XXXVI
The door shut softly. Those who had sought privacy in the gray boudoir had retreated discouraged. No more intruders came near as the ball went on. Pale faces had become burning crimson, flushed faces had darkened to purple. A fog of powder, shaken from the faces and bosoms of women, hung in the scorching, suffocating atmosphere, and made haloes round the wax-lights dwindling in gilt wall-sconces and chandeliers. Yawning servants renewed the candles as they were burned out. Not one remembered those in the gray boudoir. And while they flickered low in their silver branches, Henriette said to Dunoisse:
“Do you know the fortress of Ham?”
She continued before he could answer:
“Picture it as a hollow square of granite, set in themiddle of a vast, treeless, marshy plain. It has a huge round tower at two of its angles, a powder-magazine at each of the others. A sluggish canal crawls beneath the south and east ramparts, a river winds across the marshy plain, passing beneath the walls of the town. There is only one gateway, guarded by a square tower,—you enter, and are in a great courtyard surrounded by lofty walls, commanded by heavy masses of masonry, with water oozing from the blocks of stone that sparkle with crystals of salt-peter.... One building has grated windows—by that you know it is a prison. Another is the Barracks—a third is the dwelling of the Commandant.”
She said, with a strange wild laugh, and a look of darkling remembrance:
“I spent my honeymoon there, as a bride of seventeen, eight years ago. You have noticed that I am very pale, have you not? It is because all my roses faded and died in that chill cavern of dripping stone. My schoolfellows at the Convent, who used to joke about ‘Henriette’s red cheeks,’ would not have known me. Indeed, I seemed a stranger to myself.... The Tragedy of Existence had been revealed to me. I found it overwhelming.... Perhaps I find it so still, but I have mastered the art of hiding what I feel.”
She was playing a scene as the Henriettes alone know how to play it. This atmosphere, vibrating with allusions, hints, references to hidden griefs, quenched hopes and inward anguish, was the natural element in which she breathed. From the quiver of her lips to the heave of her beautiful bosom, every effect was thought out and calculated; no inflection of her voice but was intended to make its effect, as by an artist of the stage. And she went on:
“When a young wife lives by the side of a husband who is not young or amiable, or even kind—in a place such as I have described, something she must love if she is not to die.... Thus Henriette learned to worship a Cause, and to devote herself, heart and soul, to an object. That was the Restoration of the Empire. She lives for it to-day!...”
Her eyes were like green jewels burning under the shadow of her dusky hair-waves. Her voice thrilled and rang and sighed. “Oh, how I thanked you for those wordsI heard to-night! What man except yourself would have spoken them! Yes—women can be chivalrous!—women can live and die for a conviction! My terrible confession is made easier by your belief!”
She paused and resumed:
“I aided the escape of the Prince Imperial.... I conceived the idea, thought of the disguise—provided the lay-figure that, dressed in Prince Louis Napoleon’s clothes, lay upon the bed in his prison-cell, while M. Conneau kept guard over the supposed sick man. And I gloried in the success of the enterprise, and every louis I could obtain has since been spent in furthering the Imperial cause. Ah, Heaven! how poor its only hope has been!—he who should wield a scepter, he who should have dipped his hands at will in a treasury of milliards! How poor he still is, it pierces the heart to know. Yet how many have exhausted their resources in supplying that need of his: General Montguichet and M. de Combeville have been reduced to penury, Princess Mathilde and the Comtesse de Thierry-Robec are impoverished by their gifts! Noble, self-sacrificing women!—without envying I have emulated them.... You see these rubies that I wear? Who would guess the stones were false?”
She lifted into the light a radiant forehead. Had you been there to see and hear, you would have said with Dunoisse, “This is the voice—that is the face of Truth!”
And yet, if those rubies had been carried to some expert, obliging dealer in such gewgaws, say Bapst-Odier, late Jeweler to his Majesty, 111 Quai de l’Ecole,—they would—after that stately personage had screwed a microscope into his eye and submitted them to a brief but searching examination—have fetched a really handsome sum.
A fib, then?... Ah! but while Henriette told it she believed it. The tale had seemed to need that one artistic touch of the false jewels heaving on the loyal bosom of the fair Imperialist. And your successful, irresistible deceiver is that he, or she, who, for the time being, succeeds in humbugging and duping and bamboozling Self.
Thus, when Dunoisse, gripped by a sudden spasm of anger and contempt and disgust, muttered:
“Andhestoops to take alms—to subsist on funds sogathered! Why not rather sweep the streets?” she continued, in a voice that thrilled with genuine emotion:
“The Arabs tells you that rubies are drops of the hearts’ blood of lovers, shed countless ages ago, and crystallized into jewels by the alchemy of Time. Well, I would empty my veins to-day for the Empire, if need should arise!”
He looked at her and knew that she would do it. With what a spotless flame she seemed to burn. Sweet, heroic zealot!—adored enthusiast! What man, thought Dunoisse, could hesitate to pour his own life out upon the trampled sand of a political arena if by the sacrifice that white bosom might be spared the horrid wound!
“Judge, then, Monsieur, when it seemed, after long years, that the hour of Restoration might be approaching,—when the throne began to totter under the paralyzing weight of the Monarchy,—when I saw France, languishing for a new breath to animate, new blood to revivify her, stretch her weak hands towards the quacks and charlatans who crowd round her sick-bed,—judge if I did not thrill and pant and tremble for that absent one,—if I did not urge all those who recognize in Prince Louis Napoleon France’s rescuer and savior, to exhaust themselves in a supreme effort to bring him to her side. And knowing him in urgent need, deceived by English guile, betrayed by the specious promises of that powerful Minister who has only feigned to befriend him—I borrowed money.... Yes, it must be told....”
She stretched out the little hand and touched the gold lace upon Dunoisse’s sleeve, saying with a wistful smile:
“Borrowing degrades—even when one borrows from a woman. You see, I do not spare myself.... I borrowed from a man.”
Dunoisse’s small square white teeth were viciously set upon his lower lip. His black brows were knitted. His eyes were bent upon the carpet. He heard her say:
“A man who loved me.... Ah! what a coward I am, and how you must despise me! Who loves me, I should say!”
And the sentence was a knife in the heart of the poor dupe who heard. Words were wrenched from him with the sudden pain. He cried, before he could check himself:
“Who is the man?”
And then, meeting her look that conveyed: “You have no right to ask” ... he said with humility: “Forgive me! I was presumptuous and mad to ask that question. Forget that I ever did!”
She gauged him with a keen bright glance, and said with a noble, melancholy simplicity that was as pinchbeck as her abasement of the moment previous:
“You are very young, or you would never have committed so great an error. For if I loved him, I should never tell you for his sake, and if I lovedyou——”
She registered his start, and finished:
—“I should never tell you for yours. But as I have no love left to give to any man: as the fountains of my heart have long been frozen at their source—I will say this.... You and he were friends once, long years ago, before he became an Under-Secretary at the Foreign Ministry. A cloud has shadowed your old friendship.... A misunderstanding has thrust you apart. You know who it is I mean.”
A cloud had almost palpably come before Dunoisse’s eyes. Their black-diamond brilliancy was dulled to opaqueness, as he looked at Madame de Roux, and his lips, under the small black mustache, made a pale, straight line against his burnt-sienna skin. And from them came a grating voice that said:
“You are speaking of M. Alain de Moulny. I saw you together in the courtyard of the Hotel of Foreign Affairs a moment before the pistol-shot. And he——”
She stretched out, with a gesture of entreaty, her little hands, sparkling with the jewels that were such marvelous imitations, and yet would have fetched a good round sum at Bapst Odier’s.
“Wait—wait! Do not confuse me. Let me tell you in my roundabout woman’s way! He——”
She drew her brows together; moved the toe of her little gray satin slipper backwards and forwards through the silky fur of the chinchilla rug. How little of actual fact may be held to constitute the entire truth, is a problem which confronts the Henriettes at every turn of the road.
“We had had an appointment to meet in my box at the Odéon Theater that evening. M. de Moulny was to have brought me the money there. The disturbancesrendered it impossible that he could keep the appointment—the Ministry was guarded by troops—M. Guizot uncertain whether the King would support or abandon him—dispatches and messengers coming every moment, messages and dispatches every instant going out.... So I was to meet M. de Moulny in one of the more private waiting-rooms opening from the Hotel vestibule and receive the money from his hands. He is not rich—what younger son is wealthy? But where there is devotion—what cannot be achieved? He would do anything for me!”
She said, meeting Hector’s somber glance:
“I have heard it said that you are indifferent to women. If so, you are lucky. We bring nothing but misery—even to those we love!”
She swept her little hands upwards through the mass of curls upon her temples, with her favorite gesture:
“I was leaving the Hotel—where my husband was dining with M. Guizot—when the great crowd of people, led by the drum and the Red Flag, filled the Boulevard, and seemed as though about to charge the soldiers, who were drawn up along the railings motionless as statues, with their muskets at the present.... Upon a gray Arab, in command of the half-battalion was a young officer who interested me much....”
Invisible, red-hot needles pricked the listener all over. Then something icy cold seemed to trickle down his spine and escape through the heels of his spurred military boots. The speaker did not look in his direction. Her downcast eyelids fluttered, a faint mysterious smile hovered upon the eloquent mouth.
“He sat his horse like a young Bedouin of the Desert, or such a warrior of ancient Greece as one has seen sculptured on the walls of the Parthenon at Athens. His skin was the ground-color of an Etruscan vase.... Cold though I am—ah! you cannot dream how cold I am!—I have never been insensible to the beauty that is male.”
Under the covert of her eyelashes she stole a glance at the victim.
“I guessed who you were, of course!—you had been minutely described to me.... But it pleased me to pretend ignorance. I said, pointing you out to M. de Moulny: ‘That must be the officer who has newly joined us fromAfrica. His type is rare—at least in my experience. It is a reincarnation of the Young Hannibal. He has the rich coloring, the bold features, the slender shape.... De Roux must present him. He will bring me purple stuffs and golden ingots and the latest news from Tyre.’ And de Moulny answered, looking at you coldly: ‘He has millions of ingots, but he cannot give you them—unless he cares to break a vow.’ I said: ‘So, then, you know my handsome Carthaginian?’ He answered: ‘I used to, when we were boys at a military institute. It was he who induced me to give up my intention of entering the Army.’ I asked: ‘How, then, Monsieur?... Are you so easily persuaded? What means did your friend employ to alter your determination?’ And de Moulny answered, looking at me oddly: ‘A false step, and a broken foil!’”
The spider-web of fascination she had woven about Dunoisse was weakened, perhaps, by the mention of de Moulny’s name. He looked at Henriette with eyes that had become harder and brighter. He waited for the rest.
“Naturally, so strange an utterance roused my curiosity. I wanted to hear the story, if there is one? But M. de Moulny stuck out his underlip—perhaps you remember a trick he has;—and I thought: ‘Some day you shall tell me the rest.’ We talked of other things—standing there under the portico. Of ourselves, France, the political crisis that loaded the air with the stifling smell of garlic, of old clothes, of unwashed human beings—that filled it with those cries of, ‘Down with the Ministry! Long live Reform! Give us no more thieves in velvet!’ and drowned them in the bellowed strophes of ‘The Marseillaise.’ And as the crowd surged and roared and the Red Flag waved like a bloody rag in the light of their torches, I asked of M. de Moulny—I cannot tell you why I asked it.... Perhaps one is fated to say these things....”
Real emotion was beginning to mingle with feigned feeling. She lifted the chain of rubies that encircled her round white throat as though its light weight oppressed, and tiny points of moisture glittered on her temples and about her lips. She said, touching the lips with a filmy handkerchief edged with heavy Spanish lace:
“I asked of Alain, as the great crowd seemed about to rush upon the gates of the Hotel: ‘What would be, at thisjuncture, the greatest misfortune that could befall the House of Bourbon?’ He answered: ‘That your young Hannibal should give the word to fire!’”
She imposed silence upon Dunoisse, who was about to break into impetuous speech, by laying a little velvet hand upon his lips, as she had once laid them upon de Moulny’s. She kept the hand there as she said:
“Do not interrupt—it takes all my courage to tell this! I carry a loaded pistol upon all occasions—it is a habit I learned in Spain—in Algeria I found it of use. And I drew the weapon from its hiding-place,—I can hear my own voice saying as I did so: ‘One shot might hasten the crisis.—What if I fired?’... And M. de Moulny said: ‘No, no! You must not!’And I did!I pulled the trigger, and before the echo of the shot had died, and the salt blue smoke cleared from before my face.”
She was at his feet, weeping, clinging to the shaking hands with which Dunoisse strove to raise her, choking with sobs, burying her face upon his arm, wetting the blue cloth with real tears, entangling silken shining strands of night-dark hair in the rough gold embroidery of the Staff brassard on the Assistant-Adjutant’s sleeve.
“This is my place! Let all the world come and find me here! I do not care! What is humiliation if I can atone? Make no allowances or excuses for me.... Do not say: ‘It was a moment of madness!’ Think of me as your enemy and your destroyer! Ah! what a heart I must have to have smiled in your eyes, as I did when we met this evening, and not have cried out at the first look: ‘Pardon! Forgiveness!—you whom I have wronged!’”
She drew some sobbing breaths, and said, lifting beautiful tear-drenched eyes like pansies in a thunder-shower:
“Hate me for the cold, calculating selfishness—bred of the base desire to save myself from the taint of all that blood—the cowardly fear of the possible vengeance of Red Republicans—that led me to say to you: ‘Take the advice of a sister. Say that you were guilty of this crime!’ For it is a crime. It has defiled my soul with stains that cannot be wiped away.”
The supple red hands of Dunoisse tightened upon the little hands they clasped. He said, looking in her eyes:
“The pistol-shot was yours. Buthecried, ‘Fire!’”
She moved her lips soundlessly and nodded.
“I recognized his voice.... I should recognize it through the noise of battle—above all the tumult of the Judgment Day. It claimed payment for the false step—indemnity for the broken foil. Well, let him have both, and find his joy in them!”
He laughed harshly, and his grip was merciless. Yet she bore the pain of it without crying out. His eyes had quitted her face—they were fixed upon the portrait of the nun-Princess of Orleans. And as though some subtle, evil influence had passed from those proud voluptuous painted eyes into his blood, he was conscious of the shaping of a purpose within him and the surging of a flood that was to carry all before it and undo the work of years.
“But one joy he shall not have....”
He hardly knew whether his own lips or another’s had uttered the words. But he looked down and saw Henriette at his feet, between his hands. And as his eyes fell upon the creamy treasure of the fair bosom that heaved so near, Monsieur the Marshal, had he been enabled to look into the gray boudoir at that particular moment, would no longer have been able to say to Hector:
“You are an iceberg. You have Carmel in your blood!”
For the son of Marie Bathilde—carried away by a tidal wave of passion, such as had swept Sister Thérèse deSt.François out from among the pallets of the Lesser Ward of the Mercy-House at Widinitz, out of her nun’s cell into the wild, turbulent ocean that rolled and billowed outside the convent walls—was to yield, and take, and eat as greedily as any other son of Adam of the fruit of the Forbidden Tree.
How it matures, the first bite into the sweet, juicy pulp! He had seemed to Henriette a brilliant boy; obstinate and stiff-necked, scrupulous and absurd. Now she saw him transformed to a new being. Vigorous, alert, decisive, masterful, a man to be reckoned with, to be feared while you deceived. And on the boiling whirlpool of passion her own light fragile craft began to dance, and rock, and spin in ever-narrowing circles, as he said, with a strange smile that showed the white teeth gleaming under the small black mustache, but set no gay light dancing in the brilliant, cold black eyes:
“Have no fear. Try to believe me when I promise you,upon my word of honor, that no harm shall come to you from—this that you have done.”
He stooped and kissed the little white hands, and said to their owner:
“Blood on these exquisite hands would be a horror. Well! from henceforth I take their stains on mine.”
She faltered in real agitation:
“What are you going to do?”
The lovely lips were very near his own, as he said, still smiling in that curious way:
“I shall take the advice—not of a sister!”
She panted, shuddering closer.
“No, no! You must not——”
His eyes were fastened on her lips. Instinctively his own were drawn to them. His hot kiss would have burned them in another moment, but that a chill breath seemed to flutter at his ear, and in a flash, he saw the thing he was about to do in its true, ugly colors, and shame stung through and through him, and he drew back.
He had gathered of the fruit of Pleasure and plucked its gaudy flowers in the parterres where these things can be had at a price. He had emptied the frothy cup of Passion and paid its exorbitant bill. But though he may have coveted the mistress of another man, he had never yet desired his neighbor’s wife.
De Roux might be a reprobate and a libertine, but he was Henriette’s husband. And she was not the pure, unattainable planet, the chaste, immaculate divinity he had imagined her; but yet she was a wife. She felt the change in him—saw the fierce, eager light die out in his black eyes, and rose up, saying hurriedly:
“How good you are!—how good! I shall rely upon your promise. We must join the others now. It will not do to be missed!”
So they went out together and mingled with the spinning rout of dancers, as the neglected wax-lights burned out in their silver branches, and the waning moon peeped through the curtains of the gray boudoir. One pale ray touched the portrait of the witch-Princess of Orleans, grasping the Crucifix in the dimpled hand that had never scrupled to pluck Sin’s reddest flowers—treading crowns and scepters under the dainty, naked feet so many lovers had kissed as gayly they danced downwards along the hellward path.And surely the proud, sensuous eyes leered with wicked triumph, and could it be that the smile upon the painted mouth had given place to laughter?