VII
Followed upon the blow a sputtering oath from de Moulny, succeeded by a buzzing as of swarming hornets, as the various groups scattered over the exercise-ground broke up and consolidated into a crowd. Hector and de Moulny, as the nucleus of the said crowd, were deafened by interrogations, suffocated by the smell of red and blue dye, perspiration and pomatum, choked by the dense dust kicked up by thick, wooden-heeled, iron toe-capped shoes (each pupil blacked his own, not neglecting the soles—at cockcrow every morning)—jostled, squeezed, hustled and mobbed by immature personalities destined to be potential by-and-by in the remolding of a New France,—the said personalities being contained in baggy red breeches and coarse blue, black-belted blouses. All the eyes belonging to all the faces under the high-crowned, shiny-peaked caps of undress-wear, faces thin, faces fleshy, faces pimply, faces high-colored or pale—were round and staring with curiosity. The Redskin had challenged de Moulny! But de Moulny was his superior officer! The quarrel was about a woman. Sacred name of a pipe! Where was the affair to come off? In the Salle de Danse?—empty save at the State-appointed periods of agility occurring on two days in the week. In the yard behind the Department of Chemistry? That was a good place!
Meanwhile a duologue took place between the challenged and the challenger, unheard in the general hubbub. Said de Moulny, blotchily pale excepting for the crimson patch upon one well-padded cheekbone, for his madness was dying out in him, and he was beginning to realize the thing that he had done:
“What I have said is true: upon my honor! I heard it from my father. Or, to be more correct, I heard my father tell the story to M. de Beyras, the Minister of Finance, and General d’Arville at the dinner-table only last night.” He added: “My grandmother and the other ladies had withdrawn. I had dined with them—it being Wednesday. Perhaps they forgot me, or thought I was too deep in the dessert to care what they said. But if my mouth wasstuffed with strawberries and cream, and peaches and bonbons, my ears were empty, and I heard all I wanted to hear.”
The crowd was listening now with all its ears. That image of de Moulny gormandizing tickled its sense of fun. There was a general giggle, and the corners of the mouths went up as though pulled by one string. De Moulny, sickening more and more at his task of explanation, went on, fumbling at his belt:
“As to remembering, that is very easy. Read me a page of a book, or a column of a newspaper twice—I will recite it you without an error, as you are very well aware. I will repeat you this that I heard in private, if you prefer it?”
Hector, between his small square teeth, said—the opposite of what he longed to say.... “There can be no privacy in a place like this. I prefer that you should speak out, openly, before all here!”
There was a silence about the boys, broken only by a horse-laugh or two, a whinnying giggle. The piled-up faces all about, save one or two, were grave and attentive, the hands, clean or dirty, generally dirty, by which the listeners upon the outer circle of the interested crowd supported themselves upon the shoulders of those who stood in front of them, unconsciously tightened their grip as de Moulny went on, slowly and laboriously, as though repeating an imposition, while the red mark upon his cheek deepened to blackish blue:
“How Marshal Dunoisse originally prevailed upon Sister Térèse de Saint François, of the Carmelite Convent of Widinitz in Southern Bavaria, to break her vows for him, I have no idea. I am only repeating what I have heard, and I did not hear that. He went through a kind of ceremony with her before a Protestant pastor in Switzerland; and three years subsequently to the birth of their son, induced a French Catholic priest, ignorant, of course, that the lady was a Religious,—to administer the Sacrament of Marriage.” De Moulny stopped to lick his dry lips, and pursued: “By that ceremony you were made legitimate,per subsequens matrimonium, according to Canon Law.” He syllabled the Latin as conscientiously as a sacristan’s parrot might have done. “There is no doubt of the truth of all this; my father said it to M. de Beyras and the General,and what my father saysisso—he never speaks without being sure!”
Hector knew a pang of envy of this boy who owned a father capable of inspiring a confidence so immense. But he never took his eyes from those slowly moving lips of de Moulny’s, as the words came dropping out....
“Having made Madame his wife, and legitimatized her son by the marriage, Monsieur the Marshal instituted legal proceedings to recover the dowry paid by Madame’s father, the Hereditary Prince of Widinitz, to the Mother Prioress of the Carmelite Convent when his daughter took the Veil. Monsieur the Marshal did not think it necessary to tell Madame what he was doing.... Her determination some years later, to resume the habit of the Carmelite Order—provided the Church she had outraged would receive her—was violently opposed by him. But eventually”—de Moulny’s eyes flickered between their thick eyelids, and he licked his lips again as though Hector’s hot stare scorched them—“eventually he permitted it to be clearly understood; he stated in terms, the plainness of which there was no mistaking, that, if the Church would repay the dowry of the Princess Marie Bathilde von Widinitz to the husband of Madame Dunoisse, Sœur Térèse de Saint François might return to the Carmel whenever she felt disposed.”
Hector was sick at the pit of his stomach with loathing of the picture of a father evoked. He blinked his stiff eyelids, clenched and unclenched his hot hands, opened and shut his mouth without bringing any words out of it. The Catholics among the listeners understood why very well. The Freethinkers yawned or smiled, the Atheists sneered or tittered, the Protestants wondered what all the rumpus was about? And de Moulny went on:
“Here M. de Beyras broke in. He said: ‘The Swiss innkeeper spoke there!’ I do not know what he meant by that. The General answered, sniffing the bouquet of the Burgundy in his glass: ‘Rather than the Brigand of the Grand Army!’ Of course, I understood that allusion perfectly well!”
The prolonged effort of memory had taxed de Moulny. He puffed. Hector made yet another effort, and got out in a strangling croak:
“The—the dowry. He did not succeed in——?”
De Moulny wrinkled his nose as though a nasty smell had offended the organ.
“Unfortunately he did, although the money had been expended by the Prioress in clearing off a building-debt and endowing a House of Mercy for the incurable sick poor. I do not know how the Prioress managed to repay it. Probably some wealthy Catholic nobleman came to her aid. But what I do know is that the reply of the Reverend Mother to Monsieur the Marshal, conveyed to him through Madame Dunoisse’s Director, ran like this: ‘We concede to you this money, the price of a soul. Sister Térèse de Saint François will return to the Convent forthwith.’”
Hector groaned.
“It was a great sum, this dowry?”
“My father says,” answered de Moulny, “the amount in silver thalers of Germany, comes to one million, one hundred-and-twenty-five thousand of our francs. That will be forty-five thousand of your English sovereigns,” he added with a side-thrust at Hector’s weakness of claiming, on the strength of a bare month’s holiday spent in the foggy island, an authoritative acquaintance with its coinage, customs, scenery, people and vernacular. “The money,” he went on, “was bequeathed to the Princess Marie Bathilde von Widinitz by her mother, whose dowry it had been. My father did not say so; possibly that may not be true.”
Hector’s brows knitted. He mumbled, between burning anger and cold disgust:
“What canhehave wanted with all that money? He had enough before!”
“Some men never have enough,” said de Moulny, in his cold, heavy, contemptuous way. “What did he want it for? Perhaps to gamble away on the green cloth or on the Bourse! Perhaps to spend upon his mistresses! Perhaps to make provision for you....”
“I will not have it!” snarled Hector.
“Nor would I in your place,” said de Moulny with one of his slow nods. “I like money well enough, but money with that taint upon it!... Robbed from the dying poor, to—bah!” He spat upon the trodden dust. “Now have you heard enough?” He added with an inflection that plucked at Hector’s heartstrings: “It did not give me pleasure listening to the story, I assure you.”
Hector said:
“Thank you!”
The utterance was like a sob. De Moulny jumped at the sound, looked about him at the staring faces, back at the face of the boy who had been his friend, and to whom he had done an injury that could never be undone, and cried out wildly:
“Why did you challenge me just now for agaffe—a mere piece of stupid joking—about the bonnet of an old woman who snivels in a pocket-handkerchief? Do you not know that when once I get angry I am as mad as all Bicêtre? I swear to you that when I listened to that story it was with the determination never to repeat it!—to bury it!—to compel myself to forget it! Yet in a few hours....” He choked and boggled, and the shamed blood that dyed his solid, ordinarily dough-colored countenance, obliterated that deepening bruise upon the cheekbone. “I apologize!” he at last managed to get out. “I have been guilty of an unpardonable meanness! I ask you, before all here, to forget it! I beg you to forgive me!”
Hector said, in pain for the pain that was written in de Moulny’s face:
“De Moulny, I shall willingly accept your apology—after we have fought. You must understand that the lady of whose bonnet you spoke offensively is my old English governess, once my mother’sdame de compagnie.... If she dried her eyes when she looked at me it must have been because she was thinking of my mother, whom she loved; and—I must have satisfaction for your contempt of those tears.... And—you have refused to fight me because of my birth, you have told me of my mother’s sin, and of the sacrilege committed by my father. Do you not understand that this duel must take place? There can be no one who thinks otherwise here?”
Hector looked about him. There was a sudden buzz from the crowd that said “No one!”
De Moulny said, with his eyes upon the ground: “I understand that I have been a brute and a savage. The meeting shall be where you please. I name my cousin Albert de Moulny for my second, unless he is ashamed to appear for one who has disgraced his name?”
It was so terrible, the bumptious, arrogant de Moulny’s self-abasement, that Hector turned his eyes elsewhere, andeven the most callous among the gazers winced at the sight. Albert de Moulny, red and lowering, butted his way to the side of his principal, savagely kicking the shins of those boys who would not move. Hector, catching the alert eye of Pédelaborde, a fat, vivacious, brown-skinned, button-eyed youth who had the School Code of Honor at his stumpy finger-ends, and was known as the best fencer of the Junior Corps, gave him a beckoning nod.
“Sapristi!” panted the nephew of the man of teeth, as he emerged, smiling but rather squeezed, from the press of bodies, “so you are going to give the fat one rhubarb for senna? Ten times I thought you on the point of falling into each other’s arms! I held on to my ears from pure fright!—there has not been an affair of honor amongst the Juniors for three months; we were getting moldy! By-the-way, which of us is to prig the skewers from the Fencing Theater? De Moulny Younger or me? I suggest we toss up. As for de Moulny Elder—he is a bad swordsman—you are better than decent! I say so!... It rests with you to cut his claws and his tail. He is stronger than you....Saperlipopette!he has the arms of a blacksmith, but there are certain ruses to be employed in such a case—I said ruses, not tricks!—to gain time and tire a long-winded opponent. For example—saisissez-vous—you could stamp upon one of your opponent’s feet during acorps à corps, thus creating a diversion——”
“I am no blackguard ... whatever else I may be!” said his principal sulkily.
“—Or if you felt in need of a rest,” pursued the enthusiast Pédelaborde, “you could catch your point against the edge of de Moulny’s guard, so as to bend it. Then a halt is called for straightening the steel, and meanwhile—you get your second wind. It is very simple! Or—you could permit your sword to fall when his blade beats yours.... De Moulny would never do a thing like that, you say? not so dishonorable!Oh! que si!And I said these devices might be practiced in ease of need—not that they were in good form. For example! Youcould, if he lunges—and de Moulny’s lunge is a nasty thing!—you could slip and overbalance. Fall to the ground, I mean, point up, so that he gets hit in that big belly of his. It’s an Italian mountebank-trick, I don’t recommend it, French fencing keeps to the high lines. But—tiens, mon œil!—toskewer him like a cockchafer, that would be a lark!”
“Your idea of a lark makes me sick!” broke out Hector, so savagely that Pédelaborde’s jaw dropped and his eyebrows shot towards his hair. Then:
“Messieurs The Pupils!Return To Your Studies!” bellowed the most bull-voiced of the three Sergeants of the Line, appointed to assist the Captain-Commandant in the drilling and disciplining of the young gentlemen of the Junior Corps.
The deafening gallop of three hundred regulation shoes followed as Messieurs the Pupils surged across the parade-ground, mobbed a moment at the wide pillared entrance to the Hall of the Class-Rooms, then foamed, a roaring torrent of boyhood, up the iron-shod staircase into the gallery where the accouterments were racked, the brass-mounted muskets piled with a clattering that woke the echoes in every stone-flagged passage and every high-ceilinged room of the big, raw, draughty building.
Hector had prophesied correctly. Before evening roll-call a further, deliberate, purposefully-flagrant breach of propriety on the part of de Moulny had caused him to be relieved of the responsibilities, with thegalonof Corporal. The duel was fought beforereveilleof the following day.
Perhaps half-a-dozen cadets were present beside the principals and their seconds. Deft Pédelaborde had purloined a pair of foils from one of the wall-cases of the School of Fence. The combat took place according to the most approved conditions of etiquette, at the rear of the Department of Chemistry, whose thick-walled, high-windowed rows of laboratories harbored no possible observers at that hour. Everybody wore an expression of solemnity worthy of the occasion.... Pédelaborde was on his best behavior. As he himself said afterwards, “As good as bread.”
The buttons were ceremoniously broken off the foils. The opponents, stripped to their drawers, were placed: ... Hector looked at the big fleshy white body of de Moulny, the deep chest and barreled ribs heaving gently with the even breathing, and a shudder went through him. He was remembering something that Pédelaborde had said. And his blade, when measured against that of his antagonist, shook so that Pédelaborde could barely restrain a whistle of dismay.
“My man has got thevenette!” he thought, as de MoulnyYounger gave the word, and the duelists threw themselves on guard. Yet palpably the advantage was with his man. If not like Hamlet, fat and scant of breath, de Moulny Elder was too much addicted to the consumption of pastry, sweets, and fruit to be in hard condition. The contrast between his sallow impassive bulk, its blonde whiteness intensified by the vivid green of a vine whose foliage richly clothed the wall that was his background, and the lithe slimness of Dunoisse, the slender boyish framework of bone covered with tough young muscle and lean flesh, the unblemished skin colored like the red Egyptian granite, was curious to see.
A cat glared and humped and spat upon the wall behind de Moulny, brandishing a hugely-magnificent tail. Another cat growled and cursed hideously, below upon the grass-fringed flagstones. The rankness of their hate tainted the cool clean air. De Moulny, who loathed vile smells, and was qualmishly sensible of his empty stomach, sniffed and grimaced.... And a pale rose-and-golden sunrise illuminated the lower edges of long fleets of pearl-white, pearl-gray-mottled clouds, traveling north-westwards at the bidding of the morning breeze. The square tower ofSt.Étienne and the magnificent towering dome-crowned dome of the Pantheon beyond, shone out in vivid delicate aquarelle-tints of slate-blue and olive-green, of umber and warm brown.... The squat laboratory annexe, bristling with furnace-shafts, that made one side of the oblong, walled enclosure where the boys had met to fight; the big barrack-like buildings of the School, were touched to a certain beauty by the exquisite pure light, the clear freshness of the new day. And as the sparrows of Paris began to chirp and flutter, her cocks to crow, her pigeons to preen and coo-coo, and her milk-carts to clatter over her historic paving-stones—not yet replaced by the invention of Macadam—the horrible thing befell.
You cannot fence even with the buttoned foil, either for play or practice, without being conscious that the primitive murderer has his part in you. These boys, coming to the encounter half-heartedly, yielded ere long to the fascination of the deadliest game of all. The strangeness of the unmasked face, and the bare body opposed to the point, wore off. Hector and de Moulny, at first secretly conscious of their immaturity, painfully anxious to comport themselveswith dignity and coolness in the eyes of their fellows, mentally clinging with desperation to evasive Rules, forgot their inexperience, and rose above their youth, in the heat and strength and fury of that lust to slay.... And by-and-by de Moulny had a jagged bleeding scratch upon the forearm, and Hector a trickling scarlet prick above the collar-bone, and now they fought in earnest, as Man and other predatory animals will, each having tasted the other’s blood.
De Moulny’s wide, heavy parry, carried out time after time with the same stiff, sweeping pump-handle movement of the arm, had warded off the other’s sudden savage attack in quinte. He disengaged, dallied in a clumsy feint, made a blundering opening, delivered one of his famous long-armed lunges. Hector, in act to riposte, trod upon a slug in the act of promenading over the dew-wet flagstones, reducing the land-mollusc of the rudimentary shell to a mere streak of sliminess; slipped on the streak, made an effort to recover his balance, and fell, in the seated position sacred to the Clown in the knockabout scenes of a Pantomime, but with the right wrist at the wrong angle for the ducal house of de Moulny.
Your schoolboy is invariably entertained by the mishap of the sitter-down without premeditation. At Hector’s farcical slide and bump the spectators roared; the seconds grinned despite their official gravity. De Moulny laughed too, they said afterwards; even as the broken point of the foil pierced the abdominal bulge above the tightly-tied silk handkerchief that held up his thin, woolen drawers. A moment he hesitated, his heavy features flushing to crimson; then he said, with a queer kind of hiccough, staring down into Hector’s horrified eyes:
“That spoils my breakfast!”
And with the scarlet flush dying out in livid deadly paleness, de Moulny collapsed and fell forwards on the blade of the sword.