A BOLT FROM THE BLUE
Surprised and beset in that moment of unguarded emotionalism,
Fanchette had capitulated; and there was an end to her scruples as a
reluctant confederate. With the sacrifice of her self-respect went her
last feeling of charity towards hard-pressed virtue. She regarded that
now, with the eyes of the qualified _chère-amie_, as an hypocrisy to
be derided and shown up. Thenceforth she was in all things her showy
tyrant’s most devoted auxiliary, to be cursed or fondled, to be used
and abused, to be dragged by him by the hair of her head, should he
please--and so to revile him and spit at him, and turn with raking
fingers on any humane champion who should come to her aid. That is to
speak conditionally of Fanchette, but not of the type to which she
belonged, and to which she would sooner or later conform. Not that
jimp figure of hers, in its striped sarsenet frock with the slim
waist, not that demure smile and young mealy complexion, would save
her presently from the fate of the termagant, swollen of feature and
foul of tongue, to which she was destined. There was in her that seed
of Xantippe which is wont, once quickened, to sprout and increase and
burst into riotous blossom in a night. She was of the substance of the
true virago--vulgar, incorruptible, animal; rending the lust she has
provoked; ready to die whether to spite or to save the object of her
desire; ecstatically courting her own destruction at the hands of the
rage she has wantonly excited--and all to prove her utter devotion to
and absorption in the one. Such was Fanchette in promise--a sufficient
foil, even so undeveloped, to the nobler passion she was called upon
to assist in betraying.
That idyllic love should lie at the mercy of such coarse
understandings! But so is it decreed in this paradoxical world of
ours, where the myriad inanities sit in judgment on the sapient few,
where the rabble overrules the senate, the dunce the scholar, the loud
illiterate voice the cultured wit.
La Coque stood for the vulgar majority in this case. His hatred of a
finer spirit was simply the expression of an envious and ignoble mind.
He was avid to ruin Tiretta, and indifferent as to what other fair
fames he besmirched in the process. At the beginning he had had no
least grounds, save his own inventive malice, for the scandal at which
he had obscurely hinted. Later, when he came to learn that appearances
were at least beginning to give colour to his fiction, his joy waxed
great and fierce. He began then seriously to contemplate the means and
methods by which he might bring this belauded cockerel to his knees.
He set Fanchette to watch and to report.
Enough was soon gathered to give him a clue to his policy. He aimed at
nothing more at the outset than the disgrace and recall of his
detested rival, as he chose to consider him--an end, nevertheless,
which must be effected without compromising the Infanta. He was sharp
enough to see that any mistake in that direction might involve himself
in ruin. It would be sufficient for his purpose could Tiretta be led,
somehow and definitely, into an amorous self-betrayal, armed with the
evidences of which it would be easy for anyone to procure the
reptile’s dismissal. He instructed Fanchette to affect sympathy, to
worm herself into the chevalier’s confidence, to inveigle him if
possible into a pretended intrigue with herself, on the score that it
would at once cover his real design and afford him particular
opportunities for prosecuting it. He instructed her so to manage
appearances, in fine, that at the right moment M. Tiretta could be
represented to the duke for the traitor he actually was, and to the
Infanta as having been secretly prosecuting all this time a
discreditable _affaire_ with her own serving maid.
And to this pretty programme, Fanchette, a procuress for love’s sake,
was amiably prepared to subscribe--even though she might endanger her
own emotions in the process. For she certainly found a fearful joy in
playing with the fire kindled for another’s consuming.
As material for the plot, that little scene in the corridor had had
its timely uses. It had put her and her gentleman on a confidential
footing, which that later whispered colloquy had encouraged and his
own indecision confirmed. Thereafter he must suffer her secret
intelligences meekly, and little by little cease of any pretence at
misreading them. In truth, poor fool, in the torment of self-reproach
he must endure, the solace of a sympathetic ally was hardly to be
refused. Somehow it seemed to make him feel less guilty.
Not that he frankly countenanced Fanchette’s partisanship, or ever
appeared to assume an inner meaning from it. But, like the artless
receivers of stolen goods we hear of, he accepted its fruits
unquestioning, and, when she made profitable opportunities for him,
took them with the most ingenuous air possible. He thought, in truth,
she was a friend, and so played in all things into her hands.
The main thing was, for his greater exposure and degradation, to
discredit him in Isabella’s eyes. Fanchette took a peculiar pleasure
in that moiety of her task. One day, having manœuvred to come upon
him alone in the grounds, she met him point blank with a question
which brought him up aghast:
“Are you in love with me, monsieur?”
He stared a moment, and then bungled out a monosyllable:
“Why?”
“O!” she said; “it is a fair challenge, is it not? Tell me--do you
think me pretty?”
He was beginning to recover his self-possession.
“Yes, certainly I do, Fanchette,” he said.
“Do you take an obvious pleasure in my company?”
“If it is obvious, it is obvious,” he answered evasively.
“I will put it another way,” she said. “Is it for my sake that you
seek it so often?”
“Do I seek it often?”
She put up her face quite close to his, and said mockingly:
“Would you like to kiss me now, monsieur?”
He drew back, with a smiling shake of the head.
“I honour your good fame too well, Fanchette.”
She broke into a shrill little laugh.
“O, the darling, the Joseph! And yet he cannot be happy apart from me.
Why, I wonder. He will never say--wherefore it behoves the poor
rejected one to give him a morsel of advice.” She came close again,
and perked her chin at him. “Do not think for a moment, monsieur, that
I want your love; and as for my good fame, it can look after itself.
But, for my company, that is another matter from the point of view of
your own interests; and, if you follow my advice, you will continue to
pretend to take pleasure in it, if you do not feel any.”
“But I do feel pleasure, girl.”
“That is well, then; and I say, let your pleasure be as obvious to
others as it is to yourself.”
He looked his bewilderment, and she derided him:
“How slow of comprehension you are! Why, for the reason that they may
think this no more than an intrigue with a femme de chambre, and so
spare you the gossiping and eavesdropping which might otherwise work
you mischief. O, understand me, monsieur! It is friendship which
suggests this--not inclination. I do not propose to you to do more
than pretend.”
He looked stupefied: “I believe you are my true friend indeed,” he
stammered; and she laughed, and snapped her fingers in his face, and
left him feeling as if he had suddenly pulled up on the brink of an
abyss.
A pretended intrigue! The very thought was profanation to his love--an
outrage and a shame. But it embodied a _quasi_-revelation which was
even more ashaming. Fanchette knew; his affectation of artless
misunderstanding of her hints and innuendoes was exposed, and finally,
for the guilty sham it was. He positively blushed like a child
detected in a lie.
Was it a fact, too, that gossip was beginning to whisper? He had been
so absorbed in his dream, had held it in truth so sacred from the
world, that he had never so much as imagined that danger from without.
Not while the dream lasted--the mad impossible beatitude. And was it
already threatening to an end? He would not believe it--so perfect and
so uplifted, risen above the reach of mortal hurts. These shadows were
but conditions of its brightness.
After all, what had he done but follow the path appointed him, and if
by the way he had wandered into paradise, that chance was in the
itinerary. He had not abused his paradise; he had simply turned its
inspiration into song. In appearance, at least, there was nothing to
convict him.
And so he ended with derision for that monstrous suggestion, and a
determination utterly to discard it. Yet the thing being always in his
mind may have given him thenceforth in Fanchette’s company an air of
self-consciousness, which the vicious might interpret if they would
into a secret understanding.
Let all that pass for the moment. Our theme is still of Isabel and her
“young palmer in love’s eye” wandering, yet unchallenged, in their
unsoiled Eden.
Now June with these bewitched lovers drifted down a golden haze into
July, and July itself burned stilly on towards harvest-time. It was
the midsummer of their happiness--all the world one soundless tide of
light on which their dreaming hearts, like the fairy nautilus, made
rainbow sail by mystic strands, and silent moon-drenched gardens, and
paths of rippling flame which ran into the sunset. All time was
rapture to them, and most when they were silent and together; for
speech is but the sorry change of thought, and cannot for all its
volume match one golden maxim of the soul. What they felt, each to the
other, was better understood unspoken; in sleep alone it found the
perfect utterance.
One day, loitering so rapt, they came upon a terrace-corner by the
house where, at a man’s height above the ground, was a window with a
little balcony looking towards the lower gardens. Here were myrtle
bushes growing and loading the air with their scent. Beyond, the turf
shelved down to meet the leafy margin of the thickets, which enshrined
the flowery walks and lily ponds dear to the girl’s heart. She paused
and pointed to the window.
“Did you know,” she asked, “that was my bower, my oratory?”
He shook his head, smiling.
“It is,” she said. “Have I not a beautiful altar to worship at?”
He understood:
“This view? the green dale of quietude, with all its lovely secrets. I
like best, Madonna, the lilies of your altar-piece.”
“Ah, if one could but see them!”
“It is enough to know they are there, as I know the love that is in
your heart. It is sweet, I think, in hiding. But some day it will be
sweeter to go down and drown among my lilies. Is the basil in bud
yet?”
“Not yet.”
She called him by the name it was only hers to know. He sighed.
“It is shyer than these myrtles. Why did we not make them the symbol
of our bridal? They have the better right. I wonder what it waits
for?--my life’s blood, perhaps, Aquaviva would say.”
She cried “Bonbec!” and looked at him with such a white piteousness
that his heart smote him.
“Beloved,” he whispered: “That was a senseless and a wicked thought.
Forgive me for it. But I wish the basil would blossom. Where do you
keep it--in that same dear bower?”
He stood on tiptoe to peep, but could catch no more than a glimpse of
daintily flowered silks and hangings, and gilded mirrors, and a sheen
of _marqueterie_ and ormolu, all in the richly fragile fashion of the
day.
“No,” she said, still pale and troubled: “In my bedroom, which is
above.”
He wafted a kiss to that lily sanctuary.
“Could you not, unsuspected, come down from it,” he whispered--“just
to the little balcony--and speak with me when all the house is silent?
To be alone together in the night, my beautiful!”
Her cheek had turned from pale to pink; but she looked at him with
unfaltering eyes.
“I will do anything you tell me to,” she said.
“Even if it were that, Isabel?”
“It would not be wrong if you told me.”
Much moved, he touched her hand, and bade her sleep undisturbed for
him. “And speak for me in your prayers,” he said.
“Every night,” she answered, “when I kneel to our unknown God, Bonbec,
and pray that some day we may find the print of His footsteps under
the rainbow.”
It was his song that was in her mind--that had become, indeed, her new
faith’s inspiration. That “passion of the past” of which he had
spoken, and into whose ghostly texture her own life seemed woven;
those “long far lands of home” towards whose unutterable rest and
understanding his spirit sought to convey her--to what more soothing
wings of mysticism could she confide her burden of fearful joys and
apprehensions? Northward: the world’s unfathomed mystery of the
pointing finger: the threshold of the great wonder; and home--not home
new made, but home recovered! That was the ecstasy of the thought.
They had been wanderers apart these long centuries, and now at last
were come together again upon the starry track.
Fond nonsense, was it not? And yet so strangely real to them, that
that flight together up the white staircase of the world for ever took
them in fancy homewards. When they thought of escape--not spoke, for
that had not come yet--those little outpost islands in the cold seas
were always their mental refuge and first breathing-place.
But these transcendent moods were not for every occasion. They had
their living Eden to engage them, and it was sweet to tread all day on
flowers, and hear the drowsy doves murmur, and take the sun into their
hearts. And so fate allowed it until the golden cup was brimming.
One night--long cause had Tiretta to remember that night with rapture
and with grief--the Gonzalès left the two alone together in the
_salon_ whither the chevalier had been invited to improvise sweet
ditties for the ladies’ behoof. He had not perhaps acquitted himself
very well; he seldom did under compulsion; and the marquise had shown
signs of boredom. She was overfed, she was sleepy, she was cross;
moreover she had an indescribable air as of resenting the lagging
close of an entertainment which had lost its point and its motive.
There was patronage in her manner to the soldier; there was even a
hint of insolence. At last she said, with rude impatience: “Well,
minstrels stale, I find, like other sweetmeats, and there comes a time
when we wonder why we cloyed ourselves with them. After all they only
appear at the feast to prove how well we could have done without
them.”
She had gorged herself at dessert on _marrons-glacés_, the old pig,
and no doubt spoke feelingly. Yet there seemed a motive behind her
ill-manners, too.
“I have sung badly,” said Tiretta good-humouredly. “I admit it.”
“Eh bien!” said madame; “it does not matter in the least. You have
done your best, and there is an end of it.”
She got up almost immediately, having delivered herself, though with a
hurried manner, as if she doubted having gone too far, and, saying she
had an appointment to keep and would be back in a minute, waddled out
of the room.
“To sleep,” whispered Isabella. “She will say to herself it is only to
shut her eyes for a moment; but it will be an hour.”
“She will expect to find me gone when she returns,” said Tiretta. “It
was a very palpable hint.”
He stood before the girl. She rose, and they looked at one another.
Their hearts were somehow conscious of a vague foreboding. Then she
moved, and made a sign to him to follow her to the window. Together
they stepped out upon the balcony which overlooked the dreaming
grounds.
It was a night for love and lovers. The moon burned large behind a
film of mist, whose gauze just veiled the barren spaces of the dark,
and charmed the sleeping trees, and shook within its tissue a spangled
star or two, caught like fireflies in a web. Deep and shadowy below
them lay the gardens, their far solitary sentinels two dim and grey
colossi, Hercules and a satyr, whose hugeness alone had in past days
saved them from the hands of the despoiler. Now, mere unsubstantial
phantoms of the mist, they seemed to move and palpitate, as if some
antique spirit in the night stirred in their stony veins. Here and
there low down a light twinkled from a distant lodge or villa. Not a
sound broke the utter stillness, save now and again the drowsy burr of
a cricket, or the swish of a bat’s wings as its shadow dipped and
fled.
Silent in that breathing trance of things, the two stood together and
drank in the beauty of the scene. Their pulses throbbed in unison to
its sensuous appeal; they touched, and did not draw apart. Never
before had he seemed so dear or she so fair in the other’s eyes. He
marvelled how he could ever have dared to lift his to this white
miracle of girlhood--to dream of possessing it. As she stood near him,
the sense of her proud young loveliness, so submissive to his love, of
all that maiden treasure, and he the chosen master of its sweets and
secrets, swelled in his heart until he scarce could bear its rapture.
Mad thoughts were surging in his brain; he felt that he was losing
command of himself, when suddenly she turned and spoke to him, a tense
emotion in her voice:
“Whatever happens, keep me in your heart.”
“Isabel!” he breathed.
He held out his arms; and she came instantly into them, and gave her
lips to him, yielding herself utterly with just one sigh like a
dreaming child’s. All discretion, all good resolutions were forgotten
in the passionate stress of that moment. He strained her to his breast
with a fierce tyranny of possession; and, her face lifted close to
his, she whispered out her soul.
“I shall not be false, even though--O, you will believe me, you will
believe me, will you not?”
“Hush!” he said. “What is there to fear?”
“I do not know,” she sighed.
“Not the cryptic utterances of that rude old woman?”
“Your mind, too, is troubled. How can I be so close to you and not
feel it. Bonbec, I am afraid of to-morrow.”
“Come away with me then--here, to-night. I will get horses, and we
will fly northwards--Isabel--to the unknown Eros! He gave us to one
another--O, long long past in the beautiful gardens!--and I cannot
live without you, beloved. Duty, honour, reason--throw them all to the
wolves, so that our love alone remain to us.”
She clasped her white arms about his neck, and with one soft hand
caressed the hair from his forehead.
“Would it remain, dear my lord? Or would you not come to grudge the
price you paid for it? And yet I love you so that I must risk it; but
not till every other hope is gone.”
“What hope, Isabel?”
“Ah! I do not know. But give me that plea of desperation for my
pretext. Then, at last, if you call to me I will come.”
“My princess; my true heart!”
“Not your princess, but your slave, Bonbec.”
“My bird, then.”
“O, yes, indeed--caught captive by a song, and trembling in your
hand.”
Some noise, real or imaginary, startled them. He stirred; but she
would not let him go.
“Yet one moment, beloved.”
“Is it she returning?” he said. “Well, let her find us. To die for
you, Isabel--what a little thing it sounds beside my love! Just to
change this mortal suit for one more meet to await our nuptials in!
Yet how sweet the body clings to sweet!”
She struggled to free herself--to push him from her.
“No, go,” she said. “For pity’s sake, Bonbec! O, you kill my heart
with fear!”
“One last kiss to comfort it.”
She tore herself from him, and he left her, going gaily through the
empty room.
All that night he slept on roses, and all the following day he walked
on air, his brain drugged with an exultant ecstasy which bore him far
above the world of common thoughts and common apprehensions. Some
instinct holding him from presuming too soon on a transcendent favour,
he took horse and rode far into the country, returning only to the
palace when night was falling. And presently, hardly knowing what to
hope or what to fear from it, the summons reached him to attend the
ladies in the _salle-d’audience_.
She was not there when he entered it; only the old marquise, who rose
with unwonted condescension and alacrity to greet him.
“Ah, monsieur!” she said; “you are to congratulate us and yourself on
the happy termination of your labours.”
There was a sort of leery jubilance in her manner, sufficiently
significant in the context of late forebodings. He looked at her
stupidly.
“I do not understand,” he said.
“What!” she cried. “You have not heard?”
“Heard what? I have been absent all day.”
“And no advice has reached this amorous proxy from his indulgent
principal? Eh well, monsieur! Wonders will never cease. It was for us
to suppose that your periodical reports to the archduke were lately of
such a favourable nature as to decide his Highness upon thus bringing
matters to a head. And he has not informed you of his decision?”
“No, madame.”
“That I, then, should be the first to enlighten you!”
“If you please, madame.”
“It is only, monsieur, that her Imperial Majesty has despatched an
ambassador to Parma to request for her son Joseph the hand of the
Infanta. Such, you may consider if you like, is the fruit of your fond
advocacy.”
If he was staggered, he took the blow standing and like a soldier. No
hint of what he felt must betray itself here. Even the old lady was
half imposed upon by his manner.
“And her Highness herself?” he said, in a voice whose very desperation
lent it coolness. “She is reconciled?”
“Hoity-toity!” cried the marquise. “A fine expression to apply to
her.”
“Else,” said the chevalier, “why should _I_ be here?”
“Well,” answered madame: “that is true enough; but it was not
diplomatic. Judged by the alacrity with which she obeyed her father’s
summons to court, I should say she was very well reconciled indeed.”
“She has gone to Parma?”
“To receive the betrothal ring, monsieur. And so your task is ended.
Henceforth, so long as you favour us with your company here, you are
free to command your own time and your own inclinations. I can
appreciate, believe me, the relief it will be to us all.”