Part 26
She looked at him full, and her beautiful eyes were dewy, and her white bosom rose and fell in sighs that, if not genuine, were excellently rendered. He went on:
“And yet you are changed. You were courageous and high-spirited--you have become heroic. That shot at the Foreign Ministry.... A colossal idea! When I heard of it I applauded the stratagem as masterly. ‘_Who of all my friends_,’ I wondered, ‘_can have been so much a friend?_’ Then your little message in Spanish was brought to me in London. I read it and cried out, to the surprise of de Morny and some other men who were sitting with me in the smoking-room of the Carlton Club: ‘Oh, that I had a crown to bestow on her!’ ‘Upon whom?’ they asked, and I answered, before I could check myself, ‘Upon Henriette!’”
She breathed quickly as the instilled poison worked in her. The fiery light of ambition was in her glance. He saw it, and noted that her dress of filmy Alençon lace and the style of her jeweled hair-ornaments were copied, as closely as the prevailing fashion would admit, from a well-known portrait of the Empress Josephine.... It tickled his mordant sense of humor excessively that a lovely woman should endeavor to subjugate him by resembling his aunt deceased. But no vestige of his amusement showed in his sallow face as he went on:
“But magnificent as was the service you rendered, I am glad that you have escaped the pillory of publicity, and the possible vengeance of the Reds. By the way, that young officer who proclaimed before the Military Tribunal, ‘It was I who gave the order to fire! Do with me what you will!’ is here to-night. I told them to send him an invitation. His father was a valued General upon the Staff of my glorious uncle. I desired that he should be presented to me on that account. Pray point him out.”
Then, as the lace-and-tortoiseshell fan wielded by Henriette’s little dimpled hand, loaded with gems which surely were not paste imitations, indicated a young and handsome man in infantry uniform, who from the shelter of a doorway was gazing at her with all his eyes and his heart in them, the drawling nasal voice said:
“He loves you!... It is written in his face.... And I can even wish that he may be happy.... Have I not my share of heroism too?”
“Monseigneur,” said Henriette, with an air of simple candid dignity, “in that young man you see a devoted friend who is ready to give all, and to demand nothing in return.”
She had quite forgotten the kiss in the box at the Opera, and a good deal more besides. But when the Henriettes prefer not to remember an episode, it is as though it had never occurred. She continued in her soft, thrilling tones:
“Nothing save absolute trust: confidence such as he gives me. A few nights past he told me his entire history: I could not refrain from tears. He is young, as your Highness sees; handsome, as you have observed; heir-presumptive to the throne of a Bavarian feudal Principality and owner of a vast fortune. Well, the throne he is too scrupulous to claim, because of a fault in the line of succession; the fortune he has refused to accept because it was gained by what he holds to be an unjust claim. But if I lifted up my finger ... like that, Monseigneur....”
She laughed as she held the slender finger up, and challenge and meaning and promise were in her face, and the witchery of it, no less than that hint of gold piled up and hoarded, made even the Pretender’s dull blood tingle in his veins. He said, with brightening eyes and a tinge of color in his sallow cheeks:
“It might yet be worth your while to lift your finger up, Madame, although I have as yet no crown to share with the woman who shall bear my name.”
It was a name, at that psychological moment, that was not worth sixpence among the British bill-discounters, and at sight of which upon paper the sons of Levi and Manasseh morally rent their garments and threw figurative dust upon their heads. But it had a specious value, dangled as a bait before ambitious women; and here, he knew, was one....
To sway the mass of men you must have Money to give them. True, de Morny, Persigny and Co. could be pacified with orders for millions upon an Imperial Treasury that was non-existent as yet. But the rank-and-file of his filibusters and mercenaries must be paid in hard cash, and women always knew where to go for the shekels. Either they had independent fortunes, or their families were wealthy, or their lovers were rich and generous. Skillfully handled, stimulated by artful hints of marvelous rewards and compensations, Eve’s daughters, his confederates and creditors, had never failed to serve him at his need.
That indomitable partisan and tireless intriguer, his cousin the Princess Mathilde, had poured her whole fortune into his bottomless pockets. Now, when his want was greater than ever, Mathilde was without a sou. Lord Walmerston’s last subsidy of three thousand pounds, a sum of humiliating smallness, grudgingly accorded, was dwindling rapidly. And money for the expenses of the campaign of June must be forthcoming, and at once.
The attempt on Boulogne had failed, because the tin cases of gold coins slung round the necks of the adventurers for distribution had held so little, and been emptied so quickly.... Money must not be lacking for the printing of millions of handbills and posters; for the payment of hundreds of electioneering agents, touts, and canvassers; for the bribery of thousands of electors who could not be coaxed into giving their suffrage--heaps of money would be required now.
Money! If one would be elected as Representative for the Department of the Seine, and the three other Departments that were to prove so many steps to the armchair upon the platform behind the tribune of the Assembly--money, money! If one would by bribery and corruption raise that same armchair to the height of an Imperial throne--money, money, money! Golden mortar, without which the house that Jack builds must topple at the first puff of wind, and resolve itself into a mere heap of jumbled brickbats. Money, money, money, money! And the little Corporal, at the lowest ebb of his fortunes, had scarcely been poorer than his nephew was to-day.
The uncle was not over-scrupulous, less so the nephew. His end of self-glorification justified every shameful means.
For him the harlot emptied her stocking, the wealthy saloon-keeper and ex-procuress poured out her tainted gold. To be mistress-in-chief to an Emperor, to flaunt a title in the face of prim Respectability, that was what Kate Harvey sought, and had, when his sun had risen. But the other women, lured on to bankruptcy and ruin by his dull magnetic glance and skillfully-cast bait of promises, saw hovering before their dazzled eyes--receding ever farther into the sandy desert of Unattainability--the bridal carriage of gold lacquer and mother o’ pearl, surmounted by the Imperial Eagle. The carved and gilded Matrimonial Chair upon the crimson bee-spangled daïs and the Crown of Josephine....
* * * * *
So, with the flutter of a fan in a jeweled hand, a few brief sentences interchanged, the glance of a pair of brilliant eyes and the dull, questioning look of a pair of fishy ones, at the dark, vivid face and lithe, erect figure standing in the doorway, Dunoisse was bought and sold.
If he had only known, when a little later he was presented to the Prince by Colonel de Roux.... But there was no expression in the vacuous eyes that blinked at him, hardly a shade of meaning in the flat toneless voice that said:
“I am happy in the knowledge, Bonsieur, that a young officer, the gifted son of a noble father, who is gapable of acting upon his own resbonsibility in a moment of national emergency, has been exonerated from undeserved plame--has met with gomblete rehabilidation at the hands of his suberiors and chiefs. Did I possess the influence once wielded by my klorious ungle, you would be regombensed as you teserve.”
For after this fashion did he misuse the French language: struggling as gamely as any German Professor to keep the g’s from turning out the c’s, the b’s from usurping the places of the p’s ... beset with consonantal difficulties to the ending of his life....
He bowed to the young man of high prospects and great possessions, and solemnly extended the gloved finger-tips of the small effeminate hand. Could it have been, despite his tactful negation of all influence, the hand that had shielded Dunoisse? Was it the hand that shortly afterwards obtained his promotion? One may suspect as much.
* * * * *
At that moment Dunoisse took the utterance for what it seemed worth. He looked into the puffy, leaden face, and as the lifeless eyes glittered back at him from between their half-closed shutters, he knew a base relief, an ignoble joy, in the conviction that Henriette could never have loved this man.
He was quite right. She did not love the man, neither did she love Dunoisse, or any other trousered human. Being a Henriette, she was the lover of Henriette.
True love, pure passion was not to be born in her then,--but long afterwards,--amidst dreadful throes and strivings unspeakable,--the winged child-god was to see the light. Across a gulf of seeming Death his radiant hands were to be outstretched to her. And they were to render her no flowers of joy, but wormwood and rue and rosemary, drenched with the bitter tears of expiation.
XLI
A few days subsequently to that reception at the Hotel du Rhin, Dunoisse found his friend in tears, and asked the reason. She evaded reply, he pleaded for confidence. Then, little by little, he elicited that Henriette’s sensitive nature was wrung and tortured by the thought of that money borrowed from de Moulny.
Dunoisse asked of her:
“How much was the amount? I have earned the right to know.”
Her heart gave a great throb of triumph, but her eyelids fell in time to veil her exultation. She faltered, in her haste only doubling the sum:
“Sixty thousand francs.” She added, with a dewy glance and a quivering lip: “But do not be distressed for me, dear friend. The money shall be repaid promptly. I have still a few jewels left that were my mother’s. She will not blame me, sweet saint! for parting with her legacy thus.”
He assumed a tone of authority, and forbade her to sacrifice the trinkets. She pleaded, but finally gave in.
“To-morrow,” he told her, “you shall receive from me a hundred thousand francs, in billets of a thousand; the sole condition being that you send de Moulny back his money, and that from the hour that sees me break a vow for you, you swear to borrow from no man save me!”
She hesitated, paled, faltered. He kissed the little hands, and she gave in. Had he been older, and wiser in the ways of the world, knowing that money is power, and that he who holds the key to the cashbox can dictate and be obeyed, he would have been more frugal. As it was, being what he was, he gave liberally with both hands. For there is no prodigal like your poor devil suddenly become rich.
* * * * *
Next day, the dusty check-book that had lain for long years forgotten in the drawer of the lost Marie-Bathilde’s inlaid writing-table, as impotent for good or evil as the son of Eblis in his sealed-up jar, came out and went into Dunoisse’s pocket, and so to the Rue d’Artois. No good angel in the Joinville cravat and the short-waisted, high-collared frock-coat of a somewhat rowdy young Captain of _piou-pious_ met Hector on the steps of Rothschild’s Bank on this occasion.
He went in. The double doors thudded behind him; the polite, well-dressed Head Cashier looked observantly through his brazen lattice at the young man with the hard, brilliant black eyes and the face like a thin ruddy flame. He bowed with profound respect, did the stately functionary, when he heard the name of the owner of a deposit account of one million, one hundred and twenty-five thousand francs, and sent a clerk with a message to the Manager. And a personage even statelier, wearing black silk shorts--you still occasionally saw them in 1848--and hair-powder,--a being with the benignant air of a Bishop and a dentist’s gleaming smile,--issued from a shining cage at the end of a long vista of dazzling counters, and condescendingly assisted at the drawing of the First Check. Its magnitude made him smile more benignantly than ever.... The Head Cashier’s checking thumb quivered with emotion as it rapidly counted over a bulky roll of thousand-franc notes.
But, the happy owner of these crackling potentialities departed, the Manager returned to his golden cage, sat down and indited a little note to Marshal Dunoisse. Which missive, conveyed to the old gentleman’s residence by an official in the Bank livery of sober gray, badged with silver, made its recipient--not chuckle, as one might have supposed, but gnash his costly teeth, and stamp up and down the room and swear.
For the old brigand of Napoleon’s army, the indefatigable schemer for Widinitz dignities, had been proud--after a strange, incomprehensible fashion--of the incorruptible honesty, the high principle, the unstained honor of his son. The Marshal had gloated over the set face of endurance with which the Spartan youth had borne the gnawing of the fox Poverty, beneath his shabby uniform. And that thumping check on Rothschild’s cost him a fit of the gout. When his apothecary had dosed and lotioned the enemy into partial submission, you may suppose the old man hobbling up the wide, shallow, Turkey-carpeted staircase to those rooms of Hector’s to find them vacant--their late occupant removed to a palatial suite of bachelor apartments occupying the first floor of a courtyard-mansion in the Rue du Bac. A million odd of francs will not last forever; forty-five thousand English sovereigns--smooth, slippery, elusive darlings!--do not constitute a Fortunatus’ purse; and yet the sum represents a handsome golden cheese with which to set up housekeeping; though such sharp little gleaming teeth and such tiny white, insatiable hands belonged to the mouse that was from this date to have the run of Hector Dunoisse’s cupboard, that in a marvelously short space of time the golden cheese was to be nibbled quite away.
Henriette had carried out her tacit understanding with Monseigneur. She had lifted up her finger, and a golden plum of a hundred-thousand francs had fallen from the shaken tree. Do you suppose de Moulny had been paid? do you imagine that the Baal of her worship was to be propitiated with all that glittering coin?
Not a bit of it! For this Henriette, like all the others, had huge debts and rapacious creditors, the necessity of being always beautiful cost so much. And de Roux had his horses, gambling-losses, and nymphs of the Opera to maintain and satisfy and keep in good humor. And pious ladies, collecting at Church functions for the benefit of the poor, have been known ere now to slip their jeweled hands into the velvet bag, weighed down with the gold and silver contributions of the faithful, and withdraw the said hands richer than they went in.
The Empire was the religion of Henriette, and she made her collection in its interests tirelessly. If no more than a moiety of what she gathered clinked into the High Priest’s coffers, he did not know that--any more than those who had emptied their purses to fill the bag, so nobody was the worse.
XLII
The reader has not been invited to contemplate, in the person of Dunoisse, the phenomenon of the Young Man of Virtue. Of kindred passions with his fellow-men, of unblemished health, hot blood and vivid imagination, he was, _per_ grace of certain honorable principles instilled into a boy’s mind by a poor old gentlewoman, no less than by an innate delicacy and fastidiousness, a cleanly liver: a man whom Poverty had schooled in self-restraint. Now Poverty was banished, and self-restraint was flung to the winds. And, regrettable as it is to have to state the fact, the lapse of Miss Caroline Smithwick’s late pupil from the narrow path of Honor was attended by no chidings of conscience, visited by no prickings of remorse.
Dunoisse was happy. The world took on a brighter aspect, the air he breathed seemed purer and more fragrant, the sunshine brighter and the moonlight lovelier, because of this his sin.
The eyes of men and women--especially of women!--met his own more kindly; there was no sense of strangeness barring social intercourse.... Life was pleasanter as the months rolled into years.
People found him agreeable now--a charming fellow. He was asked everywhere, petted and flattered, quoted and caressed. Not only because he spent his money lavishly, but because there is a freemasonry between the votaries of illicit pleasure which does not extend to the conscientious and cleanly. Vice is a boon-companion in whose society you may lounge unbuttoned. Virtue and Integrity are the two flagrant offenses the world can never pardon or condone.
An agreeable, even brilliant man: well-bred, well-read, and in one branch at least of his profession, marvelously competent. These were among the encomiums bestowed by his world upon Dunoisse, who learned to dress in the height of the prevailing fashion; to spend heaps of money upon jewelry, cigars, wines, restaurant-dinners and little suppers, and to lose as much at cards in a single night at the Club as would have formerly kept him for a year. Other things indispensable to a young man moving in the inner circle of fast Parisian Society were mastered by him in due course--such as the art of living on terms of daily, familiar, friendly intercourse with a man hated, loathed, and envied above all men. Also, the secret of saying one thing and conveying another; the art of taking formal leave and slipping back again; and of applying to the solution of every sum of existence the Ancient Rule of Three.
* * * * *
For in spite of Adjmeh and one or two other brief amatory episodes, the Book of the Ways of Women had not until now been placed open between the hands of Hector Dunoisse.
When you have read that book from Preface to Finis you will have learned much, and yet not all there is to learn. For every page of the manuscript is a palimpsest. When the writing is washed off with tears of blood, the true characters start out from their concealment, the mystery of mysteries is revealed.
But no man has ever lived long enough to master that Book from cover to cover, though some, wiser or more patient than their fellows, have learned a chapter or two by heart before they died. And those deep scholars know that it is never possible to determine whether a woman be prompted to the gift of her beauty and the sacrifice of her honor by love of herself, or love of him who covets it. And also they are aware that the last chapter of the tome is never to be finished. Some Henriette adds a fresh gloss to it every day.
Dunoisse read in that Book with raptures and exultations, and fierce delight and passionate triumph. He was to read it with agonies and humiliations and galling, unspeakable shame. He was to shed secret scalding tears over the cruel pages. He was to laugh over them with the laughter that is born of despair. But the sweetness of honey came before the tang of gall, the pleasure before the torment. So it was and will be while the world goes spinning round.
Women like Henriette give out fascination as radium dispenses its invisible energies. Every tone of their voices is a call, every glance an appeal or an invitation, every rustle of their garments, every heave of their bosoms, constitutes an appeal to the senses and a stimulant to the passions of men.
She was half-a-dozen women in one; you were master of a whole harem of beauties possessing her; a jewel cut in innumerable facets lay in your hand. She could be fierce and tender, pathetic and cynical, gay and sorrowful, delicate and robust, in the space of half-an-hour. Cigarettes calmed her nerves; moonlight, music, tiny glasses of Benedictine, and minute pills of Turkish opium. Chloral and morphia had not at that date been discovered, else what a votary of the tabloid would have been found in Henriette.
She adored sweets, Chinese bezique and good cookery. Green oysters, bouillabaisse, _poulet sauté Marengo_, and peaches in Kirsch, were among her passions. But she was a pious Catholic, and observed with scrupulous rigor the fasts and feasts of the Church.
She had campaigned with the 999th in Algeria, wore a dagger sometimes in her girdle; carried a tiny ivory-and-silver mounted pistol--fellow to one de Moulny kept locked up--and was expert in its use, as in the handling of the fencing-foil and the womanlier weapon, the needle. What webs of cunning embroidery grew under those little fingers! She wrought at these, sometimes for days together. Then she would pine for exercise and the open air: ride furiously in the Bois, with her plumed hat cocked _à la mousquetaire_, and her silver-gray veil and smoke-colored habit streaming; use the jeweled whip until her horse lathered, drive home the little silver-gilt spur of the dainty polished boot until his flank was specked with blood. Or she would shoot pigeons at Tivoli, handling her gun with ease, and vying with crack masculine sportsmen in her skilled capacity for slaughter. Or she would be driven in her barouche or landau, lying back among her silken cushions, as though too indolent to lift an eyelash, languid and voluptuous as any odalisque. Returning from these excursions, she would lie upon the sofa, silent, pale and mysterious, her vinaigrette at her nostrils, a silken handkerchief bound about her brows. For a crown of diamonds she could not, would not go to theater, or ball, or supper that night! She was fit to die--wanted nothing but to be left in solitude.... But she never failed to go; and towards the end of some gay, boisterous midnight banquet she would move with that long, gliding, supple step of hers into the middle of the room, and dance you the cachucha, with coffee-spoons for castanets, if nobody could produce these.
Who could resist her then? With the proud little head swaying on the rounded throat, and the long eyes darting fiery glances as the lithe body swung, and whirled, and the white arms beckoned and waved. With the silken swish of skirts calling attention to the lovely supple curve that went from hip to knee, and from the swelling calf to the delicate rounded ankle, and bidding you note and worship the elastic arch of the Andalusian instep, under which water could run and never wet the sole....
Nor was she less bewitching, be sure, at those other moments when Dunoisse would be alone with her; when, snatching her Spanish guitar from clumsier hands, she would warble the naughtiest ballads of the cafés chantant, reproducing the cynical improprieties of Fanny Hervieu or Georgette Bis-Bis, with inimitable _chic_ and go. Or she would sing a Spanish love-song, vibrating with Southern passion; or sigh forth some Irish ballad, breathing of the green isle whence Norah Murphy sailed, to conquer with her beauty a guerrilla chief of Spain, and bear him Henriette, and die of sorrow; bequeathing her daughter a passionate, emotional nature and an hereditary religion, and the memory of some kisses and cradle-songs.