Louis-Marie was really ill, though his complaint, it seemed, baffled
diagnosis. He was sunk in an extreme debility, which from a moral had
become a physical one. There appeared nothing wrong with him
constitutionally; but he dreamt, and saw vampires, and the substance
of his eternal illusions figured in “blood-boltered” forms. Nightly
they sucked him, and daily his increasing wanness testified to their
inhuman appetites. He faded to a frail image of himself, very pitiful
in its suggestion of a sick prince of porcelain. Any sudden noise,
like the opening of a door, was enough now to make him start and shake
with terror. A footstep outside the window vibrated in his nerves for
minutes after it had passed. His heart was become a very seismograph
to record alarms. But the unexpected entrance of anyone into the room
most perturbed him. A furtive aghast look, an artificial rally and
instant physical collapse, were the almost certain consequences of
such an intrusion. Once, at a chance mention of Bonito’s name, he sunk
back in his chair as if under a stroke. Cartouche, who was present and
distressfully concerned, attributed his state to a sort of hysterical
resentment against that minister of ill-luck, and struggled to overlay
some conscious contempt of it with a real anxious commiseration.
“Have you soothed him, reassured him?” he asked of Molly Bramble, when
that frail sweet of Nature came down to him to report upon the
invalid.
“I have left him asleep,” she said.
He tramped to and fro in the little room, pondering a psychologic
problem.
“He fainted when I told him of another loss--a real poignant one that
time. Here’s a mere slip of Fortune--a few ducats rolled into the
gutter. He’s already recovered more than their equivalent in
abstinence. Are these good people so utterly wanting in a sense of
proportion?”
“Think what it meant to him, Cherry!”
“And what did it mean, Mollinda?”
“Why, to go a-courting, to be sure, with that in his hand to recommend
him.”
“Does he think she needs that form of persuasion? I would not
condescend to break _my_ heart on such a mistress. He’s no worse off
than he was.”
“Well, he mayn’t be. _But how about her?_”
Cartouche stopped, and took the girl’s soft chin in his hand.
“Talk about what you understand, you little village wench,” he said.
“You was bred in a cottage, and think in pence. A guinea is your
standard of corruption. Noble natures are not bought with gold.”
She did not move: but her eyes, unwinking, filled with tears.
“Thank you for reminding me,” she whispered.
Remorse smote him; but still an angrier, or a worthier, feeling made
him stubborn.
“Pish, Mollinda!” he said; “we’ve agreed to compromise there on a
better sentiment. That proves you noble too, my girl.”
She looked him fearlessly in the eyes, though her own were like wet
forget-me-nots.
“Do you know she’s here--in Turin?” she said.
“No.”
“Well, she is. You needn’t start and let me go. She’s nothing to you.”
“Why should she be? Who told you?”
“He did.”
She gulped, but did not stir.
“Tell me honest,” she said. “Is it for my sake, or for hers, that
you’re so anxious all of a sudden to be good?”
He delayed to answer. She gripped him, quickly and fiercely.
“If I knew for certain what I’ve feared,” she cried low, “I’d kiss and
cling until you gave me back what I’ve lost--I would, for all it
damned us both together.”
She broke from him, and went hurriedly out of the room. Reaching the
invalid’s door above, she paused to the sound of a little cry within,
hesitated, and entered.
Louis-Marie was sitting up on his bed. His eyes were wide with fever.
He greeted her appearance with something like a sob.
“Who is it?” he whispered. “Has he come? My God, don’t keep me in this
suspense!”
She hastened to comfort him--the more emotionally; perhaps, because
her own heart was very full.
“There’s nobody--indeed there isn’t.”
“I heard voices.”
“It was only ours--Mr Trix’s and mine.”
He sank back, with the sigh of a reprieved soul; but was up again
almost immediately, stroking and fondling the girl’s hand. His eyes
had grown flushed and maudlin out of relief. The sensuous fever of him
was uppermost.
“Dear little nurse!” he murmured; “dear kind little Molly! You never
fail to frighten the dreams away. I think you could cure me altogether
if you would.”
She sat on the bed, suffering his caresses, because, as she wilfully
told herself, they were lavished on her as another’s proxy. Would she
could act so indeed, in the manner of those Eastern enchantments of
which she had read, and secure that other’s compromise without hurt to
herself! He was emboldened by her passiveness.
“Molly,” he whispered: “if you would only put your face--here, down by
mine, on the pillow.”
She did not stir. He stole an arm about her.
“We could make it all right afterwards,” he said, with a thick little
laugh. “If I once had that reason, as I have the power, to mend
something I’d done, I think I could face the world like a giant. It’s
only shadows that upset me. Perfection, I’ve come to see, was never
meant for men. It’s better to sin a little, if one does penance for
it--better than being a saint. We know that on good authority, Molly,
don’t we? I’ll promise amendment--I will, on my honour--and--and--are
you fond of jewels, Molly?”
She slipped from him, and to her feet.
“Are you dreaming still?” she said. “Do you take me for _her_? We
don’t do these things in our class.”
She had had her little revenge, and flushed triumphantly to it. It
were supererogation to confess--what he did not know--that she was
engaged in these matters to another. But, after all, the creature was
a man, and his offence therefore nothing very terrible. Of course, if
it had signified treachery to his blood-brother, that were another
pair of shoes. But, inasmuch as only the betrayal of his fine
lady-love was implied by it--why, the Marchioness di Rocco might very
well profit by learning that her supposed pre-eminence in men’s hearts
was at least open to challenge. A light sentence--as she considered
it--was enough to meet this case.
She stood away, panting--a very ruffled little _amourette_, and thrice
desirable in those plumes.
“I wouldn’t promise on my honour, if I was you, my good gentleman,”
says she. “’Tisn’t much to trust on, when you can speak to me like
that, and you sworn to another. I wonder what she’d think of it all.
You’d best go to sleep, and get the better of yourself.”
He caught at her, the poor devil, as she was going, all his gauche
libertinism snubbed out of him at a breath. The loss of his
self-respect was nothing to this sudden realisation of his
contemptible immaturity in vice, and of her recognition of it. There
is no such crestfallen dog in all the world as your seducer held up to
ridicule by his intended victim. He appealed to her abjectly:--
“Don’t go--don’t! I am so ill. I didn’t mean what--what you suppose.
My brain is all on fire. He wouldn’t allow for that!”
“He? Who?” she demanded, withdrawing from him. He still pursued her
with his hands, distraught, half frenzied:--
“You’re going to tell him, I know; and he so believes in me. It would
be cruel, wicked, to shatter his faith. You ought to think of the
demoralising effect on him--and--and I’m not myself, you know that
perfectly well. I say and do things I had never thought of once.”
“Do you mean Mr Trix?” she said.
“You know I do,” he cried. “It would be wicked to tell him!”
She stood conning him gravely a little. There had been no thought of
tale-bearing a minute ago in her liberal heart. But now, for the first
time, it began to consider that policy, in the light of a possible
retaliation on a suspected rival. The “demoralising effect” on _him_,
her Cherry, quotha! What, indeed, if she were to try that effect, with
the result that it evoked jealousy there, anger, indignation, a
declaration of his exclusive and never-foregone property in her, his
Molly’s, person? It might serve for the very means to dissipate this
sad veil of continence which had come to fall between them, and which,
only out of the inherent purity of her love, she had agreed to
respect. For spiritual relationships, it must be admitted, were
water-gruel to this poor Mollinda, and tinctured with wormwood at
that, when, as in the present case, they carried suspicions of the
disinterestedness of the party suggesting them.
Should she go and tell him in truth? No, it wasn’t fair to this other
fellow, for all the exhibition he had made of himself. But her
conscious prettiness was something to blame, no doubt, in that matter;
and, after all, he had been guilty of no disloyalty to his friend. Her
ethics of the heart were Nature’s ethics, founded on a frank
recognition of the logic of feminine lures, and the reasonableness of
wanting to pluck inviting fruit when one was thirsty. A parched man
could not be expected to drink water when wine was going.
Nevertheless, he deserved a measure of punishment, less for his fault
than for his mean attempt to escape its consequences. A little
suspense, she decided, just a moderate spell on the rack, would do him
no harm--might even prove salutary.
“I’ll promise naught,” she said. “It would just amount to my allowing
a secret between us; and you aren’t the man for my confidence--no, nor
for any part of me. Besides, if you didn’t mean nothing, why should
you be afraid? I’ll do as I think fit, and speak or hold as it suits
me.”
She whisked away, leaving the adorable fragrance of a dream
unfulfilled to clinch the poor creature’s damnation. She did not know,
could not know, how thorough that was at this last. She would have
been horrified, kind heart, to realise how her balmy breath had blown
a smouldering fire into devouring flame; how it had sentenced this
victim of “little-ease” to be transferred to the pillory. For indeed
in that sorry yoke did she leave Louis-Marie exposed to himself, and,
as he thought, to all the world.
There is a form of morbid self-consciousness which is characterised by
a perpetual turning inward of the patient’s moral eye. The man subject
to it sees--especially during the wakeful hours of the night--his own
past deeds and words imbued with a meaning of which they had appeared
quite innocent when acted or spoken. He writhes in the memory of
mistakes of self-commission or omission, which no one other than
himself, probably, is troubling to recall, or is even capable of
recalling. What an ass somebody must have thought him under such and
such circumstances, is the reflection most distressingly constant to
his mind. Nevertheless, while eternally holding himself the
irreclaimable fool of untactfulness, he remains to his own
appreciation a thing of price, which he himself is for ever giving
away for nothing Modesty is no part of his equipment though he is so
sensitively conscious of his own failings. He cannot detach himself
from himself, in fact, or, even once in a way, realise comfortably his
own insignificance in the serene philosophy of the Cosmos.
So far for his tortured memory of solecisms, real or imaginary,
committed by himself. When it comes to the question with him of a
genuine conscience-stricken introspection, his reason is in the last
danger of overthrow.
Now, Louis-Marie’s was a temperament a little of this order. It was
the temperament of a man at once thin-skinned and bigoted, righteous
and passionate. It had all the conceit and the sensitiveness of
conscious virtue. The fellow could never forget himself, in the
abstract sense--believe that people were not incessantly thinking and
talking of him. A morbid diathesis is the inevitable result of such
self-centralisation. Acutely sentient, it will learn to inflame to the
least thrust of criticism, and to brood eternally over the
pointlessness of its own _ripostes_. Then, at last, when it comes to
sin, as it is bound some time to do, it will take its lapses with a
self-same seriousness as it took its merits. It is always, in its own
vanity, a responsible example; people are always regarding it. Its
attitude, as a consequence, will become a pose; but by now it is a
fair rind hiding a rotting kernel. The devastating grub has entered,
and it dare not reveal itself by expelling it. It hugs its disease in
secrecy, hoping against hope for some interior process of healing. How
can self-centredom heal itself? There comes a day when the last film
cracks, and its emptiness stands exposed to the world.
Louis-Marie, abandoned to his reflections, thought that that day had
arrived for him. His hollow pretence was on the point of being laid
bare; he was to be made the subject of a universal contempt and
execration. A moment’s temptation had revealed him to himself for the
sham thing he was--would reveal him to Gaston--would reveal him, in
the certain course of scandal, to Yolande. For ever more now he must
be an outcast from social respectability. His life, for all that it
was worth, was virtually at an end.
Practically, too, it seemed almost. He fell back on his bed in a
death-sickness, and lay there without movement, without conscious
thought, for hours.
Cartouche, returning, very quiet and sombre, from his interview with a
great lady in the Palace, heard him moaning to himself, as he passed
his door, and went softly in. The room was in darkness; only a faint
light from the lamps outside fell spectrally across the figure
stretched on the bed. He crossed hurriedly to it and bent over.
“What is it, brother? Are you so ill?”
Saint-Péray uttered a little weak cry between terror and rapture.
“Gaston! is it you? I believe I am dying.”
“No, no.”
“I have so waited for you, sinking and struggling to keep above. This
load! I can endure it no longer. You are so strong--I seem always to
have clung to you--my brother--and you will take some of the burden?
Yet how can I ask you! O, my God, my God! to what can I appeal!”
“Why not to my love, Louis?”
“Ah! your love!--there were older claims to it. You don’t know--you
know nothing of it all--of what I am and have been--of what I am
capable, even, when tempted. Or do you? are your eyes opened a little
since--but what does it matter! I will confess everything; I--O, my
Yolande! my Yolande!”
“Now hush! and listen--do you attend? I am but this moment come from
her.”
“You--O, Gaston! fetch me a priest--I am going!”
“She loves you still--I say, she loves you still. Is not that the best
priest--and doctor, too? I will go and fetch _her_.”
The sick man clutched at him frantically.
“And confirm my sentence? You shall not. Though it parts us for ever,
I must speak. I could live, I think, if once this load were thrown.
Gaston!--”
“I am listening.”
“It was I murdered di Rocco!”