuendo! Out with it!”
The physician grinned unconcerned.
“Only,” said he, “that I hope, when you do see her, it will not make you wish to take your blood-brother’s place in the spoiling of di Rocco’s romance.”
Cartouche leaped to his feet.
“Beast!” he hissed. “If thou hadst as much nose as a barber could lay hold on, I would take thee by it and shave thy cursed throat!”
The other did not move.
“As to my nose,” he said, “it serves its purpose.”
“I don’t doubt it,” cried Cartouche. “The smallest vent is enough for slander. When have you ever known me wrong a friend in his love?”
“Never, indeed—where the wrong’s been expected of you. Perversity’s your crowning devil. You’ve suffered some losses for the pleasure of confuting your oracles, I know. Well, you’ve only to confute them here, to earnmygratitude, at least.”
“A dog to suggest such a villainy!”
“What! to you? Ho, ho! Have you ever heard of carrying owls to Athens? But let it pass. It’s all one if we are in accord as to the impossibility of this alliance between Mademoiselle and our patron, and the timeliness of our young mountaineer’s intrusion. You choose to believe that you will serve monsignore best by helping M. Saint-Péray to the lady. Well, believe it, and save us our reversions by an act of virtue.”
Cartouche, yielding to humour with a sudden laugh, yawned and stretched himself.
“After all,” he said indolently, “there’s no such sporting science as casuistry. Di Rocco is certainly an old bottle for this heady young wine; a villainous scarecrow to be asking for a patch of this bright new cloth. The pattern is out of suits with his raggedness, and calls for a seemly pair of breeches. We’ll save him his character in spite of himself.”
“It would be a veritable act of grace,” said Bonito.
“If we could only do him that good by stealth,” said Cartouche, relighting his pipe.
“La-la-la!” cried the physician, softly. “Why need we appear in the matter at all?”
“What do you mean?”
“It is only a question of terms with Le Marais—of sufficiently gilding the countenance it will give to a stolen union. They have no particular tenderness there for di Rocco, whose ugly countenance, for his part, is the only thing he has ever given them. The rest lies between you and your blood-brother.”
“I can bring a horse to the water—”
“Bah! he will drink. It is a Pierian spring. You will know when you see.”
“Shall I? And how about the lady?”
Bonito chuckled.
“For choice she has di Rocco!”
A voice at the door, little, and gloating, and jubilant, took up the word,—
“Di Rocco, di Rocco, di Rocco! What about him, you rogues? What about the knave of hearts, the gallant, the irresistible, the latter-day saint of love, who is going to be so blessed that he will need no physician, nor no runagate scamp to remind him of his days of unregeneracy?”
Bonito, risen, shot one significant glance at Cartouche, and then lowered his eyes as his patron entered.
“Monsignore’s suit has sped?” he murmured.
“Drawn by doves,” crowed the Marquess; “flown straight as a bee into the bosom of love, where it stops to hive.”
He crossed to the table, took up the bottle, cried, “Ha, you inordinate dog!” to Cartouche; slapped him on the back with, “A thief of a cellarer, go hang!” and blew out the candle.
“Who can’t drink by moonlight,” he cried, “is no chaste Diana’s servant. I’ll have to immure thee, dangerous rogue, among thy bottles.”
The moonlight, as he spoke, striking from a white window-sill, threw up all his features grossly. He looked like some infernal sort of negro, flat-nosed, monstrous-lipped.
“It was my candle, padrone,” said Cartouche, placidly sucking at his pipe. “I think I will light it again, and this time at both ends.”
But di Rocco, paying no attention to him, was flicking at the astrolabe on the table.
“This folly, Bonito,” he said. “I am at an end of it all. What did it ever foretell me but lies?”
The physician rescued his instrument gravely.
“Nay, monsignore,” he said. “It cannot lie, so its parts remain true. Yet I confess it strained my credulity to the extent this night that I was fain to bring it in and examine it.”
“And what had been its message?” sneered the Marquess, uneasy while he scowled.
“That monsignore’s death must follow close upon his marriage,” said the Rosicrucian, calmly.
Di Rocco tore the instrument from his hand and dashed it upon the floor.
“Liar!” he screamed. “I know thy tricks and motives. Did it foretell this end to them? Begone, thou ass inside a lion’s skin, lest I spit and trample on thee! Begone, nor look upon my face again!”
Without a word Bonito stooped and gathered up the wreck of brass, then, clutching it, walked softly from the room.
Cartouche pulled calmly on at his pipe.
M. Louis-Marie Saint-Peraylodged in the house of a M. Paccard, Le Prieuré’s respectable doctor, and an enthusiast in matters of geology. Everyone loved Louis-Marie, even, in a sweet, impartial way, the doctor’s only daughter, Martha, who, however, had other geese to pluck in the matrimonial market. The young man was so good and so good-looking, so pious, so enthusiastic and so sensible. Anticipating the boy-angel of “Excelsior,” he came storming the frozen heights, which, nevertheless, he was not to attain. But his failures made the true romance of his endeavours—in the eyes of women, at least, who do not admire the cocksureness which comes of success. As to the men, the rugged mountaineers, who were experienced in the natural limitations to their craft, they mingled, perhaps, a little contempt with their liking. It would be all very well to put their knowledge to school by showing it the way up Mont Blanc; but, in the meanwhile, aspirations were not deeds. They all, for the matter of that, aspired to conquer the great white peak, but their women did not applaud them for the wish. True, they had not, not one of them, M. Saint-Péray’s serene white face, and kindling blue eyes, and hair of curling sunbeams. Yet Le Prieuré was not deficient in manly beauty, however little it might derive from an exclusive ancestry of angels.
Le Prieuré, in Louis-Marie’s time, was a rude enough valley, and almost forbidden ground to the ease-loving traveller. That was one reason, perhaps, why the women so favoured this gentle stranger, who came to them on his own initiative out of the despised world of luxury. If he brought with him the traditions of tender breeding, he brought also its fearless spirit. It was something god-like in him to defy, in his frail person, that unconquerable keep of the mountains.
That was good in itself; but a closer appeal was to reach them on the occasion of his second visit. For it was then that he and Yolande met for the first time, and provided in their meeting the basis for a more poignant romance than any which had yet glorified him. Within a week, every wife in Le Prieuré thrilled in the knowledge of a secret fathomed only by herself.
One wet July morning Louis-Marie left the doctor’s door and turned his face for Le Marais, which was a little dedicatory chapel standing under pine woods on the lower slopes of the Montverd. It was there he had first come upon Yolande, the saintly loveliness, craving some boon of the sacred heart; and what better rendezvous could the two afterwards appoint than the little holy shrine which had brought them mutually acquainted with the sweetest of all boons?
As Louis-Marie walked up the village street his heart sang like a bird with joy. It was full of thankfulness to the God of orthodoxy, who was nevertheless the God of nature and of love. How easy and how profitable it was to earn approval in those great eyes! One had only to keep the faith of a little child, to ask no questions, to court no vexing heresies, and be happy. And so to be rewarded for one’s happiness, as witness himself twice blessed. He had done nothing but be good according to his orthodox lights, and for that virtue, which was instinct, here was he glorified in the affection of the loveliest lily of womanhood which had ever blossomed in a by-way of the world. He turned and breathed a laugh in the direction of the unsurmountable peak, hidden now within league-deep folds of mist. What was there to gain which seemed other than trivial in the light of his higher achievement? The mountain was shrunk to a mole-hill under that star, that altitude.
There was no wind; the wet dropped softly, caressingly; the fields were full of flowers. Louis-Marie could interpret the talk between them and the earnest rain. The patches of standing rye were stippled with poppies. He recognised why the supreme artist had touched them in here and there and nowhere else. Sacred love was the understanding love after all; he felt that he had been given the gift of tongues.
He took no sense of depression from the drowning mist. The gloom made the lamp of his heart shine the more friendly, smiling on all things in its consciousness of the ecstatic wings which were waiting up there to flutter to it in a little. He had no doubt of himself, or of his right to hold that lure to them. Perhaps he had no reason to have. He came, for all worldly considerations, of an old and stately family, and he had his orphan’s patrimony—nothing great, but enough to bring him within the bounds of eligibility in the eyes of a poor Chevalier. If he had consented hitherto to make a secret of his suit, it was because he could not find it in his heart to materialise the first virgin rapture of that idyll—to submit it to flesh-and-blood conditions. There was no other reason; or, if one was to be suspected in M. de France’s pride and aloofness, as gossip painted them, he would not admit to himself that he had been influenced by it. But, in any case, propriety, always to him the little thing more than love, without which love itself must lack perfection, demanded its vindication the moment he realised that it was in question; and he was now actually on his way, in fact, to entreat his love’s consent to an appeal to the paternal sanctions.
Half-way down the village street he encountered a young fellow, a friend of his, and one intimately associated with some past ambitions. This was Jacques Balmat, already the most experienced of mountaineers at twenty-two. His dark eager face and bold eyes showed in significant contrast with the girlish pink and blue of the other’s. He held out a handful of pebbles.
Louis-Marie was in no hurry. “For Dr Paccard, Jacques?” he asked, with a smile. The young man nodded his head.
“Some of them are rare enough, monsieur. I risk my life in getting them. But who would win the daughter must court the father.”
There was significance as well as sympathy in his tone. To him, also, there was a peak higher than Mont Blanc’s to attain.
“Very true, Jacques,” said Saint-Péray. “I hope we may both find favour.”
The young mountaineer nodded again.
“And in the meanwhile, monsieur, there is no favour imperilled by showing what resolute fellows we are. I was even now on my way to monsieur. This mist presages a sunny morrow. Monsieur, the mountain still waits to be scaled.”
“It must wait, Jacques, for me. There are rarer heights to gain. For the moment I hold my life like the frailest vessel, which it is my duty to protect from so much as a breath of danger.”
“Well, monsieur, that sounds funny to me. But then, manliness is my only recommendation. To win a great name out of venture—there is my chance, and now more than ever.”
“Why now, Jacques?”
“Monsieur has not heard? Dr Paccard has been appointed physician to the Château. Dr Paccard will be a big man presently—too big to countenance a son-in-law chosen from the people.”
“Since when has he been appointed, Jacques?”
“Since last night, monsieur, by the talk. It tells of how the monsignore’s erst familiar, the seer Bonito, came down into the village raging over his dismissal. And there are other whispers—of a libertine reformed; of changes projected at the Château. I know little of their import, I—only this, that Jacques Balmat will lose nothing by conquering the mountain. Shall we not join hands, monsieur, in essaying once more a triumph which would make all men our debtors—monsieur, to win or perish?”
But Saint-Péray shook his head.
“Another time, Jacques,” he said. “My claim to conquest must rest on lower deserts.Bonne chance, camarade!” And he went on his way, to meet the fate of the irresolute; while young Balmat went on his, to climb to his Martha by-and-by.
Louis-Marie was grown thoughtful as he walked on. Nature somehow seemed a little further from his knowledge than before; the talk between the flowers and the rain was like a whispered conspiracy; the dank air chilled him. As he turned out of the village into the wet meadows, which sloped gently upwards towards Le Marais, he started to see a figure standing by a little freshet as if awaiting him.
“Gaston!” he cried, with an irresistible thrill of guiltiness in his note.
Mr Trix wore, making a grace of necessity, a thick dove-grey redingote. His buckish little “tops,” which came but half-way up his calves, appeared scarcely soiled by the rain and mud. The smallest of black cocked hats was placed jauntily on his black curls, of which one, and one only, was privileged to accent the whiteness of his fine forehead. Over his head he carried a small Spanish silk umbrella, an innovation of such effeminacy that his daring it at all in the teeth of fashion testified to something in his character which was at least as noteworthy as his foppishness. Like the dandy wasp, with his waist and elegance and sting, there was that suggestion in Mr Trix of an ever-ready retort upon the rashness of his critics. Some men there are who carry swords in their eyes, and no one laughed at Cartouche the macaroni unless behind his back.
He came up to Louis-Marie, and took his arm with an assured frankness. His smile showed an enviable regularity of teeth.
“Yes, I purposed to meet you,” he said. “Are you in a hurry?”
His self-sufficiency somehow mended Louis-Marie’s.
“My business can wait,” he answered, “for a friend.”
Nevertheless he paused meaningly, as if that business were exclusive.
Cartouche laughed.
“Louis-Marie,” said he, “you have never yet asked me for my credentials.”
“You saved my life,” said Saint-Péray, simply.
“That is true,” said Cartouche. “But supposing it was for my own ends? I am the very hawk of opportunism.”
“You must have quick eyes indeed, dear Gaston,” said Saint-Péray, with a smile, “if you saw your way to turn me to account during those few moments of my peril.”
“Eyes of the hawk, Louis-Marie. Well, I saved your life, you say. It is certainly the only thing I ever saved, and therefore perhaps, like a spendthrift, I put a particular value on it.”
“And I too, Gaston, I assure you. There was never a time when I held my life so dear as now.”
“That is as I supposed, and the very reason why I am here to warn you.”
“What! is my life in danger?”
“That is as it may hit. If someone came to me and said, ‘Gaston, there is one who has it in his power to administer to you the potion of virtue, so that you shall wish to marry and live respectable,’ I should say that my life was in peril. But one man’s food is another man’s poison, and it is possible that you might welcome such a physicking.”
“Indeed I think I should.”
“Very well. Then there is a priest at Le Marais, I believe—a professional dealer in such potions. There is also, if I am not in error, the necessary other party to such a transaction awaiting you there. I would seize the opportunity, if I were you, to be made respectable for ever.”
“What do you mean?”
Saint-Péray’s face was grown suddenly a little white and stern.
“We are blood-brothers,” answered Cartouche, quietly; “comrades of a very recent sentiment. I honour the tie, despite—I saydespite—an older and, to me, more natural one. I mean no reflection upon anything but the blindness of two simplicities, living, privately as they suppose, in a little-high paradise of their own. Will you not be satisfied with a hint? Will you not believe in its sincerity, though I tell you that I should profit personally by its acceptance by you? You have chosen to take me on trust. I choose to vindicate that confidence by assuring you that my patron di Rocco has spoiled more idylls in his time than I can tell. He is in the way to ruin yet another, this time by the Church’s sanction; and his arguments, from the worldly point of view, are overwhelming.”
Saint-Péray was like a ghost now.
“Speak plain, brother,” he whispered; “or rather, answer only. Is the Marquess a suitor for the hand of Mademoiselle de France? Is that what you mean?”
Cartouche stepped back and nodded.
“He is an accepted suitor, Louis-Marie.”
The young man dropped his head with a shudder, as if he had been stabbed. But in a moment he looked up again, pale and trembling.
“So vile!” he said hoarsely. “She’s soiled in his mere thought! Gaston! My God! it must not be; it—”
He checked himself suddenly, gazed a troubled moment into the other’s face, then turned and went quickly up the hill. As soon as the mist had hidden him, Cartouche followed easily in his steps.
“I must see this folly out,” he thought. “Perhaps they will want a witness.”
The chapel of Le Marais hung in the clouds. Its stone walls streamed with rain. The sop and suck of it were the only sounds which broke the silence of the hillside. Cartouche stepped softly to the door and looked in.
It was just a dovecot, of a size for these two pious pigeons. They knelt side by side before the little gimcrack altar. The girl had been waiting there for the other to join her. A picture of the sacred heart transfixed hung on the wall above her head. It was thence she had sought to gather strength for the cruel thing she had to say.
Cartouche, standing without, looked through the crack of the door. He could not see Yolande’s face, for it was hidden in her hands. But presently, with a quivering sigh, she raised it, and, seeing her lover still bowed down in prayer, turned towards the entrance as if seeking light. So the young virgin of Nazareth might have turned, in great doubt and loveliness, following with her eyes the dimming messenger of heaven. And then she herself went to prayer again.
We have likened Yolande once before to Dorothea the Martyr, she who, when condemned to death for loving Christ, promised that she would send to Theophilus, the young advocate who had bantered her, a posy from the garden of her desires. Now, like that Theophilus, when a child-angel stood before him offering to his hand a spray of unearthly roses, Cartouche felt his heart suddenly constrict and, rallying, choke his veins with fire. Stepping softly back, he tiptoed round the end of the chapel, and gained the tiny presbytery which stood in a clearing above. The little house was deserted, it seemed, both of father and sacristan. No one answered to his low tapping. As he stood undecided, the voices of the lovers approaching from the chapel reached him. The door of the presbytery was on the latch. He opened it, entered, and stood hidden just within. He had no wish to eavesdrop; his heart was in a strange panic, that was all. He felt as Actaeon must have felt as he backed into the thickets.
The two came close up to his hiding-place; and then they stopped, and uttered for his shameful ears the tragedy of their lives. In the first of their meeting, amazed as yet, and unrealising the abyss which was fast gaping between them, they spoke in the soft romance, the old love-language of Savoy; but soon a woefuller cry wrung itself from the torture of their hearts.
“Garden of my soul! as the rose clings to the wall, so art thou mine.”
“I have clung to thee, Louis.”
“The sun hath welded us into one. Thy perfume is in me, as my strength upholds thy beauty. We cannot be torn apart but we perish.”
“I have climbed heavenwards resting on thy heart. My cheek hath glowed to thee by day, and at night, when thou sleptst, I have put my lips to the moon kisses on thy face.”
“Who is this thief that comes into my garden to steal my rose? A beast whom they liken to Gilles de Rais; a thing so foul that I would rather my rose were scentless than that he should boast to have shared in the tiniest largesse of her perfume.”
“Hush! he is the husband whom my father has chosen for me.”
At that Louis-Marie threw poetry to the winds, and seized Yolande’s hands, and looked with madness into her eyes.
“He may choose, but let me gather no submission from your tone. Yolande, we will go down together, and claim our older pledge and win his heart by tears. I had meant this very morning to urge you to that course. Why didn’t I before! O, why didn’t I before! I curse my own delay! I—”
“Louis!”
“Yes, I was wrong. ’Tis love’s, it seems, to damn. Come down, Yolande, before it is too late.”
“Listen, dear love; it is too late. It was a conditional promise, and the condition has been observed. What should my father know of you? His word is his bond, and he will hold to it.”
“He cannot know the reputation of this man. His breath’s a blight upon the earth. Why, even now—”
He broke off with a cry, and clasped his arms convulsively about her.
She was like a ghost, holding up her white hands to him piteously. Cartouche saw what perfect things they were, frail and slender, yet of a beauty to cradle all love. Her face, in its milky pallour, grey-eyed and scarlet-lipped, was like the face of some spirit tragedy flowering from the mists.
“Ask me nothing,” she whispered. “Tell me what to do.”
“Itell you?” he said, releasing and stepping back from her. He forced his trembling lips to resolution. “What does your heart say, Yolande? your stainless womanhood? your duty to yourself?”
“My duty to my father, Louis.”
“Now, God help me! Is that a note of wavering in your voice? This man’s rich and powerful, and I’m neither.”
“Louis, I’ll not upbraid you.”
“For duty’s sake to tie yourself to a leper! What abuse of authority will not women plead to justify their treacheries!”
“Will you break my heart? If I married him from duty, I should kill myself from love.”
“Hush, dearest! hush, my lily! I was a brute and coward. Forgive me. Yolande, Yolande! have I offended you beyond recall?”
“I forgive you, indeed. But, Louis, were it not better just now to think than kiss?”