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 of
_piou-pious_ met 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 honor of 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.