Chapter 14

“Oh! child,” said the Marquise, lowering her voice, but not so much but that her husband could hear her, “you are false to all the principles of honor, modesty, and right which I have tried to cultivate in your heart. If until this fatal hour you life has only been one lie, there is nothing to regret in your loss. It can hardly be the moral perfection of this stranger that attracts you to him? Can it be the kind of power that commits crime? I have too good an opinion of you to suppose that--”

“Oh, suppose everything, madame,” Helene said coldly.

But though her force of character sustained this ordeal, her flashing eyes could scarcely hold the tears that filled them. The stranger, watching her, guessed the mother’s language from the girl’s tears, and turned his eagle glance upon the Marquise. An irresistible power constrained her to look at this terrible seducer; but as her eyes met his bright, glittering gaze, she felt a shiver run through her frame, such a shock as we feel at the sight of a reptile or the contact of a Leyden jar.

“Dear!” she cried, turning to her husband, “this is the Fiend himself. He can divine everything!”

The General rose to his feet and went to the bell.

“He means ruin for you,” Helene said to the murderer.

The stranger smiled, took one forward stride, grasped the General’s arm, and compelled him to endure a steady gaze which benumbed the soldier’s brain and left him powerless.

“I will repay you now for your hospitality,” he said, “and then we shall be quits. I will spare you the shame by giving myself up. After all, what should I do now with my life?”

“You could repent,” answered Helene, and her glance conveyed such hope as only glows in a young girl’s eyes.

“_I shall never repent_,” said the murderer in a sonorous voice, as he raised his head proudly.

“His hands are stained with blood,” the father said.

“I will wipe it away,” she answered.

“But do you so much as know whether he cares for you?” said her father, not daring now to look at the stranger.

The murderer came up a little nearer. Some light within seemed to glow through Helene’s beauty, grave and maidenly though it was, coloring and bringing into relief, as it were, the least details, the most delicate lines in her face. The stranger, with that terrible face still blazing in his eyes, gave one tender glance to her enchanting loveliness, then he spoke, his tones revealing how deeply he had been moved.

“And if I refuse to allow this sacrifice of yourself, and so discharge my debt of two hours of existence to your father; is not this love, love for yourself alone?”

“Then do you too reject me?” Helene’s cry rang painfully through the hearts of all who heard her. “Farewell, then, to you all; I will die.”

“What does this mean?” asked the father and mother.

Helene gave her mother an eloquent glance and lowered her eyes.

Since the first attempt made by the General and his wife to contest by word or action the intruder’s strange presumption to the right of staying in their midst, from their first experience of the power of those glittering eyes, a mysterious torpor had crept over them, and their benumbed faculties struggled in vain with the preternatural influence. The air seemed to have suddenly grown so heavy, that they could scarcely breathe; yet, while they could not find the reason of this feeling of oppression, a voice within told them that this magnetic presence was the real cause of their helplessness. In this moral agony, it flashed across the General that he must make every effort to overcome this influence on his daughter’s reeling brain; he caught her by the waist and drew her into the embrasure of a window, as far as possible from the murderer.

“Darling,” he murmured, “if some wild love has been suddenly born in your heart, I cannot believe that you have not the strength of soul to quell the mad impulse; your innocent life, your pure and dutiful soul, has given me too many proofs of your character. There must be something behind all this. Well, this heart of mine is full of indulgence, you can tell everything to me; even if it breaks, dear child, I can be silent about my grief, and keep your confession a secret. What is it? Are you jealous of our love for your brothers or your little sister? Is it some love trouble? Are you unhappy here at home? Tell me about it, tell me the reasons that urge you to leave your home, to rob it of its greatest charm, to leave your mother and brothers and your little sister?”

“I am in love with no one, father, and jealous of no one, not even of your friend the diplomatist, M. de Vandenesse.”

The Marquise turned pale; her daughter saw this, and stopped short.

“Sooner or later I must live under some man’s protection, must I not?”

“That is true.”

“Do we ever know,” she went on, “the human being to whom we link our destinies? Now, I believe in this man.”

“Oh, child,” said the General, raising his voice, “you have no idea of all the misery that lies in store for you.”

“I am thinking of _his_.”

“What a life!” groaned the father.

“A woman’s life,” the girl murmured.

“You have a great knowledge of life!” exclaimed the Marquise, finding speech at last.

“Madame, my answers are shaped by the questions; but if you desire it, I will speak more clearly.”

“Speak out, my child... I am a mother.”

Mother and daughter looked each other in the face, and the Marquise said no more. At last she said:

“Helene, if you have any reproaches to make, I would rather bear them than see you go away with a man from whom the whole world shrinks in horror.”

“Then you see yourself, madame, that but for me he would be quite alone.”

“That will do, madame,” the General cried; “we have but one daughter left to us now,” and he looked at Moïna, who slept on. “As for you,” he added, turning to Helene, “I will put you in a convent.”

“So be it, father,” she said, in calm despair, “I shall die there. You are answerable to God alone for my life and for _his_ soul.”

A deep sullen silence fell after these words. The on-lookers during this strange scene, so utterly at variance with all the sentiments of ordinary life, shunned each other’s eyes.

Suddenly the Marquis happened to glance at his pistols. He caught up one of them, cocked the weapon, and pointed it at the intruder. At the click of firearms the other turned his piercing gaze full upon the General; the soldier’s arm slackened indescribably and fell heavily to his side. The pistol dropped to the floor.

“Girl, you are free,” said he, exhausted by this ghastly struggle. “Kiss your mother, if she will let you kiss her. For my own part, I wish never to see nor to hear of you again.”

“Helene,” the mother began, “only think of the wretched life before you.”

A sort of rattling sound came from the intruder’s deep chest, all eyes were turned to him. Disdain was plainly visible in his face.

The General rose to his feet. “My hospitality has cost me dear,” he cried. “Before you came you had taken an old man’s life; now you are dealing a deadly blow at a whole family. Whatever happens, there must be unhappiness in this house.”

“And if your daughter is happy?” asked the other, gazing steadily at the General.

The father made a superhuman effort for self-control. “If she is happy with you,” he said, “she is not worth regretting.”

Helene knelt timidly before her father.

“Father, I love and revere you,” she said, “whether you lavish all the treasures of your kindness upon me, or make me feel to the full the rigor of disgrace.... But I entreat that your last words of farewell shall not be words of anger.”

The General could not trust himself to look at her. The stranger came nearer; there was something half-diabolical, half-divine in the smile that he gave Helene.

“Angel of pity, you that do not shrink in horror from a murderer, come, since you persist in your resolution of intrusting your life to me.”

“Inconceivable!” cried her father.

The Marquise then looked strangely at her daughter, opened her arms, and Helene fled to her in tears.

“Farewell,” she said, “farewell, mother!” The stranger trembled as Helene, undaunted, made sign to him that she was ready. She kissed her father’s hand; and, as if performing a duty, gave a hasty kiss to Moïna and little Abel, then she vanished with the murderer.

“Which way are they going?” exclaimed the General, listening to the footsteps of the two fugitives.--“Madame,” he turned to his wife, “I think I must be dreaming; there is some mystery behind all this, I do not understand it; you must know what it means.”

The Marquise shivered.

“For some time past your daughter has grown extraordinarily romantic and strangely high-flown in her ideas. In spite of the pains I have taken to combat these tendencies in her character--”

“This will not do----” began the General, but fancying that he heard footsteps in the garden, he broke off to fling open the window.

“Helene!” he shouted.

His voice was lost in the darkness like a vain prophecy. The utterance of that name, to which there should never be answer any more, acted like a counterspell; it broke the charm and set him free from the evil enchantment which lay upon him. It was as if some spirit passed over his face. He now saw clearly what had taken place, and cursed his incomprehensible weakness. A shiver of heat rushed from his heart to his head and feet; he became himself once more, terrible, thirsting for revenge. He raised a dreadful cry.

“Help!” he thundered, “help!”

He rushed to the bell-pull, pulled till the bells rang with a strange clamor of din, pulled till the cord gave way. The whole house was roused with a start. Still shouting, he flung open the windows that looked upon the street, called for the police, caught up his pistols, and fired them off to hurry the mounted patrols, the newly-aroused servants, and the neighbors. The dogs barked at the sound of their master’s voice; the horses neighed and stamped in their stalls. The quiet night was suddenly filled with hideous uproar. The General on the staircase, in pursuit of his daughter, saw the scared faces of the servants flocking from all parts of the house.

“My daughter!” he shouted. “Helene has been carried off. Search the garden. Keep a lookout on the road! Open the gates for the gendarmerie!--Murder! Help!”

With the strength of fury he snapped the chain and let loose the great house-dog.

“Helene!” he cried, “Helene!”

The dog sprang out like a lion, barking furiously, and dashed into the garden, leaving the General far behind. A troop of horses came along the road at a gallop, and he flew to open the gates himself.

“Corporal!” he shouted, “cut off the retreat of M. de Mauny’s murderer. They have gone through my garden. Quick! Put a cordon of men to watch the ways by the Butte de Picardie.--I will beat up the grounds, parks, and houses.--The rest of you keep a lookout along the road,” he ordered the servants, “form a chain between the barrier and Versailles. Forward, every man of you!”

He caught up the rifle which his man had brought out, and dashed into the garden.

“Find them!” he called to the dog.

An ominous baying came in answer from the distance, and he plunged in the direction from which the growl seemed to come.

It was seven o’clock in the morning; all the search made by gendarmes, servants, and neighbors had been fruitless, and the dog had not come back. The General entered the salon, empty now for him though the other three children were there; he was worn out with fatigue, and looked old already with that night’s work.

“You have been very cold to your daughter,” he said, turning his eyes on his wife.--“And now this is all that is left to us of her,” he added, indicating the embroidery frame, and the flower just begun. “Only just now she was there, and now she is lost... lost!”

Tears followed; he hid his face in his hands, and for a few minutes he said no more; he could not bear the sight of the room, which so short a time ago had made a setting to a picture of the sweetest family happiness. The winter dawn was struggling with the dying lamplight; the tapers burned down to their paper-wreaths and flared out; everything was all in keeping with the father’s despair.

“This must be destroyed,” he said after a pause, pointing to the tambour-frame. “I shall never bear to see anything again that reminds us of _her_!”

The terrible Christmas night when the Marquis and his wife lost their oldest daughter, powerless to oppose the mysterious influence exercised by the man who involuntarily, as it were, stole Helene from them, was like a warning sent by Fate. The Marquis was ruined by the failure of his stock-broker; he borrowed money on his wife’s property, and lost it in the endeavor to retrieve his fortunes. Driven to desperate expedients, he left France. Six years went by. His family seldom had news of him; but a few days before Spain recognized the independence of the American Republics, he wrote that he was coming home.

So, one fine morning, it happened that several French merchants were on board a Spanish brig that lay a few leagues out from Bordeaux, impatient to reach their native land again, with wealth acquired by long years of toil and perilous adventures in Venezuela and Mexico.

One of the passengers, a man who looked aged by trouble rather than by years, was leaning against the bulwark netting, apparently quite unaffected by the sight to be seen from the upper deck. The bright day, the sense that the voyage was safely over, had brought all the passengers above to greet their land. The larger number of them insisted that they could see, far off in the distance, the houses and lighthouses on the coast of Gascony and the Tower of Cardouan, melting into the fantastic erections of white cloud along the horizon. But for the silver fringe that played about their bows, and the long furrow swiftly effaced in their wake, they might have been perfectly still in mid-ocean, so calm was the sea. The sky was magically clear, the dark blue of the vault above paled by imperceptible gradations, until it blended with the bluish water, a gleaming line that sparkled like stars marking the dividing line of sea. The sunlight caught myriads of facets over the wide surface of the ocean, in such a sort that the vast plains of salt water looked perhaps more full of light than the fields of sky.

The brig had set all her canvas. The snowy sails, swelled by the strangely soft wind, the labyrinth of cordage, and the yellow flags flying at the masthead, all stood out sharp and uncompromisingly clear against the vivid background of space, sky, and sea; there was nothing to alter the color but the shadow cast by the great cloudlike sails.

A glorious day, a fair wind, and the fatherland in sight, a sea like a mill-pond, the melancholy sound of the ripples, a fair, solitary vessel, gliding across the surface of the water like a woman stealing out to a tryst--it was a picture full of harmony. That mere speck full of movement was a starting-point whence the soul of man could descry the immutable vast of space. Solitude and bustling life, silence and sound, were all brought together in strange abrupt contrast; you could not tell where life, or sound, or silence, and nothingness lay, and no human voice broke the divine spell.

The Spanish captain, the crew, and the French passengers sat or stood, in a mood of devout ecstasy, in which many memories blended. There was idleness in the air. The beaming faces told of complete forgetfulness of past hardships, the men were rocked on the fair vessel as in a golden dream. Yet, from time to time the elderly passenger, leaning over the bulwark nettings, looked with something like uneasiness at the horizon. Distrust of the ways of Fate could be read in his whole face; he seemed to fear that he should not reach the coast of France in time. This was the Marquis. Fortune had not been deaf to his despairing cry and struggles. After five years of endeavor and painful toil, he was a wealthy man once more. In his impatience to reach his home again and to bring the good news to his family, he had followed the example set by some French merchants in Havana, and embarked with them on a Spanish vessel with a cargo for Bordeaux. And now, grown tired of evil forebodings, his fancy was tracing out for him the most delicious pictures of past happiness. In that far-off brown line of land he seemed to see his wife and children. He sat in his place by the fireside; they were crowding about him; he felt their caresses. Moïna had grown to be a young girl; she was beautiful, and tall, and striking. The fancied picture had grown almost real, when the tears filled his eyes, and, to hide his emotion, he turned his face towards the sea-line, opposite the hazy streak that meant land.

“There she is again.... She is following us!” he said.

“What?” cried the Spanish captain.

“There is a vessel,” muttered the General.

“I saw her yesterday,” answered Captain Gomez. He looked at his interlocutor as if to ask what he thought; then he added in the General’s ear, “She has been chasing us all along.”

“Then why she has not come up with us, I do not know,” said the General, “for she is a faster sailor than your damned _Saint-Ferdinand_.”

“She will have damaged herself, sprung a leak--”

“She is gaining on us!” the General broke in.

“She is a Columbian privateer,” the captain said in his ear, “and we are still six leagues from land, and the wind is dropping.”

“She is not _going_ ahead, she is flying, as if she knew that in two hours’ time her prey would escape her. What audacity!”

“Audacity!” cried the captain. “Oh! she is not called the _Othello_ for nothing. Not so long back she sank a Spanish frigate that carried thirty guns! This is the one thing I was afraid of, for I had a notion that she was cruising about somewhere off the Antilles.--Aha!” he added after a pause, as he watched the sails of his own vessel, “the wind is rising; we are making way. Get through we must, for ‘the Parisian’ will show us no mercy.”

“She is making way too!” returned the General.

The _Othello_ was scarce three leagues away by this time; and although the conversation between the Marquis and Captain Gomez had taken place apart, passengers and crew, attracted by the sudden appearance of a sail, came to that side of the vessel. With scarcely an exception, however, they took the privateer for a merchantman, and watched her course with interest, till all at once a sailor shouted with some energy of language:

“By Saint-James, it is all up with us! Yonder is the Parisian captain!”

At that terrible name dismay, and a panic impossible to describe, spread through the brig. The Spanish captain’s orders put energy into the crew for a while; and in his resolute determination to make land at all costs, he set all the studding sails, and crowded on every stitch of canvas on board. But all this was not the work of a moment; and naturally the men did not work together with that wonderful unanimity so fascinating to watch on board a man-of-war. The _Othello_ meanwhile, thanks to the trimming of her sails, flew over the water like a swallow; but she was making, to all appearance, so little headway, that the unlucky Frenchmen began to entertain sweet delusive hopes. At last, after unheard-of efforts, the _Saint-Ferdinand_ sprang forward, Gomez himself directing the shifting of the sheets with voice and gesture, when all at once the man at the tiller, steering at random (purposely, no doubt), swung the vessel round. The wind striking athwart the beam, the sails shivered so unexpectedly that the brig heeled to one side, the booms were carried away, and the vessel was completely out of hand. The captain’s face grew whiter than his sails with unutterable rage. He sprang upon the man at the tiller, drove his dagger at him in such blind fury, that he missed him, and hurled the weapon overboard. Gomez took the helm himself, and strove to right the gallant vessel. Tears of despair rose to his eyes, for it is harder to lose the result of our carefully-laid plans through treachery than to face imminent death. But the more the captain swore, the less the men worked, and it was he himself who fired the alarm-gun, hoping to be heard on shore. The privateer, now gaining hopelessly upon them, replied with a cannon-shot, which struck the water ten fathoms away from the _Saint-Ferdinand_.

“Thunder of heaven!” cried the General, “that was a close shave! They must have guns made on purpose.”

“Oh! when that one yonder speaks, look you, you have to hold your tongue,” said a sailor. “The Parisian would not be afraid to meet an English man-of-war.”

“It is all over with us,” the captain cried in desperation; he had pointed his telescope landwards, and saw not a sign from the shore. “We are further from the coast than I thought.”

“Why do you despair?” asked the General. “All your passengers are Frenchmen; they have chartered your vessel. The privateer is a Parisian, you say? Well and good, run up the white flag, and--”

“And he would run us down,” retorted the captain. “He can be anything he likes when he has a mind to seize on a rich booty!”

“Oh! if he is a pirate--”

“Pirate!” said the ferocious looking sailor. “Oh! he always has the law on his side, or he knows how to be on the same side as the law.”

“Very well,” said the General, raising his eyes, “let us make up our minds to it,” and his remaining fortitude was still sufficient to keep back the tears.

The words were hardly out of his mouth before a second cannon-shot, better aimed, came crashing through the hull of the _Saint-Ferdinand_.

“Heave to!” cried the captain gloomily.

The sailor who had commended the Parisian’s law-abiding proclivities showed himself a clever hand at working a ship after this desperate order was given. The crew waited for half an hour in an agony of suspense and the deepest dismay. The _Saint-Ferdinand_ had four millions of piastres on board, the whole fortunes of the five passengers, and the General’s eleven hundred thousand francs. At length the _Othello_ lay not ten gunshots away, so that those on the _Saint-Ferdinand_ could look into the muzzles of her loaded guns. The vessel seemed to be borne along by a breeze sent by the Devil himself, but the eyes of an expert would have discovered the secret of her speed at once. You had but to look for a moment at the rake of her stern, her long, narrow keel, her tall masts, to see the cut of her sails, the wonderful lightness of her rigging, and the ease and perfect seamanship with which her crew trimmed her sails to the wind. Everything about her gave the impression of the security of power in this delicately curved inanimate creature, swift and intelligent as a greyhound or some bird of prey. The privateer crew stood silent, ready in case of resistance to shatter the wretched merchantman, which, luckily for her, remained motionless, like a schoolboy caught in flagrant delict by a master.

“We have guns on board!” cried the General, clutching the Spanish captain’s hand. But the courage in Gomez’s eyes was the courage of despair.

“Have we men?” he said.

The Marquis looked round at the crew of the _Saint-Ferdinand_, and a cold chill ran through him. There stood the four merchants, pale and quaking for fear, while the crew gathered about some of their own number who appeared to be arranging to go over in a body to the enemy. They watched the _Othello_ with greed and curiosity in their faces. The captain, the Marquis, and the mate exchanged glances; they were the only three who had a thought for any but themselves.

“Ah! Captain Gomez, when I left my home and country, my heart was half dead with the bitterness of parting, and now must I bid it good-bye once more when I am bringing back happiness and ease for my children?”

The General turned his head away towards the sea, with tears of rage in his eyes--and saw the steersman swimming out to the privateer.