Part 28

“Because all this swearing of fidelity to the Republic will end, as I have prophesied, in a coronation at Notre Dame, and a court at the Tuileries. My Emperor crowned himself without all this lying and posturing. He said to France: ‘You want a master. Well, look at me. I am the man for you....’ Josephine squawked: ‘_Oh, M. Bonaparte!_’ ‘Go!’ he told her. ‘Order your dresses!’ just as he said to the Senate, ‘Decree me Emperor!’ While this fellow ... sacred name of a pig!”

He tucked one of the crutch-sticks under his arm, got out his snuff-box, and said as he dipped his ringed, yellow old claws into the Spanish mixture:

“His cant about Socialism and Progress and the dignity of Labor gives me the belly-ache. His groveling to the working man, and slobbering over the common soldier, make me want to kill him. His hand in his trousers-pocket and his eye on a _plebiscite_--there you have him--by the thunder of Heaven! A corporal of infantry said to me: ‘If I showed M. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte my back--he would kneel down and salute it....’ _My_ Napoleon would have said to that man: ‘Lie down in the mud, so that I may walk dryshod upon your body!’ and the man would have obeyed him. But perhaps half an Emperor is better for France than none!”

He fed each wide nostril with the Brobdingnagian pinch he had held suspended while he talked, and said, snorting:

“We shall see if, for all his cartloads of wine sent to their barracks, and his rolls of ten-franc pieces scattered among the rank-and-file, he is served better than the man who scorned to flatter, and more loved than he who did not bribe.... Who said: ‘Follow me, and I will show you capitals to plunder!’ and when they were conquered, said: ‘Help yourselves, one and all, there are fat and lean!’”

He plunged his shaking fingers back into the box, sputtered a little, and said a trifle wildly:

“Though there was a good deal of fasting going to set against the seasons of plenty. During the Retreat from Moscow in October, 1812, I had a handful of unset diamonds in my haversack, and a beryl weighing thirteen pounds, worth ninety-five thousand francs, upon my word of honor! Well, I swopped that crystal with a Bavarian aide-de-camp of the Staff for a pudding made of horse’s blood mixed with bran and flour.... The man who sold me the pudding was Luitpold von Widinitz, a cousin of your mother’s. It was a dirty action I have never pardoned. _Pardieu!_ _Morbleu!_ A comrade, and sell--not share! Prince be damned!... Huckster! Sutler! Tschah! Faugh! Pouah!”

He dropped the crutch he had tucked under his arm, and, recalled from his ancient reminiscence by Hector’s picking up the stick and giving it to him, said, with a formidable bending of the brows:

“You came here, not out of filial duty, but upon some private affair or other. Spit it out, and have done!--I have no time to waste.”

Hector obeyed.

“I have spent my mother’s dowry as you always hoped I should. Chiefly upon gratifications--pleasures--luxuries, that I once pretended to despise. I have acquired the taste for these things. That ought to gratify you. With the money I have wasted, many prejudices and convictions that you found objectionable in past days have been scattered to the winds. If you are still disposed to give, I am very willing to take. I have no more to say!”

Seldom has an appeal for pecuniary aid been preferred less ingratiatingly. The Marshal glared and champed for several moments before he could reply:

“I do not doubt you are willing, sir.... _’Credieu!_ Do you suppose I have not seen this coming?--though the insolence of your approach goes beyond anything that I could have conceived.... I have my informants, understand!... I am aware of your infernal folly, your crazy infatuation.... As for that de Roux woman who leads you by the nose, she is a jade who will land you in the gutter, and a harlot into the bargain. Do you hear?”

The bellowed “Do you hear?” was followed by a shower of curses. When these imprecations had ceased to rattle among the trophies of arms and bronzes, and bring down sprinklings of dust from the gilded cornices, Hector said imperturbably:

“My father may insult my mistress with impunity. I cannot call him out----!”

The Marshal took the opening.

“If you did, and sat down on your tail--sacred name of a blue pig!--with the notion of sticking me in the gizzard, as you did de Moulny Younger when you were boys--allow me to tell you--you would find yourself skewered and trussed in double-quick time!”

Never before in Hector’s hearing had the Marshal made reference to that old sore subject of the false step and the broken foil. He made a flourishing pass with one of the ebony-handled crutches, slipped on the polished marble pavement, and would have fallen but for the strong red hand of Marie Bathilde’s son.

Hector put the old man into the hall porter’s capacious chair, picked up his great curly-brimmed hat--the hat worn by Deans at the present moment--brushed it on his sleeve and handed it back again. He felt a good deal like Sganarelle before Don Juan, the case being reversed, and the homilist the elder libertine.

Meanwhile the gouty old soldier fulminated oaths, and hurled reproaches of a nature to make listening Asmodeus smile. He was scandalized at the life his son was leading. Sacred name of a pipe! A thousand thunders! He shook his clenched hand, as he demanded of Hector if he really supposed there was no Deity Who demanded an account from evil livers, and no Hell where sinners burned?

“For priests are rogues and knaves and liars, but there is such a place, for all that! And you--living in open adultery--for you there will be Hell!”

Said Dunoisse, cool and smiling, standing before his irate parent:

“I am a better theologian than you are. Hell is for the finally impenitent, I have always been instructed; and I am invariably scrupulous to repent before I sin. If it will afford you any particular gratification, I will undertake to perform a special act of contrition,” he looked at his watch, “punctually at the hour of twelve, to-night.”

“You are going to her to-night?” snarled the Marshal, adding: “Tell her from me that she deceives a blackguard for the sake of a booby. For one you are, by the thunder of Heaven! who soil yourself and spoil yourself for such a drab as she!”

“What can you expect,” said Hector, with the same cool offensiveness, “but that your son should follow in your footsteps? I am, as you have said, living with the wife of another man in open adultery. You were bolder, and more daring, who with your master had discrowned kings and humiliated Emperors. You did not hesitate, at the pricking of your desire, to ravish the Spouse of God.”

“Your mother is a Saint!” cried the old Marshal, purple and gnashing with furious indignation. “Do not dare to mention her in the same breath with that--that----”

And the coarse old man plumped out an epithet of the barrack-room, full-flavored, double-barreled, of which Henriette, had she heard it, would have died.

“There is no need to tell me to honor my mother,” said the son. “She is sacred in my eyes. But do not venture to speak to me of Him Whom you have dishonored. I have thought ever since I was a boy that it would be better for me and for you if He did not exist. For the fact of my being is an insult to Him. I am a clod of earth flung in His face by your sacrilegious hand!”

He had often dreamed of speaking such words as these, face to face with his father. Now they poured from him, thick and fast. But pity checked them in mid-torrent, at the sight of the working mouth and nodding head, and trembling hands of unreverend, ignoble age.

The old man capitulated even as the young one relented. He got out, between spasms of wheezing, in quite a conciliatory snarl:

“Well,--well! What if you have spent your mother’s dowry! there is more where that came from. You are my legitimate heir,--and for me, I had rather you were a prodigal than a prig. And blood-horses and Indian shawls, wines, jewelry and cigars and bonnets,--wagers on the Turf and bets on cards, are unavoidable expenses.... I do not wish you to be a niggard. Only it seems to me that with your opportunities you might have invested well. Steel Rails and Zinc, those are the things to put money on. This will be the Age of traveling behind boilers and housing under roofs of metal. Ugh--ugh! Ough, c’r’r--_’aah_!”

He stopped to have a bout of coughing and hawking, and resumed:

“Do not suppose I blame you for having been extravagant. Though it seems to me you have managed badly. This Bonaparte is one who takes with one hand and gives with the other--is bled or bleeds. He has never tapped my veins yet, nor shall for any hint of his. But I suspect he has had money of you. That woman of yours--never mind! I will not name her, the cockatrice!--but I have had it hinted to me that she is an agent in his pay. And he pays women with compliments and promises--he has probably promised to create her a peeress in her own right when he is Emperor.... Her Grace the Duchess of Trundlemop--that is the title she will get.”

Seeing Hector scowl forbiddingly at these unwelcome references, the Marshal made haste to conciliate.

“You have paid through the nose to get de Roux decanted to Algeria. You have been sweetly choused. One must live and learn. See!--I will strike a bargain with you. Do not you be stiffnecked any longer with regard to that question of the von Widinitz Succession, and I will unbutton my pockets.... You shall have money--plenty of money! All that you need to make a splash. I suppose you know that there are millions of thalers waiting to drop into your pockets once the Council of the Germanic Confederation shall confirm your right to the Crown Feudatory.... You will stand upon that right--it is patent and undeniable. And I will have the throne from under the Regent Luitpold in return for that lump of beryl the rogue once robbed from me!”

Absurd, formidable, gross old monster. Was the ravished crystal really the fulcrum of the lever with which the Marshal strove to upset a State? World-changes have been brought about by quarrels springing from causes even more trivial? The price of Luitpold’s blood-pudding had remained for thirty-seven years an undigested morsel in the Marshal’s system. It rankled in him to his dying day.

Though his gouty feet were tottering on the downward slope, his mental faculties were as clear as ever. He watched his son from under his bushy eyebrows as the young man gnawed his lip and drew patterns with his cane on the tesselated pavement of the hall. Hector had uttered sounding reproaches, arrayed himself on the side of Heaven a moment previously. The merry devil who laughs over human contradictions and mortal frailties, must have chuckled as he listened to the terms of the bargain now arranged between the father and the son.

Money. For the sake of the golden mortar without which the House of Hopes that Jack builds must inevitably tumble to ruin, Dunoisse reluctantly consented to become the puppet of an ambition he had scorned. The instrument of a desire for vengeance that had never ceased to rowel the old war-horse’s rheumatic sides.

“So! It is understood, then, after all this fanfaronade of high-mindedness. You will meet my Bavarian agents, Köhler and von Steyregg--and you will be compliant and civil to them, do you understand?”

He lashed himself into one of his sudden rages, the gouty old lion, and roared:

“For my Marie’s son shall not be slighted--kicked aside into a corner while that knave Luitpold holds the Regency of Widinitz from the Bund. I will give him a colic for the one his pudding gave me! And I will have no more accusations and reproaches!--I will not permit you who are my son to taunt me with your own begetting, and throw your mother’s Veil of Profession, in a manner, at my head.”

He rapped his stick upon the pavement. He was strangely moved, and his chin was twitching, though his fierce black eyes were hard and dry.

“You have said that I stole my wife from God, and it is true; though I do not know that it is very decent in you to twit me with it. And do you suppose I have not smarted for the sin I committed? I tell you I have shed tears of blood!”

A harsh sound came from his throat: he swallowed and blinked and went on talking:

“Listen to me, you who are more my son than Marie’s, though you tell me that you hold her memory sacred, and denounce me as the plunderer of Christ? When her youngest child, your sister, died, Marie saw in that the beginning of Heaven’s vengeance: the price that must be paid, the punishment that must be borne. And she prayed and wept--what tears!--and gave me no peace until she had wrung from me my promise that she should go back to her Convent if the Chapter would receive her.... I am an old tactician--I gave the pledge in the full belief that never would they open their doors.... And when she brought me the Prioress’s letter, it was as though a spent cannon-ball had hit me on the headpiece. Then I had an idea. The dowry of three hundred thousand silver thalers. What the Church had once got her claws on I knew she would never let go.... So I blustered and raved and swore to Marie.... ‘_The dowry, or I keep my wife!_’”

His pendulous cheeks and chin shook as he wagged his head at Hector.

“Do you suppose I wanted the accursed dross? No! by the thunder of Heaven! I was greedy of something else. The woman--my wife--who lay in my arms and sighed, and kissed me, and wept....”

His voice cracked. He said:

“Do you think she did not know the truth? You shall never make me believe she did not. Even while I bragged and blustered about a lawsuit--even when my notary wrote a letter, I had fears and quakings of the heart. When no answer came from the Mother Prioress, I rubbed my hands and congratulated myself. Thrice-accursed fool who thought to outwit God----”

He rummaged for his snuffbox, tapped it wrong way up, opened it in this position, spilt all its store of snuff, swore, and pitched it across the hall.

“He is the King of strategists--the Marshal of Napoleon’s Grand Army, compared with Him, was a blind beetle. The Prioress’s answer came: ‘We concede you this money,’ said the letter, ‘as the price of a soul.’ Enclosed was a draft on the Bank of Bavaria. That night Marie left me. Without even a kiss of farewell, she who had been my wife for nine years, and borne me a boy and a girl.... Imagine if the money did not weigh on me like the dead horse I lay under all through the night of Austerlitz, with the bone of my broken leg sticking through my boot! Conceive if it did not smell to me of beeswax candles, brown serge habits, incense and pauper’s pallets! Pshaw! Peugh! Piff!”

He blew his old nose and swore a little, and then went on:

“I did not send back the three hundred thousand thalers. True! they were so much dirt in my eyes.... But cash is cash, and to part with it would not have brought my Marie back again. I let the stuff lie and breed at my bank. I would have raked the kennels for crusts rather than touch it. Not that I have ever needed money. The old brigand of the Grand Army has known how to keep what he had gained. Though I have lived up to my income....drank, gambled, amused myself with women! What matter the women? Did Marie suppose I should spend my time in stringing daisy-chains when she had gone away?”

He laughed in his formidable, ogreish way, and said, still laughing:

“She knew me better, depend upon it. Though, mind you, I had been true to Marie. But a wife who is a nun is a dead wife. I was a widower--the boy motherless.... And He up above us had another score to make off me!... When the boy--Death of my soul!”

He struck one of his crutches on the marble pavement with such force that the stick broke.

“A day came when you looked at me with my own eyes shining out of Marie’s face, and said: ‘I have heard the story. The terms upon which you let my mother resume the Veil were vile!’ Impudent young cockerel! Was it to be supposed that I should try to justify myself in the eyes of a stripling? A man to whom the Emperor used to say: ‘Well, Dunoisse, let us have your opinion on such and such a plan?’ So I laughed at you for a nincompoop--boasted of the pail of milk I had drawn from the Black Cow, saying to myself: ‘All right! He is Marie’s son, that boy! When he is a man grown, I will give him that accursed money, smelling of candles and incense, and he will give it back to the nuns.’ And when time was ripe I transferred the whole lump to your name at Rothschild’s. You made virtuous scruples about taking it, but you never restored it whence it came!... Now you have showed your breed--you have poured it into the lap of a light woman. And you come to me and own that, and ask for more to pitch after it!” He rapped out a huge oath. “Am I not justified in thinking you more my son than Marie’s? Have I not the right to say I am disappointed in you?”

His voice was a mere croak. He went on, with his fierce, bloodshot eyes fixed on vacancy:

“Do you suppose I did not love your mother--have never longed for her--have ever forgotten her? I use her chocolate-set every morning.... Her Indian shawl is the coverlet of my bed. When I have the gout in my eyes I tie a scarf she used to wear over them, like a bandage. There is virtue in things that have been used by a Saint.”

He added:

“For a Saint she is ... and though, as you say I stole my joy in her from Heaven--do you suppose, for one moment, a woman like that is going to let me be damned? She will wear her knees to the bone first; and so I tell you!... Was it not for the sake of my soul she went back to her cell at the Carmel? At the Day of Judgment one voice will be heard that pleads for old Achille Dunoisse.”

One scanty teardrop hung on his inflamed and reddened underlid.

“But Saint or none, she loved me, like twenty women, by Heaven! And if she says she repents of that, again, by Heaven!--she lies!”

The solitary tear fell on his discolored hand. He shook it off, angrily. Somewhere in the middle of that gross bundle of contradictions, absurdities, appetites, vices, resentments, hatreds, calling itself Achille Dunoisse--there beat and bled a suffering human heart. And the distance that separated the father and the son was bridged by a moment of sympathy and understanding. And a pang of envy pierced it through....

* * * * *

For the supreme jewel that Fate can bestow upon mortal, is the love that will even yield up the Beloved for Love’s sake. To this gross old man, his sire, had been given what would never fall to the younger Dunoisse.

By the radiance of this great passion of Marie Bathilde’s, her son saw himself in like case with some penniless student in a Paris garret, crouching, upon a night of Arctic cold, over a fire of paper and straw. When the small fierce flame of Henriette’s slight sensuous fancy should have sunk down into creeping ashes under the starved hands spread above it, what would be left to live for? His heart was sick within him as he went away.

He returned to Madame de Roux with the news that his application to the Marshal had succeeded. She threw her arms about him, in a transport of joy.

“Ah then, so you really love me?” the poor dupe asked, putting the most fatal of all questions. For it sets the interrogated he or she wondering, “Do I?” and hastens the inevitable end.

“How can you doubt it?” she queried, hiding an almost imperceptible yawn behind her tiny fingers. “_Did I not send away Eugène for you?_”

She passed by gentle degrees to a question possessing much more interest. The amount to be placed upon the books at Rothschild’s to the credit of the Marshal’s son.

XLV

So thickly did the deposit of golden plums lie at the bottom of the pie-dish--so handsomely did the Marshal keep his given word, that at the suggestion of Henriette, Hector did some more shopping at the vast comprehensive mart of the Élysée. General de Roux, puffing a cheroot and sweltering in his cane chair at the Military Club of Algiers, was to read in the official Gazette of the Army--a special copy, thoughtfully forwarded by an anonymous friend--that his late Assistant-Adjutant had received yet further promotion. That the Cross of the Legion of Honor had been conferred upon him by the Prince-President, with his appointment as extra aide-de-camp of the Staff of the Élysée.

Thenceforwards at Reviews, Inspections, and other public functions, you saw the keen dark face shaded by the plumed cocked hat of a Lieutenant-Colonel--the slender active figure set off by a brilliant uniform, as mounted on Djelma, or some animal even more beautiful and spirited, the lover of Henriette brought up the rear of the showy cavalcade of Marshals, Generals, foreign envoys, aides-de-camp and Staff officers, galloping at the flying heels of the spirited English charger ridden by Monseigneur.

What could the heart of man want more? At State dinners at the Élysée, shooting-parties at Fontainebleau, hunts at Compiègne, balls at the Tuileries, Colonel Hector Dunoisse cut a gallant figure. His intrigue with Madame de Roux became a recognized _liaison_. Monseigneur was so kind--the world was so charitable. Nobody dreamed of censuring, or even looking askew.

In the galaxy of beautiful women that glittered about that rising planet of Monseigneur’s, Henriette shone prominently. Many men’s eyes were fixed in longing on that throbbing, radiant star. The man on whom its rays were shed knew himself envied. Secure in possession of what others keenly desired, he believed himself happy at last.

Happiest when, with that little hand of Henriette’s upon his arm, in some crush of gold-laced uniforms, diplomatic dress-coats, silks, satins, flowers, feathers and diamonds, he would encounter a tall, bulky, officially-attired figure topped with a heavy, ugly, distinguished face; and meet the cold, repellent, cynical stare of de Moulny’s hard blue eyes.

The eyes would meet Redskin’s, the head would move slightly, responding to Dunoisse’s own chilly, perfunctory salutation. Once or twice they had been near neighbors at the dinner-table.... What of that? In civilized society one eats with one’s enemy. Only the nomad of the desert and the savage of the jungle refuse to break bread with those they hold in suspicion or hate. And it is easy to forget a great injustice done you, by a friend you have ceased to care for; and to forgive a wrong wrought by a man off whom you have doubly scored.

For de Moulny had been paid his money, had not Henriette said so? Besides, she had never exchanged a word with him alone since that night of the fusillade.

She assured Dunoisse of this; and that their intercourse when they met was limited to the briefest utterances compatible with common civility. Then, no matter for de Moulny, now Representative for the Department of Moulny upon Upper Drame, and Secretary-Chancellor at the Ministry of the Interior. Success was his, though the woman he had desired had given her favors to another. Without the bliss that he had vainly coveted, let de Moulny go upon his way....

Dunoisse believed that Henriette loved him, as he her, with passion and fidelity. He asked nothing better of Fate than that he should be permitted to pass through life with those fairy fingers twined about his own. But sometimes when her beautiful hair was shed upon his breast and her lustrous eyes looked into his, and her lovely lips gave back his kisses, the thought of the strange face that might be lurking behind those beautiful, beloved, familiar features would strike him cold with dread.