DEMON AND ARCH-DEMON.
After one sharp slighting look at the visitor, Madame Clemenceau had
withdrawn her senses within herself, so to say, to come to a conclusion
on the singular conduct of her husband. His cold scorn daunted her, and
filled her with dread. Had not the Jewess been on the spot, whom she
believed to be a rival once more, however high was her character and
Hedwig's eulogy, she would have prudently fled again without fighting.
She had the less reason to stay, as the house was to be sold, in a
manner of speaking, from under her feet.
Yet the Marseillais was worth more than a passing glance. When alone
with the lady, whom he regarded steadfastly, a radical change took place
in his carriage, and he who had been so easy and oily became stiff,
stern and rigid. It was the attitude no longer of a secret agent,
wearing the mien and mask of his profession, but of a military spy, who
stands before a subordinate when disguise is superfluous.
"Truly, she is more bewitching than when I first knew her," he muttered
between his close teeth, as if he admired with awe and suppressed
breath. "What a pretty monster she is!"
Feeling that his view was weighing upon her, Madame Clemenceau suddenly
looked up. It seemed to her that something in the altered and insolent
bearing was not unknown to her but the recollection was hazy, and the
black whiskers perplexed.
"Did you speak, monsieur?" she said, to give herself countenance.
"I spoke nothing," he replied still in the smooth accent which was not
familiar to her. "A man of business like myself, feels bound, if he has
any natural turning that way, to become a physiognomist and
thought-reader in order not to pay too dearly for bargains; I am happy
to say that I rarely blunder."
"Then you can read my disposition?" exclaimed Césarine mockingly.
"I knew it before."
"Indeed! then you would do me a great service, monsieur, if you would
tell me how it strikes you, as an average man. For I assure you," she
went on, taking a seat without pointing out one to him, "that some days
I do not understand myself, a most humiliating thing, though ancient
wisdom acknowledged that the hardest thing is self-knowledge."
"If you authorize me to be outspoken, madame, I will enlighten you,"
returned Cantagnac.
"Do not let me be in your way!" impertinently.
"It is the most simple thing, for your entire character is described in
these four words: venal, ferocious, frivolous and insubmissive!"
She sprang to her feet with quivering lips and flashing eyes, while he,
like a statue, lowered upon its pedestal, calmly sank upon an arm-chair.
Then, looking round and listening to make certain that they had no
observers, he leaned both elbows on the table and fixed his sea-blue
eyes on the startled lady.
"Kaiserina!" he said in a commanding voice, without the least softening
with that southern suavity, "for how much do you want to sell me
secretly, your husband's invention?"
The altered voice appeared not at all strange, but the words were so
unexpected that she merely stared in bewilderment while he had even more
deliberately to repeat them. Deeply frightened by this mystery which in
vain she tried to solve, she forced a laugh.
"Oh, it is no jest--I am one of the most serious of men," proceeded
Cantagnac, "as becomes one of the busiest."
She looked at him like a fawn, which, having never seen a human being,
is suddenly peered upon in the lair by the hunter.
"You want to know who I am, speaking to you in this style? See my card
on the table there--it says I am Cantagnac, the agent, modest but
passing for rather subtle, of a private and limited company recently
established with a cash capital fully paid up of several millions of
_fredericks_--for, to tell the plain facts to you--the obtaining for its
profit the ideas, inventions and discoveries of others. In short, we,
who used to despise mental fruits, see that it is the most profitable of
trades to work genius. As soon as we see, learn, or even scent that an
important thing is being produced anywhere in the world, we hurry to the
spot and by one means or another--money, cunning, persuasion, main
force, if needs must, we make ourselves master of what we must have if
we mean to be the world's rulers. With a European war impending, even a
lady will see at once of what value an invention is, like M.
Clemenceau's."
"In plain language, you are proposing to me an infamous deed!" she
exclaimed with scathing irony which failed to scare the other.
"I am proposing a matter of business. Where are you going?"
"Straight to my husband--whose confidence you have imposed on by some
deception"
"Dear madame, do not do what you would eternally deplore," said
Cantagnac quietly, and motioning with his broad hand for her to be
seated again. "I deceived your husband with a bit of character acting
which you would, I think, have applauded, as you were once on the
stage--the music hall stage, at least."
She sat down, as if this allusion had stunned her.
"His secret is indispensable to my company and I was given instructions
to try to obtain it, by surprise and for nothing, if possible. Without
it, many another purchase of ours made at great expense, would become
utterly useless. From an incomplete acquaintance with your husband, I
feared I could do nothing with him; from a study of him here, at a later
period, I doubted still more; and, having spoken with him, I am sure."
A previous acquaintance with Clemenceau? It was a ray of light, but
still Césarine, who did not cease to stare at him, failed to identify
him with a figure in her past. Was this only a new phase of a Proteus?
"Clemenceau is no longer the frank and enthusiastic student but a man of
talent and feeling who has found his true course. In what concerns the
revelation he has had from science, he is reserved and circumspect.
Happily, man that is borne of woman, however great, if a simpleton and
an idealist, almost always is the prey of the sex in one form or
another. When they escape feminine influence, they are impregnable, and
strong measures must be employed."
"Strong measures," repeated Césarine, shuddering at the icy, passionless
tone like a lecturer's.
"They must be blotted off the book of life--and it is always painful to
have to proceed to such extremities. It is frequent, very--and
ninety-nine times in the hundred, we run up against the woman for whom a
great magistrate advised the search whenever a crime is perpetrated."
"It would appear that you expect to induce me to commit that crime!"
sneered the woman, pale but rebellious.
"We have no need to induce you, dear madame, for we can constrain you."
"Constrain me!" repeated the woman savagely and tossing her head with
pride. "If you really knew my nature, you would not say that. You might
tell me how?"
"Really know you? you shall judge for yourself. In your marriage
certificate, you are described as of the Vieradlers, but your eagle is
not the German one--it is the Polish. The women of your race are
distinguished for beauty, when young, and freedom in love at all times.
Your grandma has a volumnious chronicle of scandal all to herself, but
her glory is thrown into the shade by the peculiar celebrity enjoyed
rather briefly by her favorite daughter, La Belle Iza, that one of the
Sirens of Paris who has, under the present Empire, lured the most men to
wreck. This was your aunt. Her sister, your mother, quite as beautiful,
was rescued at an early hour from her mother's manoevres to 'place' her,
as she called it, and for this loss, the indignant old lady vowed a kind
of unnatural vengeance, to be visited on the child of her who had
offended her by remaining in the path of virtue. This child is the woman
before me. Oh, it is useless to look at me like that!" he grimly said,
with the perplexed air of a man with no ear for music who listens to a
music-box delighting others. "Pure wasted labor! The old lady, who had
fallen from her high estate where Iza had lifted her, and was ordered
out of the capital for extorting hush-money upon her daughter's stock of
love-letters, the old lady became a queen--a queen of the disreputable
classes. In Munich, sleepy old town where superstitions linger and the
women are as besotted with ignorance as the men with beer, she ruled the
beggars and vagabonds. It was there that fate led you and you fell under
her hand. She pretended to befriend you, for even so young, you promised
to have power by your charms, renewing those she had never forgotten in
her lost Iza. No one consulted the Almanack de Gotha when you were
launched on an admiring society as one of the Vieradlers. You soon won
a great reputation for freshness of wit and coquetry in all South
Germany. In plain words, you could not see a man come into the
drawing-room without wishing to make him fall in love with you. We want
to monopolize genius--you to monopolize the love of man. You have the
mania of loving, more common than it is suspected, especially by those
who would have us believe that good society is a fold where snowy lambs
are led about from the cradle to the butcher's shambles, by pastors
carrying crooks decked with sky blue ribbons. The feeling is a craving
in you--an involuntary and invincible instinct which was to have its
inevitable end. You turned from a man who sincerely loved you to make a
conquest of another whose heart was engaged."
"Stop!" interrupted Césarine, triumphantly for she had detected genuine
feeling the last tone used by the living enigma. "I know you now! you
are the man whom you say really loved me. Down with the masks! You
are--"
"Not so loud!"
"You are Major von Sendlingen!"
"Say 'Colonel' and you will be exact. Yes; I am the lover whom you cast
off in favor of the student Ruprecht, as this Clemenceau was called when
he pottered about Europe, sketching ruined doorways and broken windows
and dreamed of architectural structures. A man whom destiny had chosen
to be the greatest demolisher of the age! what sarcasm!"
"Well, you should be the last to complain! Was it like devotion to me
that you should try to abduct La Belle Stamboulane in the public street?
"To remove her from your path! She was your rival in the music hall!
Love her, love a Jewess? You do not understand men--you fancy they are
put here for your pleasure, safeguard and redemption. An error! We are
neither your joy or your punishment. Let that pass. You married the
student Ruprecht who turned out to be your cousin Felix Clemenceau. For
a time you played the part of the idolizing young wife admirably. You
never reproached his father's head for the murder of your aunt and he
said never a word about the old beggar-sovereign Baboushka. In your
gladness at having stolen the man away from Fraulein Daniels, I believe
you imagined that it was love you felt. Not a bit of it! Love is the sun
of the soul--all light, heat, motion and creativeness! there are no more
two loves than two suns. There may be two or many passions, but not two
loves. If a man loved twice, it would not be love!"
The hard man spoke so tenderly that his hearer dared not scoff.
"He ran through your witchery after a while, but he built his hopes upon
maternity. You had a child but you connived at its death, if you did not
deal the stroke."
How accurately Sendlingen had measured this woman! Another would have
cried out against him at this accusation--or burst into tears and so
disarmed a less adamantine man. She did not blanch; she did not lift her
hand to cover her unaltered features, but listened as idly as she would
to the last plaint of the fool who might blown out his brains at her
feet. The false Cantagnac pursued in his natural voice, rancid and
imperious, rolling out the gutturals like a heavy wagon thundering over
an old road.
"It follows, madame, that if you run to your husband at a faster gait
than you took to run away with the Baron of Linden, to inform him of my
proposition, I will tell him what you hear--I will accuse you of
infanticide, of unfaithfulness--"
"He knows that!" ejaculated the woman with irony and in defiance. "Ask
him, if you do not believe."
"Impossible."
"He would not say a word to anybody, and I would not have confessed only
I was driven to it."
"And he forgave you?"
"All!"
"He is very grand; and few men of my acquaintance would not at least
have caned you smartly. However, it was not long after the 'removal' of
your child, to put it mildly, that you threw yourself into the swim of
distractions, such as were to be had hereabouts. The old marchioness'
circle soon surrounded you; she was one of my company's instruments, and
from that time we counted on you as a coadjutrix some day."
"On me!"
"Precisely! to whom should we look for aid and complicity in our
concealed and wary work but to the embodiment of permanent and domestic
corruption? You are merely an impulse--we are a policy, and you will be
our bondwoman. Ah, we are merely men--not fools, scoundrels or gods like
your husband, for only such would tolerate depravity like yours."
"He is like a god," said Césarine, trembling, in a low, hushed voice.
"When he speaks, it seems to me that it is what people call conscience."
"How long is it since you acknowledged this superiority?" sneered the
sham Marseillais.
"Too short a while, alas! some few minutes," sighed she.
"Well, granting he is at least a demi-god, he is a power which we have
an interest in destroying. Hercules became a nuisance to neglectful
stable-keepers, and like conservative institutions. Let us have done
with him. But, first, the final training of yourself. I repeat that the
marchioness' house was the rendezvous at the gates of Paris, where we
assembled our bearers of intelligence. Under cover of chit-chat and
vocal-waltzes, we heard reports and issued orders. It was necessary to
link you to us and we employed our foremost captivator, the dandy of two
countries, the international Lothario, the Viscount-baron Gratian von
Linden-hohen-Linden-_cum_ de Terremonde. Luckily, too, he had been at
the same period as myself, smitten with your vernal charms, and he
entered upon his amorous mission with gusto. You believed him very
wealthy, but let me tell you that the cash he really had under hand was
our petty expense fund. Judge by that what a capital we control!"
exclaimed Von Sendlingen proudly. "Our poor Gratian the double dealer,
seemed not to be loved by the gods any more truly than by his goddess
here present, for she let him, unassisted, be thrust down, on falling
through a broken bridge, into the mire of a rivulet visible from your
window. There he breathed his last. Fit death for a traitor! For our
corporation, the untimely, unmanageable passion of this athletic fop
might have had grave consequences, and for you. We did not find the
money on his person only a pocketbook stuffed with rubbish, as if he
were the victim of some gross deception. But, have no fear, Madame, we
are not going to claim the sum from you, we prefer to let you regard it
as a payment on account. We intend you no mischief, and we intended you
none, then; we might have stopped your flight--that is, I might have
done so, but I only threw myself across your path after you ran on, to
stay your husband from pursuing you."
"You were there?" she stammered, more and more frightened at the
vastness of the serpent which involved her with its coils, and which was
so careless about the loss of its golden scales.
"Enough! all is well that ends well! You will serve us?"
"But I have repented!"
"Nonsense! you returned home because your husband was suddenly enriched
above your dreams. Your repentance was simply a prompting of moral
hygiene for you to take rest before a new and less unlucky flight. You
had the instinctive warning that to the greatly successful inventor, the
modern king or knowing man--for civilization has come round the circle
to the point where savagery commenced and the wise man rules--to the
wizard, power, riches, beauty, all gravitate. Your husband would be
courted; duchesses would sue him to place their husbands or gallants on
the board of his company--the dark-eyed charmer whom you ousted in the
Munich music hall and whom you foresaw to be your eternal rival, might
meet him again. With you beside him, she might be repulsed--with you
distant, he would surrender at discretion. What a triumph for your
self-conceit and banquet for your senses to make your husband love you
even more than when he was the suitor! Look out! in battling with your
husband you say you fight Conscience; with Mademoiselle Daniels, with
whom I have had twenty minutes' pleasant conversation, enlightening him,
you would conflict with Virtue. Tell your husband that the money you
offered to help him, came out of our bank, and he will not forgive you
or tolerate you this time. No, for his silence would no longer be
loftiness of soul, but complicity of which I do not think him capable,"
he grudgingly said. "He would hand you over to the police, and believe
me, the Emperor Napoleon, having a mania on the subject of artillery,
would personally instruct his _procureur_ to draw up an indictment
against you which would not miss fire. And were you to escape in France,
we should have that abstracted money's worth from you elsewhere. Now,
dear lady, for how much will you sell us the secret of M. Clemenceau?"
The woman bowed her head, like one imprisoned in a sand drift, not to be
crossed in any direction, but closing in and weighing down. She was in a
pitfall, overpowered like Gratian had been, subjugated, soon to be put
to the yoke and compelled to draw steadily the harrow of transcendental
politics. Her caprices, faults, fancies, duplicities, wiles, caresses,
impudence, conquests and delights were but straws out of which some
great diplomatist would draw supplies for his cattle. It was humiliating
to the superb creature, but logical. She gnashed her teeth, but she was
sure that her cajolery--even her tears would be thrown away on this
soldier-spy whom once she had jilted, and who at present surfeited
himself with her defeat.
"It is a crime," she moaned, "a dastardly crime that you require me to
do."
"Not your first! You robbed us for your own private ends--we want you to
rob another for ours! you must not always be selfish."
'But I had really repented--"
"Pooh! you may repent of this fresh misdeed while you are about penance.
I have no objections to you becoming a good wife! it will be a novel
sensation, and of nothing are you more fond! Suppose you convince your
husband that it is wicked to kill his fellow-men by the myriad--that
love of woman is better than glory--decide him to go into a cottage by
the Mediterranean with you, and--sell us the invention. We could put it
to a righteous end; clear Africa of cannibals, that the merchants'
stores, and farms to raise produce to fill them, should replace
cane-huts. But I doubt you will succeed!"
"Never!" she exclaimed, afraid that her hopelessness would injure her,
for she would be the creditor of this remorseless combination without
any prospect of repaying them. But all resistance was useless, she was
convinced; she had to submit or she would be expunged from life. She who
had fancied herself so powerful was but the lowly, abject subaltern at
the beck of a preponderating power of which she understood no more the
details than the aim and principle.
"There is always a second course," observed Von Sendlingen slowly. "That
weak, inexperienced, young Italian, who loves you passionately."
"Antonino?"
"Antonino, yes; he carries the key to that coffer, and the key, too, of
the private cipher in which the inventor records his discoveries."
Shrinking away aghast, her blanched countenance expressed her wonder at
this preternatural knowledge. These master-spies knew everything, even
under this roof, better than the wife! This grim giant carried on an
abominable craft with thorough insight. That she could never emulate,
for completeness was not her forte. Oh, had she but been a virtuous
woman--an honorable wife, he had not dared assume to govern her! but
when of a girl's age, she had acted like a woman; when a wife she had
acted like the dissolute and unwived; when a mother, she had
disembarrassed herself of the token of her glory of maternity. She was
not fit to be anything but the instrument of such universal
conspirators. She whom the viscount had playfully called "Donna Juana!"
had met the Statue of the Commander at last, and once grasped, she would
no more be free.
"I shall report to our committee that we have made our agreement," he
said calmly and then, as he proceeded toward the door with the jolly
swagger of the Marseillais transforming his stalwart and rigid frame, he
added in the southern bland tone, "Delighted to see you again, dear
Madame Clemenceau!"
She did not hear him, for she had sunk too deeply within the abyss. She
regretted she had come back. It is true that the company which he
represented so terrifyingly, might have pursued her and pestered her for
their money, but she had the gifts that would arouse defenders for her
in any quarter of the globe.
Had she not one ally? certainly no friend! and yet, if Clemenceau would
only help her a little, she might cope with the arch-intriguer. If,
indeed, Felix did not save her, she would be lost. It was a dreadful
game, but glorious to win it, and she would be another and worthy woman
if she came out unwounded. In her distress, she would have had recourse
to the Jew and have utilized Rebecca though her rival, too! Besides,
there was Antonino, so passionate as to rush blindly, dagger in hand, on
even a Von Sendlingen.
"Come, come, cheer up," she said to herself, "there is a chance or two
yet. If only I could get over this crisis, I will reform and sincerely
resolve not to do a single act for which to reproach myself!"