Balls, dinners, concerts, receptions, and hunting-parties at the
Tuileries and at Versailles, St. Cloud, and Compiègne, succeeded in
dazzling rotation. Round the little study where Dunoisse wrought and
planned and labored, driven on by a very demon of work, the active,
busy, vari-colored life of the palace hummed and buzzed and swirled.
Strains of music, gay or voluptuous, and sounds of fast and furious
revelry came, midnight after midnight, to the ears of the solitary
toiler--sometimes sounds more sinister than these.
The screams of a woman.... “Help! Mercy, for the love of Heaven!...”
dying away into incoherent prayers and moans. The noise of a
scuffle--the scraping of feet--the hoarse panting and muffled
ejaculations of men engaged in desperate struggle--the thud of blows
falling on something soft. Desperate outcries of “Murder! Treachery!...
Monseigneur promised!... Monseigneur swore that I should be set
free!” The revolver shots in the leafy palace garden, followed by a
heavy silence not even broken by a groan. The man who heard never
interrupted his labors for a moment. If the Prince-President chose to
make the Élysée a place of execution, why,--stranger things had been
done at the time of the _coup d’État_. And the vices of potentates are
privileged.... That woman’s voice crying for help was not the voice of
Henriette.
She was as beautiful as ever. At the most splendid State functions,
in the vicinity of her most brilliant rivals, her charms shone with
undiminished fire. Men paid her court as ardently as ever, and her
accredited lover was still a man keenly-envied. But in despite of this,
and although his pressing duties at the Élysée debarred him from his
place at her side in Society, Dunoisse had ceased to be jealous. So
powerful an anodyne is absorbing mental labor, the shrill rattle of
warning that used to sound from under every tuft of flowers or clump
of grasses brushed by her draperies in passing, had fallen silent. Her
paramour no longer dreaded a possible successor in every young and
handsome man on whom she shed her smiles.
The green-eyed demon even left off taunting Dunoisse with de Moulny,
still Representative of the Right for Moulny upon Upper Drame, and
Secretary-Chancellor at the Ministry of the Interior; where the Count
de Morny had been succeeded by M. de Persigny--less affected than his
predecessor with scruples, you will remember, regarding the contents of
a certain stately row of steel deed boxes that were crammed to bursting
with palaces, cities, forests, villages, and farmsteads, and emblazoned
with the arms of the House of Bourbon.
Rivers of plundered gold, derived from the sale of these great family
estates, flowed away between Dunoisse’s fingers. None of it stuck to
them, much to the surprise of Monseigneur. For Dunoisse wanted money;
and the chief reason at length become known to his patron, who had a
peculiar knack of getting at the secrets of men.
To repay the three hundred thousand thalers that had been the dowry
of Sister Térèse de Saint François had been, ever since the hour of
their meeting, the abiding steadfast purpose of her son.... He saw
her sometimes in dreams, when he went home in the gray dawn from the
palace, and threw himself down, half dressed, upon his bed to snatch
a little fevered sleep. And he would seem to hear the tear-soaked,
toneless voice saying that the only road to Peace was the thorny
Way of Expiation.... He would feel again the light, thin touch upon
his forehead, and would wake, crying “Mother!” as the black curtain
blotted her from his sight. And at other times, when the man was bound
to the revolving wheel of his endless labors, the diligent pen would
be arrested as her dim wistful eyes came hovering between his vision
and the page. Then he would drive her away, and fall to his work with
desperate assiduity. For never, Dunoisse knew, would he be happy until
he had earned and repaid every centime of that accursed dowry. That
debt discharged, there would be a turn of the tide. De Roux would die;
his widow would become the wife of her lover; there would be happiness,
children, a home.... For these he spent himself, allured by the glitter
of Monseigneur’s golden promises as other victims had been--would be
until the end.
And in the fever of toil that consumed him, the man aged and wasted
visibly. His black eyes lost their fire, his vivid coloring faded,
his hair, no longer thick and glossy, showed broad streaks of gray.
Lines graved themselves between his eyebrows, crow’s feet appeared
upon his temples. The wings of the nostrils were pulled downwards by
the unrelaxing, constant tension of the muscles of the mouth, as month
after month Dunoisse sat diligently incubating the egg of Monseigneur.
It hastened matters sensibly, that physical decadence--that wreck of
the man’s good looks upon the rocks of merciless mental toil. Society
was charitable--Monseigneur was all kindness--but the betrayed husband
and the supplanted lover are fair game, always: has it not been so
since the beginning of the world?
Whispers began to circulate.... In the smoking-rooms of the great
Clubs, in the social circle at the palace of the Presidency, Dunoisse’s
rare appearances were provocative of the smart _double entente_, and
the cynical witticism; flagged darts that, thrown without discretion,
presently found their way to the raw quick under the thickened skin.
The very day that showed the stupendous task all but accomplished,
brought home to Dunoisse--by the medium of an unsigned letter in a
delicate feminine hand--the knowledge that, in the estimation of his
world, at least--he was held to have been supplanted by de Moulny. The
closing sentence of the anonymous writer reproduced, almost in the very
words, the unforgettable utterance of Henriette at the inn of “The
Heron”:
“_You only have yourself to thank for what has happened now!_”
It seemed the very voice of his Fate speaking, and Dunoisse grew pale
as ashes, and laid the letter down. He had been much weakened by his
unremitting labors, and the drumming of the blood in his ears and
the violent beating of his heart made him deaf to the quiet opening
and closing of the door. But a voice spoke to him, and he looked up,
with the sharp-fanged fox of desperate jealousy gnawing under his
uniform, as it had possibly gnawed under that of de Roux, and became
aware that Monseigneur had entered, and was looking at him with a
somewhat sinister smile. He said--as Dunoisse stumbled to his feet and
saluted--looking narrowly at the haggard handsome face, and smoothing
his thick brown mustache with the little hand that was so like a pretty
woman’s:
“So! We draw near the end! We have at last the goal in view, according
to the report I received from you this morning.” He added, as Dunoisse
bowed in assent: “Accept my sincere congratulations upon the excellent
service you have rendered, General-of-Brigade von Widinitz Dunoisse.”
His glance, as keen as dull and lusterless, had recognized the writing
of the letter lying on the blotting-pad. He had calculated, and
rightly, that to grant the coveted step at the moment of revelation
would inconceivably intensify the torment of its sting. He did not
delay to receive the halting thanks of the victim. He went on in his
cool, mellifluous tones, showing a docketed paper in his hand:
“You mention at the close of your summary of the work that has been
accomplished, that without diligent and painstaking revision of the
maps of Eastern Europe at present in use at our Military School,
and employed at our War Department, the coping-stone of perfection
must be lacking still.” He added, “This, I will own, surprises me,
our Government Survey Department being considered--I believe with
justice!--as pre-eminent in skill and accuracy. How, then, do you
suggest that the maps should be improved?”
“Monseigneur, the network of intelligence being complete,” answered
Dunoisse, “a minute sanitary survey of the ground most likely
to become the scene of militant operations should necessarily
follow. Fever-breeding districts must be plainly labeled
‘Pestilential,’--doubtfully-salubrious regions must be indicated
for what they are.... No detail should be neglected. Special
qualifications--precise scientific knowledge will be necessarily
required of the Staff officer who is deputed to carry out this
mission.” He added, “For upon the health of the Army depends its
fighting-power. One cannot win battles with sick men!”
“An excellent apophthegm,” Monseigneur pronounced, with that peculiarly
amiable smile of his. He tapped his teeth thoughtfully with the paper
in his hand. “As regards the Staff officer who is to be despatched
on this--would you call it a perilous mission?”--He went on,
Dunoisse having admitted it to be a decidedly perilous mission--“I
know of but one individual possessing the necessary, indispensable
qualifications, and he is yourself!” He added, turning the poisoned
poniard in the wound: “Fair eyes will weep at your departure, my dear
Dunoisse--lovely lips will call me cruel. But undoubtedly--you must be
the man to go!”