THE DECOY
Tiretta one morning was traversing an inner corridor of the palace
on his way to the gardens, when, passing by a private door which gave
egress from the Infanta’s apartments, he almost ran against a young
woman who at that moment issued from the opening. The lady effected a
quite natural little scream and start, notwithstanding the fact that
her eyes had been, but the instant before, watching through the
door-slit the young gentleman’s approach. He apologised becomingly,
with many regrets for the alarm he had occasioned, and was proceeding
on his way, when an exclamation from the girl arrested him. She had
pressed a faultless little hand to that region in her dainty bodice
under which her heart was presumably lodged, and, with her eyes half
closed, appeared to be swaying slightly. He returned at once, and,
with an aspect of real concern, offered his support.
Mademoiselle Becquet resisted, though faintly, the proffered
assistance. There was, after all, something of the moral
_hors-d’œuvre_, of the appetisingly unexpected, about this early
capture of her slim waist by a shapely masculine arm. Finally she
turned her head away, and, with a sigh, yielded herself to the embrace
just as it appeared about to be withdrawn.
“You are better?” said Tiretta anxiously.
She gulped, still panting a little.
“It was the suddenness, monsieur. My heart is weak.” (The wicked
fibster! It was as tough as indiarubber, what there was of it.)
He expressed his compunction:
“And soft, I am sure,” said he, “on behalf of a penitent sinner.”
She smiled, in a recovered way.
“If you please, monsieur. But you need not take advantage of that
absolution. A soft heart is the most fatal possession a girl can own
to in this bad world. It were as foolish as to flaunt her jewels in
the Ghetto.”
Tiretta, with a laugh, released the slender waist.
“If you can stand alone,” he said.
“O, yes!” she answered--and indeed there was no doubt she could.
He looked at her with a twinkling gravity.
“What is your name, child?”
She dipped him a demure little curtsey.
“Fanchette Becquet, at your service, monsieur. I am her Highness’s
confidential maid.”
“She is prettily served, Fanchette.”
“And handsomely, I am sure, monsieur. You see I return the
compliment.”
He laughed again at her insolence--and checked himself suddenly.
“What on earth do you mean by that?”
“O!” she said innocently: “do you not love my mistress? Everybody
loves her.”
He breathed again. There was safety in generalisations.
“If everybody loves her, then I suppose I must,” he said.
She clapped her pink hands.
“I will tell her. She will like to know that.”
He stared at the girl aghast; then nipped one of her slender wrists.
“If you dare! Are you off your head?”
“Perhaps, monsieur. You see you startled me so.”
“I don’t believe a word of it. I believe this was premeditated.”
“Yes, that is quite true.”
“It was?”
“I saw you coming before you saw me. I thought I should like to be her
Highness’s proxy for your attentions. I would have let you kiss me, if
you had offered.”
He released her, and stepped back.
“You are certainly mad,” he exclaimed.
She laughed: they were quite alone: then came close up to him.
“Would you like to practise again on me, monsieur--to test the
softness of her heart by deputy? No?”
“I am no thief,” he said, as if stupefied. “Keep your jewels, for what
I care.”
“That is well,” she answered mockingly, “since they are bespoken by
another. Only I love an intrigue.”
He commanded himself by a great effort; assumed a chilling
masterfulness, if he did not feel it.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I cannot pretend to know on what false and
vicious assumptions you are daring thus to impeach my honour. They are
mistaken, whatever they are; and let that suffice for you.”
Fanchette set her lips tight, and nodded her head once or twice.
“O! very well,” she said. “There is no harm done. If I am mistaken I
am mistaken, that is all.”
He should have gone; but he unwisely lingered.
“I believe,” he said, “I ought to probe this to the bottom. Only
gossip takes good care to be elusive.”
“It cannot help itself, monsieur,” said the girl. “It is all shaped
upon signs and hints and glances--upon a mystic code which only the
initiated can interpret.”
“Then in that case you are not one of the initiated.”
“I do my best, monsieur. Hey-day! Well, from my own point of view, I
am sorry for my mistress--especially as she looks, for her
entertainment, to the company this afternoon of so chill a cavalier.”
“What do you mean?”
“O! nothing, but that we are going, she and I, to that old Aquaviva’s
garden; and without the she-dragon, who will be engaged over M. du
Tillot.”
“Her Highness expects me to accompany her?”
“I did not say that. To think she could so commit herself! But she
sighs over the incompleteness of her dear orange-grove, which, says
she, only needs its Orpheus to be the sweetest garden under heaven.”
“It is melancholy to have to produce music to order, is it not,
Fanchette?”
“I think it is, monsieur.”
“Well, I must respond, I suppose. It will only be a little while
longer. It has this use, that you shall convince yourself by my
behaviour of the wickedness of your innuendo.”
Convince herself as he convinced himself, no doubt. He told his
conscience, as he walked away, that thus to go forward, steadfastly
and dutifully, his eyes set to his mission, his ears deaf to the jeers
and chuckles of scandal, was his only safe course. There was a story
somewhere he had read of a prince whose way to a definite purpose lay
up a stone-strewn hill, every pebble of which, when he came to the
test, was clamant with an agonised or seductive voice entreating him
to turn. And he did turn, and was changed into stone. Well, he must
not be like that prince, that was all--an easy matter, it seemed. But
the spirits of evil know their business better than man, or they would
not provide so simple a lure for his ruin. It is the complicated trap
which fails to beguile the confiding little mouse; the deadly snare
consists in no more than a fragment of bait and a wire spring.
Just to go steadily forward: yes, but this unexpected halt, with its
startling revelation, had suddenly made of that plain road a rather
formidable maze. Had he appeared, noticeably appeared, to be making
too personal a matter of this business? Then how was a part so
impassioned to be played in a spirit of aloofness? He swore he was
loyal to his mission, loyal to his friend, that he was a man of
honour, that he had never consciously wavered in his fidelity. Of
course he had not. The devil knows better than to inoculate his
victims perceptibly. It is a very favourite trick of his to encourage
a man, who knows nothing whatever about moral architecture, to build
over-heavily upon his moral strength. Tiretta was so confident in his,
that he had never thought of questioning its capacity for supporting
any test. He did not now; he would not, Fanchette and all such
mischievous gossips despite. He was just, he flattered himself,
beginning to succeed in his romantic undertaking, and to feel a
certain thrill in the near accomplishment of a task which had once
promised to prove so distasteful. To withdraw now would certainly seem
to give a colour to calumny. If only for the lady’s sake, he must
prosecute his purpose to its triumphant end.
What a chivalrous Tiretta, to be sure; but indeed, he was not yet so
conscious of his own state as to be guilty of lying to himself in the
matter.
And in the meantime Mademoiselle Fanchette stood and looked after the
retreating figure, and curtsied derisively to its back.
“You are a very pretty gentleman,” she said: “but I know a prettier.”
She had that other in her mind’s eye. He was also a musician, but of a
very different “tone,” so to speak. He did not deal in the visionary
stuff of dreams, but in the practical material of courtship--the sort
of suitor a woman could understand. He set adorable words to
intelligible music; one was at no trouble with him to puzzle out
sentiments which fitted themselves quite naturally into the
love-traffic they recorded and provoked. And he too was handsome, but
in a braver, bolder way, wooing, as a man should, by compulsion. She
was in fact very much under the thrall of this cavalier, though still
coquetting--for business’ sake, as some Frenchwomen will--with the
thought of capitulation.
And yet, with a curious perversity, she was jealous of the very
quality she sneered at--acutely jealous of the mistress who might
command, if she liked and as she liked, that dreamer of dreams. She
did not understand M. Tiretta’s mystical rhapsodies (she had often,
herself unseen or unobserved, heard him improvise), or the fine
subtlety of his mind, or the rareness of his gift; she did not admire
either his melancholy looks or his serene humour. But an uneasy
suspicion as to the superior value of these qualifications, as
compared with la Coque’s showy and meretricious ones, haunted her. She
felt them like supercilious reflections on her own vulgar taste, or on
what they seemed to imply to be such; and the thought, as with common
natures, did not drive her to aspire, but to degrade. She had no wish,
for herself or her lover, to rise to Tiretta’s level; she would have
liked dearly to pull him down to theirs. Wherefore, in the prosecution
of that amiable design, she had been quite ready to lend herself a
subtle instrument to the ruin of that rival favourite. She would even,
if provoked to it, have given her body to the task, as she had her
soul. To hate and to seduce, to seduce because she hated, to risk
loving because she had seduced--that was something her mental
attitude. It was the passionist French view, and Fanchette was
excessively French.