For many months he had not crossed his father’s threshold. The great
courtyard bore a look of squalor, grass was springing up between the
flagstones; flaunting tufts of groundsel and chickweed were growing
in the green-painted wooden tubs containing myrtles and oleanders and
rhododendrons, that were ranged along the walls and on either side of
the flight of steps that led to the hall-door.
The hall-door stood open: Auguste, now gray-headed and stouter than
ever, waited with a low-wheeled open carriage that had succeeded the
high tilbury with the rampant mare and the tiny cockaded groom. A quiet
pair of English pony-cobs were attached to the vehicle. Hector stopped
to look at them, and speak to the old servant, then went into the hall.
The trophies of arms upon the walls looked dull and rusty, the
bronze equestrian statue of the Emperor was covered with a patina of
encrusted dirt. The black-and-white squares of the marble pavement
were in shrieking need of a broom and soap-and-water. Then, to the
tap-tapping of the two ebony-handled crutch-sticks that had succeeded
the gold-topped Malacca cane with the silk tassel, came Monsieur the
Marshal, heralded by a dropping fire of oaths.
He was much changed and aged since Hector had last seen him, but
bravely bewigged and dyed and painted still. He was wrapped in a furred
driving-cloak, despite the warmth of the September sunshine; his cheeks
were pendulous, his fierce eyes had baggy pouches underneath. And he
stumbled as he shuffled over the marble pavement in his cloth boots
that were slit with innumerable loopholes for the better ease of his
corns.
He stopped short, seeing his son, and the change in him was painfully
apparent. He was hurrying down the hill that ends in an open grave.
His morals were more deplorable than ever. The cook, a strapping
Auvergnate, was his mistress now, in lieu of an opera-girl or nymph
of the Palais Royal: and he drank and played cards with his valet and
butler: indeed, servants were his masters, and, from the porter’s lodge
to the mansard roof-garrets, dirt and disorder marked their unchecked
sway.
Mild Smithwick, lying beside the sister who had been a paralytic, in
her quiet grave in the Hampstead churchyard, would have turned uneasily
upon her pillow stuffed with shavings, had she known of the goings-on
of the debauched old idol of her earthly worship, who had long ago
forgotten her.
He opened fire directly, quite in the old manner.
“Hey? What the devil?--so you have remembered us, have you? Well? Was
I not right in telling you that that affair of the fusillade would end
to your advantage? That the Court Martial was a piece of mummery--a
farce--nothing more? There you are with promotion, and the patronage
and goodwill of Monseigneur at the Élysée! Though for myself I cannot
stomach that Bonaparte with the beak and the Flemish snuffle. Had
Walewski but been born on the right side of the blanket--there would
have been the Emperor for me!”
He trumpeted in a vast Indian silk handkerchief with something of the
old vigor, and went on:
“Because all this swearing of fidelity to the Republic will end, as
I have prophesied, in a coronation at Notre Dame, and a court at the
Tuileries. My Emperor crowned himself without all this lying and
posturing. He said to France: ‘You want a master. Well, look at me.
I am the man for you....’ Josephine squawked: ‘_Oh, M. Bonaparte!_’
‘Go!’ he told her. ‘Order your dresses!’ just as he said to the Senate,
‘Decree me Emperor!’ While this fellow ... sacred name of a pig!”
He tucked one of the crutch-sticks under his arm, got out his
snuff-box, and said as he dipped his ringed, yellow old claws into the
Spanish mixture:
“His cant about Socialism and Progress and the dignity of Labor gives
me the belly-ache. His groveling to the working man, and slobbering
over the common soldier, make me want to kill him. His hand in his
trousers-pocket and his eye on a _plebiscite_--there you have him--by
the thunder of Heaven! A corporal of infantry said to me: ‘If I showed
M. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte my back--he would kneel down and salute
it....’ _My_ Napoleon would have said to that man: ‘Lie down in the
mud, so that I may walk dryshod upon your body!’ and the man would have
obeyed him. But perhaps half an Emperor is better for France than none!”
He fed each wide nostril with the Brobdingnagian pinch he had held
suspended while he talked, and said, snorting:
“We shall see if, for all his cartloads of wine sent to their barracks,
and his rolls of ten-franc pieces scattered among the rank-and-file, he
is served better than the man who scorned to flatter, and more loved
than he who did not bribe.... Who said: ‘Follow me, and I will show
you capitals to plunder!’ and when they were conquered, said: ‘Help
yourselves, one and all, there are fat and lean!’”
He plunged his shaking fingers back into the box, sputtered a little,
and said a trifle wildly:
“Though there was a good deal of fasting going to set against the
seasons of plenty. During the Retreat from Moscow in October, 1812, I
had a handful of unset diamonds in my haversack, and a beryl weighing
thirteen pounds, worth ninety-five thousand francs, upon my word of
honor! Well, I swopped that crystal with a Bavarian aide-de-camp of the
Staff for a pudding made of horse’s blood mixed with bran and flour....
The man who sold me the pudding was Luitpold von Widinitz, a cousin of
your mother’s. It was a dirty action I have never pardoned. _Pardieu!_
_Morbleu!_ A comrade, and sell--not share! Prince be damned!...
Huckster! Sutler! Tschah! Faugh! Pouah!”
He dropped the crutch he had tucked under his arm, and, recalled from
his ancient reminiscence by Hector’s picking up the stick and giving it
to him, said, with a formidable bending of the brows:
“You came here, not out of filial duty, but upon some private affair or
other. Spit it out, and have done!--I have no time to waste.”
Hector obeyed.
“I have spent my mother’s dowry as you always hoped I should. Chiefly
upon gratifications--pleasures--luxuries, that I once pretended to
despise. I have acquired the taste for these things. That ought
to gratify you. With the money I have wasted, many prejudices and
convictions that you found objectionable in past days have been
scattered to the winds. If you are still disposed to give, I am very
willing to take. I have no more to say!”
Seldom has an appeal for pecuniary aid been preferred less
ingratiatingly. The Marshal glared and champed for several moments
before he could reply:
“I do not doubt you are willing, sir.... _’Credieu!_ Do you suppose
I have not seen this coming?--though the insolence of your approach
goes beyond anything that I could have conceived.... I have my
informants, understand!... I am aware of your infernal folly, your
crazy infatuation.... As for that de Roux woman who leads you by the
nose, she is a jade who will land you in the gutter, and a harlot into
the bargain. Do you hear?”
The bellowed “Do you hear?” was followed by a shower of curses. When
these imprecations had ceased to rattle among the trophies of arms and
bronzes, and bring down sprinklings of dust from the gilded cornices,
Hector said imperturbably:
“My father may insult my mistress with impunity. I cannot call him
out----!”
The Marshal took the opening.
“If you did, and sat down on your tail--sacred name of a blue
pig!--with the notion of sticking me in the gizzard, as you did de
Moulny Younger when you were boys--allow me to tell you--you would find
yourself skewered and trussed in double-quick time!”
Never before in Hector’s hearing had the Marshal made reference to
that old sore subject of the false step and the broken foil. He made a
flourishing pass with one of the ebony-handled crutches, slipped on the
polished marble pavement, and would have fallen but for the strong red
hand of Marie Bathilde’s son.
Hector put the old man into the hall porter’s capacious chair, picked
up his great curly-brimmed hat--the hat worn by Deans at the present
moment--brushed it on his sleeve and handed it back again. He felt a
good deal like Sganarelle before Don Juan, the case being reversed, and
the homilist the elder libertine.
Meanwhile the gouty old soldier fulminated oaths, and hurled reproaches
of a nature to make listening Asmodeus smile. He was scandalized at the
life his son was leading. Sacred name of a pipe! A thousand thunders!
He shook his clenched hand, as he demanded of Hector if he really
supposed there was no Deity Who demanded an account from evil livers,
and no Hell where sinners burned?
“For priests are rogues and knaves and liars, but there is such a
place, for all that! And you--living in open adultery--for you there
will be Hell!”
Said Dunoisse, cool and smiling, standing before his irate parent:
“I am a better theologian than you are. Hell is for the finally
impenitent, I have always been instructed; and I am invariably
scrupulous to repent before I sin. If it will afford you any
particular gratification, I will undertake to perform a special act of
contrition,” he looked at his watch, “punctually at the hour of twelve,
to-night.”
“You are going to her to-night?” snarled the Marshal, adding: “Tell her
from me that she deceives a blackguard for the sake of a booby. For one
you are, by the thunder of Heaven! who soil yourself and spoil yourself
for such a drab as she!”
“What can you expect,” said Hector, with the same cool offensiveness,
“but that your son should follow in your footsteps? I am, as you have
said, living with the wife of another man in open adultery. You were
bolder, and more daring, who with your master had discrowned kings and
humiliated Emperors. You did not hesitate, at the pricking of your
desire, to ravish the Spouse of God.”
“Your mother is a Saint!” cried the old Marshal, purple and gnashing
with furious indignation. “Do not dare to mention her in the same
breath with that--that----”
And the coarse old man plumped out an epithet of the barrack-room,
full-flavored, double-barreled, of which Henriette, had she heard it,
would have died.
“There is no need to tell me to honor my mother,” said the son. “She is
sacred in my eyes. But do not venture to speak to me of Him Whom you
have dishonored. I have thought ever since I was a boy that it would be
better for me and for you if He did not exist. For the fact of my being
is an insult to Him. I am a clod of earth flung in His face by your
sacrilegious hand!”
He had often dreamed of speaking such words as these, face to face with
his father. Now they poured from him, thick and fast. But pity checked
them in mid-torrent, at the sight of the working mouth and nodding
head, and trembling hands of unreverend, ignoble age.
The old man capitulated even as the young one relented. He got out,
between spasms of wheezing, in quite a conciliatory snarl:
“Well,--well! What if you have spent your mother’s dowry! there is more
where that came from. You are my legitimate heir,--and for me, I had
rather you were a prodigal than a prig. And blood-horses and Indian
shawls, wines, jewelry and cigars and bonnets,--wagers on the Turf and
bets on cards, are unavoidable expenses.... I do not wish you to be a
niggard. Only it seems to me that with your opportunities you might
have invested well. Steel Rails and Zinc, those are the things to put
money on. This will be the Age of traveling behind boilers and housing
under roofs of metal. Ugh--ugh! Ough, c’r’r--_’aah_!”
He stopped to have a bout of coughing and hawking, and resumed:
“Do not suppose I blame you for having been extravagant. Though it
seems to me you have managed badly. This Bonaparte is one who takes
with one hand and gives with the other--is bled or bleeds. He has never
tapped my veins yet, nor shall for any hint of his. But I suspect he
has had money of you. That woman of yours--never mind! I will not name
her, the cockatrice!--but I have had it hinted to me that she is an
agent in his pay. And he pays women with compliments and promises--he
has probably promised to create her a peeress in her own right when he
is Emperor.... Her Grace the Duchess of Trundlemop--that is the title
she will get.”
Seeing Hector scowl forbiddingly at these unwelcome references, the
Marshal made haste to conciliate.
“You have paid through the nose to get de Roux decanted to Algeria. You
have been sweetly choused. One must live and learn. See!--I will strike
a bargain with you. Do not you be stiffnecked any longer with regard to
that question of the von Widinitz Succession, and I will unbutton my
pockets.... You shall have money--plenty of money! All that you need to
make a splash. I suppose you know that there are millions of thalers
waiting to drop into your pockets once the Council of the Germanic
Confederation shall confirm your right to the Crown Feudatory.... You
will stand upon that right--it is patent and undeniable. And I will
have the throne from under the Regent Luitpold in return for that lump
of beryl the rogue once robbed from me!”
Absurd, formidable, gross old monster. Was the ravished crystal really
the fulcrum of the lever with which the Marshal strove to upset a
State? World-changes have been brought about by quarrels springing from
causes even more trivial? The price of Luitpold’s blood-pudding had
remained for thirty-seven years an undigested morsel in the Marshal’s
system. It rankled in him to his dying day.
Though his gouty feet were tottering on the downward slope, his mental
faculties were as clear as ever. He watched his son from under his
bushy eyebrows as the young man gnawed his lip and drew patterns with
his cane on the tesselated pavement of the hall. Hector had uttered
sounding reproaches, arrayed himself on the side of Heaven a moment
previously. The merry devil who laughs over human contradictions and
mortal frailties, must have chuckled as he listened to the terms of the
bargain now arranged between the father and the son.
Money. For the sake of the golden mortar without which the House
of Hopes that Jack builds must inevitably tumble to ruin, Dunoisse
reluctantly consented to become the puppet of an ambition he had
scorned. The instrument of a desire for vengeance that had never ceased
to rowel the old war-horse’s rheumatic sides.
“So! It is understood, then, after all this fanfaronade of
high-mindedness. You will meet my Bavarian agents, Köhler and von
Steyregg--and you will be compliant and civil to them, do you
understand?”
He lashed himself into one of his sudden rages, the gouty old lion, and
roared:
“For my Marie’s son shall not be slighted--kicked aside into a corner
while that knave Luitpold holds the Regency of Widinitz from the Bund.
I will give him a colic for the one his pudding gave me! And I will
have no more accusations and reproaches!--I will not permit you who are
my son to taunt me with your own begetting, and throw your mother’s
Veil of Profession, in a manner, at my head.”
He rapped his stick upon the pavement. He was strangely moved, and his
chin was twitching, though his fierce black eyes were hard and dry.
“You have said that I stole my wife from God, and it is true; though I
do not know that it is very decent in you to twit me with it. And do
you suppose I have not smarted for the sin I committed? I tell you I
have shed tears of blood!”
A harsh sound came from his throat: he swallowed and blinked and went
on talking:
“Listen to me, you who are more my son than Marie’s, though you tell
me that you hold her memory sacred, and denounce me as the plunderer
of Christ? When her youngest child, your sister, died, Marie saw in
that the beginning of Heaven’s vengeance: the price that must be paid,
the punishment that must be borne. And she prayed and wept--what
tears!--and gave me no peace until she had wrung from me my promise
that she should go back to her Convent if the Chapter would receive
her.... I am an old tactician--I gave the pledge in the full belief
that never would they open their doors.... And when she brought me the
Prioress’s letter, it was as though a spent cannon-ball had hit me on
the headpiece. Then I had an idea. The dowry of three hundred thousand
silver thalers. What the Church had once got her claws on I knew she
would never let go.... So I blustered and raved and swore to Marie....
‘_The dowry, or I keep my wife!_’”
His pendulous cheeks and chin shook as he wagged his head at Hector.
“Do you suppose I wanted the accursed dross? No! by the thunder of
Heaven! I was greedy of something else. The woman--my wife--who lay in
my arms and sighed, and kissed me, and wept....”
His voice cracked. He said:
“Do you think she did not know the truth? You shall never make me
believe she did not. Even while I bragged and blustered about a
lawsuit--even when my notary wrote a letter, I had fears and quakings
of the heart. When no answer came from the Mother Prioress, I rubbed
my hands and congratulated myself. Thrice-accursed fool who thought to
outwit God----”
He rummaged for his snuffbox, tapped it wrong way up, opened it in
this position, spilt all its store of snuff, swore, and pitched it
across the hall.
“He is the King of strategists--the Marshal of Napoleon’s Grand Army,
compared with Him, was a blind beetle. The Prioress’s answer came: ‘We
concede you this money,’ said the letter, ‘as the price of a soul.’
Enclosed was a draft on the Bank of Bavaria. That night Marie left me.
Without even a kiss of farewell, she who had been my wife for nine
years, and borne me a boy and a girl.... Imagine if the money did not
weigh on me like the dead horse I lay under all through the night of
Austerlitz, with the bone of my broken leg sticking through my boot!
Conceive if it did not smell to me of beeswax candles, brown serge
habits, incense and pauper’s pallets! Pshaw! Peugh! Piff!”
He blew his old nose and swore a little, and then went on:
“I did not send back the three hundred thousand thalers. True! they
were so much dirt in my eyes.... But cash is cash, and to part with it
would not have brought my Marie back again. I let the stuff lie and
breed at my bank. I would have raked the kennels for crusts rather
than touch it. Not that I have ever needed money. The old brigand of
the Grand Army has known how to keep what he had gained. Though I have
lived up to my income....drank, gambled, amused myself with women! What
matter the women? Did Marie suppose I should spend my time in stringing
daisy-chains when she had gone away?”
He laughed in his formidable, ogreish way, and said, still laughing:
“She knew me better, depend upon it. Though, mind you, I had been true
to Marie. But a wife who is a nun is a dead wife. I was a widower--the
boy motherless.... And He up above us had another score to make off
me!... When the boy--Death of my soul!”
He struck one of his crutches on the marble pavement with such force
that the stick broke.
“A day came when you looked at me with my own eyes shining out of
Marie’s face, and said: ‘I have heard the story. The terms upon which
you let my mother resume the Veil were vile!’ Impudent young cockerel!
Was it to be supposed that I should try to justify myself in the
eyes of a stripling? A man to whom the Emperor used to say: ‘Well,
Dunoisse, let us have your opinion on such and such a plan?’ So I
laughed at you for a nincompoop--boasted of the pail of milk I had
drawn from the Black Cow, saying to myself: ‘All right! He is Marie’s
son, that boy! When he is a man grown, I will give him that accursed
money, smelling of candles and incense, and he will give it back to
the nuns.’ And when time was ripe I transferred the whole lump to your
name at Rothschild’s. You made virtuous scruples about taking it, but
you never restored it whence it came!... Now you have showed your
breed--you have poured it into the lap of a light woman. And you come
to me and own that, and ask for more to pitch after it!” He rapped
out a huge oath. “Am I not justified in thinking you more my son than
Marie’s? Have I not the right to say I am disappointed in you?”
His voice was a mere croak. He went on, with his fierce, bloodshot eyes
fixed on vacancy:
“Do you suppose I did not love your mother--have never longed for
her--have ever forgotten her? I use her chocolate-set every morning....
Her Indian shawl is the coverlet of my bed. When I have the gout in my
eyes I tie a scarf she used to wear over them, like a bandage. There is
virtue in things that have been used by a Saint.”
He added:
“For a Saint she is ... and though, as you say I stole my joy in her
from Heaven--do you suppose, for one moment, a woman like that is going
to let me be damned? She will wear her knees to the bone first; and so
I tell you!... Was it not for the sake of my soul she went back to her
cell at the Carmel? At the Day of Judgment one voice will be heard that
pleads for old Achille Dunoisse.”
One scanty teardrop hung on his inflamed and reddened underlid.
“But Saint or none, she loved me, like twenty women, by Heaven! And if
she says she repents of that, again, by Heaven!--she lies!”
The solitary tear fell on his discolored hand. He shook it
off, angrily. Somewhere in the middle of that gross bundle of
contradictions, absurdities, appetites, vices, resentments, hatreds,
calling itself Achille Dunoisse--there beat and bled a suffering human
heart. And the distance that separated the father and the son was
bridged by a moment of sympathy and understanding. And a pang of envy
pierced it through....
* * * * *
For the supreme jewel that Fate can bestow upon mortal, is the love
that will even yield up the Beloved for Love’s sake. To this gross old
man, his sire, had been given what would never fall to the younger
Dunoisse.
By the radiance of this great passion of Marie Bathilde’s, her son saw
himself in like case with some penniless student in a Paris garret,
crouching, upon a night of Arctic cold, over a fire of paper and straw.
When the small fierce flame of Henriette’s slight sensuous fancy should
have sunk down into creeping ashes under the starved hands spread above
it, what would be left to live for? His heart was sick within him as he
went away.
He returned to Madame de Roux with the news that his application to the
Marshal had succeeded. She threw her arms about him, in a transport of
joy.
“Ah then, so you really love me?” the poor dupe asked, putting the
most fatal of all questions. For it sets the interrogated he or she
wondering, “Do I?” and hastens the inevitable end.
“How can you doubt it?” she queried, hiding an almost imperceptible
yawn behind her tiny fingers. “_Did I not send away Eugène for you?_”
She passed by gentle degrees to a question possessing much more
interest. The amount to be placed upon the books at Rothschild’s to the
credit of the Marshal’s son.