“You speak French not like a Breton or Norman,” she added. “What is your
province?”
“I am an Auvergnian.”
She said no more, but motioned to me, enjoining silence also by a sign,
and I stood with her beside the panel. Before it was a piece of tapestry
which was mere gauze in one place, and I could see through and hear
perfectly. The room we were in was at least four feet higher than the
other, and we looked down on its occupants.
“Presently, holy Mother,” said I, “all shall be told true to you, if you
wish it. It is not your will to watch and hear; it is because you
love the lady. But I love her, too, and I am to be trusted. It is not
business for such as you.”
She saw my implied rebuke, and said, as I thought a little abashed, “You
will tell me all? And if he would take her forth, give me alarm in the
room opposite yonder door, and stay them, and--”
“Stay them, holy Mother, at the price of my life. I have the honour of
her family in my hands.”
She looked at me gravely, and I assumed a peasant openness of look and
honesty. She was deceived completely, and, without further speech, she
stepped to the door like a ghost and was gone. I never saw a human being
so noiseless, so uncanny. Our talk had been carried on silently, and I
had closed the panel quietly, so that we could not be heard by Alixe
or Doltaire. Now I was alone, to see and hear my wife in speech with
my enemy, the man who had made a strong, and was yet to make a stronger
fight to unseat me in her affections.
There was a moment’s compunction, in which I hesitated to see this
meeting; but there was Alixe’s safety to be thought on, and what might
he not here disclose of his intentions!--knowing which, I should act
with judgment, and not in the dark. I trusted Alixe, though I knew
well that this hour would see the great struggle in her between this
scoundrel and myself. I knew that he had ever had a sort of power over
her, even while she loathed his character; that he had a hundred graces
I had not, place which I had not, an intellect that ever delighted me,
and a will like iron when it was called into action. I thought for one
moment longer ere I moved the panel. My lips closed tight, and I felt a
pang at my heart.
Suppose, in this conflict, this singular man, acting on a nature already
tried beyond reason, should bend it to his will, to which it was, in
some radical ways, inclined? Well, if that should be, then I would go
forth and never see her more. She must make her choice out of her own
heart and spirit, and fight this fight alone, and having fought, and
lost or won, the result should be final, should stand, though she was
my wife, and I was bound in honour to protect her from all that might
invade her loyalty, to cherish her through all temptation and distress.
But our case was a strange one, and it must be dealt with according
to its strangeness--our only guides our consciences. There were no
precedents to meet our needs; our way had to be hewn out of a noisome,
pathless wood. I made up my mind: I would hear and see all. So I slid
the panel softly, and put my eyes to the tapestry. How many times did I
see, in the next hour, my wife’s eyes upraised to this very tapestry,
as if appealing to the Madonna upon it! How many times did her eyes look
into mine without knowing it! And more than once Doltaire followed her
glance, and a faint smile passed over his face, as if he saw and was
interested in the struggle in her, apart from his own passion and
desires.
When first I looked in, she was standing near a tall high-backed chair,
in almost the same position as on the day when Doltaire told me of
Braddock’s death, accused me of being a spy, and arrested me. It gave
me, too, a thrill to see her raise her handkerchief to her mouth as if
to stop a cry, as she had done then, the black sleeve falling away from
her perfect rounded arm, now looking almost like marble against the
lace. She held her handkerchief to her lips for quite a minute; and
indeed it covered more than a little of her face, so that the features
most showing were her eyes, gazing at Doltaire with a look hard to
interpret, for there seemed in it trouble, entreaty, wonder, resistance,
and a great sorrow--no fear, trepidation, or indirectness.
His disturbing words were these: “To-night I am the Governor of this
country. You once doubted my power--that was when you would save your
lover from death. I proved it in that small thing--I saved him. Well,
when you saw me carried off to the Bastile--it looked like that--my
power seemed to vanish: is it not so? We have talked of this before, but
now is a time to review all things again. And once more I say I am the
Governor of New France. I have had the commission in my hands ever since
I came back. But I have spoken of it to no one--except your lover.”
“My husband!” she said steadily, crushing the handkerchief in her hand,
which now rested upon the chair-arm.
“Well, well, your husband--after a fashion. I did not care to use this
as an argument. I chose to win you by personal means alone, to have you
give yourself to Tinoir Doltaire because you set him before any other
man. I am vain, you see; but then vanity is no sin when one has fine
aspirations, and I aspire to you!”
She made a motion with her hand. “Oh, can you not spare me this to-day
of all days in my life--your Excellency?”
“Let it be plain ‘monsieur,’” he answered. “I can not spare you, for
this day decides all. As I said, I desired you. At first my wish was to
possess you at any cost: I was your hunter only. I am still your hunter,
but in a different way. I would rather have you in my arms than save New
France; and with Montcalm I could save it. Vaudreuil is a blunderer and
a fool; he has sold the country. But what ambition is that? New France
may come and go, and be forgotten, and you and I be none the worse.
There are other provinces to conquer. But for me there is only one
province, and I will lift my standard there, and build a grand chateau
of my happiness there. That is my hope, and that is why I come to
conquer it, and not the English. Let the English go--all save one, and
he must die. Already he is dead; he died to-day at the altar of the
cathedral--”
“No, no, no!” broke in Alixe, her voice low and firm.
“But yes,” he said; “but yes, he is dead to you forever. The Church has
said so; the state says so; your people say so; race and all manner of
good custom say so; and I, who love you better--yes, a hundred times
better than he--say so.”
She made a hasty, deprecating gesture with her hand. “Oh, carry this old
song elsewhere,” she said, “for I am sick of it.” There were now both
scorn and weariness in her tone.
He had a singular patience, and he resented nothing. “I understand,” he
went on, “what it was sent your heart his way. He came to you when you
were yet a child, before you had learnt the first secret of life. He was
a captive, a prisoner, he had a wound got in fair fighting, and I will
do him the credit to say he was an honest man; he was no spy.”
She looked up at him with a slight flush, almost of gratitude. “I know
that well,” she returned. “I knew there was other cause than spying at
the base of all ill treatment of him. I know that you, you alone, kept
him prisoner here five long years.”
“Not I; the Grande Marquise--for weighty reasons. You should not fret at
those five years, since it gave you what you have cherished so much,
a husband--after a fashion. But yet we will do him justice: he is an
honourable fighter, he has parts and graces of a rude order. But he will
never go far in life; he has no instincts and habits common with you; it
has been, so far, a compromise, founded upon the old-fashioned romance
of ill-used captive and soft-hearted maid; the compassion, too, of the
superior for the low, the free for the caged.”
“Compassion such as your Excellency feels for me, no doubt,” she said,
with a slow pride.
“You are caged, but you may be free,” he rejoined meaningly.
“Yes, in the same market open to him, and at the same price of honour,”
she replied, with dignity.
“Will you not sit down?” he now said, motioning her to a chair politely,
and taking one himself, thus pausing before he answered her.
I was prepared to see him keep a decorous distance from her. I felt he
was acting upon deliberation; that he was trusting to the power of his
insinuating address, his sophistry, to break down barriers. It was as
if he felt himself at greater advantage, making no emotional
demonstrations, so allaying her fears, giving her time to think; for it
was clear he hoped to master her intelligence, so strong a part of her.
She sat down in the high-backed chair, and I noted that our batteries
began to play upon the town--an unusual thing at night. It gave me a
strange feeling--the perfect stillness of the holy place, the quiet
movement of this tragedy before me, on which broke, with no modifying
noises or turmoil, the shouting cannonade. Nature, too, it would have
seemed, had forged a mood in keeping with the time, for there was no
air stirring when we came in, and a strange stillness had come upon the
landscape. In the pause, too, I heard a long, soft shuffling of feet in
the corridor--the evening procession from the chapel--and a slow chant:
“I am set down in a wilderness, O Lord, I am alone. If a strange voice
call, O teach me what to say; if I languish, O give me Thy cup to drink;
O strengthen Thou my soul. Lord, I am like a sparrow far from home; O
bring me to Thine honourable house. Preserve my heart, encourage me,
according to Thy truth.”
The words came to us distinctly yet distantly, swelled softly, and
died away, leaving Alixe and Doltaire seated and looking at each other.
Alixe’s hands were clasped in her lap.
“Your honour is above all price,” he said at last in reply to her.
“But what is honour in this case of yours, in which I throw the whole
interest of my life, stake all? For I am convinced that, losing, the
book of fate will close for me. Winning, I shall begin again, and play a
part in France which men shall speak of when I am done with all. I never
had ambition for myself; for you, Alixe Duvarney, a new spirit lives in
me.... I will be honest with you. At first I swore to cool my hot face
in your bosom; and I would have done that at any price, and yet I would
have stood by that same dishonour honourably to the end. Never in my
whole life did I put my whole heart in any--episode--of admiration: I
own it, for you to think what you will. There never was a woman whom,
loving to-day,”--he smiled--“I could not leave to-morrow with no more
than a pleasing kind of regret. Names that I ought to have recalled I
forgot; incidents were cloudy, like childish remembrances. I was not
proud of it; the peasant in me spoke against it sometimes. I even have
wished that I, half peasant, had been--”
“If only you had been all peasant, this war, this misery of mine, had
never been,” she interrupted.
He nodded with an almost boyish candour. “Yes, yes, but I was half
prince also; I had been brought up, one foot in a cottage and another in
a palace. But for your misery: is it, then, misery? Need it be so? But
lift your finger and all will be well. Do you wish to save your country?
Would that be compensation? Then I will show you the way. We have three
times as many soldiers as the English, though of poorer stuff. We could
hold this place, could defeat them, if we were united and had but two
thousand men. We have fifteen thousand. As it is now, Vaudreuil balks
Montcalm, and that will ruin us in the end unless you make it otherwise.
You would be a patriot? Then shut out forever this English captain from
your heart, and open its doors to me. To-morrow I will take Vaudreuil’s
place, put your father in Bigot’s, your brother in Ramesay’s--they are
both perfect and capable; I will strengthen the excellent Montcalm’s
hands in every way, will inspire the people, and cause the English to
raise this siege. You and I will do this: the Church will bless us, the
State will thank us; your home and country will be safe and happy, your
father and brother honoured. This, and far, far greater things I will do
for your sake.”
He paused. He had spoken with a deep power, such as I knew he could use,
and I did not wonder that she paled a little, even trembled before it.
“Will you not do it for France?” she said.
“I will not do it for France,” he answered. “I will do it for you alone.
Will you not be your country’s friend? It is no virtue in me to plead
patriotism--it is a mere argument, a weapon that I use; but my heart
is behind it, and it is a means to that which you will thank me for
one day. I would not force you to anything, but I would persuade your
reason, question your foolish loyalty to a girl’s mistake. Can you think
that you are right? You have no friend that commends your cause; the
whole country has upbraided you, the Church has cut you off from the
man. All is against reunion with him, and most of all your own honour.
Come with me, and be commended and blessed here, while over in France
homage shall be done you. For you I would take from his Majesty a
dukedom which he has offered me more than once.”
Suddenly, with a passionate tone, he continued: “Your own heart is
speaking for me. Have I not seen you tremble when I come near you?”
He rose and came forward a step or two. “You thought it was fear of me.
It was fear, but fear of that in you which was pleading for me, while
you had sworn yourself away to him who knows not and can never know how
to love you, who has nothing kin with you in mind or heart--an alien of
poor fortune, and poorer birth and prospects.”
He fixed his eyes upon her, and went on, speaking with forceful
quietness: “Had there been cut away that mistaken sense of duty to him,
which I admire unspeakably--yes, though it is misplaced--you and I would
have come to each other’s arms long ago. Here in your atmosphere I feel
myself possessed, endowed. I come close to you, and something new in me
cries out simply, ‘I love you, Alixe, I love you!’ See, all the damnable
part of me is burned up by the clear fire of your eyes; I stand upon the
ashes, and swear that I can not live without you. Come--come--”
He stepped nearer still, and she rose like one who moves under some
fascination, and I almost cried out, for in that moment she was his,
his--I felt it; he possessed her like some spirit; and I understood it,
for the devilish golden beauty of his voice was like music, and he had
spoken with great skill.
“Come,” he said, “and know where all along your love has lain. That
other way is only darkness--the convent, which will keep you buried,
while you will never have heart for the piteous seclusion, till your
life is broken all to pieces; till you have no hope, no desire, no love,
and at last, under a cowl, you look out upon the world, and, with a dead
heart, see it as in a pale dream, and die at last: you, born to be a
wife, without a husband; endowed to be the perfect mother, without
a child; to be the admired of princes, a moving, powerful figure to
influence great men, with no salon but the little bare cell where you
pray. With me all that you should be you will be. You have had a bad,
dark dream; wake, and come into the sun with me. Once I wished for you
as the lover only; now, by every hope I ever might have had, I want you
for my wife.”
He held out his arms to her and smiled, and spoke one or two low words
which I could not hear. I had stood waiting death against the citadel
wall, with the chance of a reprieve hanging between uplifted muskets
and my breast; but that suspense was less than this, for I saw him, not
moving, but standing there waiting for her, the warmth of his devilish
eloquence about him, and she moving toward him.
“My darling,” I heard him say, “come, till death...us do part, and let
no man put asunder.”
She paused, and, waking from the dream, drew herself together, as though
something at her breast hurt her, and she repeated his words like one
dazed--“Let no man put asunder!”
With a look that told of her great struggle, she moved to a shrine of
the Virgin in the corner, and, clasping her hands before her breast
for a moment, said something I could not hear, before she turned to
Doltaire, who had now taken another step towards her. By his look I
knew that he felt his spell was broken; that his auspicious moment had
passed; that now, if he won her, it must be by harsh means.
For she said: “Monsieur Doltaire, you have defeated yourself. ‘Let no
man put asunder’ was my response to my husband’s ‘Whom God hath joined,’
when last I met him face to face. Nothing can alter that while he lives,
nor yet when he dies, for I have had such a sorrowful happiness in
him that if I were sure he were dead I would never leave this holy
place--never. But he lives, and I will keep my vow. Holy Church has
parted us, but yet we are not parted. You say that to think of him now
is wrong, reflects upon me. I tell you, monsieur, that if it were a
wrong a thousand times greater I would do it. To me there can be no
shame in following till I die the man who took me honourably for his
wife.”
He made an impatient gesture and smiled ironically.
“Oh, I care not what you say or think,” she went on. “I know not of
things canonical and legal; the way that I was married to him is valid
in his country and for his people. Bad Catholic you call me, alas! But
I am a true wife, who, if she sinned, sinned not knowingly, and deserves
not this tyranny and shame.”
“You are possessed with a sad infatuation,” he replied persuasively.
“You are not the first who has suffered so. It will pass, and leave you
sane--leave you to me. For you are mine; what you felt a moment ago you
will feel again, when this romantic martyrdom of yours has wearied you.”
“Monsieur Doltaire,” she said, with a successful effort at calmness,
though I could see her trembling too, “it is you who are mistaken, and
I will show you how. But first: You have said often that I have unusual
intelligence. You have flattered me in that, I doubt not, but still
here is a chance to prove yourself sincere. I shall pass by every wicked
means that you took first to ruin me, to divert me to a dishonest love
(though I knew not what you meant at the time), and, failing, to make
me your wife. I shall not refer to this base means to reach me in this
sacred place, using the King’s commission for such a purpose.”
“I would use it again and do more, for the same ends,” he rejoined, with
shameless candour.
She waved her hand impatiently. “I pass all that by. You shall listen to
me as I have listened to you, remembering that what I say is honest,
if it has not your grace and eloquence. You say that I will yet come to
you, that I care for you and have cared for you always, and that--that
this other--is a sad infatuation. Monsieur, in part you are right.”
He came another step forward, for he thought he saw a foothold again;
but she drew back to the chair, and said, lifting her hand against him,
“No, no, wait till I have done. I say that you are right in part. I will
not deny that, against my will, you have always influenced me; that, try
as I would, your presence moved me, and I could never put you out of my
mind, out of my life. At first I did not understand it, for I knew how
bad you were. I was sure you did evil because you loved it; that to
gratify yourself you would spare no one: a man without pity--”
“On the contrary,” he interrupted, with a sour sort of smile, “pity is
almost a foible with me.”
“Not real pity,” she answered. “Monsieur, I have lived long enough to
know what pity moves you. It is the moment’s careless whim; a pensive
pleasure, a dramatic tenderness. Wholesome pity would make you hesitate
to harm others. You have no principles--”
“Pardon me, many,” he urged politely, as he eyed her with admiration.
“Ah no, monsieur; habits, not principles. Your life has been one long
irresponsibility. In the very maturity of your powers, you use them
to win to yourself, to your empty heart, a girl who has tried to live
according to the teachings of her soul and conscience. Were there not
women elsewhere to whom it didn’t matter--your abandoned purposes? Why
did you throw your shadow on my path? You are not, never were, worthy of
a good woman’s love.”
He laughed with a sort of bitterness. “Your sinner stands between two
fires--” he said. She looked at him inquiringly, and he added, “the
punishment he deserves and the punishment he does not deserve. But it
is interesting to be thus picked out upon the stone, however harsh the
picture. You said I influenced you--well?”
“Monsieur,” she went on, “there were times when, listening to you, I
needed all my strength to resist. I have felt myself weak and shaking
when you came into the room. There was something in you that appealed to
me, I know not what; but I do know that it was not the best of me, that
it was emotional, some strange power of your personality--ah yes, I can
acknowledge all now. You had great cleverness, gifts that startled and
delighted; but yet I felt always, and that feeling grew and grew,
that there was nothing in you wholly honest, that by artifice you had
frittered away what once may have been good in you. Now all goodness in
you was an accident of sense and caprice, not true morality.”
“What has true morality to do with love of you?” he said.
“You ask me hard questions,” she replied. “This it has to do with it: We
go from morality to higher things, not from higher things to morality.
Pure love is a high thing; yours was not high. To have put my life in
your hands--ah no, no! And so I fought you. There was no question of
yourself and Robert Moray--none. Him I knew to possess fewer gifts,
but I knew him also to be what you could never be. I never measured him
against you. What was his was all of me worth the having, and was given
always; there was no change. What was yours was given only when in your
presence, and then with hatred of myself and you--given to some baleful
fascination in you. For a time, the more I struggled against it the more
it grew, for there was nothing that could influence a woman which you
did not do. Monsieur, if you had had Robert Moray’s character and your
own gifts, I could--monsieur, I could have worshiped you!”
Doltaire was in a kind of dream. He was sitting now in the high-backed
chair, his mouth and chin in his hand, his elbow resting on the
chair-arm. His left hand grasped the other arm, and he leaned forward
with brows bent and his eyes fixed on her intently. It was a figure
singularly absorbed, lost in study of some deep theme. Once his sword
clanged against the chair as it slipped a little from its position, and
he started almost violently, though the dull booming of a cannon in no
wise seemed to break the quietness of the scene. He was dressed, as
in the morning, in plain black, but now the star of Louis shone on
his breast. His face was pale, but his eyes, with their swift-shifting
lights, lived upon Alixe, devoured her.
She paused for an instant.
“Thou shalt not commit--idolatry,” he remarked in a low, cynical tone,
which the repressed feeling in his face and the terrible new earnestness
of his look belied.
She flushed a little, and continued: “Yet all the time I was true to
him, and what I felt concerning you he knew--I told him enough.”
Suddenly there came into Doltaire’s looks and manner an astounding
change. Both hands caught the chair-arm, his lips parted with a sort of
snarl, and his white teeth showed maliciously. It seemed as if, all at
once, the courtier, the flaneur, the man of breeding, had gone, and you
had before you the peasant, in a moment’s palsy from the intensity of
his fury.
“A thousand hells for him!” he burst out in the rough patois of
Poictiers, and got to his feet. “You told him all, you confessed your
fluttering fears and desires to him, while you let me play upon those
ardent strings of feelings, that you might save him! You used me,
Tinoir Doltaire, son of a king, to further your amour with a bourgeois
Englishman! And he laughed in his sleeve, and soothed away those
dangerous influences of the magician. By the God of heaven, Robert Moray
and I have work to do! And you--you, with all the gifts of the perfect
courtesan--”
“Oh, shame! shame!” she said, breaking in.
“But I speak the truth. You berate me, but you used incomparable gifts
to hold me near you, and the same gifts to let me have no more of you
than would keep me. I thought you the most honest, the most heavenly of
women, and now--”
“Alas!” she interrupted, “what else could I have done? To draw the line
between your constant attention and my own necessity! Ah, I was but a
young girl; I had no friend to help me; he was condemned to die; I loved
him; I did not believe in you, not in ever so little. If I had said,
‘You must not speak to me again,’ you would have guessed my secret, and
all my purposes would have been defeated. So I had to go on; nor did I
think that it ever would cause you aught but a shock to your vanity.”
He laughed hatefully. “My faith, but it has, shocked my vanity,” he
answered. “And now take this for thinking on: Up to this point I
have pleaded with you, used persuasion, courted you with a humility
astonishing to myself. Now I will have you in spite of all. I will
break you, and soothe your hurt afterwards. I will, by the face of the
Madonna, I will feed where this Moray would pasture, I will gather this
ripe fruit!”
With a devilish swiftness he caught her about the waist, and kissed her
again and again upon the mouth.
The blood was pounding in my veins, and I would have rushed in then and
there, have ended the long strife, and have dug revenge for this outrage
from his heart, but that I saw Alixe did not move, nor make the least
resistance. This struck me with horror, till, all at once, he let her
go, and I saw her face. It was very white and still, smooth and cold as
marble. She seemed five years older in the minute.
“Have you quite done, monsieur?” she said, with infinite quiet scorn.
“Do you, the son of a king, find joy in kissing lips that answer
nothing, a cheek from which the blood flows in affright and shame? Is it
an achievement to feed as cattle feed? Listen to me, Monsieur Doltaire.
No, do not try to speak till I have done, if your morality--of
manners--is not all dead. Through this cowardly act of yours, the last
vestige of your power over me is gone. I sometimes think that, with you,
in the past, I have remained true and virtuous at the expense of the
best of me; but now all that is over, and there is no temptation--I feel
beyond it: by this hour here, this hour of sore peril, you have freed
me. I was tempted--Heaven knows, a few minutes ago I was tempted, for
everything was with you; but God has been with me, and you and I are no
nearer than the poles.”
“You doubt that I love you?” he said in an altered voice.
“I doubt that any man will so shame the woman he loves,” she answered.
“What is insult to-day may be a pride to-morrow,” was his quick reply.
“I do not repent of it, I never will, for you and I shall go to-night
from here, and you shall be my wife; and one day, when this man is dead,
when you have forgotten your bad dream, you will love me as you can not
love him. I have that in me to make you love me. To you I can be loyal,
never drifting, never wavering. I tell you, I will not let you go. First
my wife you shall be, and after that I will win your love; in spite
of all, mine now, though it is shifted for the moment. Come, come,
Alixe”--he made as if to take her hand--“you and I will learn the
splendid secret--”
She drew back to the shrine of the Virgin.
“Mother of God! Mother of God!” I heard her whisper, and then she raised
her hand against him. “No, no, no,” she said, with sharp anguish, “do
not try to force me to your wishes--do not; for I, at least, will never
live to see it. I have suffered more than I can bear I will end this
shame, I will--”
I had heard enough. I stepped back quickly, closed the panel, and
went softly to the door and into the hall, determined to bring her out
against Doltaire, trusting to Gabord not to oppose me.