Part 21

“You will see!... It is as I say!... This arrest is a mere piece of official humbug. No doubt it was better for your own sake that you should not be seen in the streets for a day or so, one can conceive that!--these ultra-Reds have good memories and long knives, sacred name of a pig!”

The old man trumpeted in his yellow silk handkerchief, hobbling about the room in tremendous excitement, swinging the ample skirts and heavy tassels of his Indian silk dressing-gown, twirling his gold-headed Malacca cane to the detriment of the inlaid furniture and the cabinets loaded with the chinaware and porcelain that had belonged to the lost Marie-Bathilde....

“You gave the word to fire--why trouble to deny it? Upon my part, I defend the act!--I applaud it!--I admire! It was the idea of an Imperialist,--a move of strategical genius--fraught at a moment like this with profound political significance. _Sapristi!_--we shall have an Emperor crowned and reigning at the Tuileries, and you, with the Cross and a Staff appointment--you will learn what it means to have served a Bonaparte. Ha! hah, ha!”

“Sir,” said his son, who had been looking out of the window during this tirade, and who now turned a sharp set face upon the father’s gross, inflamed, triumphant visage: “you mistake.... I am not capable of committing murder for the furtherance of political ends or private ambitions. For this act that commands your admiration I am not responsible. I declare my innocence before Heaven! and shall to my latest breath, before the tribunals of men.”

“Ta, ta, ta! Blague! rhodomontade!--pure bosh and nonsense!” The Marshal took an immense double pinch of snuff. “Be as innocent as you please before Heaven, but if you value the esteem of men who _are_ men--’_credieu!_--and not priests and milksops, you will do well to appear what you call guilty. At this moment such a chance is yours as falls to not one man in a hundred thousand--as fell to me but once in my life. Make the most of it! You will if you are not absolutely a fool!”

And Monsieur the Marshal hobbled to the door, but came back to say:

“You appear not to have heard that His Hereditary Highness of Widinitz is dead. There can be no obligation upon you to refrain from appearing at ordinary social functions, but I presume you will accord to your grandfather’s memory the customary tokens of respect? A band of crape upon the sleeve--a knot of crape upon the sword-hilt will not compromise your dignity, or endanger your independence, I presume?”

“I presume not, sir!” said Hector with an unmoved face.

And the Marshal departed, spilling enough snuff upon the carpet to have made an old woman happy for a day.... Later, an orderly from Headquarters in the Rue de l’Assyrie, brought from the younger Dunoisse’s Chief--a purple-haired, fiery-faced personage, with whom the reader has already rubbed shoulders,--the intimation that, pending official inquiry into a certain regrettable event, not more broadly particularized in words, the Assistant-Adjutant of the 999th of the Line would be expected to return to his duties forthwith.

And within an hour of the receipt of this notification Dunoisse was the recipient of a little, lilac-tinted note, regretting in graceful terms that the writer had most unhappily been absent from home when M. Dunoisse had called; inviting him to a reception, to be held upon the following evening at the Rue de Sèvres, Number Sixteen....

That delicately-hued, subtly-perfumed little billet, penned in thick, brilliant violet ink in a small, clear, elegantly-characteristic handwriting, signed “Henriette de Roux.”

Ah! surely there was something about it that made Hector, in the very act of tossing it into the fire, pause and inhale its perfume yet again, and slip it between the pages of a blue-covered Manual of Cavalry Tactics that lay in a litter of gloves, studs, collars, and razors, small change and handkerchiefs, cigars and toothpicks upon the Empire dressing-table whose mirror had framed the wild, dark, brilliant beauty of the Princess Marie-Bathilde.... The features it gave back now, clear, salient, striking, vigorous in outline as those representing the young Bacchus upon a coin of old Etruria, were very like the mother’s. And their beauty, evoking the careless, admiring comment of a coquette, had stained the pavement before the Hotel of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with blood that was to darken it for many a day to come.

* * * * *

The invitation, coming from such a source, could not be declined--must be regarded as an order. Dunoisse wrote a line of acceptance, dispatched it by his soldier-valet,--and went out.

A pretentious mourning-hatchment, displaying the splashy arms of Marshal Dunoisse, cheek-by-jowl with the princely blazon of Von Widinitz, upon a black-and-white lozenge over the hall-door, arrested his eye as he descended the paternal doorsteps; a replica of this egregious advertisement gave him a cold shudder as he passed through the gates of the courtyard on foot, for Djelma, though nearly recovered of her hurts, was still in the hands of the veterinary, and the poor young officer, son of the wealthy owner of well-filled stables, must walk, or ride his servant’s horse.

The streets of Paris still ran thick with the human flood that ebbed and flowed, surged and swirled, roaring as it went with a voice like the voice of the sea.... Strange shapes, dislodged by Red Revolution from the bottom-sludge, floated on the surface of the muddy torrent; their terrible faces bit themselves into the memory as they drifted by, as aquafortis bites into the copper-plate. Bands of military students and Guardes Mobiles patroled the upheaved streets--National Guards fraternized with the people--the little white tents still studded the camping-grounds of the troops on the great public squares; the limes and acacias of the boulevards, ruthlessly cut down to stumps; barked by the hungry troop-horses tethered to them, showed naked in the wintry sunshine; while squadrons of mounted chasseurs and detachments of Municipal Guards patroled the thoroughfares, and Commissaries of Police bore down on stationary groups and coagulated masses of the vast crowd:

“Circulate! In the Name of the Republic!”--with little more success than when they had adjured it in the name of fallen Majesty and impotent Law, to roll upon its way.

* * * * *

Dunoisse went to the Barracks in the Rue de l’Assyrie, and later to the Club of the Line, prepared for a chilly, even hostile reception. He met with elaborate cordiality from his equals, condescension as elaborate on the part of his superiors.

The Dissolution of the Chamber of Deputies, the abolition of the Chamber of Peers, was in every mouth; the political convictions and personal qualifications of the members constituting the New Provisional Administration were discussed with heat and eagerness: the sporting odds given and taken upon and against the chances of the exiled Claimant to the Imperial Throne being permitted to return to France and canvass for election. Some said: “It will never be permitted,” and others: “He has already been communicated with,” and others even more positive announced: “He is now upon his way!”...

But not a single reference was made to the affair of the fusillade at the Foreign Ministry, though a chance hint, dropped amidst the Babel, gave Dunoisse to understand that the Conservative Republican and Democratic newspapers had not been so merciful.

Lives there the man who could have refrained, under the circumstances, from hunting through the files of the past week? It was a leading article in the _Avénement_ that first caught the young man’s eye, and what a whip of scorpions the anonymous writer wielded! What terrible parallels were drawn, what crushing epithets hurled at the unlucky head of the victim. More than ever, as the fiery sentences burned their way from his eyes to his brain, Hector Dunoisse knew himself the well-scourged whipping-top of Destiny, the shuttlecock of adverse chances, the pincushion of Fate.... And as though in mockery, yet another burden of shame must be piled upon the overladen shoulders: a brief, contemptuous paragraph in the _Ordre_ caught the young man’s eye, referring in jesting terms to that pretentious mourning-hatchment mounted over the door of the paternal mansion ... touching lightly on the vexed question of Succession, hinting that the Catholics of the Bavarian Principality of Widinitz were being stirred up by the agents of “a certain wealthy, unscrupulous impostor and intriguer” to rebel against the nomination, by the Council of the Germanic Federal Convention, of the Lutheran Archduke Luitpold of Widinitz, nephew of the departed Prince, as Regent.... And heavy clouds of anger and resentment gathered upon Dunoisse’s forehead as he read.

They darkened upon him still when the night closed in, and he went home to his lonely rooms. Nor were they lightened by the hour that saw him, in the uniform of ceremony, and with that mourning-band upon the sleeve of the dark blue full-dress uniform frock, that the Princess Marie-Bathilde’s son could not deny to the memory of her father, pitching and tossing in a hired cabriolet over the upheaved pavements of the Paris streets. On his way to the Rue de Sèvres, where in a stately suite of apartments sufficiently near the Rue de l’Assyrie--once forming part of the ancient Cistercian convent of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, the de Roux were established with some degree of splendor; visited by certain of the lesser luminaries of the great world, and receiving the cream of military society.

You saw Dunoisse dismiss his deplorable conveyance at the tall grilled gates of the Abbaye. In the exterior building, upon the left-hand side of the courtyard as one entered, were situated, upon the ground-floor, the apartments of the de Roux.... In a suite of poorly-furnished, stately, paneled chambers upon the floor above, Madame Récamier was slowly dying, haloed still by the unblemished virtue that had won the respect of the Emperor Napoleon--beautiful yet even in blindness and decay--clinging to life by the last strand of a friendship too pure and tender to bear the name of love.

The green Venetian shutters of that row of first-floor windows were closed, all save one; the fold of a green silk curtain stirred in the chill February breeze, a solitary lamp upon a table made a cocoon-shaped patch of light against the somber darkness within. A worn exquisite profile, pearly-pale as the new moon’s, with a black fillet bound over the eyes, showed against the background of shadow--a man’s hand, ivory-white, and so emaciated that the heavy seal-rings on the third finger hung there like hoops upon a grace-stick, drew the curtain and closed the shutters, as the firm elastic step of Youth and Hope sounded on the flagstones, crossed the threshold below....

Who would spy upon one of these last evenings with Chateaubriand? In July she was to follow him to the tomb.

XXXI

Dunoisse, to the ring of his dress-spurs upon the pavement, passed in by the glazed double-doors. A somnolent porter, rousing out of his chair, admitted the guest by yet another glass door to a handsome vestibule upon the ground floor, an orderly-sergeant of the 999th saluted his officer, received his cloak, shako, and sword, delivered him to a footman in light green livery with silver cords and shoulder-knots, whose roseate calves preceded him across an ante-room of stately proportions towards a high doorway, draped with curtains of deep crimson velvet tasseled with gold. Brilliant light streamed from between the curtains, warm fragrance was borne to the nostrils of the visitor with the hum of voices; the white shoulders of ladies, their ringleted heads wreathed, in the charming fashion of the day, with natural flowers, moved across the shining vista, companioned by the figures of men in uniform, or lay-wear of the latest mode and most fashionable shades of color; or displaying the severe black frock-coat and tricolored rosette of the New Provisional Government of France.

A man thus distinguished was speaking, as the footman raised the crimson curtain and signed to Dunoisse to pass beneath. A cessation in the stream of general chatter had conveyed that the speaker was worth hearing. And in the dignity of the massively-proportioned figure, crowned by a leonine head of long waved auburn hair, in the deep melodious tones of the voice that rose and fell, swelled or sank at the will of the accomplished orator, there was something that fascinated the imagination and stirred the pulse.

“No, Madame, I do not despise Rank or Wealth,” he said to a seated lady of graceful shape, whose face, like his own, was turned from the doorway and invisible to the entering guest. “But though I do not despise, I fear them. They should be handled as ancient chemists handled subtle poisons, wearing glass masks and gloves of steel.”

No one answered. The speaker continued:

“That Kings have been noble and heroic--that Emperors have reigned who were virtuous and honest men, can be proved from the pages of History. Their reigns are threads of gold in a fabric of inky black. The reverence in which we hold their names proves them to have been prodigies. They, by some miracle of God or Nature--were not as evil as they might have been.... For, even as the handle of the racket used by the Eastern tyrant had been impregnated, by the skill of the wise physician, with healing agents; the juice of medicinal herbs that, entering by the pores, cleansed, purified, regenerated the leper’s corrupted flesh: so in the folds of the ermine mantle there lurks deadly contagion: so, in the grasp of the jeweled truncheon of State there is a corroding poison that eats to the heart and brain.”

The mellow-voiced orator ceased, and the silence into which his closing sentences had fallen was broken by the announcement of Dunoisse’s name. The recent speaker glanced round as it was uttered. Only to one man could that pale, close-shaven, classic mask belong; only one brain could house behind the marble rampart of that splendid forehead, or speak in the flashing glances of those gold-bronze eagle eyes. It was Victor Hugo; and the thrill a young man knows in the recognition of a hero, or the discovery of a demigod, went through Dunoisse, as amidst the rustling of silks and satins, the fluttering of fans and the agitation of many heads, curled, or ringleted, or braided, that turned to stare, he moved over the pale Aubusson carpet towards the seated figure of the lady, indicated by the footman’s whisper as the mistress of the house.

How soon the demigod was to be forgotten in the revelation of the goddess....

As the writer of the lilac-colored note rose up, with supple indolent grace, amidst a whispering purplish-gray sea of crisp delicate silken flounces,--held out a small white hand flashing with diamonds and rubies--murmured something vaguely musical about being charmed;--as Dunoisse, having bent over the extended hand with the required degree of devotion, raised his head from the ceremonious salute, a pair of eyes that were, upon that particular night, hazel-green as brook-water in shadow, looked deep into his own.... And the heart beating behind the young soldier’s Algerian medals knocked heavily once, twice, thrice!--as the knock behind the curtain of the Théâtre Français when the curtain is about to rise upon the First Act, and the strong young throat encircled by the stiff black-satin-covered leather stock, and the collar with the golden Staff thunderbolt, knew a choking sensation, and the blood hummed loudly in his ears.

A flame, subtle, electric, delicate and keen, had passed into him with the look of those eyes, with the touch of the little velvet hand that was fated to draw, what wild melody, what frenzied discords from the throbbing hearts of men....

And the gates of his heart opened wide. And with a burst of triumphant music Henriette passed in,--and they were shut and locked and barred behind her.

XXXII

Ah! Henriette, what shall I say of you? How with this halting pen make you live and be for others as you exist and are for me?

There are men and women born upon this earth, who, walking lightly, yet print deep, ineffaceable footprints upon the age in which they live. The world is better for them; their breath has purified the atmosphere they existed in.... Ignorant of their predestination as they are, every word and act of theirs bears the seal of the Divine Intelligence. They were sent to do the work of the Most High.

And there are men and women who appear and vanish like shooting stars or falling meteors. Their path is traced in ruin and devastation, as the path of the tornado, as the path of the locust is. And having accomplished their appointed work, they pass on like the destroying wind, like the winged devourer: leaving prone trees and ruined homes, wrecked ships, stripped fields--Death where there was Life.

* * * * *

Think of Henriette as one of the fatal forces, a velvet-voiced, black-haired woman with a goddess’s shape and a skin of cream, such little hands and feet as might have graced an Andalusian lady,--with mobile features--the mouth especially being capable of every variety of expression--and with great eyes of changing color, sometimes agate-brown, sometimes peridot-green, sometimes dusky gray. Shaping her image thus in words, I have conveyed to you nothing. No sorceress is unveiled, no wonder shown.

In the old, old days when the Sons of Light walked upon earth with the children of men, some seraph fell for the sake of a woman like this. From the seed of that union sprang all the Henriettes.... You may know them by the tattered rags of glory that trail behind them; by the pale flickering aureole, no brighter than a will-o’-the wisp or glow-worm’s light, that hovers over the white brow....

About that brow of Henriette the willful hair rose in a wave-crest of delicate spraying blackness; curled over, shadowing the pearly forehead and blue-veined temples and the little shell-like ears, as though the waves were about to break; then rolled back and twined into a labyrinthine knot of silken coilings from which two massive curls escaped, to wander at their will. It was a face of lights and shadows; in their continual play you forgot to criticise its features. But they were eloquent, from the wide jetty arches of the eyebrows, to the silken-lashed languid eyelids, purplish-tawny as the petals of fading violets over the liquid, lustrous, changeful eyes. Eyes that mocked and laughed at you even as they wooed you; and mourned and wept for you even as they tempted and lured.

“Ah! do you indeed love me?” they seemed to say. “Is it so? Then most unhappy--poor, poor friend!--are you! Because I am of those women who are born to cause much misery. For we sting to desire without intention, and provoke to pursuit without the will. And ‘No’ is a word we have never learned to say.”

XXXIII

It seemed to Dunoisse that he had always known her, always waited for her to reveal herself just in this manner, as she rose up amidst the crisping rustle of innumerable little flounces, outstretched the white arm partly veiled by the scarf of black flowered lace--shed the brilliance of her look upon him, and smiled like a naughty angel or a sweet mischievous child, saying in a soft voice that was strange to his ears and yet divinely familiar:

“So we meet at last?”

He found no better reply than:

“You were not at home, Madame, when I paid my visit of ceremony.”

“I detest visits of ceremony,” she said, and her tone robbed the words of harshness.

“Do you then turn all unknown visitors from your doors?” Dunoisse queried. Her smile almost dazzled him as she returned:

“No, Monsieur ... I turn them into friends.” Adding, as he stood confounded at the vast possibilities her words suggested: “And I have wished to know you.... My husband has told me much.... But in these times of disturbance, how is it possible to be social? One can only remain quiescent, and look on while History is made.”

“I have been quiescent enough, Heaven knows!--for nearly a week past,” said Dunoisse, “without even the consolation of looking on.”

Her shadowy glance was full of kindness.

“I know!... Poor boy!” She added quickly: “Do not be offended at my calling you a boy. I am twenty-five--nearly!... Old enough to be your elder sister, Monsieur.... Have you sisters? If so, I should like to call them friends.”

“I had one sister,” said Dunoisse, his eyes upon a night-black curl that lay upon an ivory shoulder. “She died very young--a mere infant.”

“Poor little angel!”

Henriette de Roux rather objected to children--thought them anything but little angels. But her white bosom heaved and fell, and a glittering tear trembled an instant on a sable eyelash. And so infectious is sentiment, that Hector, who dedicated a regret to the memory of the departed cherub on an average once a year, echoed her sigh.

* * * * *

The silver-coated roach, contemplating the dangling bait of the angler, is quite aware that for innumerable generations the members of his family have succumbed to the attraction of the pill of paste that conceals the barbed hook. Yet he deliberately sucks it in, and is borne swiftly upwards, leaving in the round-eyed family circle a gap that is soon refilled.

That tear of Henriette’s was the bait. When her sigh was echoed, it was to the feminine fisher of men significant as the slow, deliberate curtsey of the float is to the angler for the slimy children of the river. Variable as a fay in a rainbow, she smiled dazzlingly upon the young man; and said, touching him lightly upon the arm with her Spanish fan and leaning indolently back in the fauteuil that was almost completely hidden beneath the rippling wavelets of her purplish-gray flounces:

“Look round. Tell me what flower is most in evidence to-night?”

Thus bidden, Dunoisse turned his glance questingly about. A moment gave the answer. The corsage of every lady present, no matter of what costly hothouse blooms her bouquet and wreath might be composed, had its bunch of violets; the coat of every second man displayed the Napoleonic emblem. His eyes went back to meet an intent look from Henriette. She said:

“You do not wear that flower, Monsieur!”

He returned her look with the answer:

“My military oath was of allegiance to a King. And though the King be discrowned and the Republic claims my services, I know nothing of an Empire--at least, not yet.”

The irony stung. She bit her scarlet lip, and said, with a bright glance that triumphed and challenged:

“Unless the winds and tides have conspired against us, the Emperor will be in Paris to-night.”

“Indeed!” The reports bandied, the bets made at the Club, came back upon Dunoisse’s memory. He said:

“Then Prince Louis-Napoleon has determined to risk the step?”

She answered with energy:

“He is of a race that think little of risking. The son of Marshal Dunoisse should know that.... Ah! how it must grieve your father to know you indifferent to the great traditions of that noble family!”

Hector answered her with a darkening forehead:

“My father congratulated me upon good service rendered to the cause of Imperialism--only yesterday.” He added as Madame de Roux opened her beautiful eyes inquiringly: “He is of the comprehensive majority who hold me guilty of that deed of bloodshed at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He----”

Dunoisse broke off. She had become so pale that he knew a shock of terror. Deep shadows filled the caves whence stared a pair of haunted eyes. There were hollows in her cheeks--lines about her mouth that he had never dreamed of.... A broken whisper came from the stiff white lips that said:

“Do not seem to notice.... It is the ... heat!...”