XL
He said to Henriette now, stroking his mustache, and giving another of those dull, inscrutable glances:
“No!—the President of the Democratic Republic of France would neither be destitute of the power to strike his enemies or the ability to shower honors and rewards upon his friends.”
She dropped her white, deep-fringed eyelids, and said, almost in a whisper:
“True friendship seeks no honors, and is indifferent to rewards.”
Only that morning he had received a letter from another woman, young, beautiful, and heiress to vast estates. She offered him all her wealth. He was to use it as he would. She made no conditions, stipulated for no repayment. She was perfectly disinterested, just like Henriette.
And on the previous day an elderly person with two wooden legs, who had once been a popular actress in vaudeville, and who kept the newspaper-kiosk in front of Siraudin’s at the angle of the Boulevard des Capucines and the Rue de la Paix, had made a similar proposal.
“Monseigneur,” she had said, as he gave her a small gratuity in passing, “deign to permit a word?” She added, as Monseigneur signified permission: “See you, they tell me you are uncommonly tight for money; do not ask who they are—everybody knows it. And I am not so poor but that I have three billets of a thousand francs laid away as a nest-egg. Say the word, and I will lend you them—you shall pay me back with interest when you are Emperor of France.”
Kate Harvey and the newspaper-seller were more honest than the rest of them....
Kate had said:
“Look here, old pal, here are fifty thousand shiners it took me a heap of trouble to rake together. You shall have ’em to play with, only give me I.O.U.’s for a hundred and forty thou. And a title by-and-by, when you areEmperor,—something to make the proper folks at home twiddle their thumbs and stare.”
That was plain speaking. He understood that kind of bargaining. People who asked nothing wanted most in the long run.
“Undoubtedly,” he now replied to Madame de Roux, “friendship like yours seeks no return of favors. But the heart is relieved of its burden of gratitude in the lavish bestowal of these....” He added: “Not that obligations to you weigh heavily.... Yes, I have eaten the bread of your charity. That sum of twenty thousand francs—sent to me at the commencement of the insurrection—the twenty-five thousand forwarded to me here on the evening of yesterday—anonymously—like other sums that I have received from the same source.... Did you think I should not guess whose hand it was that traced the words, ‘From a Lover of the Violet, who longs to see the flower take root again upon the soil of France’?”
She faltered, careful that the denial should appear hesitating and labored:
“Monseigneur, you mistake.... I wrote nothing.... The money you speak of did not come from me!”
He shook his lank-haired head, and said in a nasal murmur:
“Do not deny it. The sheet of paper upon which the words were traced bore no signature, it is true, but the handwriting could not be mistaken. Or the perfume, that recalled so much when I pressed it to my lips.”
Her beautiful bosom heaved. Her eyes seemed to avoid him.
“My lips, that were more privileged once.... Shall I tell you what words broke from them to-night when they announced you? Ask de Morny, who overheard. He will tell you that I said: ‘Thank Heaven, she is not changed!’”
To be accurate, he had remarked to de Morny that night upon her entrance: “She is still charming!” and de Morny had answered: “And still ambitious, you may depend!”
It suited him that women should be ambitious. All through those years of intrigue and plotting their ambitions were the rungs of the ladder by which he climbed.
She looked at him full, and her beautiful eyes were dewy, and her white bosom rose and fell in sighs that, if not genuine, were excellently rendered. He went on:
“And yet you are changed. You were courageous and high-spirited—you have become heroic. That shot at the Foreign Ministry.... A colossal idea! When I heard of it I applauded the stratagem as masterly. ‘Who of all my friends,’ I wondered, ‘can have been so much a friend?’ Then your little message in Spanish was brought to me in London. I read it and cried out, to the surprise of de Morny and some other men who were sitting with me in the smoking-room of the Carlton Club: ‘Oh, that I had a crown to bestow on her!’ ‘Upon whom?’ they asked, and I answered, before I could check myself, ‘Upon Henriette!’”
She breathed quickly as the instilled poison worked in her. The fiery light of ambition was in her glance. He saw it, and noted that her dress of filmy Alençon lace and the style of her jeweled hair-ornaments were copied, as closely as the prevailing fashion would admit, from a well-known portrait of the Empress Josephine.... It tickled his mordant sense of humor excessively that a lovely woman should endeavor to subjugate him by resembling his aunt deceased. But no vestige of his amusement showed in his sallow face as he went on:
“But magnificent as was the service you rendered, I am glad that you have escaped the pillory of publicity, and the possible vengeance of the Reds. By the way, that young officer who proclaimed before the Military Tribunal, ‘It was I who gave the order to fire! Do with me what you will!’ is here to-night. I told them to send him an invitation. His father was a valued General upon the Staff of my glorious uncle. I desired that he should be presented to me on that account. Pray point him out.”
Then, as the lace-and-tortoiseshell fan wielded by Henriette’s little dimpled hand, loaded with gems which surely were not paste imitations, indicated a young and handsome man in infantry uniform, who from the shelter of a doorway was gazing at her with all his eyes and his heart in them, the drawling nasal voice said:
“He loves you!... It is written in his face.... And I can even wish that he may be happy.... Have I not my share of heroism too?”
“Monseigneur,” said Henriette, with an air of simple candid dignity, “in that young man you see a devotedfriend who is ready to give all, and to demand nothing in return.”
She had quite forgotten the kiss in the box at the Opera, and a good deal more besides. But when the Henriettes prefer not to remember an episode, it is as though it had never occurred. She continued in her soft, thrilling tones:
“Nothing save absolute trust: confidence such as he gives me. A few nights past he told me his entire history: I could not refrain from tears. He is young, as your Highness sees; handsome, as you have observed; heir-presumptive to the throne of a Bavarian feudal Principality and owner of a vast fortune. Well, the throne he is too scrupulous to claim, because of a fault in the line of succession; the fortune he has refused to accept because it was gained by what he holds to be an unjust claim. But if I lifted up my finger ... like that, Monseigneur....”
She laughed as she held the slender finger up, and challenge and meaning and promise were in her face, and the witchery of it, no less than that hint of gold piled up and hoarded, made even the Pretender’s dull blood tingle in his veins. He said, with brightening eyes and a tinge of color in his sallow cheeks:
“It might yet be worth your while to lift your finger up, Madame, although I have as yet no crown to share with the woman who shall bear my name.”
It was a name, at that psychological moment, that was not worth sixpence among the British bill-discounters, and at sight of which upon paper the sons of Levi and Manasseh morally rent their garments and threw figurative dust upon their heads. But it had a specious value, dangled as a bait before ambitious women; and here, he knew, was one....
To sway the mass of men you must have Money to give them. True, de Morny, Persigny and Co. could be pacified with orders for millions upon an Imperial Treasury that was non-existent as yet. But the rank-and-file of his filibusters and mercenaries must be paid in hard cash, and women always knew where to go for the shekels. Either they had independent fortunes, or their families were wealthy, or their lovers were rich and generous. Skillfully handled, stimulated by artful hints of marvelous rewards and compensations, Eve’s daughters, his confederatesand creditors, had never failed to serve him at his need.
That indomitable partisan and tireless intriguer, his cousin the Princess Mathilde, had poured her whole fortune into his bottomless pockets. Now, when his want was greater than ever, Mathilde was without a sou. Lord Walmerston’s last subsidy of three thousand pounds, a sum of humiliating smallness, grudgingly accorded, was dwindling rapidly. And money for the expenses of the campaign of June must be forthcoming, and at once.
The attempt on Boulogne had failed, because the tin cases of gold coins slung round the necks of the adventurers for distribution had held so little, and been emptied so quickly.... Money must not be lacking for the printing of millions of handbills and posters; for the payment of hundreds of electioneering agents, touts, and canvassers; for the bribery of thousands of electors who could not be coaxed into giving their suffrage—heaps of money would be required now.
Money! If one would be elected as Representative for the Department of the Seine, and the three other Departments that were to prove so many steps to the armchair upon the platform behind the tribune of the Assembly—money, money! If one would by bribery and corruption raise that same armchair to the height of an Imperial throne—money, money, money! Golden mortar, without which the house that Jack builds must topple at the first puff of wind, and resolve itself into a mere heap of jumbled brickbats. Money, money, money, money! And the little Corporal, at the lowest ebb of his fortunes, had scarcely been poorer than his nephew was to-day.
The uncle was not over-scrupulous, less so the nephew. His end of self-glorification justified every shameful means.
For him the harlot emptied her stocking, the wealthy saloon-keeper and ex-procuress poured out her tainted gold. To be mistress-in-chief to an Emperor, to flaunt a title in the face of prim Respectability, that was what Kate Harvey sought, and had, when his sun had risen. But the other women, lured on to bankruptcy and ruin by his dull magnetic glance and skillfully-cast bait of promises, saw hovering before their dazzled eyes—receding ever fartherinto the sandy desert of Unattainability—the bridal carriage of gold lacquer and mother o’ pearl, surmounted by the Imperial Eagle. The carved and gilded Matrimonial Chair upon the crimson bee-spangled daïs and the Crown of Josephine....
So, with the flutter of a fan in a jeweled hand, a few brief sentences interchanged, the glance of a pair of brilliant eyes and the dull, questioning look of a pair of fishy ones, at the dark, vivid face and lithe, erect figure standing in the doorway, Dunoisse was bought and sold.
If he had only known, when a little later he was presented to the Prince by Colonel de Roux.... But there was no expression in the vacuous eyes that blinked at him, hardly a shade of meaning in the flat toneless voice that said:
“I am happy in the knowledge, Bonsieur, that a young officer, the gifted son of a noble father, who is gapable of acting upon his own resbonsibility in a moment of national emergency, has been exonerated from undeserved plame—has met with gomblete rehabilidation at the hands of his suberiors and chiefs. Did I possess the influence once wielded by my klorious ungle, you would be regombensed as you teserve.”
For after this fashion did he misuse the French language: struggling as gamely as any German Professor to keep the g’s from turning out the c’s, the b’s from usurping the places of the p’s ... beset with consonantal difficulties to the ending of his life....
He bowed to the young man of high prospects and great possessions, and solemnly extended the gloved finger-tips of the small effeminate hand. Could it have been, despite his tactful negation of all influence, the hand that had shielded Dunoisse? Was it the hand that shortly afterwards obtained his promotion? One may suspect as much.
At that moment Dunoisse took the utterance for what it seemed worth. He looked into the puffy, leaden face, and as the lifeless eyes glittered back at him from between their half-closed shutters, he knew a base relief, an ignoble joy, in the conviction that Henriette could never have loved this man.
He was quite right. She did not love the man, neitherdid she love Dunoisse, or any other trousered human. Being a Henriette, she was the lover of Henriette.
True love, pure passion was not to be born in her then,—but long afterwards,—amidst dreadful throes and strivings unspeakable,—the winged child-god was to see the light. Across a gulf of seeming Death his radiant hands were to be outstretched to her. And they were to render her no flowers of joy, but wormwood and rue and rosemary, drenched with the bitter tears of expiation.