CHAPTER I

A ROGUE’S TRAGEDY

BY

BERNARD CAPES

METHUEN & CO.

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.

LONDON

[COPYRIGHT]

_First Published in 1906_

CONTENTS

Part I

Prologue

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Part II

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Part III

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Afterward

A ROGUE’S TRAGEDY.

PART I

A LOVERS’ PROLOGUE

Matter is but the eternal dressing of the imagination; the world the

unconscious self-delusion of a Spirit. Everything springs from Love,

and Love is the dreaming God.

Two figments of that endless sweet obsession stood alone--high on a

slope of Alp this time. Born of a dream to flesh, they thought they

owed themselves to flesh--a sacred debt. Truth seemed as plain to them

as pebbles in a brook, which lie round and firm for all their apparent

shaking under ripples. There, actual to their eyes, were the white

mountains, the hoary glaciers, the pine woods and foamy freshets of

eighteenth century Le Prieuré. Here, actual in the ears of each, was

the whisper of the deathless confidence which for ever and ever helps

on love’s succession. They loved, and therefore they lived.

Man has been for ten thousand ages at the pains to prove love a

delusion, and still he greets a baby, and a kitten, and the nesting

song of birds, and a hawthorn bush in flower, as freshly as if each,

in its latest expression, were the newest product of his wisdom. But

love is no delusion, save in the shadows which it builds itself for

habitation. “Of dust thou art,” said the older God, “and unto dust

returnest.” Yet man does not inherit from the earth, but from the

imagination of that which created the earth and its life--the brain of

the dreaming Love. Nor has he once, in all his æons of sequence,

touched or borrowed from the earth. The seed which is himself was his

mother’s seed, herself the seed of another who contained his seed

within his mother’s seed within herself--a “nest” _ad infinitum_. Womb

within womb, myriadfold, he proceeds from Love, his flight a heavenly

meteor’s, his origin the origin of the star which has never been of

earth until it falls extinguished on it. He draws from the eye of the

dawn. He is the top section in a telescope of countless sections, each

extending from the other, and all from all, and the last from the

first. Close it, and it is he. Open it, and it is he. He helps to

Love’s view of the dream of which he is a part. He is Love’s heir in

dreams.

Or call him a bubble which rises in deep waters, and floats a moment

on the surface and breaks. Whence came he? Whither vanishes? He is a

breath; the expiration of a dream. The spirit of him looks out upon

its phantom journey, as a traveller gazes from a coach window on the

landscape. He is within it, but not of it. His destination is death,

which is Love’s sleep. He is reclaimed to Love, of whom he was always

a thought. As a thought he can never be launched again. He has played

his part and is at rest in Love.

But his part, while he played it, was Love’s part. It was when he

realised this most that the palpable world became a shadow, the solid

ground a cloud, the sun and moon and hills but figments of a rapture

of Love’s dream. It was then that he stepped exalted, knowing his fair

succession--knowing of whom he was born and for what reason. He had

been accredited Love’s representative.

So the man felt it here, walking on air. The mountains were more real

to him than the rock he stood on. He dealt in dreams’ paradoxes. “I

have never lived till now,” he said.

There was a little wind abroad which fluted in the pines, making sharp

notes of their fragrance. One’s ears and nose were always at a

conflict in the matter, whether to claim music for perfume or perfume

for music. It was the same as to the battle between sun and snow,

which fought to a compromise on the terms of chilly warmth or glowing

coldness. Yet the name was of no importance in the bracing sweetness

of the atmosphere they contrived together. One could not breathe there

and think of breathing as a condition of life. The temperature was the

temperature of a neutral ground between earth and heaven--of a present

unreality and a real distance.

The two had just issued in company from a hillside chapel, a little

lonely ark stranded on a shelf of rock hung up in a pine thicket, with

rills of water tinkling all about it like the last streaks of a

receded flood. They had sent forth their unreturning dove, and had

followed it to find their phantasm of a new world budding in green

islands from a lake of mist. Their feet seemed to sink in eternity.

Only the bright heavens above them were actual.

A butterfly, like a flake of stained glass blown from the robe of the

Christ in the little painted window within, came wafted after them as

they emerged. From a loophole in the presbytery above, the face of the

old sacristan leered out secretly, and, marking their going, grinned

and apostrophised it in a fit of silent laughter. “You sha’n’t have

him; you sha’n’t have him!” thought he, like the very sacristan of St

Anne’s Chapel under the Hinne Mountain, of whom children read. Then

they vanished in the mist, going upwards, and he sat down to chuckle.

As they ascended, the vapour sank beneath their feet, or was rolled

away like bales to topple over the precipices. It had all been clear

enough, bright palpable fact, before they entered the chapel. The

swift change was nothing surprising in these resting-places of the

clouds. Yet it seemed to them as if, returning to their world, they

found it transformed beyond all precedent. But then, was not their

rapture beyond all precedent? None had ever before loved as they

loved--and that was true, because there is no such thing as a

stereotype in Nature.

The whistle of a marmot straight ahead on a boulder startled them

suddenly as into a self-consciousness of guilt. They saw an atom of

mist cleave and close to the red flick of him as he vanished, and then

the phantoms of mountains looking in upon them above the place where

he had sat. It was like a priestly summons to love’s shrift. They

stopped, as by one consent, and stood in scarlet confusion to falter

out their confessions.

First love, I think, must reveal itself to fervent Catholics, as these

two were, in a more poignant form than to most others. The wonder of

it, as a divine absolution for shamefaced thoughts, as a divine

authorisation of those thoughts’ indulgence to a natural end, must

thrill their most sacred traditions of virginity to the marrow. Then

they must first realise, on its human merits, the sacrifice of the

Christ who died that men might live. They have worshipped the

transubstantiation apart; now they are bidden to an intimate share in

it.

That, perhaps, was why this man and woman were justified in feeling

their state an ecstasy unparalleled. Love to them was a

transubstantiation, such as no heterodox soul could ever know. They,

to whom flesh had been a shame, were authorised, in a moment, of

nakedness; they were surrendered, for their faith, to the paradise of

mortal raptures. Henceforth, dear incarnations of a dream, they

believed they owed themselves to flesh--while they trod on air.

Young god and goddess certainly they looked, poised on their misty

Ida. The man was cream-pink of face, sunny of hair, blue and a thought

prominent of eye. A fervour of soul perpetually flurried his cheek,

flushing or paling it in flying moods. He had the air and appearance

of an eager evangelist who had a little outgrown his spiritual

strength. He would sometimes overbalance on self-exaltation, and pitch

into an abyss of depression. He was tall and well-moulded as a whole;

but his hips were unduly feminine. His colour, too, erred on the

feminine side of prettiness. But he looked, all in all, a fit bright

mate for the happy figure beside him.

She, as like a Dresden china shape in melting demureness, as sunnily

contrived in pink and blue and gold, was only the other’s better

partner by reason of eyes slightly bluer than his, of hair a shade

more golden, of lips of a rosier dye on the soft pallour of her face.

By the same token she stood as much nearer to womanhood as he stood

from manhood--a step either way. It swelled in her, though she was but

fifteen, as the milk-kernels swell in nuts. I think she was at the

perfect poise, largeness in promise waiting on performance, shapely as

Psyche when first stolen by love--a covetable bud, whom no mortal man

could be above the desire to open with a kiss.

As this man, this good man, in a fury of love sanctified, desired

suddenly and uncontrollably. She stood before him, her face a little

raised, her lips a little parted--the prettiest figure between tears

and rapture. Her hat hung on her shoulders by a blue ribbon looped

about her neck, leaving her hair loose-coiled to snare the sun. Her

dress was a fine smock, having half-sleeves tied at the elbows with

ribbons, and a low bodice of rich blue velvet, open and laced in

front, to clasp it about the middle. From her hips fell, in a fluting

of Greek folds, a white skirt just long enough to show her ankles and

silver shoe-buckles, and there were blue velvet ribbons fastened with

diamond studs on her wrists.

So she stood gazing up at him, tremulous and fearful, unknowing but

half guessing what she had brought upon herself, what outrage on her

meek decorum. The shrine she had most cherished, held most sacred, was

threatened somehow; and God, it seemed, was on the side of the enemy.

For had not this man’s piety, sincere beyond question, been his

passport, a divine one, to her heart? How could she have allowed his

advances else? They were friends of but a few weeks; had met first in

the chapel hard by, bent upon a common worship. Some accident, of

stress in storm, had been his pretext for a self-introduction; and

she?--she had loved the pretext because in this figure she had come to

picture her ideal of virtuous manhood. And then words had wakened

knowledge, and knowledge admiration, and admiration rapture--the

desire of the moth for the star.

He had not spoken of love till this moment; he did not even speak of

it now. But all in an instant he leapt to the appeal of her lips, and

was fighting for their surrender to him. She struggled a little,

uttering no sound. And presently he conquered. Then speech came,

breathless and imploring,--

“Forgive me. What have I done? I have done wrong! My God! I couldn’t

help it!”

He was the one to break away. She stood motionless, white as a figure

of wax.

“Yolande!” he cried, “don’t look at me like that! Say you forgive me!”

She did not stir, but her lips moved.

“Did you do wrong? O! and I thought you knew!”

“I knew?”

He caught at his storming pulses and took a new step towards her. But

at that she backed from him.

“No,” she said, “if you have done wrong, if for one moment you think

you have done wrong, you must not stay here, not with me, any longer.”

Understanding came to him.

“No, I do not think it,” he said. “Why should I, unless to dream of my

being worthy of you was a presumption? But that is too late an apology

now. Yolande, will you marry me?”

She gave a sigh of heavenly rapture, and came and put her sweet hand

trustingly into his.

“O, yes, Louis, if God will let me!”

He cried “Amen!” and caught her to him again in an ecstasy.

“Why should He not, my bird, my love, my dear, dear angel?”

“He must speak through my father first.”

He laughed in triumphant confidence.

“Your father? Ah, yes! But I do not come empty-handed--not altogether.

It is little enough, dear sweet, to pay this debt; but in the worldly

view such bargains are relative, and the world--forgive me--has not

treated _your_ father according to his deserts.”

She conned his face with trouble in her eyes.

“No,” she whispered. “He is poor, but he thinks so much of me. What if

he and you were to disagree as to my value?”

“Impossible. I will admit at once that you are priceless.”

He saw her distress, and tightened his hold.

“Little rogue,” he said playfully, “what _is_ your value in your own

eyes? What do you put it at?”

“The money in your pocket,” she said, smiling faintly.

“I believe that is no more than a couple of soldi.”

“I am yours for a penny, then. Give it me. Do you think I hold myself

very dear? With that in my purse, yes. If the King wooed me with half

his kingdom I should say, ‘Not even with the whole. I have a greater

fortune in Louis’s penny.’” Her lip quivered. “But, alas!” she sighed,

“it is not kings I dread!”

Moved beyond expression, he could only strain her to his heart,

murmuring and adoring.

“Look,” he said presently, “you are trembling. Come and rest with me

on this stone, and set your feet with mine at its base and say to me,

as I shall say to you, ‘Here on a rock I plant my love, never to be

displaced.’”

He helped her to the seat, then threw himself down beside her, and,

raising his arm, was beginning in perfect gravity, “Here on a rock I

plant--” when, without the least warning, there came a snap, and he

went backwards heels-over-head into the grass, and lay there kicking

like a delirious acrobat. Some demon of perversity, working with a

wedge of frost, had once split a section of the stone near through,

and he had sat upon that section.

The girl shrieked and ran to his help.

“O, Louis!” she cried, “art thou hurt?”

He did not answer with the poet, “I have got a hurt o’ the inside of a

deadlier sort!” It is to be feared that both he and his lady were

entirely lacking in the sense of humour. He arose crestfallen, but

more mortified in his faith than his vanity. The two looked at one

another tragically. Then Yolande suddenly burst into tears.

“O!” she sobbed, “what were we, to liken our love to God’s Church! He

has answered our arrogance with a thunderbolt. Louis, you are all

dusty and covered with prickles! Something in my heart tells me that

I can never, never marry you!”

“Hush!” he said desperately. “We will go back to the chapel and pray

for pardon. I ought to have looked to the stone first.”

But she only sighed miserably. “That would have made no difference. Do

you think you are more foreseeing than He?”

He put his hand in his pocket.

“I have lost my soldi!” he said faintly.

That was the culmination. For an hour these two ninnies of a dream

sought vainly in the grass for the missing coins. Then, together but

apart, they went like lost souls down the mountain.

Verily, the laws canonical, like the lawyers of Westminster, “thrive

on fools.”

CHAPTER I

On the day when Augias, Conte di Rocco, was raised to the Marquisate

and made a member of the Government of Victor-Amadeus III., titular

King of Sardinia and Duke of Savoy and Piedmont, an express was

despatched from Turin by that newly-aggrandised nobleman to the

Chevalier de France in his Hôtel Beausite at Le Prieuré, demanding

in marriage the hand of the Chevalier’s only child and daughter,

Yolande of the white hands.

No more than a day later the brass-new Marchese in person came

treading on the heels of his amorous cartel (for, indeed, that seems

the word for it), and had his formal interview with the solitary

parent--for Yolande was long motherless. This happened in the year

1783, when a certain democratic simplicity was beginning to temper the

extravagances of fashion. Monsignore di Rocco, therefore, had that

much excuse for his rusty buckles, his cheap wisp of a cravat (in

which a costly diamond burned), his hired equipage and single equerry,

or _valet d’écurie_, who was literally his stable-boy. Otherwise, as

the great man of the neighbourhood and a suitor to boot, he might have

been accused of that sorriest form of ostentation, which is for rank

to parade its independence of recognised convention.

On the other hand, M. de France’s “Hôtel” was just a decent abode at

the southern end of the village, rich in nothing but the magnificence

of the view from its windows.

The Marchese was already expected, and certainly with no delusions as

to the manner of his appearance. M. de France gave no thought to

anything but his visitor’s expression as he advanced to meet him in

the little “_salle d’audience_” into which di Rocco had been ushered.

Of the two, even, the bearing of the Chevalier, though he was no more

than a simple gentleman of Savoy, was the more _over_bearing in its

self-conscious vanity.

He gave the other stiff welcome and congratulations on his exaltation.

One would never have guessed that he knew himself very plainly for the

mouse, sweating and desperate, in the claws of the great cunning cat

which he took and pressed.

But the Marchese, with a high little laugh, broke through the

proffered formality.

“Here, here, to my breast, father-in-law!” he cried, and seizing,

strenuously kissed the Chevalier on both cheeks, verily like a cat in

a sort of blood-lust.

The thin white face of M. de France pinked as he stepped back. His

hollow eyes glared, his stern lips trembled, every fold of his

threadbare dressing-gown seemed to flatten, as if the wind had been

taken out of it. But an habitual self-discipline came to his aid with

an acid smile.

“Pardon me,” he said. “You take me by surprise. The term is premature.

You young men are so impulsive.”

The enormous sarcasm was in itself a confession of surrender. He would

never have essayed it, save in the knowledge of the price he had at

hand for acquitting himself of any and all such debts. For di Rocco

was, as a matter of fact, old as times went, a scarred and puffed

ex-libertine of sixty--a monster of unloveliness, moreover.

He was hideous as Dagon, in truth, half man, half fish, with strained

cod eyes, a great wobbling jaw, and lips which had shaken themselves

pendulous on naughtiness and laughter. Sordid, slovenly, unclean in

mind and body, inordinate as a drayman in bulk and physical strength,

a voluptuary, miser, and a fecund _raconteur_, his rank and wits had,

through a well-filled life, been procurers to his inclinations at a

nominal cost to himself. His parsimony, not his vices, had alone

debarred him from taking that position in the State to which his

wealth and social talents had else easily exalted him. At the same

time it had always made of him a slumbering force, full of interest

and potentialities.

The real power of wealth lies, indeed, not in expenditure but in

possession. There is a sacredness about the crowded granary which

affects even the starving. There is no fool so despised of the

democracy as the spendthrift fool; and, when its time comes, it is the

plutocrat it bleeds with an apology.

The Conte di Rocco possessed the tastes of a sybarite with the soul of

a usurer. He lit his debauches with candle-ends, and could singe the

paws of his tame cats with a most engaging humour whenever he desired

chestnuts for nothing. The army of pimps, followers, led-captains and

parasites which had always attended his ignoble career, cursed him

eternally through jaws as lank as those of Falstaff’s ragged company.

But it served him, nevertheless--on the security, it would appear, of

phantom post-obits. Everyone hoped some day to have his picking from

the carrion of that great carcase--even, it may be supposed, his

physician Bonito, whose face in the meanwhile was like a

cheese-paring.

And it was this paragon, _grandissimo_ for all his imperfections, who

had nominated himself to be the husband of Yolande, the loveliest

young lily of Savoy.

How it came about was thus.

Sated, or merely whimsical, or, perhaps, as some said, in a sudden

mood to withdraw himself timely from the world in order to “patch up

his old body for heaven,” the Count had, about the end of 1782,

retired upon his estate and grand Château di Rocco on the Flegère,

with the intent, it seemed, to make it thenceforth his permanent

abode. Here, having cashiered, or temporised or compromised with, or

anything but paid off, the bulk of his disreputable _valetaille_, he

resolved upon the simple life--of candle-ends. And here he made the

acquaintance of M. de France and his lovely child, with the former of

whom he was able, moreover, in some fits of moral reactionism, to play

the effective usurer.

The Chevalier was a creature of enormous pride, though of fortunes

fallen to the lowest ebb. But he could never forget that his ancestors

had lost Chambéry to the Dukes of Savoy, nor his present despicable

position in a State whose highest attentions to him might hardly have

compensated for the dignities of which it had deprived his family. He

had served with credit, under the reigning King’s predecessor, in the

wars of the Austrian succession, yet not with such compelling

brilliancy as to enforce recognition from Victor-Amadeus, when that

prince came to succeed his father. Neglected, impoverished, De France

had withdrawn from a Court whose master was always more concerned with

problems of ceremonial than of statecraft, and had retired into

necessitous oblivion. Debts, contracted in the days of promise, came

winging paper billets after him, and his situation was soon fairly

desperate. His wife died, and he gave her grand-ducal obsequies. His

child must always go attired in the right trappings of her rank. He

called his villa an hôtel, and his parlour an audience-room. Through

everything he was gnawed with an eternal hunger for the recognition

which would not come his way. He loved his daughter as vain men love

their rank, holding it supreme above emotion, humanity, a thing

untarnishable but by contact with the base. The possibility of a

consort for her in Le Prieuré was a thing not to be thought of. The

fact that she was only fifteen and dowerless was inessential. She was

Yolande de France.

And then one day old di Rocco asked for her hand.

M. de France was not so surprised as sarcastic. He knew all about the

Count and his supposed reformation.

“You would do a final act of atonement, monsignore,” said he, “and

dower a penniless girl?”

“I would do more,” answered the Count. “I would burn those bits of

paper of yours.”

The Chevalier’s eyes glittered, but his face remained like hard ivory.

“Pardon me,” he said, “there is a difference in your ages.”

“Ah! monsieur, it would be obliterated when the rivulet mingled with

the river.”

“You have lived fast.”

“The sooner to reach my redemption.”

“You are out of favour with the Court.”

“Pouf! Call it what you mean--black disgrace--and yet I tell you that

I hold its favour in the hollow of my hand.”

The Chevalier’s eyes glistened more.

“I do not doubt your powers of propitiation; else, with grateful

thanks for the proffered honour--”

“Exactly--you must decline so sinful a connection. Make it a condition

if you will: reconciliation with the Government, and Yolande; or

failure, and no Yolande. I am confident. I know myself and others. I

will be Marchese in a week, and M. de France will have won his first

step towards the position from which he has been too long excluded.”

“H’m!”

“Moreover, he will have acquired a devoted and generous son-in-law”

(the Chevalier smiled), “whose first act will be to settle the

reversion of his entire property on his own widow.”

“You are serious? And if I decline?”

“I shall leave everything--including bills, acceptances, securities,

all the little pigeons waiting in my _casier_ to be plucked--to M.

Gaston Trix.”

“Who is he?”

“I am very fond of him. They call him also Cartouche. What does it

matter? The hawk is not named hawk in every country of the world. Here

he is this--there that. Trix was Cartouche in Chambéry, Scaramuccio

in Turin, anything elsewhere. His mother was English; he was born in

London; his father forgot to leave his address. Yes, I am very fond of

him.”

“Count, you have never yet honoured one of the sex with your hand?”

“Alas! it has lacked cleanness.”

He held it out. It was obvious he spoke the truth.

“I have been a sad rogue,” he said. “It would be useless for me to

deny it.”

The Chevalier put the confession by rather hastily. It would appear

that his conscience may have resented its intrusion. It is such an

advantage, after having realised a personal ambition, to be able to

say, “I knew nothing of any moral objection until too late.” But that

is just what some queer providence or fatality will never give one the

opportunity of asserting. He flushed a little and said, with a stiff

air of demand,--

“Monsignore, what attracts you in my daughter?”

The powerful old _roué’s_ face became a mere leering slop of roguery.

There was the picture, for anyone who cared to consider it, of

concupiscence in its dotage. He had come, in the very exhaustion of

his faculties, upon an unheard-of stimulant of loveliness; but sacred,

and the more appetising for being so. Any sacrifice was worth to gain

this ante-room to heaven. He felt once more the poignant ecstasies of

hunger and thirst, he whose sense of surfeit had seemed confirmed to

everlastingness. There is no need to enlarge upon his state.

“Ah, monsieur!” he said, “can you, who live in daily contemplation of

such perfection, ask? Believe me, the question alone is the riddle;

the answer possesses a thousand tongues of rapture and adoration.

Would I could speak in them all, that I might ease my breast of this

load of undelivered homage which stifles it. I swear, on my honour,

there is no interpreter between earth and paradise but Yolande. You

will bestow her on me--conditionally?”

M. de France didn’t see, or wouldn’t see, that he was being bribed.

There is a point of magnificence, perhaps, above which corruption is

elevated to sublimity. What earthly sacrifices can approach the gifts

with which the gods reward them? He actually smiled, wintrily but

condescendingly, on the other’s enthusiasm.

“Well, well, monsignore,” he protested; “what would your ardour say to

a compromise?”

“There is none possible.”

“A betrothal, for instance, on the conditions you were good enough to

suggest? I am flattered--it goes without saying--by your proposal. I

admit myself distinguished, actually and potentially, in the

connection. But the child is but fifteen.”

“I can never consent to it. It puts ten thousand obstacles of accident

and caprice between me and my attainment of beatitude. Mademoiselle

to-day is an angel, but every feather of her wings, so tied, would

invite the cupidity of worldlings--those robbers of the heavenly

roost. I know them well. I must, indeed, have the first and last right

to protect her.”

“_Must_, Count? Is she yours or mine? I have said enough, and you, I

think, more than enough.”

His brows and his mouth closed down. His vanity could be a very

obstinate devil. Di Rocco felt that he had touched his limits.

“Ah! my friend,” he pleaded, “love’s best proof of itself is in

outrunning discretion. I went, in truth, too far. Let me hark back to

reason. I pledge you my credit that within a month my father-in-law

shall be War Minister. Di Broglio wearies of his office, and waits but

for an efficient successor. Give me, I entreat you, that warrant to

enlarge upon your claims.”

“No, no, the poor child--scarce arrived at woman’s estate.”

“Then let her come to it, for me, unabashed. Make her mine

ceremonially, and I swear on my honour to postpone the consummation

for a year.”

“Ah! And if you fail?”

“I ask no pledge until my success is assured.”

The Chevalier gnawed his lip, looking on the suitor. He saw an old,

fat, unlovely man, scarred by the claws of depravity (one of his eyes

was bulging askew, as if actually half torn out by them). But the

indelible stamp of rank and wealth redeemed the worst that could be in

him. He told himself that it would be a high mission for his Yolande

to make of herself the instrument for this monster’s salvation. It had

come to be her only chance--and his. Besides, she was a de France, and

surely eager for the restoration of her family’s rights.

He stopped there, by a strong effort of will, and pronounced--on his

word of honour from which there could be no receding--his inexorable

fiat.

“Accomplish what you promise, signore, and she is yours on the

condition you propose.”

Nevertheless, he felt something as nearly approaching meanness as it

was possible for his pride to feel when the Count returned triumphant

with the glad tidings of his success.

“Bid mademoiselle attend me here,” he said coldly to the servant who

waited on his summons.

Di Rocco rubbed his dry palms together, tingling through every nerve

of his dishonoured old body.

And in the doorway, like Dorothea the martyr, stood the white lily of

Savoy, wondering with wide eyes on her judges.

CHAPTER II

The Château di Rocco stood well back, among pine woods, from the

little village of Les Chables on the Argentière Road. Above it sloped

the stony steeps of the Flegère; below were huddled neglected

terraces, like dams to check the further descent of the house into the

valley. It might, in its relation to the huge quarry which contained

it, have been part of the mountain itself, a vast boulder torn away

from its parent rock, and retaining in relief the form of the socket

from which it had parted. Towers, pinnacles and walls, heaped up like

an enormous ice-mould, seemed to have shaped themselves to the uproar

of avalanches, and falling torrents, and the thunder of the wind which

uproots whole hill-sides. Yet it was so old itself as to have

withstood a legion of assaults and survived unshaken. It had been the

stronghold of the di Roccos from the days when the passes of the Alps

were a very active trust in the keeping of the border lords, and was

still a formidable veteran of its stones.

Within, a world of sombre and tarnished magnificence witnessed to the

hands of great mechanics of the past generations. Only the spirit

which could minister to such traditions was debased beyond recall.

What strain was responsible for its existing lord’s, who could say?

The miser, like the comet, is a recurrent phenomenon, eccentric in his

orbit.

The Château, all in all, was a savage, stone-locked, cold-harbour of

a place, the teeth of whose very ghosts chattered as they walked its

vaulted corridors. It was haunted throughout by sounds and whispers of

cold--the boom of subterranean waters; the high rustle of snow; the

growl of ice splitting in the great glaciers opposite. The wind

whistled in its halls, lifting the skirts of the tapestry in a sort of

stately dance, as if the phantom figures thereon were at a minuet to

warm themselves. There was not a closet in all its recesses which

might have been called cosy, nor a rat behind its wainscoting which

had grown sleek on plenty.

Dr Bonito, private physician to the Count, was himself as waxy a

spectre as any which inhabited there. His face was like a

topographical map, with all its features in low relief--wrinkles for

rivers, dull eyes for lakes, a nose like a rudimentary volcano. There

was no expression whatever on it but what seemed to derive from

drought and starvation, and no colour but a bilious glaze, which

pimpled here and there into red. A death-mask of him might very well

have stood for a chart of the dead moon.

The doctor was said to be a Rosicrucian, a member of that queer sect

(then somewhat out of date) which mixed up alchemy with ethics, and

thought to coin a millennium out of the alloy. Or it had thought to

once. Rosicrucianism was not founded, professedly, to interfere with

the polity or religions of States, but simply to pursue the True

Philosophy--to “follow the Gleam.” Yet no secret society, I suppose,

has ever failed, when success has brought it self-conscious of its

power, to abuse its mission; and certainly Dr Bonito, as a latter-day

Frater Roseæ-Crucis, distilled other and less perfumed waters than

utilitarianism from his alembics. He was an empiric, in fact, and

lived on the gross superstition of his employer--barely, it is true,

but resignedly, since Di Rocco had promised him a legacy proportionate

with his services in keeping him alive, and a very bonanza should he

conduct him well over the Biblical span. For which reason Bonito

scarcely resented his present treatment, because he counted every

penny now withheld from him as a penny invested against his future.

Plumpness, under the circumstances, was hardly to be expected of him;

but the doctor was so very thin that, when he hugged himself, his

elbows seemed to meet in his waist. Mr Trix (as he liked to be

called), sitting opposite at a little table, with a solitary candle

burning between, laughed to see him so caress himself.

“You have no bowels,” he said, “consequently no hunger. What is the

matter with you then, old Bonito?”

The physician, who, in order that he might cherish his numb fingers,

had put down on the table an instrument which he had been engaged in

correcting--an astrolabe so antique in construction that it might have

dated from Hipparchus--answered, with a peevish wince of his breath,--

“Hunger, child? What dost thou know of the hunger of the soul?”

“Something,” said Trix.

“Something!” echoed the other. “Ay, the baffled appetites of one whose

sensorium is but a mirror to reflect back into his brain the visible

lusts of the flesh.”

Mr Trix laughed again, pulling at his long pipe. He had a reckless

young dark face, jet-eyebrowed, winsome out of wickedness, and

handsome enough to be a perpetual passport to his desires. His form,

properly slim and elastic for the “blade” that he was, was “sheathed,”

quite elegantly for di Rocco, in cloth of a fine black, and with a

ruff of Valenciennes lace at its breast. A glass and a bottle of old

wine stood at his elbow.

“True,” he said, “I deplore the loss of our late good company. And so

do you, my Bonito, if for a different reason. I miss its penny-wisdom,

and you its penny-fees. But however our respective souls may feel the

present pinch, they would do well, it seems to me, to prepare for,

even to provide against, a worse. I think Di Rocco looks very bloated

and shaky of late, don’t you?”

“Ah! you wish him to die first!”

Bonito rose to his feet and went pacing vehemently up and down. Trix,

watching him, said quietly,--

“You are very wrong. I wish the padrone no harm whatever--least of all

the harm of this ludicrous misalliance.”

The physician stopped suddenly.

“It is quite true,” he said. “I know the conditions. We should both be

disinherited--taken by the scruff and kicked out. The notary has

already been advised.”

“What then? The stars are always common land.”

“Do you think so, my friend? There are no pastures so exclusive, nor

so costly in the grazing. Why else have I served parsimony these long

years, as Galeotti served Louis Gripes, if not for promise of the late

means to their attainment. Let us be frank; why have you?”

“For fun,” said the young man, “or my duty to an older scapegrace. I

don’t see the possibility of either in a _regimen_ of Mademoiselle de

France.”

Bonito, sitting down again and leaning his elbows on the table,

searched hungrily the brown eyes which canvassed his imperturbably.

Suddenly he dealt out a question,--

“M. Louis-Marie Saint-Péray?”

“Well?”

“Have you come across such a gentleman here?”

Trix nodded.

“Eh! you have?” said the other. “Well, what do you know of him?”

“That he is a young gentleman of France, of slender means, which he

expends largely on impracticable enthusiasms.”

“Anything more?”

“That he is in Le Prieuré for the second time, to attempt the assault

of Mont Blanc.”

“Ay, and what else?”

“Incidentally, that he will never conquer anything.”

“Why not?”

“Because he is a creature of fervid aspirations and lame conclusions.”

“Has he taken you into his confidence?”

“More; into his arms.”

“How was that?”

“He would cross the Glacier of the Winds without a guide; he fell into

a crevasse which, luckily for him, his alpenstock bridged. But he

could not get out until I pulled him. There’s the thing in the corner.

Do you see it? I gave him my hunting-knife for it, the one with the

jade handle and little rat’s head in-gold. Nothing would satisfy him

but that we exchanged blood tokens.”

“I don’t doubt it. A fair exchange, and M. Cartouche all over.”

“Why, thou unconscionable hunks! didn’t he give me, for his part, what

he had reason to value most in the world? ‘Use it for my sake,’ says

he, ‘so that I may dream always of my two best friends going hand in

hand.’ There were tears in his eyes. Do you think he will ever ascend

Mont Blanc?”

“Maybe not. But his aspirations mount higher.”

“You mean to the de France. Ha, ha, old fox! you have not had me, you

see.”

“He has confessed to you?”

“No, I swear. But the sacristan of Le Marais is an exuberant toss-pot,

and apt to overflow in his cups. My information is from him.”

“What information?”

“Why, that miss and my friend have very much the air of being lovers

secretly pledged to one another.”

“It is a fact. But how does he know it?”

“His chapel is their pious rendezvous, sweet souls. There they met

first, and there they meet still.”

“It is well they take their loves to church--a good sign. He will want

to make an honest woman of her.”

Cartouche grew suddenly and fastidiously articulate.

“I will beg you to bear in mind, Dr Bonito,” he said, “that M.

Saint-Péray has made his honour my own.”

“That is admirable indeed,” answered the physician. “But has he

introduced you to the lady?”

“No,” said Cartouche, irresistibly tickled for the moment. “There are

limits even to _his_ friendship.”

“You do not know her?”

“Not even by sight.”

“She is very pretty, Mr Trix.”

Cartouche, staring at the speaker a moment, took his pipe from his

lips, which as always, when his mood grew ugly, seemed to thin down

against his teeth.

“What are you hinting at?” he demanded low. “A pox on your innuendo!

Out with it!”

The physician grinned unconcerned.

“Only,” said he, “that I hope, when you do see her, it will not make

you wish to take your blood-brother’s place in the spoiling of di

Rocco’s romance.”

Cartouche leaped to his feet.

“Beast!” he hissed. “If thou hadst as much nose as a barber could lay

hold on, I would take thee by it and shave thy cursed throat!”

The other did not move.

“As to my nose,” he said, “it serves its purpose.”

“I don’t doubt it,” cried Cartouche. “The smallest vent is enough for

slander. When have you ever known me wrong a friend in his love?”

“Never, indeed--where the wrong’s been expected of you. Perversity’s

your crowning devil. You’ve suffered some losses for the pleasure of

confuting your oracles, I know. Well, you’ve only to confute them

here, to earn _my_ gratitude, at least.”

“A dog to suggest such a villainy!”

“What! to you? Ho, ho! Have you ever heard of carrying owls to Athens?

But let it pass. It’s all one if we are in accord as to the

impossibility of this alliance between Mademoiselle and our patron,

and the timeliness of our young mountaineer’s intrusion. You choose to

believe that you will serve monsignore best by helping M. Saint-Péray

to the lady. Well, believe it, and save us our reversions by an act of

virtue.”

Cartouche, yielding to humour with a sudden laugh, yawned and

stretched himself.

“After all,” he said indolently, “there’s no such sporting science as

casuistry. Di Rocco is certainly an old bottle for this heady young

wine; a villainous scarecrow to be asking for a patch of this bright

new cloth. The pattern is out of suits with his raggedness, and calls

for a seemly pair of breeches. We’ll save him his character in spite

of himself.”

“It would be a veritable act of grace,” said Bonito.

“If we could only do him that good by stealth,” said Cartouche,

relighting his pipe.

“La-la-la!” cried the physician, softly. “Why need we appear in the

matter at all?”

“What do you mean?”

“It is only a question of terms with Le Marais--of sufficiently

gilding the countenance it will give to a stolen union. They have no

particular tenderness there for di Rocco, whose ugly countenance, for

his part, is the only thing he has ever given them. The rest lies

between you and your blood-brother.”

“I can bring a horse to the water--”

“Bah! he will drink. It is a Pierian spring. You will know when you

see.”

“Shall I? And how about the lady?”

Bonito chuckled.

“For choice she has di Rocco!”

A voice at the door, little, and gloating, and jubilant, took up the

word,--

“Di Rocco, di Rocco, di Rocco! What about him, you rogues? What about

the knave of hearts, the gallant, the irresistible, the latter-day

saint of love, who is going to be so blessed that he will need no

physician, nor no runagate scamp to remind him of his days of

unregeneracy?”

Bonito, risen, shot one significant glance at Cartouche, and then

lowered his eyes as his patron entered.

“Monsignore’s suit has sped?” he murmured.

“Drawn by doves,” crowed the Marquess; “flown straight as a bee into

the bosom of love, where it stops to hive.”

He crossed to the table, took up the bottle, cried, “Ha, you

inordinate dog!” to Cartouche; slapped him on the back with, “A thief

of a cellarer, go hang!” and blew out the candle.

“Who can’t drink by moonlight,” he cried, “is no chaste Diana’s

servant. I’ll have to immure thee, dangerous rogue, among thy

bottles.”

The moonlight, as he spoke, striking from a white window-sill, threw

up all his features grossly. He looked like some infernal sort of

negro, flat-nosed, monstrous-lipped.

“It was my candle, padrone,” said Cartouche, placidly sucking at his

pipe. “I think I will light it again, and this time at both ends.”

But di Rocco, paying no attention to him, was flicking at the

astrolabe on the table.

“This folly, Bonito,” he said. “I am at an end of it all. What did it

ever foretell me but lies?”

The physician rescued his instrument gravely.

“Nay, monsignore,” he said. “It cannot lie, so its parts remain true.

Yet I confess it strained my credulity to the extent this night that I

was fain to bring it in and examine it.”

“And what had been its message?” sneered the Marquess, uneasy while he

scowled.

“That monsignore’s death must follow close upon his marriage,” said

the Rosicrucian, calmly.

Di Rocco tore the instrument from his hand and dashed it upon the

floor.

“Liar!” he screamed. “I know thy tricks and motives. Did it foretell

this end to them? Begone, thou ass inside a lion’s skin, lest I spit

and trample on thee! Begone, nor look upon my face again!”

Without a word Bonito stooped and gathered up the wreck of brass,

then, clutching it, walked softly from the room.

Cartouche pulled calmly on at his pipe.

CHAPTER III

M. Louis-Marie Saint-Peray lodged in the house of a M. Paccard, Le

Prieuré’s respectable doctor, and an enthusiast in matters of

geology. Everyone loved Louis-Marie, even, in a sweet, impartial way,

the doctor’s only daughter, Martha, who, however, had other geese to

pluck in the matrimonial market. The young man was so good and so

good-looking, so pious, so enthusiastic and so sensible. Anticipating

the boy-angel of “Excelsior,” he came storming the frozen heights,

which, nevertheless, he was not to attain. But his failures made the

true romance of his endeavours--in the eyes of women, at least, who do

not admire the cocksureness which comes of success. As to the men, the

rugged mountaineers, who were experienced in the natural limitations

to their craft, they mingled, perhaps, a little contempt with their

liking. It would be all very well to put their knowledge to school by

showing it the way up Mont Blanc; but, in the meanwhile, aspirations

were not deeds. They all, for the matter of that, aspired to conquer

the great white peak, but their women did not applaud them for the

wish. True, they had not, not one of them, M. Saint-Péray’s serene

white face, and kindling blue eyes, and hair of curling sunbeams. Yet

Le Prieuré was not deficient in manly beauty, however little it might

derive from an exclusive ancestry of angels.

Le Prieuré, in Louis-Marie’s time, was a rude enough valley, and

almost forbidden ground to the ease-loving traveller. That was one

reason, perhaps, why the women so favoured this gentle stranger, who

came to them on his own initiative out of the despised world of

luxury. If he brought with him the traditions of tender breeding, he

brought also its fearless spirit. It was something god-like in him to

defy, in his frail person, that unconquerable keep of the mountains.

That was good in itself; but a closer appeal was to reach them on the

occasion of his second visit. For it was then that he and Yolande met

for the first time, and provided in their meeting the basis for a more

poignant romance than any which had yet glorified him. Within a week,

every wife in Le Prieuré thrilled in the knowledge of a secret

fathomed only by herself.

One wet July morning Louis-Marie left the doctor’s door and turned his

face for Le Marais, which was a little dedicatory chapel standing

under pine woods on the lower slopes of the Montverd. It was there he

had first come upon Yolande, the saintly loveliness, craving some boon

of the sacred heart; and what better rendezvous could the two

afterwards appoint than the little holy shrine which had brought them

mutually acquainted with the sweetest of all boons?

As Louis-Marie walked up the village street his heart sang like a bird

with joy. It was full of thankfulness to the God of orthodoxy, who was

nevertheless the God of nature and of love. How easy and how

profitable it was to earn approval in those great eyes! One had only

to keep the faith of a little child, to ask no questions, to court no

vexing heresies, and be happy. And so to be rewarded for one’s

happiness, as witness himself twice blessed. He had done nothing but

be good according to his orthodox lights, and for that virtue, which

was instinct, here was he glorified in the affection of the loveliest

lily of womanhood which had ever blossomed in a by-way of the world.

He turned and breathed a laugh in the direction of the unsurmountable

peak, hidden now within league-deep folds of mist. What was there to

gain which seemed other than trivial in the light of his higher

achievement? The mountain was shrunk to a mole-hill under that star,

that altitude.

There was no wind; the wet dropped softly, caressingly; the fields

were full of flowers. Louis-Marie could interpret the talk between

them and the earnest rain. The patches of standing rye were stippled

with poppies. He recognised why the supreme artist had touched them in

here and there and nowhere else. Sacred love was the understanding

love after all; he felt that he had been given the gift of tongues.

He took no sense of depression from the drowning mist. The gloom made

the lamp of his heart shine the more friendly, smiling on all things

in its consciousness of the ecstatic wings which were waiting up there

to flutter to it in a little. He had no doubt of himself, or of his

right to hold that lure to them. Perhaps he had no reason to have. He

came, for all worldly considerations, of an old and stately family,

and he had his orphan’s patrimony--nothing great, but enough to bring

him within the bounds of eligibility in the eyes of a poor Chevalier.

If he had consented hitherto to make a secret of his suit, it was

because he could not find it in his heart to materialise the first

virgin rapture of that idyll--to submit it to flesh-and-blood

conditions. There was no other reason; or, if one was to be suspected

in M. de France’s pride and aloofness, as gossip painted them, he

would not admit to himself that he had been influenced by it. But, in

any case, propriety, always to him the little thing more than love,

without which love itself must lack perfection, demanded its

vindication the moment he realised that it was in question; and he was

now actually on his way, in fact, to entreat his love’s consent to an

appeal to the paternal sanctions.

Half-way down the village street he encountered a young fellow, a

friend of his, and one intimately associated with some past ambitions.

This was Jacques Balmat, already the most experienced of mountaineers

at twenty-two. His dark eager face and bold eyes showed in significant

contrast with the girlish pink and blue of the other’s. He held out a

handful of pebbles.

Louis-Marie was in no hurry. “For Dr Paccard, Jacques?” he asked, with

a smile. The young man nodded his head.

“Some of them are rare enough, monsieur. I risk my life in getting

them. But who would win the daughter must court the father.”

There was significance as well as sympathy in his tone. To him, also,

there was a peak higher than Mont Blanc’s to attain.

“Very true, Jacques,” said Saint-Péray. “I hope we may both find

favour.”

The young mountaineer nodded again.

“And in the meanwhile, monsieur, there is no favour imperilled by

showing what resolute fellows we are. I was even now on my way to

monsieur. This mist presages a sunny morrow. Monsieur, the mountain

still waits to be scaled.”

“It must wait, Jacques, for me. There are rarer heights to gain. For

the moment I hold my life like the frailest vessel, which it is my

duty to protect from so much as a breath of danger.”

“Well, monsieur, that sounds funny to me. But then, manliness is my

only recommendation. To win a great name out of venture--there is my

chance, and now more than ever.”

“Why now, Jacques?”

“Monsieur has not heard? Dr Paccard has been appointed physician to

the Château. Dr Paccard will be a big man presently--too big to

countenance a son-in-law chosen from the people.”

“Since when has he been appointed, Jacques?”

“Since last night, monsieur, by the talk. It tells of how the

monsignore’s erst familiar, the seer Bonito, came down into the

village raging over his dismissal. And there are other whispers--of a

libertine reformed; of changes projected at the Château. I know

little of their import, I--only this, that Jacques Balmat will lose

nothing by conquering the mountain. Shall we not join hands, monsieur,

in essaying once more a triumph which would make all men our

debtors--monsieur, to win or perish?”

But Saint-Péray shook his head.

“Another time, Jacques,” he said. “My claim to conquest must rest on

lower deserts. _Bonne chance, camarade!_” And he went on his way, to

meet the fate of the irresolute; while young Balmat went on his, to

climb to his Martha by-and-by.

Louis-Marie was grown thoughtful as he walked on. Nature somehow

seemed a little further from his knowledge than before; the talk

between the flowers and the rain was like a whispered conspiracy; the

dank air chilled him. As he turned out of the village into the wet

meadows, which sloped gently upwards towards Le Marais, he started to

see a figure standing by a little freshet as if awaiting him.

“Gaston!” he cried, with an irresistible thrill of guiltiness in his

note.

Mr Trix wore, making a grace of necessity, a thick dove-grey

redingote. His buckish little “tops,” which came but half-way up his

calves, appeared scarcely soiled by the rain and mud. The smallest of

black cocked hats was placed jauntily on his black curls, of which

one, and one only, was privileged to accent the whiteness of his fine

forehead. Over his head he carried a small Spanish silk umbrella, an

innovation of such effeminacy that his daring it at all in the teeth

of fashion testified to something in his character which was at least

as noteworthy as his foppishness. Like the dandy wasp, with his waist

and elegance and sting, there was that suggestion in Mr Trix of an

ever-ready retort upon the rashness of his critics. Some men there are

who carry swords in their eyes, and no one laughed at Cartouche the

macaroni unless behind his back.

He came up to Louis-Marie, and took his arm with an assured frankness.

His smile showed an enviable regularity of teeth.

“Yes, I purposed to meet you,” he said. “Are you in a hurry?”

His self-sufficiency somehow mended Louis-Marie’s.

“My business can wait,” he answered, “for a friend.”

Nevertheless he paused meaningly, as if that business were exclusive.

Cartouche laughed.

“Louis-Marie,” said he, “you have never yet asked me for my

credentials.”

“You saved my life,” said Saint-Péray, simply.

“That is true,” said Cartouche. “But supposing it was for my own ends?

I am the very hawk of opportunism.”

“You must have quick eyes indeed, dear Gaston,” said Saint-Péray,

with a smile, “if you saw your way to turn me to account during those

few moments of my peril.”

“Eyes of the hawk, Louis-Marie. Well, I saved your life, you say. It

is certainly the only thing I ever saved, and therefore perhaps, like

a spendthrift, I put a particular value on it.”

“And I too, Gaston, I assure you. There was never a time when I held

my life so dear as now.”

“That is as I supposed, and the very reason why I am here to warn

you.”

“What! is my life in danger?”

“That is as it may hit. If someone came to me and said, ‘Gaston, there

is one who has it in his power to administer to you the potion of

virtue, so that you shall wish to marry and live respectable,’ I

should say that my life was in peril. But one man’s food is another

man’s poison, and it is possible that you might welcome such a

physicking.”

“Indeed I think I should.”

“Very well. Then there is a priest at Le Marais, I believe--a

professional dealer in such potions. There is also, if I am not in

error, the necessary other party to such a transaction awaiting you

there. I would seize the opportunity, if I were you, to be made

respectable for ever.”

“What do you mean?”

Saint-Péray’s face was grown suddenly a little white and stern.

“We are blood-brothers,” answered Cartouche, quietly; “comrades of a

very recent sentiment. I honour the tie, despite--I say _despite_--an

older and, to me, more natural one. I mean no reflection upon anything

but the blindness of two simplicities, living, privately as they

suppose, in a little-high paradise of their own. Will you not be

satisfied with a hint? Will you not believe in its sincerity, though I

tell you that I should profit personally by its acceptance by you? You

have chosen to take me on trust. I choose to vindicate that confidence

by assuring you that my patron di Rocco has spoiled more idylls in his

time than I can tell. He is in the way to ruin yet another, this time

by the Church’s sanction; and his arguments, from the worldly point of

view, are overwhelming.”

Saint-Péray was like a ghost now.

“Speak plain, brother,” he whispered; “or rather, answer only. Is the

Marquess a suitor for the hand of Mademoiselle de France? Is that what

you mean?”

Cartouche stepped back and nodded.

“He is an accepted suitor, Louis-Marie.”

The young man dropped his head with a shudder, as if he had been

stabbed. But in a moment he looked up again, pale and trembling.

“So vile!” he said hoarsely. “She’s soiled in his mere thought!

Gaston! My God! it must not be; it--”

He checked himself suddenly, gazed a troubled moment into the other’s

face, then turned and went quickly up the hill. As soon as the mist

had hidden him, Cartouche followed easily in his steps.

“I must see this folly out,” he thought. “Perhaps they will want a

witness.”

The chapel of Le Marais hung in the clouds. Its stone walls streamed

with rain. The sop and suck of it were the only sounds which broke the

silence of the hillside. Cartouche stepped softly to the door and

looked in.

It was just a dovecot, of a size for these two pious pigeons. They

knelt side by side before the little gimcrack altar. The girl had been

waiting there for the other to join her. A picture of the sacred heart

transfixed hung on the wall above her head. It was thence she had

sought to gather strength for the cruel thing she had to say.

Cartouche, standing without, looked through the crack of the door. He

could not see Yolande’s face, for it was hidden in her hands. But

presently, with a quivering sigh, she raised it, and, seeing her lover

still bowed down in prayer, turned towards the entrance as if seeking

light. So the young virgin of Nazareth might have turned, in great

doubt and loveliness, following with her eyes the dimming messenger of

heaven. And then she herself went to prayer again.

We have likened Yolande once before to Dorothea the Martyr, she who,

when condemned to death for loving Christ, promised that she would

send to Theophilus, the young advocate who had bantered her, a posy

from the garden of her desires. Now, like that Theophilus, when a

child-angel stood before him offering to his hand a spray of unearthly

roses, Cartouche felt his heart suddenly constrict and, rallying,

choke his veins with fire. Stepping softly back, he tiptoed round the

end of the chapel, and gained the tiny presbytery which stood in a

clearing above. The little house was deserted, it seemed, both of

father and sacristan. No one answered to his low tapping. As he stood

undecided, the voices of the lovers approaching from the chapel

reached him. The door of the presbytery was on the latch. He opened

it, entered, and stood hidden just within. He had no wish to

eavesdrop; his heart was in a strange panic, that was all. He felt as

Actaeon must have felt as he backed into the thickets.

The two came close up to his hiding-place; and then they stopped, and

uttered for his shameful ears the tragedy of their lives. In the first

of their meeting, amazed as yet, and unrealising the abyss which was

fast gaping between them, they spoke in the soft romance, the old

love-language of Savoy; but soon a woefuller cry wrung itself from the

torture of their hearts.

“Garden of my soul! as the rose clings to the wall, so art thou mine.”

“I have clung to thee, Louis.”

“The sun hath welded us into one. Thy perfume is in me, as my strength

upholds thy beauty. We cannot be torn apart but we perish.”

“I have climbed heavenwards resting on thy heart. My cheek hath glowed

to thee by day, and at night, when thou sleptst, I have put my lips to

the moon kisses on thy face.”

“Who is this thief that comes into my garden to steal my rose? A beast

whom they liken to Gilles de Rais; a thing so foul that I would rather

my rose were scentless than that he should boast to have shared in the

tiniest largesse of her perfume.”

“Hush! he is the husband whom my father has chosen for me.”

At that Louis-Marie threw poetry to the winds, and seized Yolande’s

hands, and looked with madness into her eyes.

“He may choose, but let me gather no submission from your tone.

Yolande, we will go down together, and claim our older pledge and win

his heart by tears. I had meant this very morning to urge you to that

course. Why didn’t I before! O, why didn’t I before! I curse my own

delay! I--”

“Louis!”

“Yes, I was wrong. ’Tis love’s, it seems, to damn. Come down, Yolande,

before it is too late.”

“Listen, dear love; it is too late. It was a conditional promise, and

the condition has been observed. What should my father know of you?

His word is his bond, and he will hold to it.”

“He cannot know the reputation of this man. His breath’s a blight upon

the earth. Why, even now--”

He broke off with a cry, and clasped his arms convulsively about her.

She was like a ghost, holding up her white hands to him piteously.

Cartouche saw what perfect things they were, frail and slender, yet of

a beauty to cradle all love. Her face, in its milky pallour, grey-eyed

and scarlet-lipped, was like the face of some spirit tragedy flowering

from the mists.

“Ask me nothing,” she whispered. “Tell me what to do.”

“_I_ tell you?” he said, releasing and stepping back from her. He

forced his trembling lips to resolution. “What does your heart say,

Yolande? your stainless womanhood? your duty to yourself?”

“My duty to my father, Louis.”

“Now, God help me! Is that a note of wavering in your voice? This

man’s rich and powerful, and I’m neither.”

“Louis, I’ll not upbraid you.”

“For duty’s sake to tie yourself to a leper! What abuse of authority

will not women plead to justify their treacheries!”

“Will you break my heart? If I married him from duty, I should kill

myself from love.”

“Hush, dearest! hush, my lily! I was a brute and coward. Forgive me.

Yolande, Yolande! have I offended you beyond recall?”

“I forgive you, indeed. But, Louis, were it not better just now to

think than kiss?”

“Yes, to think, Yolande. I would carry you by force if driven to it.”

“Would you? O, I am helpless!”

“But not unless all else failed. To prevent one outrage by another!

God would not love us any longer, Yolande. We must try all juster

means first.”

Cartouche, wincing, ground his heel softly into the boards where he

stood. The girl was weeping very hopelessly.

“You wring my heart,” said Saint-Péray, sobbing himself. “What am I

to do? What think? I would pray for light before I act--pray for

fortitude and reason. Precipitancy makes self-martyrs, Yolande. Our

cause is better won by moderation.”

She turned from him. “Yolande!” he cried in agony. “You love me best?”

Cartouche uttered a very wicked oath under his breath. But the white

lily was in her lover’s arms.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “You are always right, dear Louis. Only tell me

what I am to do.”

“Supposing you went now to your father, Yolande, and confessed the

whole truth to him?”

“Alone, Louis?”

“Only for a little, dearest. I will follow when I have prayed for

guidance. Would he know my name even?”

“I have done very wrong.”

“Hush! the blame is mine. But we will mend it--start afresh. He must

be broken to my idea--learn my deserts before he sees me. I’ll trust

to you to speak them, sweetheart, better than myself. We must not

descend upon him with flags flying, daring his enmity.”

“You’ll not be long?”

“Yolande! do you doubt me?”

“I only doubt myself, Louis. If he appeals to me by all I owe to him!”

“You owe God your soul, Yolande.”

“Yes, yes. Pray to Him for me, Louis. I am so weak alone. Good-bye,

Louis.”

“_Au revoir_, Yolande.”

She did not mend her term, however, and they parted. Cartouche turned

his face away. When he looked again they were both gone--Yolande down

the hill, Louis-Marie to the chapel.

“I have seen an angel,” thought the watcher. “Henceforth I am in love

with chastity.”

He lingered long in his eyrie, waiting for Saint-Péray to go. At

length, restless beyond endurance, he decided to take the lead in the

descent. As he went down the hillside, the mist was already retreating

before the onset of the sun. It was the dawn of mid-day. Cartouche

looked over his shoulder towards Le Marais.

“Will that bring him out?” he thought, “or will he always put off

making his hay until to-morrow?”

Coming out into the road below, he ran suddenly upon Bonito. The

physician sprang back and stood breathing at him, grinning horribly.

“Ha!” he cried. “Well met, fellow-disinherited!”

He champed like a rabid dog. He was woefully unclean and disordered.

Cartouche fell severely calm.

“What is the matter?” he asked.

“The matter!” cried Bonito. “Enough and to spare for us. Go and hear

it in the village. Thou hast sped, if thou hast sped, to great purpose

indeed. Le Marais was already bespoke, it seems. They are man and wife

this hour.”

Cartouche did not move.

“Who are man and wife?” he said.

The other raved.

“Who but the dog that hath disowned us, and the--woman that hath

replaced!”

“The woman! she of the white hands? Why, she was up yonder not twice

as long ago!”

“I cannot help that. You should have kept her there. If you let her

go, you were the fool.”

“I had nothing to do with it. She went down to plead for her lover.”

“A pretty pleading! I don’t doubt she’s like them all--caught by a

title. Anyhow springed she was and is, and held at this moment as fast

as Church can bind her.”

Cartouche laughed recklessly.

“Well,” said he, “man proposes, but woman disposes. Our best-laid

plans are nothing without the collusion of the party planned against.

We must carry our wits to a fresh market.”

Bonito, with a fearful blasphemy, hit out into the air.

“I know my market!” he screamed, “I know my market!” and ran raging up

the road. Cartouche turned his face to the hill once more.

A little way up he met Saint-Péray, pale and exalted, descending at

last. He stood in his path.

“Louis-Marie,” said he, “you have delayed too long. It does not do to

give the devil tether while you pray. Mademoiselle de France is at

this moment the Marchesa di Rocco.”

He owed the young man no mercy, he thought. His own heart, for all his

cynic exterior, was burning between contempt and anger. But he was

hardly prepared for the blighting effect of his own words. Louis-Marie

fell at his feet as if a thunderbolt had struck him.

CHAPTER IV

Yolande de France walked straight down the hill to her doom. She had

no Spanish silk umbrella, like Cartouche’s, to shield her head from

the tempest, nor any strength, like his, to dare orthodoxy. She wore

only a simple cloak and hood, like “Red-riding-hood the darling, the

flower of fairy lore;” and that was quite insufficient to protect her

from the wolf.

At the door of the “Hôtel” her father met her, distraught and

nervous. He led her, his lips quivering, into the little side study

which he called an ante-room. He was obviously, pitifully, agitated.

“Where have you been?” he said. “But no matter, since you are here.

Yolande, the moment has come when you must decide.”

“Decide, father?” She trembled.

“Whether,” he answered, “you will bow to my earnest wishes, or commit

me to dishonour and the grave.”

She felt suddenly faint, and sat down in a chair.

“Father!” she whispered; “I don’t understand you.”

“I am only too easily understood,” he said. “The Marquess di Rocco,

who holds my very existence in the hollow of his hand, renews his suit

at this moment, and peremptorily.”

“I cannot marry him.”

“Wait, before you condemn me, me, your father, to worse than death. I

must be plain with you, Yolande, in this terrible crisis. I do not

plead my word to him, although you as a de France should appreciate

its inviolability. It is associated with other pledges which, in

default of your consent, would mean my instant ruin. I owe him money,

Yolande, which it is impossible for me to repay--money borrowed

chiefly to enable you, my daughter, to maintain the condition which is

your due. You alone have it in your power to liquidate that debt.”

She did not speak. She could not, indeed. But he gathered a little

confidence from her silence.

“And after all,” he said, with a sickly smile, “one can conceive a

less attractive way out of an _impasse_. Riches, position, a princely

jointure, an alliance with the most powerful house in Savoy, whereby

our own would be enabled to recover its lost influence--are these

small considerations to be discarded for a personal sentiment, which

a month of such devotion would cure?”

She shuddered, repeating, “I cannot marry him.”

“On the other side,” he hurried on, ignoring her words desperately,

“utter material ruin and, what is worse to me, my word, my honour

foresworn. Listen, Yolande. In that very hour when you become, if you

will become, his wife, he settles his entire property upon you by

will. You will be the most influential woman in the duchy, a force for

the good which is so dear to your heart. Is to put this in your power

the act of a libertine, or of one rather who yearns to find his

redemption at the hands of a virtue which he holds so inestimably

dear?”

She cried out at last, rising from her seat and staggering as if she

were blind.

“Father! father! give me time at least!”

Even in her despair she knew that it were useless to plead how her

heart, her soul were engaged elsewhere. The shock, at this pass, would

have driven him to a very frenzy of cruelty. As it was, he leapt to

the little concession implied in her appeal, and sought to improve

upon it instantly.

“Impossible. He is on the very eve of a journey. He demands the

ceremony at once--this moment.”

“The ceremony? O, mother of God!”

“A formal one only, conditionally, for a year. Not till that time has

elapsed may he claim you for his wife in fact. It was my provision,

made in consideration of your youth and inexperience.”

She stared at him as if mad.

“You are my father,” she began. He interrupted, to better her,--

“Your dead mother’s trustee for your welfare, Yolande. As I hold that

charge sacred from abuse, believe at least in the sincerity of my

desire to urge, impartially, upon you the wisdom of a step which I am

sure she would have approved.”

The girl gave a little rending laugh--horrible--in a note quite

foreign to her.

“Is he--M. di Rocco--in the house?” she asked.

“He is in the next room awaiting us. The Maire, the notary, and the

good Father of Le Marais are also there, attending on your decision.”

“Only my mother is wanting,” said Yolande. “Call her to this

conspiracy against her child, and see what she answers to the

impartial head of it.”

He had turned his fine eyes from her, even as, it is said, the royal

despot of beasts will cower under the fearless human gaze; but at this

the goaded fire flashed into them.

“She would answer,” he cried, “cursing the graceless offspring of our

house, who could so misread a father’s tender love.”

“No, father, she is in heaven. The secrets of our hearts are bared to

her.”

He cringed before her for a moment, defeated and exposed. Looking in

her noble eyes, he knew that his moral tenure of her heart, her duty,

hung upon a thread--knew that nothing but the last poignant threat of

self-destruction could restore them to him. His stately cowardice had

even foreseen this contingency.

“You leave me no alternative,” he said, his face as grey as ashes. “I

cannot survive dishonour and my broken word. Thus, Yolande, do I take

your message to her!” and with the word he fetched a pistol from his

pocket and put its muzzle to his temple.

She uttered a fearful scream, and flew to him--wrenched down his arm,

cried, and fondled him with inarticulate moans. He stood quite

passive.

“Give me time!” she could only sob at last.

“I can give you nothing, Yolande,” he answered. “Yours is all the

gift. I am a bankrupt but for you.”

He made a movement as if to break from her. She held him madly. In

that minute the whole joy of life drained from her veins and left them

barren. At length she released him, and stepped back.

“Father,” she said, “in all your life never mention my mother’s name

to me again. When I die, bury me away from her in another grave. I am

only worthy to be your daughter. Deal with me as you will.”

A double rose of colour had come to his cheeks. He made an eager step

towards her, but she retreated before him.

“It is enough for me that you have vindicated your name,” he said. “It

is enough that I am not mistaken in you.”

“Spare me that comment on my shame,” she said. “Why will you keep me

in this torture?”

But he must still hunger to justify his self-degradation by enlarging

on it.

“Hush!” he said. “It is a sacrifice, I know; but perhaps, Yolande,

only a provisional sacrifice. Dare I whisper my own expectations? You

will be free for a year--a wife in nothing but the material endowments

of wifehood; a--a prospective dowager, Yolande. The Marquess is much

shaken--a prematurely old man--a--”

She turned from him, feeling sick to death.

“I am waiting,” she said icily.

* * * * * * * *

That was how the Marchese di Rocco gained his wife. For the rest, the

priest, the Maire and notary were creatures of his own, and among them

soon accomplished the ceremony and settlements. At the end, monsignore

offered to kiss his newly-made bride; but she backed from him.

“Is this in the bond?” she asked coldly of her father. He was very

righteous and peremptory at once.

“It is a breach of it,” he said. “I must ask you, monsignore, to

observe our compact to the letter.”

The old libertine grinned.

“A pledge only, to be redeemed in a year,” he said. “But it will keep,

sweet as roses in a cabinet. In the interval, I hope the Marchesa will

honour my poor abode, during the absence of its master.”

“No, pardon me,” said de France. “She will continue in her father’s

house.”

“I shall do neither,” said the lily.

“How!” cried the Chevalier.

“I am my own mistress,” she said. “From this moment please do not

forget that--” and she swept from the room.

He stared after her, dumbfoundered; but di Rocco burst into a great

laugh.

“By God, I like her spirit!” he said. “She is a prize worth the

winning.”

CHAPTER V

There was a little _auberge_ on the Montverd, kept open during the

summer months for the benefit of those (not many in 1783) who came to

enjoy the view. There, in a green oasis, planted amongst the

stupendous buttresses of the mountains, lived Nicholas Target and his

daughter Margot, the latter a good sensible girl and the responsible

_aubergiste_. The father was a drunken scamp, a guide by profession,

but long discredited as such in the eyes of all but his daughter,

whose faithful heart continued to make its compromise with the

self-evident. The fellow spent his days, of slouching and soaking,

mostly at the foot of the steep path which descended from the inn to

the moraine of the Winds, where, in a tiny shed, he kept a store of

woollen socks for the feet of those who desired to cross the glacier.

This at least left the _auberge_ free of his presence, and Margot to

the peaceful entertainment of her guests.

Amongst these, on a certain tragic day, came to be included Yolande,

new Marchesa di Rocco. Only the wonderful visitor came to stay, it

seemed, and not merely to gather Dutch courage for the passage of the

glacier. She took a bed at the inn, and cold command, as by right of

her husband, its rent-lord, of its general conduct. She had always had

an affection for Margot, the good girl, and this was her way of

showing her confidence in her discretion.

“I want to be alone,” she had said; “and hither none comes but the

stranger who cannot know me or my concerns. I look to you to secure me

utter privacy--from man, from woman, from child, from the whole world.

Only if my father comes must I see him, for I am his daughter. For all

else be my true and faithful watchdog, Margot.”

Margot had of course heard of the tragic ending to that idyll on Le

Marais. In common with her fellow-women she had deplored the finish to

a pretty romance; but then, when one’s feudal lord stepped in at the

door, love must fly out at the window. It was pitiful, it was sad, but

it was inevitable. She promised with all her heart to contribute what

gentle salve was hers to that open wound.

She said it with fervour, but in a panic. It was difficult for her to

reconstruct, from this figure of bloodless hauteur, the sweet and

kindly patroness of yesterday, who had never held herself other than

such a simple girl as she was herself. Could shock so turn to stone?

It was a catalepsy of the soul.

And Yolande made her home there in the _auberge_. With all Le Prieuré

at her feet, she elected for this chill small refuge of the hills. She

felt she could breathe there--was nearer God and her mother. She felt

she could pray a little even, and with more chance of being heard in

that austere silence. There was no sound of waterfalls in all the vast

valley to strike between her and her isolation, rushing down into the

hateful plains where men dwelt, dragging her thoughts on their

torrents. What voices reached her came from above--the whisper of

avalanches, the echoing crack of ice-falls in those enormous attics of

the world. She was alone with her desolation among desolations.

Once, and once only, her father visited her there. He was very humble

and deprecating. He had come to remonstrate, and he remained to weep.

She saw his tears without emotion, and bid him kindly to the descent,

lest the mists should rise presently and give him cold. He went

without a word.

Did she ever think of Louis and that dead idyll? A will of

self-reticence had so been born in her that perhaps she was able to

hold his figure from her mind. If she had not, the memory of the

cruelty of her part to him must have driven her mad. Not to think at

all was her hold on reason--not to think what he was thinking,

suffering, designing. That he could come to claim her yet, in defiance

of law, orthodoxy and every right but the right of human nature, she

could not believe, nor wish to believe. He was not so to be dethroned

from her worship of him past. It would be another Louis than the Louis

of her knowledge who could so dare. Yet was she not another Yolande?

An awful rapture, should outrage have conceived a wicked will in him

like hers! But Louis would not come. He was a purer soul than she, and

prayed, always prayed, before he committed himself to action.

The far unconquered heights above her were her reassurance, she told

herself, that he was of those who accept repulse unquestioning. His

faith was always first in heaven, and its high reasons for baffling

high achievement. Christ’s creed, and he a Christian. He could not

love her so much, “loved he not honour more.” She bowed to that higher

rival, and believed that the thing remotest from her wishes was to see

her ousted. And her brain reeled to the sound of every footstep which

came up the mountain.

Among them all she never dreamed of listening for her husband’s. That

di Rocco had kept his word and left Le Prieuré on the morrow of the

tragedy she never doubted. It was not he, but the interval which was

to separate her from him which filled her thoughts. Nebulous,

unformed, the idea was still never less than a fixed one in her mind

that any consummation to that tyranny but Death’s was unspeakable.

Whether his or hers it mattered nothing. The knot must be cut before

it was double-tied; and in her heart she rejoiced to think of his

succession to an empty bed. She did not suppose she could possibly

survive the year--twelve long months of suspension between torture

past and the prospect of the living “question” to come. She had only

to be herself and die. “Duty” could not traverse that decision. Her

heart was cold already.

Rare and alien the footsteps came up. One day it would be a traveller,

one day a goatherd. The world went by her thinly, and vanished into

the mists. She remained alone, and fell, after each interruption, into

her old communing with Death. He was the only understanding friend

left to her.

One day, as she was in talk with him, high on the hill where no one

usually came, a stranger suddenly stood before her. Either the

watchdog had been slack or the interloper cunning. He doffed his hat

to her with the most sympathetic grace imaginable.

“You seek the _auberge_, monsieur?” she said haughtily. “It lies

below. You are off the road.”

“And mademoiselle also?” he asked. “But supposing we each undertake to

put the other on it?”

She had been seated on a stone. She rose hurriedly.

“The road lies down, monsieur.”

“As I would convince mademoiselle,” he said. “I have just come up it

from a stricken friend.”

Her intuition touched some meaning in his words. She looked

breathlessly at him.

“If you know me, monsieur, as your manner seems to imply, you will

know that I am out of love with subterfuge.”

“I know you, mademoiselle, by sight and reputation.”

“Scarcely, monsieur, if you so address me.”

“Ah!” he said. “I do not hold by orthodoxy. And yet there was a time

when I was tender of it. You would be madame on a surer title had I

had my way.”

“Tell me who you are?” she demanded icily.

“It can hardly interest you. They call me Cartouche.”

Her face fell frowning.

“I have heard of you. I would not be ungracious, sir,” she said. “You

saved a life that was once dear to me.”

“I wish I could say I saved it _because_ it was dear to you. I had not

seen you then.”

“You can dispense with your compliments, sir. Your reputation is

sufficiently well known to me without.”

“Then doubtless mademoiselle is aware that disloyalty to friends is

not a part of it. Moreover, it is a human eccentricity to love what we

have saved.”

“It is easy to love some people.”

“It is easy, though our natures may be the remotest from theirs.

Verjuice loves oil in this queer salad of life. But where I have come

to love through saving, I would save again and yet again.”

“You speak a good deal of yourself, monsieur. Forgive me if I cannot

quite share your interest in the subject. No doubt your friend

appreciated your assistance in saving him a second time from

destruction. It is fataller, I am sure, in such eyes as yours, to fall

in love than into an abyss.”

“You misunderstand me--I hope not wilfully. I did not mean to speak of

saving my friend _from_ you, but _for_ you. I do not mean it now. I am

here to offer you my services.”

She drew herself up magnificently.

“I thank you, monsieur. I was to be excused perhaps, for wishing to

read on the better side of an insolence. You had done well, according

to your lights, I am sure, to strive to keep us apart--well to your

worthy patron; well for your worthy self. I could have respected you

at least for that consistency. But to offer to mend what you have

helped to mar! I am at a loss to understand how I have invited this

insult.”

A dark flush rose on Trix’s cheek. What was this new-born perversity

in him which made him not only bare his heart to this sting of words,

but, like a very anchorite of love, take pleasure in his chastising?

Her frost fired him.

“You are bitter, mademoiselle,” he said. “I could answer, very truly,

in self-defence that I was so far from choosing to have a hand in this

business, as it has sped, that I foresaw from the first what has

actually happened--that your exaltation would spell my ruin. I would

answer that, I say, but that I own to no man’s power to ruin me.”

She was quite unmoved.

“Those who serve evil must bide evil,” she said. “If, as you would

seem to imply, monsieur, your employer has made you the scapegoat of

his reformation, I can only regret, very sincerely, my involuntary

part in your dismissal. Believe me, I would give all my _exaltation_

to reinstate you.”

“I used the term unthinkingly,” said Cartouche. “It was the formal

phrase of a worldling. Will you persist in thinking me too bad to be

moved by the distresses of virtue hard beset?”

“And how would you propose to help that poor virtue, sir? For what are

your services offered? I will not even sully myself by

understanding--unless to suppose that you design to make me an

instrument of your revenge on one who has wronged you.”

The flush on his face deepened.

“You are an angel, madame,” he said grimly. “You claim your full

prerogatives. I can never please you better, I see, than by avowing my

knowledge of the gulf which separates us. I, too, will be myself,

flagrantly and without compromise. My affections are all earthly. Very

well, I love the man I have saved, because I saved him. I see him

stricken down--helpless--his very reason threatened under a calamity

worse than death.”

Her face had gone bloodless; she answered, faltering,--

“As to that, monsieur, assure yourself, assure him if you please, that

nothing but a convention separates us now, nor ever will.”

He looked wonderingly at her. Did she mean to kill herself? He could

quite believe it, as the more pardonable of two self-offences Then he

breathed and laughed.

“A convention!” he cried. “I am nearer you by that admission. There is

no moral bondage in conventions. Let me bring my friend to you and

save him.”

She reared herself like a very snake.

“I would you had never saved him,” she said deeply; “I would you had

never laid that claim on his regard. My only regret in dismissing you

is that I re-condemn him to this corruption. Go, sir, and insult and

trouble me no longer!”

He had lost, and turned to leave her. But for a moment he paused, in

anger and confusion, to fire his final charge,--

“Very well, madame! Only be quite sure of the strength of that

convention--as sure as your husband may be of its weakness. I do not

think he will wait a year for the test. Farewell!” and he went.

And no sooner was he out of sight and hearing, than Yolande bent

herself face downwards on the rock, and delivered her soul in a cry of

agony,--

“Louis! my Louis! so ill, so broken! and I may not help thee, nor

think of thee!”

CHAPTER VI

If all the rest of feminine Le Prieuré was agreed in accepting

Louis-Marie’s discomfiture with regretful resignation, Martha Paccard

was certainly not going to number herself of that complacent

sisterhood. She was hot with pity and indignation, and, because vexed,

illogical of course.

“What did the man seek?” she asked sharply of Jacques Balmat,

referring to the Chevalier de France. “Honour, renown, riches, through

this connection with a _débauché_? Our monsieur had provided them

all, and with a better savour, if only you had spurred him timely to

achieve the ambition of his life. But how was the poor boy to

accomplish that ascent, with you and your wisdom for ever at his elbow

persuading him from it? You men are all alike--great promises, and

little reasons for not performing them.”

“No later than the day of the marriage, Martha, I urged him to come

and try once more.”

“Then you did very wrong. What title had you to demand that risk of

him, when all his happiness was at stake in Le Prieuré?”

“To increase the odds in his favour, to be sure.”

“Favour and odds! Has he not his patrimony, enough to frank a presence

less angelic than his?”

“I do not see how to ascend the mountain could have added to it,

certainly.”

“Don’t you? But there is money in fame, let me tell you, even if it is

achieved ultimately through a book. As for you, you may ascend Mont

Blanc, and nobody will believe it, because they will have to take your

word, which is nothing.”

“They will take my word, nevertheless.”

“They will be more credulous, then, than I. I have long lost faith in

it. And if I still doubted, there is that poor sick boy at home to

confirm me. By this time, if you had done as you promised, not fifty

di Roccos could have equalled him in reputation.”

“Is he very ill, Martha?”

“He wrings my heart. Why are you so strong, Jacques, and so honest and

so resolute? I cannot conceive my father parting _us_ at a blow. And

yet I am a dutiful daughter too. I think we love weak men like

mothers. I am glad you are not weak, Jacques.”

“So am I. So shall your father be some day.”

“You must learn modesty, Jacques. Poor M. Saint-Péray is a model of

it.”

“And he has been jilted.”

“So he has; that is the truth. He still sits as if stunned. I don’t

know what will happen when he recovers himself. Jacques, for pity’s

sake watch him when that happens--for pity’s sake, Jacques.”

“I will be his shadow, Martha.”

“But not for him to know. I dread the time terribly. I think there is

often no such fiend as a good man wronged through his goodness. And

there has been an evil one whispering in his ear, I am sure.”

“An evil one?”

“M. Gaston, the old lord’s black whelp. He brought him home that

day--straight from hearing the disastrous news. He has been with him

once or twice since. Jacques, I should not be surprised--I should not

be surprised, I say, if that devil were urging him to dare all and

abduct--her up there.”

“Would you not? I think I wish I could believe it.”

“O, hush! are you all fiends? This Cartouche, they say, is ruined in

the marriage. _He_ may have his reasons--but _you_!”

“Well, good-bye, Martha. I will watch him.”

“That is right; to save him from himself--such a self, my God, as he

may come to be! Good-bye, Jacques.”

She went on her way home. It was a chill, oppressive day for the

season, with threat of cold storm in the air. Few people were abroad.

As she neared her door, she noticed that a man was keeping pace with

her. He reached the house as she did, and accosted her as she was

lifting the latch. She recognised him for the Dr Bonito whom her

father had supplanted at the Château, and her heart gave a little

heave.

“Whom do you seek, monsieur?” she said, standing with her back to the

door as if to bar his passage. She had not in her heart approved her

father’s promotion to that distinction; but to any outer criticism of

it she was ready to ruffle like a mother hen at a cat.

The doctor, it appeared, however, was to disarm her with a show of the

most ingenuous urbanity.

“M. Saint-Péray lodges here?” he said, with a smile like a spasm of

stomach-ache. “I should like to have a word with him.”

She looked at him with her honest eyes. It was at least a relief to

find that his visit was not connected with his replacement by her

father.

“He is not at all himself, monsieur,” she said. “Will not a message

suffice?”

“Doubtless,” he answered. “Only I must deliver it myself.”

“A message?”

She questioned his face searchingly. Whose possible delegate could he

be? Certainly he and M. Louis were at one in the question of their

discomfiture by di Rocco. There was that much of sympathy between

them. Besides, it was known that this man dealt in the occult--could

cast nativities and foretell deaths. His message might be one of

comfort and reassurance. Things were already at such a pass that no

conceivable evil could congest them further. A certain awe awoke in

her eyes. The neighbourhood of mountains engenders superstition.

“Is your--your message, monsieur,” she said, with a little choke,

“from someone--somewhere that only such as you can understand?”

He chafed his bony hands together, leering at her wintrily.

“Yes,” he said. “I think it may interest him.”

“Wait, then,” she answered, deciding in a moment, “while I ask him if

he is willing to receive it.”

She had intended to leave him on the doorstep while she went, but he

followed her in closely, lingering only at the foot of the stairs

while she ascended.

Louis-Marie sat in a little room which overlooked the hills. His

ambitions and their unfulfilment were eternally symbolised before his

vision. He was not much changed outwardly; only his eyes appeared

physically to have shallowed. A cloud had come between them and the

sun, and the transparency of their blue was grown chalky, as if a

blind had been pulled down over his soul. And as yet no lights were

lit behind, to show the shadows of what moved there. He was as quiet

and courteous as ever in seeming; but women are as sensitive as deer

to atmosphere, and Martha never saw him now but she quaked in

anticipation of a storm to come.

He was reading, or feigning to. He looked over to her kindly.

“What is it, Martha?” he asked.

“There is one come to see you, monsieur, with a message from the

stars.”

She trembled a little. He laughed.

“That is kind of him, whoever he is. Is it a fallen star, Martha? It

can have no message for me otherwise.”

“It is fallen, monsieur, and therefore, maybe, in sympathy with its

kind. It is Dr Bonito, the mage and soothsayer.”

“What! is he too the victim of a reformation? Heaven is very

impartial, Martha. It condescends to no degrees in its chastisement.

As well, after all, to be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.”

“Quite as well, if it is necessary to be hanged at all,” said Bonito

at the door, to which he had mounted softly.

Martha exclaimed angrily, but Saint-Péray did not even stir.

“Pray make yourself at home, fellow-asteroid,” said he. “I must not

complain if like attracts like. You can leave us, Martha.”

She obeyed reluctantly. Having followed impulse, she retired on

mortification, which is the common way.

“What is your message?” said Louis-Marie, impassively, the moment his

visitor was left alone to him. “You can sit or not as you like,” he

added. “I am master of nothing.”

Bonito, as apparently phlegmatic for his part, remained standing where

he was.

“You may think you know enough of my reputation to insult me,” he

said. “It is no concern of mine what you or anyone thinks. The surest

sign of worth is to be worth men’s slander, as its surest reward is

ingratitude.”

“Pardon me,” said Saint-Péray. “I have never thought of you at all

until this moment. But I agree with you so far--that to be vile and

unscrupulous is, in this world, to be successful. If you are

fortunate, we will admit, by antithesis, that you are virtuous.”

“They call me a Rosicrucian,” said Bonito. “I am at least so far in

sympathy with the sect as to believe in the universal regeneration and

the cosmopolitanism of the intellect. They call me also an alchemist.

Certainly I would transmute the dross of life into gold. It is the

world’s way to gild the calf and worship it. _We_ see below the vile

enamel. No idols of wealth or patriotism for us; no states or churches

as jealous entities. Base metal is under the skin of all. Into the

furnace with the vast accumulation, and there anneal it, with the salt

of godliness, into that one and universal benevolence which shall be

shoreless, landless, eternal--a single harmonious republic of the

entire human race!”

He took breath. Saint-Péray sat as apathetic as a deaf mute. The

other never thought to attribute his unconcern to his own uninvited

self-exposition. Any propagandist, even of disinterestedness, is

always absorbed in the first place in himself. In a moment he gave

tongue again,--

“No need to question of the force which is to compel this

transmutation. It has been growing consistently with the mind of man.

The shame of the dominion of the brute in a world which intellect has

shaped for itself; the shame of liberal knowledge lying at the mercy

of illiberal ignorance; the shame of the animal coercing the angel,

the fool cackling discredit on the sage--these things must cease off

the earth at last. For when learning learns to combine, it shall be to

ignorance as is the little bag of gun-powder, rammed home, to the

material bulk which it is capable of annihilating. This is as certain

as it is that the moment of the intellectual renaissance, age

foreseen, is at last approaching. Because I, too, hunger and thirst

with the fool, am I, Bonito, no better than a fool? The ‘fool’ can

make it appear so, because in his numbers he commands the markets. Or

has commanded--we shall see. The hour of his disillusionment perhaps

is imminent. In the meantime we, who prepare the stage, do not cease

of our efforts to divert the paths of evil, to over-reach iniquity, to

gather each his quota of dirt and filth ready for the burning.”

He ended on a loud note, and wrung his lips between his thin fingers,

leering at the other. If he had been tempted into an over long

exordium, the more plausibly, he thought, would its moral “thunder in

the index.” His craftiness was not to stultify itself by

over-precipitancy.

Saint-Péray discussed his twitching face quite unmoved.

“I am obliged for your interesting message, sir,” he said. “You are

reported to be a Rosicrucian? That concerns someone, no doubt; only I

was under the impression that that sect eschewed politics. Thank you

for putting me right. Good morning.”

Bonito did not stir.

“I aim,” he answered coolly, “in common with kindred spirits, many and

potent, at the universal purification. Our politics are no more than

that. Latency, cabala--all the rest of the terms which are held by the

ignorant to condemn us, are only so many proofs of the divine sympathy

with our mission. We can read the stars because we have, so to speak,

friends at court there. Woe on him that scoffs at our message! Woe on

di Rocco, I say, who heard and would not believe!”

He had shot his bolt, and as instantly saw that he had hit the mark.

Louis-Marie gave a mortal start, and sat rigid. The curtain of his

eyes was rent; there seemed things visible moving behind it. But not

a word came from him.

“My message now is to you,” said the physician, low and distinct, “as

to the one most intimately concerned in the scotching or expediting of

a half-acted iniquity. I propose no plan; I point out no way. Bear

that in mind very clearly. _My_ task was accomplished when I warned di

Rocco that his horoscope revealed Mars at the conjunction of the

seventh and eighth houses, presaging quick death for him to follow on

his marriage consummated. I have said that he disbelieved me.

Disregarded would be the truer word. Passion in him was desperate

enough to dare the test.”

“But not for a year.”

It was Saint-Péray who spoke, though his voice was scarcely audible.

Bonito laughed little and low.

“Do you believe it? I know him very well indeed. There is no monster

in all the world so self-convinced of his own irresistibility. You

think he has left Le Prieuré. As a fact he does not start for Turin

until to-morrow morning, when urgency compels him. But he will not

fail to storm the coy fortress first--to-night he will do it--either

to persuade or enforce!”

He paused, listening for an answer, but none followed.

“You may question how I know this,” he went on. “Be satisfied; we who

read the stars command our instruments. He is to go secretly after

dark, to-night, I say, crossing the glacier of the Winds from the

further side towards the Montverd. Nicholas Target will be there to

conduct him; Nicholas Target will have been instructed first to

dismiss his daughter from the _auberge_ on some errand which will

delay her. Monsignore will find the Marchesa quite alone and

defenceless--nothing to complain of for a wife. He will presently

leave her to return, as secretly, by the way he came. What then? There

are pitfalls on the glacier, and Target will likely be drunk. Perhaps

Fate will choose to verify its prediction during that passage. I

cannot tell. For me, I have done my part. If this act is necessary for

his destruction, a young widow will be ensured in Le Prieuré before

long. That is my message to you; I speak it, with absolute conviction

of its truth, for your consolation. If the marriage is consummated,

the man must die. On the other hand, if one would save a threatened

honour, balk by a timely abduction the hand of Fate, one would

certainly procure a renewed lease of life for a villain, and a

villain, one might be sure, who would not accept his despoliation with

meekness. It is a nice point in ethics, upon which I will not presume

to give an opinion. It had occurred to me once, I admit, that a

revelation of the plot to the father would be the proper course.

Reflection, however, convinced me that he would be only too glad to

sanction, indirectly, the most treacherous of means for breaking down

the barrier which his daughter had raised between himself and a

potential greatness. In the end, monsieur” (he prepared to leave), “I

resolved to confide the issue to the hands the most strong, in faith

and godliness, to direct it--to your hands, in fact. You have my

sympathy and good wishes. I have the honour to bid you good morning.”

He might have been speaking to an apparition for any response he could

extort. Only Saint-Péray’s eyes were fixed upon him with a greed more

horribly eloquent than words. He felt them following him as he left

the room--clinging, it seemed, like the discs of tentacles to his back

as he descended the stairs--pursuing him, silently, deadlily, through

all the convolutions of his way, however he might twist and turn to

elude them. He was not a fanciful man for all his mysticism; but the

impression of this unwinking pursuit haunted his soul into the very

dominion of sleep. The eyes followed him upstairs, in the little inn

where he was sojourning for the moment, and lay down with him on his

pillow.

* * * * * * * *

On that same day Mr Trix received his final _congé_ from his patron

with the most serene good temper.

“Rogue, rogue,” said the old devil--“though I have loved a rogue, we

must part. There is no place in this reformation for a Cartouche.”

“You have taken good care of that,” said the young man, pleasantly.

“It is very natural you should not wish to be haunted by your past.

Besides, I can foresee all sorts of complications if we remained

penitents together.”

“Don’t tell me that you also are a penitent--no, no,” said the

Marquess, with a nervous chuckle.

He was fumbling at a cabinet against the wall.

“See here,” he said; “I wouldn’t do the graceless thing by your

mother’s graceless son. If this hadn’t happened--had redemption been

denied me, I won’t say but that it might have been my intention to

make you my heir--an evil inheritance. That’s past, that’s all over.

Better to lose the world than your soul, eh? But I should blame myself

to deprive you of the means to honesty. Take my advice, rascal, and

live cleanly for the future. We’ve sown our wild oats, you and I. We

must both be out of the house by to-morrow, and leave it clear to the

sweepers and garnishers. In the meantime, here’s to commute your

expectations. Money I can’t command, without abuse of the marriage

settlements, but its equivalent lies here--take it.”

He held out a handful of jewels, of ancient setting and indiscriminate

value. Cartouche received the heap passively.

“It would be false modesty in me to refuse my wages,” he said.

“Yes, yes,” said the other, returning, still agitated, to the cabinet.

“There may be another trifle or so. There--”

He paused, holding a ring in his hand.

“This is your mother’s hair,” he said, suddenly and sharply. “You can

have it also, if you wish.”

Cartouche received the ring from his hand.

“Thank you, father,” he said quietly.

“No such thing!” began di Rocco, loudly; but his voice broke on the

word. Cartouche stepped forward, and kissed him on the cheek.

“Goodbye!” he said. “I wish you had made a good man of me.”

Di Rocco turned to the wall. When he looked round again, Cartouche was

gone. Then the old libertine sat down and wept. But tears in such are

nothing but the provocation to fresh evil emotions.

CHAPTER VII

There was a night of hurried storm long remembered in Le Prieuré.

All during it the wind drove up in squalls, like the thunder of

passing artillery, unlimbered over the mountains, crackled into brief

tempest, and swept on. Billows of black smoke marked its passage, each

in its retreat leaving a vacuum of dense silence, until the next,

rushing in to occupy it, awoke the echoes with new uproar. The roofs

smoked under the cannonade of hail; the glaciers foamed like torrents

with the dancing pellets; the brows of the hills seemed to melt and

flow down. Everything would be sudden, stunning, overwhelming for a

space; and then--exhaustion, and the drip of wounded trees alone

breaking the quiet.

Le Prieuré, weather-hardened, inhabiting under the sky-light of

Savoy, thought nothing of all this, sleeping with its face to the

clouds. What made this night of many nights notable to it was the

period it marked in the course of a human tragedy, which had certainly

seemed to cry to heaven for some such solution of its riddle. For, so

it appeared, out of all the dogs of storm unleashed to hunt the hills,

one had found the quarry sought by many; and had dragged him down, and

torn and devoured him, so that not a bone remained to mark the spot of

his undoing--di Rocco’s.

The morning succeeding opened chill and austere--a brave day for a

journey. Monsignore’s equipage, ordered overnight, was ready betimes

to convey him to Turin, whither urgencies State had called him. The

lean horses champed their rusty bits; the lean postillions whoa’d, and

cursed their cattle sympathetically for their ill-lined stomachs. When

mid-day came and with it no di Rocco, they dared the devil for the

sake of a toothful of oats and polenta, and drove back grumbling to

the stables.

Monsignore did not come, then or thereafter. Monsignore was never to

be seen in life again. At first the story of his disappearance was

received with utter incredulity. One could not conceive a figure so

potent, so absorbing, the sport of any such casualty as might overtake

a little soul in its little pride of doing. He must be keeping out of

the way intentionally--watching, from some cunning eyrie, to pounce

upon the first self-committing wretch who should venture to presume

upon his supposed removal from the board.

A hope, in that case, predoomed to unfulfilment. For, even when

curiosity woke on surprise, and gossip on curiosity, and emphasis on

gossip, his name was never bandied about but with decency. Le

Prieuré, rough as its rocks, was too manly to flog a dead lion, or

even a dead boar. There were no unworthy comments on the snatching of

that terrific presence from its midst--not in the first surmise, nor

in the last moral certainty. For so at length it came to be.

How the whisper grew, the shadow thickened, one might scarcely tell.

It took form, no doubt, in the winks and becks and exaggerated

secrecies of a sot, too brain-sodden himself at first to grasp the

full significance of his innuendoes. But as a word or two, caught from

the blabbings of sleep, may linger suggestively in ears that listen,

so Nicholas Target’s tavern maunderings came presently to be suspected

of embodying in their text a very momentous cypher.

The fellow, bewildered between apprehension and vanity, was unable,

nevertheless, to forego that hint of his marketable values, nor his

intention to negotiate them when his way became clear to him. It

became clear, brilliantly clear, all in a moment, when he felt himself

nipped by the scruff, and, twisting about, saw that the law had got

hold of him. With whine and collapse, then, he let full daylight into

so much of the mystery as it was in his power to resolve.

On that night of rapid storm, ran his confession, he had been engaged

by Monsignore to bring him secretly into the presence of the Marchesa,

where she had sought refuge in his little _auberge_ on the Montverd.

The lady was to be taken by surprise; for which reason his daughter

Margot had been despatched into Le Prieuré on the pretext of some

business which would detain her. For the same reason of privacy,

Monsignore had elected to avoid the popular route up the hill. He,

Target, was to meet him at the place called the _mauvais pas_

opposite, and conduct him thence across the glacier to his own side.

He had known nothing of any engagement on Monsignore’s part to hold

himself aloof from the Marchesa; or, if he had, it was none of his

business to cross the caprices of his over-lord; nor could there be

any real sin in procuring a wife for her husband. His conscience was

as clear on that matter as on the question of his sobriety, which at

the time was absolute.

So he had met Monsignore--with difficulty, for, as it turned out, the

night was terrible: he had met him, and was already proceeding with

him down the moraine, when he, Target, had slipped and fallen.

Monsignore was very furious at that, and had cursed him for a drunken

sot, which was quite untrue. They had proceeded, however, and were

actually on the glacier, when by great ill-fortune he had fallen a

second time. On each occasion the lantern he carried had been

extinguished, and had had to be relighted. Monsignore, on the

repetition of his mishap, had flown into an ungovernable rage,

snatched the light from him, and, driving him from his presence with

blows and curses, had bade him seek his own way to the rocks, for that

he would trust himself to his guidance no longer. The man was a demon

in fact, and he had fled from him. Instinct had guided him to his

cabin by the moraine, where he had crouched, waiting for Monsignore to

follow. While he dwelt there, there had broken over the glacier one of

those furious storms of hail and wind, which for a time had made

thought impossible. Its cessation was not followed by the arrival of

Monsignore: in fact Monsignore never followed at all. Knowing the

resolute cruelty of his passions, he, Target, had not been long in

guessing at the reason. He must have foundered in that terrific

blast--have wandered astray, with quenched light, and pitched into

some crevasse.

Long he had waited for him; and, at last, in an interval of calm, had

sought back, so far as he might dare, across the glacier. He had

peered, he had shouted. He had left at last no boulder or familiar

crack unsearched when the first weak wash of dawn had come to his aid.

It was all unavailing. The glacier, it was as morally certain as

anything circumstantial could be, had bolted Monsignore; and there was

an end of him.

So Le Prieuré agreed, awake at last to the full significance of the

shadow which had been stealing in step by step to overwhelm it. Its

verdict was untraversable, as plain as reason: Monsignore had

perished.

There was no need to question the essential truth of the drunkard’s

story. Target could have had no possible interest in committing or

leading his patron to destruction. A just retribution had overtaken an

illustrious sinner against his word. Di Rocco, the monster, the miser,

was a thing of the past. Heaven, in its own stupendous way, had

decreed the manner of his death and burial.

Moral certainties are, however, by no means legal. A man is not dead

in law without proof of witness, even though his carcase lies on the

table before it. Much remained to challenge, to certify, to cite and

answer by default, before the widow could come into her own. In the

meanwhile the Chevalier de France was not backward in righteous and

indignant denunciation of his dead son-in-law’s abuse of faith. At the

same time he was even extravagantly exacting in the question of the

acknowledgments due to himself in his position of natural guardian to

the Marquess’s august “relict.”

The village, perhaps, did not at the outset take him quite so

seriously as he expected. It was more curious to learn how M.

Saint-Péray accepted this provisional change in his fortunes. But

there Martha Paccard proved herself a very Cerberus in guarding the

approaches to her charge. She was agitated, but quite resolute about

it all. Only between her and young Balmat was there ever an

interchange of meaning glances, and once or twice, in moments of

emotion, some fearful comment. She cried, too, in private a good deal,

however brave a face she might turn to the world. For, as a fact, none

but these two knew how Louis-Marie had slipped out alone on the night

of the tragedy, and had returned home as secretly by-and-by, death

white and drenched to the skin.

Then the next thing Le Prieuré heard about him was that he had left

the village and gone none knew whither.

At that, for the first time, men and women united in putting him on

one side as an irreclaimable faint-heart.

But, for all the rest, _Vogue la galère!_ Di Rocco was dead, dead,

dead!

* * * * * * * *

One summer afternoon a young man stood on a projecting rock which

overlooked the Glacier of the Winds at a point, on the north-east

side, at no great distance below that whence his patron had, a few

nights earlier, descended to his death. Right in front of him the vast

river of ice, creeping to its fall over a precipice, was rent and

splintered into a throng of monstrous pinnacles, one or other of which

would ever and again lean, topple, and go spinning down the shallower

bed below in a thundering shatter of fragments. This happened more

than once while he lingered, and on each occasion he winced, and

stepped back, and then expanded his chest, and watched for the next

ruinous downfall. But at length, with a sigh, he prepared to go.

“So breaks away the past,” he thought. “What will the future reveal?

Well, I am still Cartouche.”

He turned, turned again, and showed a wicked face to the glacier.

“He was good to me,” he murmured. “If Bonito did it, bad for Bonito. I

shall know some day. Goodbye, evil father of a worthless child!”

He went down sombrely into the valley.

END OF PART I.

PART II

CHAPTER I

Turin, wedged into a corner between the Po and Dora, with all its

ranks of lines and squares criss-crossing the angle like the meshes of

a snow-shoe, was a depressing city to be abroad in on a rainy night.

It was characteristic of it, of its unenterprise and unoriginality,

that it had never deviated from the pattern set by its Roman founders.

It suggested, when the rain poured persistently, a vast congeries of

waterworks, with reservoirs and pumping-stations all drawing from the

rivers. Its barrack-like uniformity of buildings; its shyness of

imposing façade; its system of parcelled-out dwelling-blocks, called

appropriately “Islands,” which were ruled, scrupulously rectangular,

along the wide channels of its streets; its eternal monotonous brick

and heavy porticoes, all combined to produce an effect of unlovely

utilitarianism. Artistry, struggling here and there to emancipate

itself, and soar above the level roofs on wings of brass and timber,

had always halted, in the end, on a blank expression of futility, and

retired within doors, there to fulfil its soul of the splendour which

it had shrunk from daring without. For some reason, of taste or

policy, architectural display was not favoured in Turin. Its fanes and

palaces were all so many uncut diamonds--dull surfaces to hearts of

fire.

There was something in all this, no doubt, significant of the

character of its government; for, as art flowers at its richest under

despotisms, so, oppositely, its growth is most stunted in the

temperate climate of democracies. Turin, it is true, was not of those

latter; yet it was as true that its lords had never learned to rule

independently of their people. Even as kings, though when sovereign by

a generation or two, they had not come to take themselves very

seriously. They seemed to reign, self-consciously, by virtue of a

plebiscite; they avoided superficial ostentation; they kept all their

grandeurs for privacy.

There had been those among them who had planned, fitfully, to face all

this heavy monotony with light and lightness, to overlay it with skin

of marble, stone, or even, as a last lame resort, with stucco. Their

ambitions had declined upon a policy of _laisser faire_; in many

buildings the very holes for their scaffolding remained

unfilled--ineptitude yawning from a hundred mouths. Turin, under the

rule of Victor-Amadeus III., was still Rome before Augustus, lacking

its splendid autocrat. At the same time there was this much to its

credit: it had never bred, or allowed to self-breed within its walls,

a race of tyrants.

The Savoy princes were the militant monks of history, always keeping

a reserve of cloister for contingencies. They were recluses by

conviction, freebooters by constitution. The first duke of them all

had died a hermit. The grandfather of the present King, the

“Piedmontese Lear,” had abdicated (prematurely) on a religious

sentiment. It had been his pious intent to efface the feudal system,

age-dishonoured. It was the policy of his grandson to attempt its

restoration. He made a mistake, being a vain, weak man. It is not the

wisdom of the proletariat, but the folly of its rulers which opens the

ways to revolt. Worse than the grudging of wise concessions is their

rescinding when they have become establishments. Victor-Amadeus made

much of his army, which was a warlike father’s perfected bequest to

him. He also made much of his nobility, with the result that,

according to the popular waggery, there was, in his reign, a general

to every private. So he consistently favoured birth, ignored intrinsic

merit apart from it, alienated the sympathies of his people, and

opened his passes thereby to the hordes of the French Revolution. It

was always a figure of speech to say that he strode the Alps. He had

lost his French stirrup long before he knew it, and was jogging

lop-sided to his fall.

In the meantime, lacking the soul of Augustus, he left Turin much as

he found it, and, in place of bread and circuses, fed up discontent on

the public lottery. His kingdom was rotten when it tumbled.

Montaigne in his time found Turin a small town, situated in a watery

plain, not very well built nor very agreeable. Some two hundred years

later the ineffable Count Cassanova passed a verdict on it not much

handsomer. It was densely populated and full of spies, he said. It

boasted, as a fact, at the latter date, a population of some ninety

thousand souls. But it was not crowded nevertheless, except to one who

_saw eyes_ at every turn. A city’s numbers are not to be calculated by

one who moves exclusively in its markets. Turin’s population, if

regularly distributed over its area, would have shown most of its

quarters relatively empty.

It looked its best on a moonlight night, when along its canal-like

streets the cobble-stones glinted and sparkled like very ripples on

water, and the great hulks aligned on either side became shadowy

leviathans anchored at rest. Its worst was kept for twilight

drenchings, when the mists trooped down from the distant Alps and,

blotting out the intervening slopes--the Superga, the hill of the

Capucins, and others, a green high-stretching swarm--made one

shoreless swamp of all the level town.

On such an evening, a man, going, with humped shoulders and dripping

hat, down the Via del Po, which was one of Turin’s principal

thoroughfares, cursed the city’s original settlers with all his soul

of venom. He was, nevertheless, so bent on a particular errand, that

nothing less than a flood would have diverted him from it. Presently

he ran to a stop before a dimly-lighted shop window, and peered

eagerly up at certain labels and vouchers which were pasted to the

glass within. There were other inquisitors at the same business, quite

a throng of them, and one and all, including the newcomer, like rude

and ravenous poultry.

The shop itself might have been, in its dinginess and gloom, a mere

money-changer’s office; which at the same time it was in a measure,

only on a national scale. There were pious frescoes daubed on its

walls, as if in irresistible association of hucksters with the temple.

On either side of its door was hung a slim red board, the one headed

“Torino,” the other “Genova.” Each board was ruled into five sections,

and each section contained a number. These numbers represented, more

or less, the victims of what the wags called the torture of the wheel.

The office was, in fact, one of the many bureaux of the never-ending

State lottery.

The stranger having examined, to his hunger or satisfaction, the

numbers on the boards and the hieroglyphics in the window, stepped

back into the rain with a click of his strong teeth together.

“Weeding, weeding!” he thought, exultant and rageful in one. “Next

week will reach the grand climacteric--for me. My God! and what then?”

As he reflected, or muttered, chafing like a fettered beast, the form

of a man, advancing up the street, came between himself and the light.

Instantly he started, uttered a violent exclamation, and quickly

pursuing the figure, accosted and halted it.

“M. Saint-Péray!” he cried. “So, after all, you have come into

retreat in our capital!”

Louis-Marie regarded the speaker ghastlily. The young man’s face, in

the shaking lamp-shine, seemed to twitch like the face of an

epileptic. It was white and haggard, and indeed scarcely recognisable

for the face which had kindled to the mountains of Le Prieuré a month

earlier. He made no answer.

“_A la bonne heure!_” cried the other, very careful all the time not

to let his capture escape him. “I had wanted much to come across you,

and never so much as at this moment. Conceive my ridiculous position,

monsieur! Realise me, here on this spot, debarred the heavenly

mansions for lack of the necessary trifle of gate-money!”

“You are--Dr Bonito?” began Saint-Péray, clearing his throat to the

effort.

“And flattered in your memory of me, monsieur,” interrupted the

doctor, with a little bow which seemed to creak at the joints. “As you

will recollect, I read nativities, I foretell events, however a

capricious destiny may alter her tactics to procure them. For

instance, you will remember, I prophesied the consequences of a

certain achievement, which prediction was none the less verified

because, as it happened paradoxically, the consequences anticipated

the achievement. What then? It is the end which justifies the seer.

The lady, you will scarcely deny, is a widow at this moment.”

Saint-Péray put his hand to his pocket.

“You want money,” he said hoarsely. The other stopped him with

dignity.

“A loan is the word, monsieur--a little oil for the lamp; a little

grease for the wheel; _une épingle par jour_; a sprat to catch a

whale. You observe where you passed me just now?” (He pointed to the

bureau.) “My star culminates there, monsieur, in a week. So surely as

the heavens cannot lie, the numbers revealed at the next drawing will

spell my apotheosis. In the meanwhile one, even a seer, must buy one’s

promotion. The gods are very human. I have only approached this climax

at the cost of all my little savings. If you will condescend to drink

a glass of vermouth with me, I will explain. There is a _café_ hard

by, and the night is cold.”

Louis-Marie seemed drained of will or resolution--a flaccid, half-dead

creature. He followed whither he was told, and drank his vermouth and

élixir de China--one glass, then another and another. A spark woke at

last in his ash-blue eyes. Bonito, watching it, kindled reassured.

“The Fates, after all, have been kind to you, monsieur,” he said,

gently touching the other’s arm with a long thin finger, as a spider

experiments with a fly before he rolls it up. “There lives a spotless

widow in Le Prieuré, and wealthy beyond words. You could not yourself

have managed it better, if you had been a villain.”

Saint-Péray started, half-rose from his seat and sank down again.

“If it is villainous to have lost belief in God,” he muttered, “I am

a villain, and no longer worthy to utter her name--nor even to resent

its utterance by you.”

“As you please,” said the doctor, coolly. “I served virtue in serving

M. Saint-Péray, and so would serve again without asking thanks. But

to become an apostate and be damned at the instance of her whose name

you are unworthy to utter--that seems to me like meaning heterodox and

acting paradox.”

The spark had spread to Louis-Marie’s cheek.

“I desire, monsieur,” he said loudly, but quaveringly, “that you will

state what you wish of me without further comment on my affairs.”

Bonito was not ruffled, though immensely dry and articulate.

“Very well, Monsieur,” he said; “though you will forgive my proposing

to amend your resolution by inserting the word _present_ between the

words _further_ and _comment_. The time will come, perhaps, when you

will see _my_ disinterestedness and your own _interests_ more closely.

In the meanwhile I go wanting my gate-money.”

“Well? for your apotheosis, sir?”

“Exactly; by way of the lottery. The last of my scrap-metal, like the

sculptor Cellini’s in the crisis of his fortunes, has gone into the

mould. It needs but a finishing contribution, a final sacrifice, and

the Perseus of my destiny will rise on winged feet. Other men have

their systems, worldly and fallible. Mine derives from the stars and

is _in_fallible.”

Saint-Péray laughed shakily, starting to scoff, but compromising with

discretion. His soul was always malleable by another’s strong

conviction.

“What, then, is this lottery?” he asked.

Bonito threw up his hands in mock-incredulity.

“You have been in Turin this month, and have not discovered its

distraction of distractions! Alas! what a comment on your own! The

lottery? I can explain it in a word--the very grandeur of simplicity;

the art which conceals all art. Imagine, Monsieur, a wheel which

contains numbers up to ninety and a single zero within its hollow

circumference. Of these numbers, five are withdrawn weekly (in Turin

or Genoa, turn-about), recorded and replaced. Well, you or I select

five numbers--any, after our fancy--register them at a bureau, and

receive a counter-check in exchange. Now, supposing two out of those

our numbers shall occur in any one drawing, we score an _ambo_, and

receive two hundred and seventy times the amount of our stake: if

three, or a _tern_, we receive it multiplied five thousand five

hundred times: if four, or a _quatern_, sixty-thousand times. On the

other hand, if no such combination occurs, we forfeit our stake, to

renew it, if we please, week by week, month by month, year by year.

There is no end and no limit. _Enfin_, the zero occurring in any

drawing forfeits all stakes of that week to the Government. There are

complications, such as distributing one’s chances over the five

numbers; but the principle is what I say. I throw for a quatern, and I

shall gain it. Its sum will be, relatively, the sum which you shall be

good enough to advance me. Join with me, if you will, and foreclose on

Fortune. You will be rich, presently, beyond the dreams of parsimony.

Wealth attracts wealth. You will lose nothing thereby, if I may say

it, as a suitor.”

Wise men are often ready to listen to empirics who cite the occult

with an air of finality. Louis-Marie was not very wise, and was

thereby the nearer superstition. His faith had told him to discredit

soothsayers: but for the time he had lost his faith. Like all good men

thrown from their self-respect, he greatly exaggerated his own

potentialities for wickedness. This man, he thought, had rightly

foretold a misfortune. Might he not with equal certainty predict a

fortune? There was some material balm in that. If he was to lose his

soul, would not to gain the world better compensate the interval than

a life of inglorious brooding? As well be hanged for a sheep as a

lamb: he called the words to memory with a new sense of daring. What a

folly was piety--a hair-shirt on a heathen preordained to damnation.

It was no God, no Father, who could set snares for the feet of his

children. There _was_ no God, unless a Prince of evil. Let him serve

the chance. Live the world and the lottery!

The spirit he had drunk revelled in his starved unaccustomed brain. He

thrust his hand into his pocket, and drawing out all it contained,

offered the sum to Bonito, with a half-maudlin laugh.

“Half for myself and half for you, then,” he said. “I make you my

broker with Fate.”

The sum was large enough to awaken a glitter in the Rosicrucian’s cold

eyes. Something, the nearest approach to warmth which his heart was

capable of feeling, tickled in his breast. He showed, for the moment,

quite genial, quite impulsive.

“Always understand, Monsieur,” he said, “that I am actuated by the

most earnest desire to serve you. We have a point of sympathy in our

common wronging by one who shall be nameless. Let me here suggest,

with only the lightest touch on a sensitive place, that women

generally are not attracted by extreme ethical correctness, nor won by

diffidence so much as overbearance. Believe my sincerity when I assure

you that nothing would gratify me more than to see the ultimate

accomplishment of a union, to which no bar but that of sentiment can

ever--”

Something, some shadow of reawakening terror in the face opposite him,

warned him that it would be present wisdom to pursue the subject no

further. He “doubled” instantly.

“But I will say no more there,” he interrupted himself. “It is enough

for the moment that I undertake to prove myself” (he touched the

pocket of his coat) “your efficient friend and steward.”

An uproar of approaching voices broke upon his word. The _café_

hitherto had been but thinly peopled, mostly by weather-stressed

citizens, who had been conversing apart, low and rapid, on the subject

of the eternal lottery, while they sipped their liqueurs or

bacchierino, and flourished their cigarettes back and forth to their

lips. Now, “Cartouche!” exclaimed someone, and the sombre quietude

seemed instantly to splinter into light. The mirrors cleared to

reflect it; the sensuous figures in the pictures woke to a

Bacchanalian dance. Louis-Marie stared, speechless, at his companion,

who, for his part, appeared as dumbfoundered.

“Sentite!” he muttered. “Scaramucchio! Si, ê vero!”

The tumult, as he spoke, had broken in, running with the feet and

voices of half a score young men, a contingent, truculent and

vivacious, of the bellimbusti, or “bloods” of Turin. And in the midst

appeared Cartouche, commanding, insolent, policing a captive, a youth

of the same guild, but, unlike the rest, in a state of moral and

physical collapse. He, the latter, struggled, sobbing hysterically, in

the determined grasp of his gaoler, while the others hovered, cackling

and circling, about their neighbourhood.

“Listen, my Severo,” said Cartouche; “thou shalt drink first, and

destroy thyself afterwards, if thou wilt.”

“He has lost his whole fortune in the lottery,” whispered one onlooker

to another.

The wretched boy fought to escape.

“I will drink the river,” he gasped; “no dog shall prevent me.”

Cartouche’s hold tightened.

“Call me not a dog, little Severo,” he said, “or perchance I may show

my teeth. Be wise, while there is time. There are beer and grassini

still in Turin, and trollops enough at a penny. Beggary will yet buy

thee all that Fortune is worth but the silly gilding. Nay” (he

darkened), “if thou wilt be stubborn for death, insult me--I am more

certain than the river--and save, at least, thy immortal soul.”

The boy, writhing round and sputtering with his lips, managed to

strike his captor lamely on the cheek. The next moment he was free,

and cowering into himself, the wind all clapped out of his heroics.

The whole company stood silent and aghast.

Cartouche unbuttoned and slipped off his surtout, hung it over a

chair, adjusted the ruffs at his neck and wrists, smoothed a crease

from his slim black undercoat, and shifted the bright steel hilt of

his sword an inch or two forward--all quite quietly and deliberately.

Then he spoke with a very soft courtesy.

“That was the pious course, little Severo. Now shalt thou compromise

with thy Maker for no more than a spell of purgatory. It will not be

much, I doubt, with one so excusable for his youth.”

His blade came out with a silk-like swish. Death, in the venomous

sound, hissed into the youngster’s ears. He looked up, his face as

white as paper.

“I seek the river, not thy sword, M. Trix,” he quavered.

“That is unfortunate; because I seek thy life, little Severo.”

The boy looked round fearfully: his companions, set and terrible,

hedged him from the door. He gave all up in a pitiful cry,--

“I was wrong: I don’t want to die! Cartouche, I don’t really want to

die!”

“That is sad indeed,” said Cartouche. “You will have to summon all

your resolution.”

His face changed suddenly.

“Will you draw, sir,” he said sternly: “or am I to cut your throat

like a sheep’s?”

“It is murder,” cried the boy. “I call all to witness it is murder!”

Some exclamations of contempt alone answered him. Rallying, under the

shame, to a last agony of resolution, he drew his sword and advanced.

His under lip was shaking and dribbling; the bosom of his linen was

torn; he looked like a death-sick girl.

The blades crossed. Cartouche held his motionless a moment while the

other’s vibrated on it like a castanet. An answering small laugh went

up. Then he engaged deftly, in a wicked little prelude of cat’s-play;

and then--

It was at least as great a shock to him as to any other to hear a

sudden leap and rush, and see his sword torn from his hand and flung

to the ground. For the moment, a fury of hell flew to his eyes and

blinded them; the next, he saw Louis-Marie standing before him, white,

and terrible, and denunciatory.

“Save thou thine own soul!” shrieked Saint-Péray, “nor lose it,

saving this child’s. O, my brother! drive me not to this last despair

of cursing all I have loved. Give me the boy’s life.”

A stun of utter stupefaction had fallen on the company. For the

instant everything stood stricken--a strange and pregnant tableau. But

in the still hearts of all was a terror of the inevitable crash which

must rend in an instant the appalling hush.

To their confusion, scarcely less astounded, the crash did not follow;

but, instead--miracle of things!--the disarmed one drew a deep breath,

and smiled.

“It is a trifle; take it, my brother!” he said.

Even with the word he saw Saint-Péray sway where he stood. He darted

forward and put a strenuous arm about him.

“What is it, Louis?” he whispered.

Saint-Péray’s fluttering hands went feebly about his neck.

“I have saved a life? O, God, dear Gaston, tell me that I have saved

a life!” he whispered in wild emotion.

Cartouche, glaring around, caught sudden sight of Bonito standing

slack-jawed in the gloom. The doctor, seeing himself discovered, came

forward.

“Hist!” he muttered. “Our friend is in a poor way, Mr Trix, and needs

looking after. Get him to come outside with us.”

“You have certainly saved a life, brother,” murmured

Cartouche--“though, I am afraid, not a very worthy one.” Then he said

aloud: “To pass, by your favour, gentlemen! But deal gently with my

character, I beg you. I am still in evidence to answer for it.”