XLI
A few days subsequently to that reception at the Hotel du Rhin, Dunoisse found his friend in tears, and asked the reason. She evaded reply, he pleaded for confidence. Then, little by little, he elicited that Henriette’s sensitive nature was wrung and tortured by the thought of that money borrowed from de Moulny.
Dunoisse asked of her:
“How much was the amount? I have earned the right to know.”
Her heart gave a great throb of triumph, but her eyelids fell in time to veil her exultation. She faltered, in her haste only doubling the sum:
“Sixty thousand francs.” She added, with a dewy glance and a quivering lip: “But do not be distressed for me, dear friend. The money shall be repaid promptly. I have still a few jewels left that were my mother’s. She will not blame me, sweet saint! for parting with her legacy thus.”
He assumed a tone of authority, and forbade her to sacrifice the trinkets. She pleaded, but finally gave in.
“To-morrow,” he told her, “you shall receive from me a hundred thousand francs, in billets of a thousand; the sole condition being that you send de Moulny back his money, and that from the hour that sees me break a vow for you, you swear to borrow from no man save me!”
She hesitated, paled, faltered. He kissed the little hands, and she gave in. Had he been older, and wiser in the ways of the world, knowing that money is power, and that he who holds the key to the cashbox can dictate and be obeyed, he would have been more frugal. As it was,being what he was, he gave liberally with both hands. For there is no prodigal like your poor devil suddenly become rich.
Next day, the dusty check-book that had lain for long years forgotten in the drawer of the lost Marie-Bathilde’s inlaid writing-table, as impotent for good or evil as the son of Eblis in his sealed-up jar, came out and went into Dunoisse’s pocket, and so to the Rue d’Artois. No good angel in the Joinville cravat and the short-waisted, high-collared frock-coat of a somewhat rowdy young Captain ofpiou-piousmet Hector on the steps of Rothschild’s Bank on this occasion.
He went in. The double doors thudded behind him; the polite, well-dressed Head Cashier looked observantly through his brazen lattice at the young man with the hard, brilliant black eyes and the face like a thin ruddy flame. He bowed with profound respect, did the stately functionary, when he heard the name of the owner of a deposit account of one million, one hundred and twenty-five thousand francs, and sent a clerk with a message to the Manager. And a personage even statelier, wearing black silk shorts—you still occasionally saw them in 1848—and hair-powder,—a being with the benignant air of a Bishop and a dentist’s gleaming smile,—issued from a shining cage at the end of a long vista of dazzling counters, and condescendingly assisted at the drawing of the First Check. Its magnitude made him smile more benignantly than ever.... The Head Cashier’s checking thumb quivered with emotion as it rapidly counted over a bulky roll of thousand-franc notes.
But, the happy owner of these crackling potentialities departed, the Manager returned to his golden cage, sat down and indited a little note to Marshal Dunoisse. Which missive, conveyed to the old gentleman’s residence by an official in the Bank livery of sober gray, badged with silver, made its recipient—not chuckle, as one might have supposed, but gnash his costly teeth, and stamp up and down the room and swear.
For the old brigand of Napoleon’s army, the indefatigable schemer for Widinitz dignities, had been proud—after a strange, incomprehensible fashion—of the incorruptible honesty, the high principle, the unstained honorof his son. The Marshal had gloated over the set face of endurance with which the Spartan youth had borne the gnawing of the fox Poverty, beneath his shabby uniform. And that thumping check on Rothschild’s cost him a fit of the gout. When his apothecary had dosed and lotioned the enemy into partial submission, you may suppose the old man hobbling up the wide, shallow, Turkey-carpeted staircase to those rooms of Hector’s to find them vacant—their late occupant removed to a palatial suite of bachelor apartments occupying the first floor of a courtyard-mansion in the Rue du Bac. A million odd of francs will not last forever; forty-five thousand English sovereigns—smooth, slippery, elusive darlings!—do not constitute a Fortunatus’ purse; and yet the sum represents a handsome golden cheese with which to set up housekeeping; though such sharp little gleaming teeth and such tiny white, insatiable hands belonged to the mouse that was from this date to have the run of Hector Dunoisse’s cupboard, that in a marvelously short space of time the golden cheese was to be nibbled quite away.
Henriette had carried out her tacit understanding with Monseigneur. She had lifted up her finger, and a golden plum of a hundred-thousand francs had fallen from the shaken tree. Do you suppose de Moulny had been paid? do you imagine that the Baal of her worship was to be propitiated with all that glittering coin?
Not a bit of it! For this Henriette, like all the others, had huge debts and rapacious creditors, the necessity of being always beautiful cost so much. And de Roux had his horses, gambling-losses, and nymphs of the Opera to maintain and satisfy and keep in good humor. And pious ladies, collecting at Church functions for the benefit of the poor, have been known ere now to slip their jeweled hands into the velvet bag, weighed down with the gold and silver contributions of the faithful, and withdraw the said hands richer than they went in.
The Empire was the religion of Henriette, and she made her collection in its interests tirelessly. If no more than a moiety of what she gathered clinked into the High Priest’s coffers, he did not know that—any more than those who had emptied their purses to fill the bag, so nobody was the worse.