LXVI
When the porcelain clock upon the mantelshelf had chimed the hour, a cautious footstep had crossed the flagged pavement of the foggy courtyard. Dunoisse had not heard it—he had been listening to that speechless voice. But now that the stealthy footsteps traversed the parquet of the vestibule—stumbled over an unseen ottoman inthe darkness of the large drawing-room—threaded the next, and crossed the threshold of the green-and-gold boudoir, he heard it, with a creeping icy chill, and a rising of the hairs upon his scalp and body. He remembered that he had not shut the courtyard gate, or the hall-door behind him, upon this fatal night of revelation.... It occurred to him that some prowling night-hawk of the Paris streets might have entered in search of food and plunder, or that the intruder might prove to be asergent de ville, or the watchman of the quarter, or even a gendarme of the city patrol.... But when a large, powerful, well-kept white hand, with fleshy, round-topped fingers, came stealing about the edge of the partly-open door, and pushed it cautiously inwards—Dunoisse, with a savage leaping of the blood, knew—even before a tall, bulky figure loomed dark upon the threshold, seen against the brilliance and glitter of the boudoir—that the man who had left her had returned.
That the man was de Moulny he had never for one instant doubted. Now the muscles of his folded arms tightened across his breast like cords of steel, his keen face was set like granite, and a cold, fierce light of battle blazed in his keen black eyes. It was good to Dunoisse that this hour should have come, setting Redskin face to face with his old, treacherous enemy, stripping all pretenses from their mutual hate. The loaded pistol in the inner pocket of his coat gave him the advantage—supposing de Moulny unarmed.... But he knew how to equalize the chances.... They would toss for the shot, or throw away the Colt’s revolver. Men can kill men with no other weapons than their muscular naked hands.
In the first moment of his entrance, de Moulny—newly out of fog and darkness—blinking from the radiance of the boudoir, did not observe that the bedroom held any occupant besides the rigid, white form upon the rose-colored sofa. His light blue, strained and slightly bloodshot eyes went to that directly. His jutting underlip shook, a question was written large upon the pale, heavily-featured countenance. “Has she moved or breathed since I left her?” it seemed to ask, and the negative of her immobility wiped a latent expectation out from it. And then——
Then a purposely-made movement of Dunoisse jerked de Moulny’s head round. A sudden reddish flame leaped into the pale eyes as they took in the slender, upright figure in the rough gray traveling surtout, standing at the foot of the couch with folded arms.... And though de Moulny did not palpably start, yet his big jowl dropped a hair’s-breadth. A slight hissing intake of the breath betrayed his perturbation and surprise.
“Th’h’h!”.... And then in an instant the old de Moulny was back, arrogant, cool, self-possessed as ever. His blue eyes were hard as polished stones as they met the black eyes of Dunoisse. He said, pouting his fleshy lips, sticking his long obstinate chin out, looking arrogantly down his big thick nose in the old familiar manner:
“An unexpected return invariably leads to unpleasant explanations. But in the present case I design to make you none, further than that I came here by appointment.” His smile was intolerable as he added: “Not for the first time. And I will meet you when you please, and where you please. You have your choice of weapons, understand me—from ordinary dueling-pistols to a buttonless foil!”
Dunoisse, lividly pale and sharp-faced, looked at his enemy, showing his small square teeth almost smilingly, breathing through his nose rather loudly, just as Redskin had done upon the day of the boyish quarrel at the School. Even as then, he was conscious of being a little sick at the pit of his stomach: the sight of de Moulny, big and blond and brutal, his light-brown, curled hair and reddish whiskers glittering with fog-beads, his hard eyes bloodshot with the night’s excess, his immaculately-cut black frock-coat buttoned awry, its collar turned up to shield the bareness of his thick white bull-neck from the chill night air, its lapels dragged over the breast to conceal the absence of a cravat, his usually irreproachable trousers and polished boots dabbled with the mud of the streets, affected Dunoisse with a physical nausea as well as a malady of the soul.... To the picture of the libertine confronted by the grim mower in the midst of his garden of stolen pleasures, was added a touch of absurdity in the little white-papered, red-sealed chemist’s parcel, held with a certain air of fastidious helplessness between a finger and thumb of one of the large, white, carefully-tendedhands. And as though Dunoisse’s glance at this had reminded de Moulny of its destined use, he said, holding his head high, speaking through his nose, deliberately:
“Monsieur, since we have arrived at a complete understanding, it appears to me that delicacy and good taste should counsel you to retire, and leave me to minister to the very evident need of our lovely friend.” Meeting no response from Dunoisse, he added, with his insufferable smile, glancing towards the still sleeper on the rose-hued sofa:
“She swooned in my arms.... These delicate sensualists live hard—to put it brutally. ‘One must pay the piper,’ as the English say,—in the end,—for being perpetually attuned to concert-pitch.... And the servants had all been sent out of the way!... Imagine my predicament!... A senseless woman on my hands, and not another woman within cry.... Thus it was, that in my present, slightly compromising state ofdéshabille, I sallied out to fetch a surgeon—an excellent, discreet, and reliable person, who—as luck would have it—has gone into the country to operate upon a patient, and until to-morrow is not expected to return.... Failing him, I knocked up a chemist, who supplied me with these drops—warranted infallible”—he held up the little parcel—“adding some advicegratisas to treatment of the sufferer, involving—unless I err—friction over the region of that conjectural feminine organ, the heart....”
De Moulny, seeming bigger and more blond and brutal than ever, moved with his long, padding elastic step,—recalling the gait of a puma—to the sofa. Dunoisse, even quicker than he, interposed, and said, baldly and simply, speaking between his close-shut teeth, and looking straight in the other’s stony eyes:
“If you touch her I shall kill you! Take care!...”
“Oh, as to killing!” de Moulny said with a shrug.... But he did not carry out the intention expressed in that long, catlike stride. He moved to the hearth, where the wood-fire was glowing with a comfortable warmth that tempted him, and said, daintily picking up his splashed coat-tails, as he lolled with his heavy shoulders against the mantelshelf:
“Permit me to point out that your utterance savors of the dog in the manger. You have failed to revive Madame—andI am not to try. You would rather Death laid his bony hand upon that eminently lovely person than that I did.... Well!... Be it so!”
He shrugged with an elaborate affectation of indifference—even feigned to yawn. Dunoisse answered hoarsely, turning away his sickened eyes from him:
“Death has already touched and claimed her. She is Death’s—not mine or yours!”
De Moulny’s big jowl dropped. He shot into an erect attitude, dropped his coat-tails and made, rapidly and stealthily, the Sign of the Cross. His widely-open eyes, their distended pupils swallowing up the pale blue irises, seemed to leap at the white shape upon the sofa; and then relief relaxed the tension of his muscles, and his thick lips curled back in an almost good-humored smile. He said, in Alain’s old way:
“Nom d’un petit bonhomme!—but you are mistaken, my excellent Dunoisse!—fortunately most damnably mistaken, as it turns out! Even from where I stand, the quiver of an eyelid,—the stirring of a finger—the faintest heaving of the bosom I am not to touch, may occasionally be perceived. Use your own eyes, and they will convince you.” He went on jeeringly as Dunoisse, shaken by the furious beating of his heart, dizzy with the shock of the unexpected, and dim-eyed with newly-stirred emotion, moved unsteadily to the couch, and, stooping, noted the signs, faint but unmistakable, of reviving vitality in Henriette. “Aha! I am now enlightened as to the secret of your phlegm—your apathy—your air of fatalistic composure!—‘Dead,’ not a bit of it! She will live to dance over de Roux’s grave and yours, my good sir, and possibly mine.... But if she had been,” went on the big, blatant voice, with a scoffing gayety in it that set the still air of the rose-colored bedroom vibrating as though unholy wings had stirred it, “with that solid common-sense which she has found stimulatingly refreshing,—in contrast with the moonstruck vaporings of a person who, being present, shall go unnamed—I should have made myself scarce in double-quick time. For to be compromised with a living woman is sometimes sufficiently embarrassing, but when it comes to a——”
“Be silent—be silent!” said Dunoisse in the thick, quivering voice of overmastering anger. “Have you nosense of decency?—no manhood left in you?” he demanded, “that you mock and jeer at a woman who cannot even answer in her own defense? Our meeting cannot be too soon!—my friends will wait upon you in a few hours. Meanwhile, relieve me of your presence!” He pointed to the open door.
De Moulny, maintaining his position on the hearthrug, hunched his shoulders as though a shrug were too elaborate a method of conveying indifference. His solid jowl was doggedly obstinate, and a red light shone behind his pale blue eyes. He said:
“You have anticipated me—forestalled me, General, in pointing out that—to quote the old adage, ‘Two are company.’... Might I suggest that you should prove your own claim to decency and so forth by effacing yourself from a scene where—to put it obviously—you arede trop...! The equally obvious fact that your presence here will not conduce to Madame’s complete recovery, does not seem to have occurred to you. Face the situation. You took her from me—I won her back from you. A shameful struggle,” said de Moulny brutally, “a paltry triumph.” His thick lips rolled back in the contemptuous smile. “But be that as it may, the fact to be confronted, we have shared a strumpet, you and I!”
The words seemed so like a brutal blow in the white face against the sofa-cushions, that Dunoisse could not restrain an indignant ejaculation. De Moulny resumed, with the same intolerable coolness:
“Since neither of us will give place, one must listen to the other.... Whether Madame there hears matters very little to me.... There is very little of either delicacy or decency in the present situation. We might with truth be likened,” said de Moulny, “to a couple of dogs growling over a bone.”
He threw out his big arms and drew the air into his broad chest greedily.
“’F’ff! There is a certain relief in discarding conventionalities—in being, for the nonce, the natural man. For years, without a spoken word,—as men used before language was invented to swaddle Truth in—we have hated one another cordially, my very good Dunoisse. You had robbed me of a career—and though—when a rogue had come to me babbling the story of that trick of fencethat did the business, I had stuffed his jaws with banknotes not to tell—one does not forgive a theft of that nature.... I think you upon your side resented—with a good deal of reason—a silly oath I had exacted—an oath you had at last the common sense to break.Nom d’un petit bonhomme!I should have broken it ages before you did.... But at least you learned the art of succeeding without money.... There is not one man in a million who understands that!...”
He stuck out his hammer-head of a chin in his old way of reflection.
“I should have let you alone if you had not—for the second time—come between me and my desire. That day at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, when the pistol-shot.... Aha!” cried de Moulny, Dunoisse having winced at the allusion, “I see our disputed possession has told you the pretty little tale.... But it may be, with some embroidery of imagination (if she overhears what I say she will thank me for putting it so charmingly).... Possibly with some divagations from the rigid rectilinear of truth! For it amounts to this, that de Roux had borrowed from the regimental money-chest; the money had to be replaced, if unpleasant consequences were to be averted. And knowing me to be the most recent and infatuated of all her worshipers, Madame applied to me to make up the sum.”
His smile was an insult as his cold eyes went to the face upon the sofa. And an indefinable change seemed working under the rigid features, as one may see to-day in the partly-masked face of the anæsthetized patient outstretched upon the operating-table, a reflection of the torture caused by the surgeon’s dexterous knife.
“Perhaps she lied—as women will—and really wanted the money for her bonnet-maker or her Bonaparte,” went on de Moulny. “Still, I knew de Roux to be not afflicted with scruples—he had scraped by the ears out of even more questionable affairs. And I saw my chance, and got together the money.... One was a poor devil in those days—and thirty thousand francs meant much. And she took them—and threw me over. As one might have expected,” said de Moulny, dourly, “if one had not been a fool!”
“She repaid—” Dunoisse began in a strangled voice;and then it rushed on him that she had kept the money. His eyes fell in shame for her. De Moulny went on:
“Pass over that affair of the order to fire. Did it do otherwise than make your social reputation—smooth your path to possession of the woman I desired...? By Heaven!”—the speaker’s pale eyes gleamed, and he clenched his white hand unconsciously,—“when you lied with such gorgeous effectiveness before the Military Commission of Inquiry, I could have bitten myself, as patients do in rabies—knowing that I had been forestalled again! After that, your road lay open—your names were bandied from mouth to mouth all over Paris.... Your intrigue was Punchinello’s secret;shemade no mystery of it when we met. But”—the brutal smile curled the fleshy lips—“perhaps it may interest you to know that I was given to understand that your proprietorship was from first to last a question of Money. And that, supposing all those Widinitz millions had been mine to pour into de Roux’s insatiable clutches—Henriette would have been sold to a man she loved, instead of to a romantic weakling whom she despised and laughed at ... even from the first ... do you hear, my good Dunoisse?”
A hoarse sound came from Dunoisse’s dry throat. It deepened the ugly smile upon the sensual face of de Moulny. He said, opening and shutting one of his big white hands, with a mechanical, rhythmic movement as he went on, slowly, deliberately, pouring himself out:
“Why do men love women?” He added with an accent of utter contempt: “They are either fools or jades! Play with them—use them as tools—they can be edged ones.... But to love them—to set the heart on them—to stand or fall by their truth or treachery—that is not for a man of sense. When I loved Henriette—she fooled and flouted me.... When I had ceased to love, and only desired her—when the day came that saw hundreds of millions stored up under my hand at the Ministry of the Interior, I knew that my time had come—do you comprehend?” He rubbed his heavy chin reflectively. “She was more charming than ever—she wanted to find out how far I would go to get what I wanted—I suspected her of spying for the Count de Morny—I had long known her to be a tool of the Prince.... So I did not show her the keys of the Orleans strong-boxes—I did not even lether know where they were kept; but I made other concessions to her, concessions that I knew were harmless....” The pale, glittering self-satisfaction in his eyes was intolerable, as he added: “They served me excellently!—and for the time being pleased her just as well!...” He added, meeting Hector’s glance of loathing: “Possibly you think me a scoundrel?... I am completely indifferent to your opinion. To pursue.... She persuaded me to join the circle at the Élysée. We met at the suppers there.... You must know I am agourmetand a sensualist. Those suppers were everything one could imagine of a Regency. The corruption—unimaginable. The license—complete....” It was as though de Moulny smacked his lips as he added: “Yes!—the Élysée is the shortest road to Hell I know of.... But it was not until the night preceding thecoup d’Étatthat I—attained the supreme end I had had so long in view.”
He breathed heavily, and blinked his pale eyes in luxurious retrospection. Dunoisse drove his nails deep into the palms of his clenched hands, restraining the almost irresistible impulse to dash his fist in the evil, sensual face.
“Be reasonable, my excellent Dunoisse,” he heard de Moulny saying, in almost coaxing accents. “Quit the field—accept the situation—remove from the path the obstacle of yourself.... For Henriette de Roux has long been very weary of you!... Only her exquisite womanly insincerity—the characteristic softness of her nature—have prevented her from forcibly breaking her connection—has held the hand that would otherwise have administer to you the finalcoup de grâce.” He added, with his smooth brutality:
“Endeavor to understand that your foreign expedition has been arranged for you!—to conceive that the anonymous letter you previously received was considerately planned in the notion of opening your eyes. And receive from me the very definite assurance that where you once were ruled I am the ruler; and what you once imagined you possessed I hold and possess, and keep while it pleases me. For Henriette de Roux is my vice,” said de Moulny, dully flushed now, and with his heavy face quivering. “No other living woman has such fragrance and savor, such daring originality in the conception of sheerevil.... You have never appreciated or understood her! You were the peasant set down to thepâtéof truffles—the village fiddler scraping out a country reel upon a priceless Stradivarius—the thistle-eating ass who sought to browse on tuberoses and orchids!... What?... Have I roused the devil in you at last?”
For Dunoisse, with the savage, sudden lust to kill, thrilling in every nerve of his supple body, had leaped at the bull-neck, as a slender Persian greyhound might have launched its sinewy strength at a great mastiff; and locked together in a desperate grip, Alain and Redskin struggled for possession of the prize.
The slowly-dropping, envenomed taunts, the gross sensual hints, the vaunted luxury of possession had kindled and fanned Dunoisse’s own cooling passion to a white-hot furnace-flame. What did it matter if Henriette were vile, as long as she remained what this man appraised her—a perfect instrument for fleshly joy? She was his by right of ownership—no other man on earth—least of all this big blond brute, conceited, fatuous, arrogant in very depravity—should have and hold her but Hector Dunoisse.
So Redskin and Alain struggled for possession of her, panting and swaying to and fro amidst the delicate toys and plenishings of the rose-colored room; crushing frail chairs and spidery whatnots under the weight of their grappling bodies; grinding the costly trifles swept from tables and consoles into powder under their reckless, trampling, muddy-booted feet.
A vivid recollection of the duel at the School leaped up in Hector as he listened to de Moulny’s thick panting, and saw the savage, livid face, its paleness now blotched with red, coming nearer and more near.... And suddenly he realized that his antagonist was the stronger.... The supple muscular strength once distinctive of Dunoisse had deteriorated; possibly from excess of pleasure—from excess of labor it may be.... He nerved himself for a supreme effort, but the superior force and greater weight of his antagonist were surely gradually crushing him backwards across the sofa-foot, with those big white hands knotted in a strangling grip about his throat.
Choking, he freed one arm, and with fiery circles revolving before his eyes, and a deafening sound as of many waters in his ears, felt for the revolver in the inner pocketof his gray surtout. He meant to use it.... He would have used it, in spite of his determination, but that with lightning quickness his enemy divined his intention, and captured within his own the weaponed hand.
“Truly, old friend,” said de Moulny’s voice, thickly and lispingly, “one must needs be prepared for tricks when one happens to fight with you....” He crushed the imprisoned hand within his own, smiling evilly, and as Dunoisse, almost with a sensation of relief, felt the cold circle of steel forced home against his own temple, de Moulny spoke again:
“Do you comprehend, my excellent Dunoisse, what plan has just occurred to me? It is very simple—just a little more pressure than this upon your trigger-finger—and you will have committed suicide.... When they find you—(an ugly spectacle)—the revolver will be grasped in your dead hand—there will not be the slightest suspicion of foul play attaching to any other person. Nothing will be involved beyond the minor scandal of Madame’s discarded lover having shot himself in her room——”
He laughed silently, puffing short whiffs of breath through his clumsy nose, his bulky body yet heaving with the exertion of the struggle, his big muscles still taut with the effort of keeping the upper-hand. His eyes were very cold, and smiled cruelly. He said, looking into the fierce black eyes that stared up at him out of the discolored face of the strangling man:
“—But as I wish to spare her an ugly spectacle, and further, because I am original in my methods of reprisal....”
The Colt’s revolver, strongly thrown, crashed through the thick rose-colored glass of the one window that was not closely curtained, and, without exploding, was heard to fall upon the soft damp earth of a flower-bed underneath. And the choking grip upon Dunoisse’s throat relaxed—the weight of his enemy’s bulky body ceased to crush him....
“Get up,” said de Moulny coarsely, “and—since you will not take your dismissal from me—take it from Madame there. Look!... She is coming to herself!... In an instant she will speak!”
It was true. Long shudders rippled through Henriette’s beautiful, helpless body. Her bosom heaved with shallow, gasping breaths. The eyes between the parted eyelids rolled and wandered blindly. She moaned a little, as though in pain.
“Awake, my white leopardess!” said the voice Dunoisse so hated. “Unclose your petals, my blood-red, fragrant flower of Sin! Mock your lovers no more with that white sculptured mask of chastity, my imperial Messalina!... Say to this poor wretch, awaiting your sentence in anguish: ‘Another lover is preferred before you.... You have had your night of rapture.... Depart! and let me see your face no more!’”
She only moaned, and feebly beat her head from side to side upon the cushions. Her eyelids trembled. Spasms, like shadows, passed over the ivory face.... Her mouth hung a little open, as her lungs drank the cold foggy air that poured in through the shattered window.... And a new idea struck de Moulny. He looked at Dunoisse, standing white and haggard and shame-stricken on the other side of the sofa. And he said, in a changed, less smoothly brutal tone, and without his hateful smile:
“This is a strange, unusual method of settling a dispute for possession, but unconventionality pleases me.... Understand, I am ready to abide by the issue, be it what it may—nor have I any objection to pledge myself by an oath....” He glanced at the wall beyond the bed-foot, where Dunoisse knew well there hung an ivory Crucifix. The figure was covered with a drapery of black velvet. And at the sight the banished light of mockery came back into de Moulny’s hard blue eyes.
“Ah, no! There shall be no oath, my good Dunoisse,” he went on, almost gently.... “Both of us have proved the brittleness of such things!... But listen, and if my plan appeals to you, accept it.... When——” He rose up, and turned his eyes to the sofa. He asked himself, musingly, with cold considering eyes studying what lay there: “Was I mistaken, or did I hear her speak?”
She had only moaned, and muttered something incoherent. De Moulny went on:
“Long years ago—when one whose name is too sacred to be uttered within these walls—lay in a swoon as deathlike and protracted as this”—his big hand motionedtowards the sofa—“the first name she uttered upon her recovery, was that of her youngest son.... And I knew then—though she had never made any parade of difference between us,—that of all her children she loved me best. Then listen. Whose name this woman speaks, his she shall be, soul and body! Is that agreed, my virtuous Dunoisse?”
The cold blue eyes and the burning black eyes met and struck out a white-hot flame between them.
“It is agreed!” said Dunoisse in a barely audible voice.
“Her husband is out of the running,—a scratched horse,” said de Moulny, sneering and smiling.... “He has battened on the sale of her beauty, and climbed by the ladder of his shame. Therefore, should those pale lips frameEugéne—it counts less than nothing.... We stand or fall by their dropping into the hair-weight balance of Destiny a ‘Hector’ or ‘Alain.’”
A silence fell. The ashes of the dying fire dropped upon the tiled hearth with a little clicking echo.... Three rivals waited by the moaning figure on the sofa in the disarranged, disordered bedchamber.... De Moulny, and Dunoisse, and Another Whose Face was hidden by a veil....
“Ah, Jesu Christ!...”
The Name came from the pale lips of Henriette in a sighing whisper. Then silence fell again like a black velvet pall.... Dunoisse and de Moulny, the fire of lust and anger dead ashes between them, looked with awe and horror, each in the other’s face. And stronger and clearer upon the strained and guilty consciences of both, grew the impression of an unseen Presence, awful, condemnatory, relentless, all-potent, standing between them in the rose-colored room.
De Moulny spoke at last, in a shaking whisper, a strange light burning behind the eyes that were like polished blue stones:
“Do you hear?... She is God’s, this woman for whose body and soul we have disputed.... Christ has claimed her!... She is no longer yours or mine!...”
He thought he spoke to Dunoisse, but Dunoisse hadalready left the Rue de Sèvres behind him. With despair eating at his heart, and Remorse and Shame for traveling-companions, he had resumed his interrupted journey—he was speeding to the Pestilential Places of South-Eastern Europe to carry out the secret mission of Monseigneur.