LX
That wild night-ride through the beech-forest back to Widinitz, and the interview with his mother at the Convent of the Carmelites, was ever to Dunoisse the most unreal, the most strange of all those adventures that seemed as though woven upon the loom of Sleep.
He remembered his lost mother as so tall—yet, when the dark woolen curtains hanging behind the double grating that halved the Convent parlor had been drawn back, revealing the two brown-robed, black-veiled figures—the shape that had put its veil aside with a little, shrunken hand, and called him by his name—had appeared to be barely above the stature of a child.
Not in the haggard, ashen-gray face, closely framed in the conventual folds of white linen—its features pinched and drawn, its eyes almost extinguished as though with constant weeping—was there anything left that recalled in the remotest degree the lovely, beloved mother of the old, unforgotten days....
Only the voice, so soaked with tears, so changed from that of her son’s remembrance, retained tones that well-nigh wrought Dunoisse to a wild outbreak of weeping, though sometimes in the dim and sunken eyes there shone a transient ray of the dear light of old.
If she had shrieked, it would have pierced the heart less than her immobile and rigorous quiescence. Yet her trembling could not be controlled by any act of will. Between the visitor who stood upon one side of the double grille, and the brown-robed, black-veiled figure seated upon the other, a current of hot air might have been rising, the shape so quivered and vibrated and shuddered before his eyes.
Ah! could he have realized the wild conflict of emotions surging under the whiteguimpeand the coarse brown habit.... But if the weak body of Sister Térèse de SaintFrançois was shaken as a reed, her determination was immovable; her word was not to be gainsaid.
Never, never!—though the Plenum of the Federative Council should throw all its “Ayes!” into the scale that confirmed the females of the house of Widinitz and their heirs in the dynastic succession, would the nun-Princess consent to her son’s occupying the throne.
Saying the word so softly in her threadlike, feeble voice, her “Never!” reared between Hector and the hereditary dignities a Titanic wall of rock, that no tempered tool might pierce, no fulminate shatter and blast.
So it was quashed and ended, the vexed question of the Claim of Succession. And Dunoisse drew breath with almost a sensation of relief. Of reproach there was not a shadow in her voice or expression. She had not heard—possibly she had not heard?—that her son had not lacked a companion on his journey. Those scathing reproaches of the Archbishop’s were not to be voiced again by Sister Térèse. She spoke of the Marshal—asked of his health? Their son felt himself flushing guiltily in the sheer inability to reply with authority. Who knew less of Achille Dunoisse, well or ill, jaundiced or jovial, gouty or in good fettle, than the son he had begotten? Tardy Conscience, waking from a nodding sleep in the saddle, dug both spurs rowel-deep in Dunoisse’s smart sides. His eyes shunned the sunken eyes that questioned with such desperate eagerness, belying the sparse, meager utterance, the carefully colorless tone. He stammered a conventional reply.
“You will give him a message from me, when you return to him,” she said, and dropped the faded curtains of her eyelids between them.... “Tell him that I who know him to be infinitely generous and noble at heart”—Dunoisse barely restrained a start of incredulous surprise at the new idea of nobility in connection with the Marshal—“tell him that I was never led by any act of his to doubt the disinterestedness of his regard. And say to him, that what he wildly dreams may one day be brought about, cannot and will not! That in the parched and dried-up skeleton you have seen here at the Convent there is no beauty left to covet. Entreat of him to think of his wife and your mother as one who has passed forever beyond the gates of this world.... For I have chosen to bedead whilst living,” said the thread-thin, trembling voice, “that by the Divine Mercy not only I, but others—may not taste of the Death that is eternal.” She added, almost inaudibly: “My strength is not great, Hector. I have suffered much lately.... Take my blessing now, and go.”
She rose from what was now revealed as a wooden stool, and as her son knelt down before the inexorable grating, she thrust a slender, wasted finger between the iron wires of the lattice, and lightly traced the Sign of the Cross upon his brow. How its touch thrilled him—the withered little finger that Achille Dunoisse had kissed with such exuberant rapture! Her son would have pressed his lips to it, but that she drew it quickly away. He said in a tone of bitter sadness, for the slight involuntary recoil had wounded:
“Ah!—you do well to shrink from me, my mother!—could you know all!...”
She put up her little shaking hand, and swiftly pulled her close black veil down, and breathed from behind its screen:
“I do know all.... It is not for me to judge you—whose veins were filled from mine....”
“Mother!” broke from Hector hoarsely, for her terrible humility appalled him. It was as though she had bared her scarred shoulders in his sight, and bent her frail strength to the scourge. She silenced him by a gesture, and continued, in a whisper so faint that it barely reached his ears:
“But if you can—atone!”
The veil was lifted, the sunken eyes met Hector’s.... What infinite tenderness shone in their dark gray depths. She said, in the voice that fluttered like a cobweb in the wind: “For there is but one road to peace, and that is the Way of Expiation. My feet have stumbled amidst its thorns for many years now.... Farewell! Pray for me! Tell your father I——”
Dunoisse had no more words of her. The little figure had swayed and wavered, the watchful Sister in attendance had stepped forwards and thrown an arm about it and pulled the curtain-rope with her disengaged hand. And the black woolen drapery had fallen, with a rattling of metal rings,—and Dunoisse as he stumbled from the parlor,blinded by rushing tears, knew that he had looked his last, in this world, upon his mother....
But the details of that brief meeting remained as bitten in with acid on the memory of the son. An elderly woman, who served the Sisters as portress of the Convent’s outer gate, contributed a touch or two to the unforgettable picture; speaking, in tones of genuinely affectionate reverence, as she guided the stranger, by the light of the evil-smelling tallow candle in her iron lantern, through divers stone-flagged passages previously traversed, of Sister Térèse de Saint François.
“Who has been our Mother Prioress now ten years, and a holier and wiser never ruled the Convent. And how she wept, dear, humble soul! when the decision of the Chapter was made known to her at Vienna. She implored the Mother-General, upon her knees, to spare her the shame of being sent back to rule her superiors in piety and obedience ... but no! it had to be.... Thenceforth—until her strength gave out—the tasks that were too heavy for the most energetic were performed by the Mother-Prioress, who was the weakest of all. And to this day, when compelled to rebuke a sister for a fault, she will first beg her forgiveness; or, when any specially heavy penance will be enjoined upon another by the Father-Director, she will meet such a one as she comes from the confessional and whisper:‘Tell me what it is, so that I may perform it with you!...’One might truly say our Mother has a zest for mortification, and an appetite for fasting that is never satisfied.” The portress, whose rosy cheeks and plump figure testified to a discreet enjoyment of the good things of the world, sighed and shook her black-capped head as she added: “Thegnädiger Herrknows that Saints are not made without suffering. Our Lord decreed it should be so. And—come the Last Day—if I can catch on to the skirt of our Reverend Mother’s habit—I dare to say I shall stand a better chance than most. Good-night,gnädiger Herr!—or rather good-morning!—for in another hour it will be day.” And the portress curtsied Dunoisse out into the clammy grayness that heralded dawn, and closed and locked and barred the Convent door. And as the stars paled and the wan moon reeled northwards as though sickened at the spectacle ofall the deeds that are done by men under Night’s sable canopy, Dunoisse and Remorse rode back through the shadowy forest roads, to the inn of “The Heron,” where waited Henriette.
She had not been to bed. She had paced the single guest-room of the posting-house all night, waiting in passionate impatience for her lover’s return. When she heard his step upon the uncarpeted stair, she ran to the door and opened it, and shut it when he entered; and threw herself before it, and opened the flood-gates of her fury, that had been pent up all those hours....
“So!... You have returned!... I presume I am expected to be grateful! I, who have spent a night of horror in this miserable place with a pair of frightened servants for my sole protectors and companions....”
“Are not von Steyregg and Köhler——?” Dunoisse began. She answered before he had completed the sentence:
“They have taken what conveyance they could procure, and posted on to Paris; and had I been wiser I would have accompanied them.... ‘Had I been wiser’do I say?...” She laughed angrily, plucking at the ribbon of velvet that confined her swelling throat. “One grain of sense would have saved me from the fatal error of accompanying you to that den among the mountains—that hot-bed of bigotry and intolerance—whence we have been—like a pair of lepers!—cast out.” Her teeth chattered, she struck her mouth with her little clenched fist as relentlessly as though it had been an enemy’s. “But you insisted,” she resumed—“I yielded to your persuasions.... Oh!—how hideously I have been repaid!”
His haggard eyes regarded her with a dreadful recollection in them. In her disarray and abandonment—the dishevelled hair, with its drooping curls and loosened coils, the pallor of fatigue that warred with the burnt flush of feverish excitement; the hinted lines and indicated hollows in the passionate, mutinous, changeful face that the merciless daylight revealed as it showed the crumpled silks and soiled laces of the dinner-dress that had been so fresh and dainty a few hours before—she was the Henriette of that morning of his return to Paris—save for the branding mark upon her throat. While in her disillusioned eyes heseemed almost plain, not at all heroic—desperately uninteresting—a poor creature stripped of all his princely garniture.... And she cried, in a voice unlike her own:
“For you have made me blush for you! Why could you not have gone out upon the balcony and spoken to the people? Where were your courage—your manliness—your strength?”
Dunoisse might have answered her: “With you!” but he bowed his head in silence under the lashing hailstorm of her reproaches. The springs of energy were dried up in him; he felt like an old man. She pursued, while her beautiful eyes shot baleful lightnings, and her little teeth gritted savagely:
“How can a woman of spirit love a man who is not manly? You will have yourself to thank for whatever happens now!... Where have you been all this night? What have you done? Into what new kennel of degradation will you next drag me? Or having gone so far, will you abandon your undeniable right, and seek no longer to obtain recognition of your Claim of Succession from the Council of the Federation? That you intend to do so I am quite prepared to hear!”
She paced the painted floor of the meagerly-furnished, bare inn guest-chamber, dragging the woolen rugs awry with her trailing silken flounces, spurning the spotted fawn skins with the toes of her little satin shoes. Dunoisse murmured, as he sank down wearily into the uncomfortable arms of a three-cornered elbow-chair of green-painted pine, upholstered in Berlin-wool cross-stitch, and turned his eyes from her:
“Dearest, my mother has put her veto on the affair—it is for her to decide—and I am bound to respect her wishes.” He added, in a breaking voice: “Would to Heaven they had been known to me before!”
“Your mother!—your mother!” she raved. “Is no one to be considered—no one obeyed but she? You fool!—your wife might meekly submit to be thrust aside because of your duty to your mother.... But not your mistress!—not a woman like me!”
She was beside herself—a beautiful fury—her lovely face distorted—her mouth wrung crooked with the bitter flood of invective, insult, upbraiding, that came pouring from it. He rose, and said, in a tone that was hostile andmenacing, while the cold light in his black eyes chilled and daunted her:
“When you speak of my mother, Madame, you will do so with consideration, and respect, and reverence. Let that for the future be understood.”
She laughed harshly, setting his teeth on edge with a sensation that was sheer loathing of her. She said, shrugging her shoulders, driven on to the verge of self-degradation by her resentment, and her contempt, and her weariness; willing to break her spell over the man forever, if only she might wound him sufficiently deep:
“With all my heart, Monsieur! But at the same time, accord to me a measure of the consideration, respect, and so forth you lavish so abundantly upon Madame there! I may lay claim to it, I fancy.... After all, we are in the same galley; though, let me point out,Iwas not chained to the bench by an irrevocable vow.” She added, as Dunoisse stared at her speechlessly: “Good Heavens! it is inconceivable that nobody has ever told you, when people are so malicious! Have you never heard that I was a novice in the Convent of the Vergen de la Soledad at Cartagena when de Roux saw me, and fell in love with me, and begged me to run away with him?...”
A strange sound came from the man’s throat. She pursued, cynically smiling in his horror-stricken eyes, playing her little hand as though she held a fan:
“Listen!... My father was killed when I was an infant. My mother died when I was five years old. The Sisters of the Soledad brought me up with the idea that I might perhaps become a religious.... I dreamed of the vocation, and prayed much....” Her pearl-white teeth gleamed between the mocking curves of scarlet. “Then—my dreams changed,” she said, “and my prayers became shorter. Except the Chaplain who confessed the nuns and the pupils, and the Bishop who visited us for Confirmations, no man ever set foot inside the Convent walls. Yet we elder girls constantly talked and thought of lovers, from little Dolores, who was twelve and had a hump, to great Carlota, who was seventeen, and ah! so beautiful.... And you may imagine whether or no Henriette had her visions too!... Yet I was quite content to be a nun.... I had had the White Veil of Reception from the Bishop on my sixteenth birthday ... my behaviorgave great edification to the Sisters, and his Lordship, and the clergy ... everybody said,‘That young girl will one day become a Saint!’And one night, a week later, I got over the garden-wall because a band was playing on the Calle Major—I walked down the middle of the great, crowded street, in my little old cast-off black alpaca Convent frock and blue ribbon.... I had left the habit and the White Veil folded on the pillow of my bed.... A French officer accosted me and asked my name. It was Eugéne—I thought him splendid!—perhaps he was—compared with the Bishop, and the Chaplain, and the gardener.... And—I never went back to the Convent of the Soledad. De Roux married me. Another man might have been less honorable.... Perhaps it would have been wiser to have waited, you may think?” She laughed jeeringly. “Some odd chance might have brought you to Cartagena. Some lucky wind might have blown you over the Convent garden-wall!”
The tale was a trumped-up one at least as regards the novice’s habit and the White Veil—yet her gift of deception lent it such reality that shame and horror struggled in the heart of the man who heard. To kill her—and himself—was an almost ungovernable impulse, but he drove the nails of his clenched hands deep into their palms, and moved stiffly to the door, and Henriette shrank away.... If he had seized her by the throat,—struck her and cursed her,—marred her beauty with merciless bruises,—stabbed her, even,—he would have won her back again, though only for a time.... But in conquering the mad desire to wreak such brutal vengeance on the woman, he lost her irretrievably.... And so went from her out into the clear morning sunshine, and fled blindly, hunted by all the devils she had roused, into the dew-wet forest, and flung himself face downwards amidst the tall golden bracken at the knees of a graybeard oak that spread its giant boughs and browning foliage as though to afford sanctuary to such hunted, desperate creatures,—and wept, with groans and chokings—what bitter, scalding, shameful tears....