LXII
Balls, dinners, concerts, receptions, and hunting-parties at the Tuileries and at Versailles,St.Cloud, and Compiègne, succeeded in dazzling rotation. Round the little study where Dunoisse wrought and planned and labored, driven on by a very demon of work, the active, busy, vari-colored life of the palace hummed and buzzed and swirled. Strains of music, gay or voluptuous, and sounds of fast and furious revelry came, midnight after midnight, to the ears of the solitary toiler—sometimes sounds more sinister than these.
The screams of a woman.... “Help! Mercy, for the love of Heaven!...” dying away into incoherent prayers and moans. The noise of a scuffle—the scraping of feet—the hoarse panting and muffled ejaculations of men engaged in desperate struggle—the thud of blows falling on something soft. Desperate outcries of “Murder! Treachery!... Monseigneur promised!... Monseigneur swore that I should be set free!” The revolver shots in the leafy palace garden, followed by a heavy silence not even broken by a groan. The man who heard never interrupted his labors for a moment. If the Prince-President chose to make the Élysée a place of execution, why,—stranger things had been done at the time of thecoup d’État. And the vices of potentates are privileged.... That woman’s voice crying for help was not the voice of Henriette.
She was as beautiful as ever. At the most splendid State functions, in the vicinity of her most brilliant rivals, her charms shone with undiminished fire. Men paid her court as ardently as ever, and her accredited lover was still a man keenly-envied. But in despite of this, and although his pressing duties at the Élysée debarred him from his place at her side in Society, Dunoisse had ceased to be jealous. So powerful an anodyne is absorbing mental labor, the shrill rattle of warning that used to sound from under every tuft of flowers or clump of grasses brushed by her draperies in passing, had fallen silent. Her paramour no longer dreaded a possible successor in every young and handsome man on whom she shed her smiles.
The green-eyed demon even left off taunting Dunoissewith de Moulny, still Representative of the Right for Moulny upon Upper Drame, and Secretary-Chancellor at the Ministry of the Interior; where the Count de Morny had been succeeded by M. de Persigny—less affected than his predecessor with scruples, you will remember, regarding the contents of a certain stately row of steel deed boxes that were crammed to bursting with palaces, cities, forests, villages, and farmsteads, and emblazoned with the arms of the House of Bourbon.
Rivers of plundered gold, derived from the sale of these great family estates, flowed away between Dunoisse’s fingers. None of it stuck to them, much to the surprise of Monseigneur. For Dunoisse wanted money; and the chief reason at length become known to his patron, who had a peculiar knack of getting at the secrets of men.
To repay the three hundred thousand thalers that had been the dowry of Sister Térèse de Saint François had been, ever since the hour of their meeting, the abiding steadfast purpose of her son.... He saw her sometimes in dreams, when he went home in the gray dawn from the palace, and threw himself down, half dressed, upon his bed to snatch a little fevered sleep. And he would seem to hear the tear-soaked, toneless voice saying that the only road to Peace was the thorny Way of Expiation.... He would feel again the light, thin touch upon his forehead, and would wake, crying “Mother!” as the black curtain blotted her from his sight. And at other times, when the man was bound to the revolving wheel of his endless labors, the diligent pen would be arrested as her dim wistful eyes came hovering between his vision and the page. Then he would drive her away, and fall to his work with desperate assiduity. For never, Dunoisse knew, would he be happy until he had earned and repaid every centime of that accursed dowry. That debt discharged, there would be a turn of the tide. De Roux would die; his widow would become the wife of her lover; there would be happiness, children, a home.... For these he spent himself, allured by the glitter of Monseigneur’s golden promises as other victims had been—would be until the end.
And in the fever of toil that consumed him, the man aged and wasted visibly. His black eyes lost their fire, his vivid coloring faded, his hair, no longer thick andglossy, showed broad streaks of gray. Lines graved themselves between his eyebrows, crow’s feet appeared upon his temples. The wings of the nostrils were pulled downwards by the unrelaxing, constant tension of the muscles of the mouth, as month after month Dunoisse sat diligently incubating the egg of Monseigneur.
It hastened matters sensibly, that physical decadence—that wreck of the man’s good looks upon the rocks of merciless mental toil. Society was charitable—Monseigneur was all kindness—but the betrayed husband and the supplanted lover are fair game, always: has it not been so since the beginning of the world?
Whispers began to circulate.... In the smoking-rooms of the great Clubs, in the social circle at the palace of the Presidency, Dunoisse’s rare appearances were provocative of the smartdouble entente, and the cynical witticism; flagged darts that, thrown without discretion, presently found their way to the raw quick under the thickened skin. The very day that showed the stupendous task all but accomplished, brought home to Dunoisse—by the medium of an unsigned letter in a delicate feminine hand—the knowledge that, in the estimation of his world, at least—he was held to have been supplanted by de Moulny. The closing sentence of the anonymous writer reproduced, almost in the very words, the unforgettable utterance of Henriette at the inn of “The Heron”:
“You only have yourself to thank for what has happened now!”
It seemed the very voice of his Fate speaking, and Dunoisse grew pale as ashes, and laid the letter down. He had been much weakened by his unremitting labors, and the drumming of the blood in his ears and the violent beating of his heart made him deaf to the quiet opening and closing of the door. But a voice spoke to him, and he looked up, with the sharp-fanged fox of desperate jealousy gnawing under his uniform, as it had possibly gnawed under that of de Roux, and became aware that Monseigneur had entered, and was looking at him with a somewhat sinister smile. He said—as Dunoisse stumbled to his feet and saluted—looking narrowly at the haggard handsome face, and smoothing his thick brown mustache with the little hand that was so like a pretty woman’s:
“So! We draw near the end! We have at last thegoal in view, according to the report I received from you this morning.” He added, as Dunoisse bowed in assent: “Accept my sincere congratulations upon the excellent service you have rendered, General-of-Brigade von Widinitz Dunoisse.”
His glance, as keen as dull and lusterless, had recognized the writing of the letter lying on the blotting-pad. He had calculated, and rightly, that to grant the coveted step at the moment of revelation would inconceivably intensify the torment of its sting. He did not delay to receive the halting thanks of the victim. He went on in his cool, mellifluous tones, showing a docketed paper in his hand:
“You mention at the close of your summary of the work that has been accomplished, that without diligent and painstaking revision of the maps of Eastern Europe at present in use at our Military School, and employed at our War Department, the coping-stone of perfection must be lacking still.” He added, “This, I will own, surprises me, our Government Survey Department being considered—I believe with justice!—as pre-eminent in skill and accuracy. How, then, do you suggest that the maps should be improved?”
“Monseigneur, the network of intelligence being complete,” answered Dunoisse, “a minute sanitary survey of the ground most likely to become the scene of militant operations should necessarily follow. Fever-breeding districts must be plainly labeled ‘Pestilential,’—doubtfully-salubrious regions must be indicated for what they are.... No detail should be neglected. Special qualifications—precise scientific knowledge will be necessarily required of the Staff officer who is deputed to carry out this mission.” He added, “For upon the health of the Army depends its fighting-power. One cannot win battles with sick men!”
“An excellent apophthegm,” Monseigneur pronounced, with that peculiarly amiable smile of his. He tapped his teeth thoughtfully with the paper in his hand. “As regards the Staff officer who is to be despatched on this—would you call it a perilous mission?”—He went on, Dunoisse having admitted it to be a decidedly perilous mission—“I know of but one individual possessing the necessary, indispensable qualifications, and he is yourself!” He added, turning the poisoned poniard in the wound:“Fair eyes will weep at your departure, my dear Dunoisse—lovely lips will call me cruel. But undoubtedly—you must be the man to go!”