Molly Bramble was, and had always been, within the pale of her
social limitations, a perfectly good girl, sweet, modest and
wholesome. Child of a class rather prone, in its maternal admonitions,
to awaken a precocious curiosity as to the signs and indications which
distinguish the bad male fruit from the good, to put its virgins on
their guard against suggestion by suggesting, she was even a little
remarkable for her artless pudency. As maid and milkmaid she had
invited no offence, guarded her bosom from so little as a sun-ray’s
wanton kissing, cherished her sweet honour, jealously but simply,
within the bounds her state prescribed.
But she had had no arts to negotiate it beyond these, and, when the
ordeal came, and she heard it called a lovely superstition by lips
adorable in seduction, her innocence must yield it, for the archaism
it was pronounced, to that bright masterful intelligence.
It had all dated, alas! from a village wedding--or alas or not
alas--she had never thought to give _it_ a sigh till now. Zephyr the
god, coming over the hill, had taken Chloris unawares amongst her
flowers; and the way of a god was not woman’s guilt, but joy. Shame
could not come to blossom from that divine condescension. For its
sake, she had even stiffened to something of a precisian in questions
of maidenly decorum.
And now? The sigh, wafted from that distant scene, had overtaken her
at last. Those weddings, those weddings! Chaste procurers to the
unchaste. How men took advantage--of their feasts and dancings, of
beating pulses and warm proximities, of the sense of neighbouring
consummations--to plead the dispensations of the hour! Recalling that
plea, her god seemed all at once to reveal himself a mortal thing, and
subject to the mortal laws of change. She felt no longer secure in him
through her own unchanging faith. Her faith was shaken.
The glory of the morning fields; blown blue skies and the squirt of
milk into pails; the cosy sweetness of ricks; pigeons, and the click
of pattens on dewy tiles; a voice singing, far away in the sunny
window of a dairy,
“All the tears Saint Swithin can cry,
Saint Bartlemey’s mantle shall wipe ’em dry”--
such memories had but figured hitherto for the dim background, sweet
and a little pathetic, to a more poignant pastoral. Now, all of a
sudden, they were the commanding poignancy, infinitely haunting,
infinitely remote, and for ever and ever, as realities, irrecoverable.
Was all St Bartlemey’s mantle equal to drying the well of tears which
she felt gathering in her soul? The darkness of a great apprehension
was on her--a spectre, formless but menacing, in the thrall of whose
shadow she saw herself separated by a lifeless dumb abyss from her
living past. How had she crossed it unknowing, that deadly gulf? There
had seemed to her no break in the continuity of past and present;
until, lo! in an instant her eyes had been opened, and she knew
herself for a derelict in a desert, crying to a fading mirage.
What had happened, so to blind her eyes, obliterate space, cancel all
time? A consciousness of guilt, the very first, stole in to answer.
Love, whom she had scorned, had betrayed her--had led her on,
revenging that slight, to the very threshold of a brothel, and there
abandoned her.
And his _protégé_, for whom he had done this thing? A chawbacon
gallant, the very antipodes of the other--but then Love was born in
Arcady, and favours a rustic wooer. Poor Reuben’s homely image rose
before her--heroic hobnails, sentiment in a smock, but honest and
clear-seeing within the limits of his vision. Reuben had _seen_, and
dared to expostulate--and been smartly caned by Cartouche for his
presumption. And Reuben had blubbered--that was fatal. A crying man is
always contemptible. Yet in what other way, their relative ranks
considered, could he have answered to those flips of Fate? Privilege,
in these days, kept the stocks and gallows up its sleeve for the
correcting of any such ebullitions on the part of a mutinous
commonalty. The odds were disproportionate, and Reuben could only
express his sense of that in tears.
Poor Reuben! what had become of him? Cured his harrowed heart, belike,
with dressing of Joan or Betty. She wished she knew--could reclaim
herself to the past with even that much of certain knowledge, and
comfort. How he must hate her memory! She felt very deserted and
forlorn.
And all about what? Ask love, when in its nerves it feels the first
faint false harmonic jar within a perfect song; forehears the strife
of notes which that one cracked seed of discord must come to
germinate. Sure ear; sure prophecy; sure sorrow. The sound of M.
Saint-Péray’s first footfall on her threshold had been that fatal
dissonance to Molly. Somehow, by some sad and mystic intuition, she
had felt her hymn of happy days a broken sequence from that moment.
Now, left alone with him, the unconscious ruiner of her peace, she
felt she could have endured better to nurse a declared enemy than this
nerveless, ballastless ally and patient, whose very infirmity of
purpose was her bane. Realising the poor emotional thing he was, how
weak in self-control, she could have loathed her task enough without
this sudden embargo laid on her prescribed methods. No longer to
reassure his indecision--rather to confirm it? Why, that very task of
comforting his faint spirit, bidding it on to hope, had been her own
one reassurance in a world of doubts! And now--?
O, heart! O, heart! What did this change of policy portend? What had
happened to make it so imperative all at once? She could think of no
answer but one; and that way madness lay.
Ah! her lord, her gentleman! She knew him well enough to know she knew
him not at all. His passions were--had been--for her: his confidences
were always for himself alone. Blind obedience was what he had exacted
of her, and with blinded eyes she had let him lead her, even across
that abyss. She would never learn from him. He loved in parables.
O! Why had this stranger ever come between them, with his sighs and
moans and irresolution? It was that same irresolution which was the
crux of all. What woman could tolerate a diffident lover--and in the
face of a masterful one! She, for her part, would grant how alluring
by contrast must appear this puissant rival, Cartouche, her own pretty
gentleman--if rival he were. Her whole soul rose aghast to combat the
thought; yet, if he were not so indeed, what was his interest in
ousting this other from the lists?
“_The end we designed has become impossible. They cannot ever marry
now._ She’s not for him. _They must be kept apart at any price._”
These positive admonitions scorched her brain: day and night, sleeping
and waking they beat fiercely through it. What had M. Saint-Péray
done to forfeit his right? Was _she_ to serve as catspaw to those
others’ loves, and lay a troublesome rival? A treachery beyond
conceiving. “_If he’s weak, be strong for him. He’ll thank you some
day._” Thank her? _her_ the reward, perhaps, to irresolution for a
claim foregone! Had Gaston heard of that scene between them, and
chosen, for his own ends, to construe it into infidelity to himself?
She could not believe him so credulous or so base, nor fortune so
inhuman.
But her poor mad mind dwelt upon the monstrous thought--wrought itself
into a frenzy over it--piled fuel on its fuel, in and out of reason.
What if it were justified? No disobedience could be too great to
counter such a crime! She had been good, good, good--good, and
faithful, and self-obliterating--how utterly she herself had never
realised, until these visions of her past had risen to renounce her.
What had she not sacrificed for him--home--honour--that dear
untroubled land of innocence! had made herself an outcast for his
sake. And so to be dealt the fate of the heartless, self-qualified
wanton! “O, mammy! mammy!” she wept again, rocking and moaning.
But a fiercer thought rose to dry her tears. This other--this
woman--this white witch who had come between her love and her! She had
not forgotten a word of his description--no, nor the unspoken words,
that eloquence of silence which fills the gaps of speech. Eyes will
betray what tongue conceals. She’d seen his look beyond her at some
vision; she--
O, how she hated her, hated her! A lily? Well, there were lilies and
lilies. The scent of some grew rank at close quarters. Sweet and pure
of heart? Sweet candour, indeed, to own oneself an apostate from the
faith one’s heart had sworn to--and for a fortune’s sake! Scruples,
forsooth? They were the opportunity of the unscrupulous. She’d
betrayed her love once: why not a second time?
Love’s an elemental passion in poor Mollindas--no _finesse_, no pose,
no self-consciousness about it. They come from near the soil, and
follow Nature’s instincts. A mate’s a mate to them; their season is a
lifetime. There’s no cuckold in Nature, nor any room for one. Once
pledged, the dear doe animal but knows her lord, and holds herself
meekly at his pleasure. He may be polygamous; she is never
polyandrous: to conceive his condoning, even encouraging, such an
offence in her would be monstrous.
Cartouche was no Joseph to his poor Thais. She did not expect him to
be. She expected only his recognition of her eternal bond to him. The
thought, justified or not, that he was seeking to repudiate his sole
title to her, smote her like a madness. The thing was abnormal,
horrible, beyond reason. Yet it struck and bit into her brain. Out of
it, its torture and its haunting, this meek and pretty song-bird
threatened to grow a harpy.
Louis-Marie, lying exhausted on his bed, like one lately released from
some rending possession by devils--accepting with shamefaced gratitude
the gentle ministrations of his nurse--never guessed how mechanic had
grown the touch which soothed his pillows; what bitter scorn of him
was expressed in the averted glances of those Saxon blue eyes. For
indeed Molly could hardly look at him with safety to her patient
reason. _This_ the thing destined to her love’s succession! She felt
like one, fairy-struck, who has gone to sleep under a hay-cock, and
wakes to find herself in a strange place, the sport of goblin company.
Where had her lines fallen! she thought amazed, the sleep, as it were,
yet in her eyes--among what poor counterfeits of manhood? Her lines?
She had no lines. There was the woeful thing--the lack of the
talisman, wilfully foregone, which would have rendered these wiles
innocuous.
Reuben had howled when whipped, like a too-forward hound lashed to
heel--a natural cry of pain. But his boldness it was that had brought
him his chastisement. He would have been at the throat of his
mistress’s enemy; and his grief had been that his mistress disowned
him. Had she once given his stubborn constancy (a pathetic quality she
was now for the first time appreciating at its value) the right to
protect her, she believed fully he would have answered, hard and ugly,
in confidence of the law, the outrage to _his_ honour. His tears?
Tears shed by an honest lad, helpless and writhing under the heel of
tyranny triumphant. What pure water they had been compared with the
hysteric weepings of this saintly milksop--of these amateur
heroics--of this tragedy, to her protestant mind, of a deposed
churchwarden!
And so her thoughts recoiled as if from a sudden adder. What was
Reuben to her, any more than was this other--a dull, thick-witted
clown? To resent his just whipping? Strike back? Hurt her dear lord?
“O, Cherry, Cherry! I never meant it! _Him_ to presume and dare! You
were merciful not to kill him.”
Ah! her own love--her dark young tyrant. “Come back to me, Cherry!
Give up the bad white witch! My heart is bursting in its wild great
longing!”
Yet, while she hated to look on Louis-Marie, one aspect of him could
not but hold her curious observation. “He’s better: I think he will
recover.” Those had been her master’s words. Recover? from this
death-blow to his hopes? Take on new lease of life from the withdrawal
of what had served for that life’s one frail support? Yet, it
appeared, Cartouche had judged aright. The invalid grew better from
that day--more calm, more self-possessed; had ceased to chafe and
writhe. What did it mean, if not again that she was offered, the
potential salve to a damaged conscience?
A hectic convalescence only, could she but have known it. The wound
was there, and angry; only the festering fragment, which had made its
intolerable fret, had been withdrawn. Ease had come with confession,
and hope from the strong scornful self-assurance of the confessor. It
was the interval marking the sevenfold rally of the exorcised demon;
but, while it obtained, Louis-Marie knew almost the exaltation of a
saint uplifted by a consciousness of heroic self-sacrifice.
Yet pallid throes would take him in the night. Gaston was fearless,
Gaston was bold-seeing; but was Gaston quite the man to resolve nice
ethical problems? Would Yolande (lost to him: he told himself so,
lingering on guilty dreams of her) accept the ruling of such a
spiritual director?
The thought was father of many--a week-knee’d generation. He would
never dare to put her to that test--not for his own sake; not for
hers. For her sake, indeed, to keep sacred her mind’s peace, he would
be content for ever to bear his burden solitary. An idle resolve,
since she was lost to him. Lost, of course--but what if God should
hold that self-conscious burden atonement enough? Superfluous
macerations were not holy, but distasteful to heaven. Was it not his
duty, rather, to give himself to restore her faith in heaven’s
dispensations? Likely enough she had come to think herself unworthy of
him--of him, Louis, who had stood for her belief in Providence. Did he
not owe it to her, to God, at the cost of whatever self-renunciation,
to reassure her in the ways of faith? Her faith might decline on
heterodoxy otherwise.
He had so relieved his own conscience, with the shifting of its burden
into that stronger grasp, as almost to have lured himself into the
belief that not he, but Gaston, was the one responsible to its past.
It needed however but the rematerialising of a certain spectre, grown
hazy for a little in that charmed atmosphere of casuistry, to bring
about in him a sharp and instant relapse.
One day he was sitting in his room, listening, with shut eyes and
drowsy relish, to the voice of one of the two little _cameristas_ who
comprised the signorina’s _ménage_, and who would delight to come and
read to him when invited. These were quite excellent little abigails,
decorous as Molly could wish; with a taste for the lives of the Saints
(male, if possible), and a devotion, of course, for Louis-Marie. He
was always a lovely sentiment to such, with his angelic colouring, his
piety, his gentle courtesy of manner towards the least of his
inferiors. Each of these (pinks of morality within the recognised
Italian conventions) adored him, and was never so happy as when bidden
up to amuse her paragon with passages from his favourite anecdotes of
the Saints.
And thus read Fiorentina, in her shrewd small chaunt:--
“St Pol de Leon took a fancy to travel, and walked over the sea one
fine morning to the Isle of Batz. The governor of which, one de
Guythure, greatly coveting a silver Mass bell belonging to the King of
England, St Pol commandeth a fish of the sea to swallow and bring it
thence to him. Which the fish hasting to accomplish, the bell itself
on its arrival is found gifted with a miraculous power to heal, even
in some cases more potent than the Saint’s own. Whereby St Pol is
shown to be of less account than a little silver bell. And thereat he
boweth himself to God’s rebuke, witnessing how that sanctity, no less
than worldliness, shall be caused by Him to over-reach itself in any
unjust employment of its privileges.”
She stopped--the book dropped into her lap--“Monsignore!” she
whispered, appalled.
The invalid was leaning forward, his face livid, his hands grasping
the arms of his chair. In the silence which ensued, a voice, a step in
the room below, made themselves distinctly audible.
“Bonito!” he gasped; and fell back as if dying.
She flew to him, raised his head, petted and consoled him, feeling the
ecstasy of her opportunity.
“There, weep with me, sweet saint!” she said; and indeed, in a little,
his tears were mingling themselves with hers. Even this homely heart
could compel his soft response. She thought the story was to blame.
“There, there!” she said, as if to a child; “if it has made a mistake
in anything, God will forgive it.”
But he could hear nothing else than the voice beneath his feet.
Inarticulate as it reached him, its tones, slow whispering on his
brain, seemed measuring out its madness tap by tap.
_Bon--ito!--It--was--Bon--ito--come--at--last!_
It was Bonito, true enough; yet, for all the purposes of intrigue, not
quite the crude diplomatist a guilty conscience pictured him. He had
come, in fact, to condole the English signorina on her threatened
estate--come, it seemed, like a suitor, with an offer in his hand, and
a flower in his rusty buttonhole. His shoes were tied; his looks
commiserating and sympathetic as he could transform them. He was to
play a deep part, this old ape of mystics; and Molly was his destined
catspaw. Descending from that scene above, we find him already well
launched upon his course.
He sits, watchful and guarded. She stands before him, one hand to her
storming breast, the other leaned for support upon a chair-back.
“Say it again,” she whispered. “Perhaps I didn’t hear aright.”
Bonito licked his lips.
“He’s a suitor for her hand.”
She started, as if stung.
“But not an accepted one?”
He rubbed his gritty chin thoughtfully.
“They say he was rebuffed. What then? You women will claim that
privilege--once or twice. Persistence, by report, will always carry
ye. Perhaps you know. He’s a forceful suitor. You’d do well, by my
advice, to forestall the inevitable--drop the old shadow for the new
substance.”
She did not answer. He affected to draw encouragement from her
silence.
“Think what it may mean to you, if you refuse. A second lease of
protection is not like the first. Disillusioned faith’s a half-hearted
mistress. Your term will be short--and again will be shorter--until--”
“You damned old dog!”
She made as if to strike him. He sat quite unmoved.
“A prophet in one’s own country,” he said coolly: “I daresay you’ve
heard the adage. You’d reject the unpalatable--keep respectable in
spite of me. Try it, that’s all--cast upon the mercies of Turin, good
Lord! And what do I offer you in place? To be my confederate in
divination--chaste Sybilline--sacred through your calling--we’d make a
fortune between us in a year.”
She hardly seemed to hear, muttering:--
“Can it be true she’s so heartless--so forgetful--and him sickening to
the death for her!”
He pricked alert.
“Him? Who?” he asked low, as if responding to a confidence.
“Who?” she repeated, staring before her--“why, him
upstairs--Saint-Péray.”
He rose to his feet suddenly; seized her wrist. Her eyes fastened on
him; but he knew his mastery.
“You fool!” he said. “Why don’t you go and tell her so--tell her that
he lies here, in the house of Cartouche’s mistress, dying for love of
her? Why, if I’d known--the man who lent me money in a crisis--I’d die
to serve him. And that other--a dog to treat you so! I’ve no love for
him--I own it--and here’s a score paid off. Go at once--while the old
glamour lasts--before he’s time to return and urge his suit. You’ll
find her in her house in the Zecca--Di Rocco’s. I’ll--”
She threw him off violently. He pretended a furious anger--snatched up
his hat--made for the door.
“Rot in your folly!” he roared. “I’ve said my last to you!” and so
raged away--confident of the fruit the seed he’d sown should come to
bear.
The dusk was falling. In the shadowy room the girl lay flung, face
downwards on a chair. To her, palpitating, sobbing, wringing her plump
hands, entered Fiorentina.
“O, mistress! What have happened? What have he done to ye? And him
upstairs, ever since he heard his voice, crying on ‘Yolande! Yolande!’
to come and save him from a great spider that have got him in its
web.”
The other came to her feet, gasping, driving back the tumbled hair
from her temples.
“Tell him,” she said, “that if she’s human, he shall have her. Tell
him that I’m going this moment to fetch her to him.”
She broke off, catching her breath into a whisper:--
“No, tell him nothing. I’ll bring my own message.”