Part 38

She paced the painted floor of the meagerly-furnished, bare inn guest-chamber, dragging the woolen rugs awry with her trailing silken flounces, spurning the spotted fawn skins with the toes of her little satin shoes. Dunoisse murmured, as he sank down wearily into the uncomfortable arms of a three-cornered elbow-chair of green-painted pine, upholstered in Berlin-wool cross-stitch, and turned his eyes from her:

“Dearest, my mother has put her veto on the affair--it is for her to decide--and I am bound to respect her wishes.” He added, in a breaking voice: “Would to Heaven they had been known to me before!”

“Your mother!--your mother!” she raved. “Is no one to be considered--no one obeyed but she? You fool!--your wife might meekly submit to be thrust aside because of your duty to your mother.... But not your mistress!--not a woman like me!”

She was beside herself--a beautiful fury--her lovely face distorted--her mouth wrung crooked with the bitter flood of invective, insult, upbraiding, that came pouring from it. He rose, and said, in a tone that was hostile and menacing, while the cold light in his black eyes chilled and daunted her:

“When you speak of my mother, Madame, you will do so with consideration, and respect, and reverence. Let that for the future be understood.”

She laughed harshly, setting his teeth on edge with a sensation that was sheer loathing of her. She said, shrugging her shoulders, driven on to the verge of self-degradation by her resentment, and her contempt, and her weariness; willing to break her spell over the man forever, if only she might wound him sufficiently deep:

“With all my heart, Monsieur! But at the same time, accord to me a measure of the consideration, respect, and so forth you lavish so abundantly upon Madame there! I may lay claim to it, I fancy.... After all, we are in the same galley; though, let me point out, _I_ was not chained to the bench by an irrevocable vow.” She added, as Dunoisse stared at her speechlessly: “Good Heavens! it is inconceivable that nobody has ever told you, when people are so malicious! Have you never heard that I was a novice in the Convent of the Vergen de la Soledad at Cartagena when de Roux saw me, and fell in love with me, and begged me to run away with him?...”

A strange sound came from the man’s throat. She pursued, cynically smiling in his horror-stricken eyes, playing her little hand as though she held a fan:

“Listen!... My father was killed when I was an infant. My mother died when I was five years old. The Sisters of the Soledad brought me up with the idea that I might perhaps become a religious.... I dreamed of the vocation, and prayed much....” Her pearl-white teeth gleamed between the mocking curves of scarlet. “Then--my dreams changed,” she said, “and my prayers became shorter. Except the Chaplain who confessed the nuns and the pupils, and the Bishop who visited us for Confirmations, no man ever set foot inside the Convent walls. Yet we elder girls constantly talked and thought of lovers, from little Dolores, who was twelve and had a hump, to great Carlota, who was seventeen, and ah! so beautiful.... And you may imagine whether or no Henriette had her visions too!... Yet I was quite content to be a nun.... I had had the White Veil of Reception from the Bishop on my sixteenth birthday ... my behavior gave great edification to the Sisters, and his Lordship, and the clergy ... everybody said, _‘That young girl will one day become a Saint!’_ And one night, a week later, I got over the garden-wall because a band was playing on the Calle Major--I walked down the middle of the great, crowded street, in my little old cast-off black alpaca Convent frock and blue ribbon.... I had left the habit and the White Veil folded on the pillow of my bed.... A French officer accosted me and asked my name. It was Eugéne--I thought him splendid!--perhaps he was--compared with the Bishop, and the Chaplain, and the gardener.... And--I never went back to the Convent of the Soledad. De Roux married me. Another man might have been less honorable.... Perhaps it would have been wiser to have waited, you may think?” She laughed jeeringly. “Some odd chance might have brought you to Cartagena. Some lucky wind might have blown you over the Convent garden-wall!”

The tale was a trumped-up one at least as regards the novice’s habit and the White Veil--yet her gift of deception lent it such reality that shame and horror struggled in the heart of the man who heard. To kill her--and himself--was an almost ungovernable impulse, but he drove the nails of his clenched hands deep into their palms, and moved stiffly to the door, and Henriette shrank away.... If he had seized her by the throat,--struck her and cursed her,--marred her beauty with merciless bruises,--stabbed her, even,--he would have won her back again, though only for a time.... But in conquering the mad desire to wreak such brutal vengeance on the woman, he lost her irretrievably.... And so went from her out into the clear morning sunshine, and fled blindly, hunted by all the devils she had roused, into the dew-wet forest, and flung himself face downwards amidst the tall golden bracken at the knees of a graybeard oak that spread its giant boughs and browning foliage as though to afford sanctuary to such hunted, desperate creatures,--and wept, with groans and chokings--what bitter, scalding, shameful tears....

LXI

But he dried them, and controlled himself, and returned to “The Heron” inn, and from thence traveled with his fair companion back to Paris. Some sort of a truce was patched up before the ending of the first day’s journey--a week, and Monsieur the Colonel and Madame were upon almost their old terms of familiar, easy intimacy. Returned to Paris, the tenor of the old life was resumed as though the rupture had never happened. But the exquisite glamour of their passion had vanished; the rose-colored mist no longer veiled the crude realities of life. A heavy shadow brooded between the pair, and, gradually assuming substance, thrust them, with every day that dawned, a little farther apart. There would be days when their cooling passion would blaze up again as fiercely as a bonfire of straw.... There would be weeks when their intercourse would be limited to the baldest commonplaces that may be exchanged between a politely-indifferent husband and a civilly-contemptuous wife. The easy-going _camaraderie_ that had existed between Henriette and de Roux would never reign between Henriette and her lover. For to attain that level of complete mutual understanding, all rights must be abrogated--the last claim resigned--the last shred of self-respect cast upon the winds. Dunoisse knew that very well.

How much of self-respect remained to him as it was, he did not venture to question. Nor did he own to himself that his life was lived in fear. But sometimes the burnt-in memory of that November night of his return from London would ache and throb, and at other times he would hear the voice of his mistress saying:

“You will have yourself to thank for whatever happens now!”

Do you wonder that a man bedeviled and obsessed after this fashion should grow moody and suspicious? That he should hear the snaky rattle of warning from under every clump of flowers or tuft of grass? That he should see in every man upon whom his lovely friend bestowed her smiles a possible rival? And does it surprise you that, after a succession of violent scenes of jealousy, Henriette should have seized an early opportunity of confiding her disillusions and anxieties to the sympathetic ear at the Élysée?

When it came to stretching a point to oblige a pretty woman, who was useful to him, that woman could depend upon the goodness of Monseigneur.

“Jealousy, dear friend,” said he, with his most oracular manner, “is a vice as incurable as crib-biting in a horse, once contracted. It was Othello who ought to have been smothered!... Desdemona would certainly have consoled herself with the attentions of M. Cassio....”

“Ah! but suppose Cassio in his turn had been bitten by the green-eyed monster,” suggested Henriette, to whom Dunoisse had read the tragedy of the lady and the Moor.

“To smother Cassio,” said Monseigneur, with his somewhat ponderous humor, “would have been what literary critics term an ‘anticlimax.’ I should suggest service with the Foreign Legion for the gentleman in question,--if you are quite certain that as soon as he has gone you will not wish him back again?”

As Henriette crumpled her beautiful eyebrows in doubt, bit her red lips, and hesitated, he added:

“Besides--would it be wise to banish from your side a young, attractive man who has brilliant expectations?... This question of the Widinitz Succession--are we to hear no more of that?”

She faltered:

“I fear not, Monseigneur!... You cannot imagine the strength of his prejudices.... He is quite convinced that to put himself at the head of the Catholic electors of the Principality would be an insult to Heaven, because his mother happened to be a professed nun. Ah! how I weary of his eternal arguments.”

“Indeed!” said Monseigneur, with a curious inflection. His dull eyes had a faded twinkle in them as they rested on the lovely speaker’s face. She crimsoned to the wreath of roses nestling in their leaves within her bonnet,--pulled down the flowered lace veil with a petulant jerk of the little hand. Monseigneur hastened to soothe the sensibilities he had ruffled.

“Take my advice,” he said, “who have so often taken yours, and found it excellent. Do not hurry on a crisis. Wait!--and let me think out some effective, easy method of relieving the tension of affairs.”

His tone was mellifluous as that of a dentist who thinks that the toothache may be eased without extraction--the doubtful molar saved. She thanked him in silvery tones, made her deep reverence, and glided from the apartment where Monseigneur had received her; the private cabinet upon the ground-floor of the Élysée, where the Prince-President saw his intimate associates, interviewed his official spies and agents, and carried out experiments in musketry with the inventor, Major Minié.

You are to understand that he had lunched early that winter day, and was taking his cigar and coffee and Benedictine at a little table by the fireside. He smoked and sipped, with his dainty little feet upon a velvet footstool, and his big head lolling back against the padded velvet back of his easy-chair.

The question of how to dispose of Henriette’s inconvenient lover occupied this hour of leisure. The young man had had a good deal of money, a considerable amount of which had found its way to his own bottomless pockets. He was the only son of a wealthy father, and might be well worth plucking again by-and-by. Even the abandoned claim of the Widinitz Succession might prove a profitable investment--a veritable gold-mine, to one who possessed the art of making stubborn natures malleable. A German Serene Highness who should be devoted to one’s interests would be a useful tool, it occurred to Monseigneur....

He had, to do him justice, an exquisite discrimination in the selection of human instruments suitable for his hand; a knack of getting the best from them by stimulating their jealousies; he displayed an extraordinary cleverness in getting rid of them when blunted.... He never kept them long enough to be worn out.

It was his pride that at first sight he invariably detected in a man the qualities that would best serve him. In this handsome ex-Adjutant of the 999th, for whom Madame de Roux had had such a violent fancy--who had paid through the nose to obtain the transference of her husband to a post in Northern Africa, and who had forked out again for his own appointment as _aide-de-camp_ upon the Staff of the Presidency--Monseigneur had never seen anything out of the way.

True, the man’s career at the Training Institute for Staff Officers had been brilliant. But a reputation for brilliancy is easily gained. As a Chasseur d’Afrique he had served with distinction in the wars of Algeria--when transferred to the Line he had excellently discharged his regimental duties. Of hundreds of other men the same might be said....

The subject of his reflections was on duty that morning.... Monseigneur stretched out the neat, small hand that held his cigar, and touched a little golden chiming-bell. Dunoisse appeared in obedience to the summons, crossed the deep-piled carpet with long, light, noiseless footsteps, and placed, with a respectful hand, clad in the regulation white kid glove, a pile of letters on the little coffee-table, beside the elbow of Monseigneur.

Monseigneur, generally skeptical as regarded things unseen, firmly believed in his guiding genius. That invisible personage, he was subsequently convinced, dictated the question he suddenly put to Dunoisse; an interrogation that broached his own long-cherished purpose, and gave a clue to the deep and dark and secret workings of his strange, cold, snaky mind.

“Monsieur--supposing that France had determined to espouse the interests of the Sultan of Turkey, to the point of becoming his ally in war--waged with Russia in alliance with a certain insular maritime Power, upon the debatable ground of Eastern Europe--how should she proceed so as to insure to her Army the maximum of advantage with the minimum of loss?... Do not answer hastily I beg of you.... Reflect before you reply.”

Dunoisse thought for a minute, and gave the answer, clearly and promptly, and very much to the point. It shortened Monseigneur’s breathing inconveniently, and brought a shiny gray dampness out upon the dough-colored surface of him, as though a snail had crawled there and left its track of slime. But it was not his habit to betray emotion. Those years spent in captivity had taught him self-control.

His small, flat eyes, usually so devoid of luster, assumed the shallow glitter of aluminium. He said, composedly, urbanely, stroking his heavy brown mustache:

“The most plausible theories sometimes evaporate when one tries to set them down on paper. You would oblige me very much, my dear Colonel, by putting yours in black upon white....”

Dunoisse bowed, and said he thought it would be possible to oblige Monseigneur. His theory, set forth in half-a-dozen pages of small, neat manuscript, illustrated by plans, and maps with dotted lines traced in divers-colored inks upon them, was laid before Monseigneur on the very next day.... Monseigneur studied these papers with close attention; rolled them up, retied, and locked them away in a secret hiding-place. And said, regarding his own features in a Venetian mirror that hung above the _secrétaire_, a precious article in pearl and ebony, that had held the toys and _bibelots_ of Marie Antoinette, and the love-letters of Josephine:

“My friend, you have been saved by your lucky star from committing an irreparable error. This young man is a genius of the first water. Even to gratify the wish of a still singularly-charming woman, you would be mad, my friend, to part with Colonel Dunoisse!”

Thenceforwards, Dunoisse’s active duties as assistant _aide-de-camp_ gave place to the more sedentary occupations of Military Private Secretary, with a step in rank, a salary raised in accordance with his elevation in the estimation of his employer. It being presently discovered that he was master of Arabic, Turkish, Albanian Greek, German, Russian, and English, and possessed besides of a fair command of the Slavonic dialects of Roumania and Bulgaria, the office of Private Military Interpreter was created, and conferred on him by Monseigneur.

There was a little study, looking on a corner of the leafy gardens of the Palace, which communicated by a hidden door with Monseigneur’s private cabinet. Dunoisse was installed in this snug den, into which none of the associates of Monseigneur ever thought of penetrating. And with his notes, and maps, and works of reference about him, was given a free hand, and bidden to carry out his plan.

And now at last the studies prosecuted in spare hours at the Training Institute for Staff Officers; those years of dogged, diligent acquirement of knowledge, began to bear fruit.... At last the man had found the severe, arduous employment that gave full play to his brilliant faculties. His face grew strange to his associates and friends, as his task absorbed him more....

Masses of papers, methodically filed and docketed, accumulated about Dunoisse. A vast correspondence in many European and several Oriental languages was carried on by him. He became the center of a vast web of intelligence, the active brain of a formidable working system that centralized in the little room adjoining the private cabinet with the bullet-chipped cornices; crossed the Alps and leaped the Carpathians; threw a spider-line from Odessa to Bucharest--linked Sevastopol with Batum--and traveled back again _viâ_ the great roaring world-fair of Constantinople to the cabinet at the Élysée.

Men of many nationalities, tongues, and colors, and convictions, came and went, by day and night; gave their information, received instructions, verbal or otherwise, took their money, and departed. But they never came or went in couples, nor was the business of one known to the next. A Roumanian, one Michaëlis Giusko--formerly an assistant-lecturer and teacher of the Slavish languages at the Training Institute for Staff Officers, and a Barbary Jew, Israel Ben Hamon, with whom Dunoisse had studied Arabic in North Africa, became presently his assistants, bound to secrecy under oath.

Giusko had been found starving in a Montmartre garret; the Barbary Jew Dunoisse had accidentally encountered upon one of his periodical visits to Paris, to treat with the paper-merchants for the sale of rags from Tunis and the Levant. Both men were bound to their junior by ties of gratitude; the Israelite because his wife Miriam, now dead, had been saved by Dunoisse, when a young officer of Chasseurs d’Afrique, from robbery and outrage at the hands of some drunken Zouaves at Blidah; the Slav because all hope had left him, and he had been upon the point of suicide, when his old pupil had appeared before his gaunt and desperate eyes. But though both were trustworthy, neither of these men was to be trusted completely, according to the secret instructions of Monseigneur.

Nor had Dunoisse, who day and night sat spinning at the colossal web of Monseigneur’s private purpose, and hatching out the egg of that potentate’s secret plan, any definite knowledge of the breed of basilisk that would presently chip the shell.

LXII

Balls, dinners, concerts, receptions, and hunting-parties at the Tuileries and at Versailles, St. Cloud, and Compiègne, succeeded in dazzling rotation. Round the little study where Dunoisse wrought and planned and labored, driven on by a very demon of work, the active, busy, vari-colored life of the palace hummed and buzzed and swirled. Strains of music, gay or voluptuous, and sounds of fast and furious revelry came, midnight after midnight, to the ears of the solitary toiler--sometimes sounds more sinister than these.

The screams of a woman.... “Help! Mercy, for the love of Heaven!...” dying away into incoherent prayers and moans. The noise of a scuffle--the scraping of feet--the hoarse panting and muffled ejaculations of men engaged in desperate struggle--the thud of blows falling on something soft. Desperate outcries of “Murder! Treachery!... Monseigneur promised!... Monseigneur swore that I should be set free!” The revolver shots in the leafy palace garden, followed by a heavy silence not even broken by a groan. The man who heard never interrupted his labors for a moment. If the Prince-President chose to make the Élysée a place of execution, why,--stranger things had been done at the time of the _coup d’État_. And the vices of potentates are privileged.... That woman’s voice crying for help was not the voice of Henriette.

She was as beautiful as ever. At the most splendid State functions, in the vicinity of her most brilliant rivals, her charms shone with undiminished fire. Men paid her court as ardently as ever, and her accredited lover was still a man keenly-envied. But in despite of this, and although his pressing duties at the Élysée debarred him from his place at her side in Society, Dunoisse had ceased to be jealous. So powerful an anodyne is absorbing mental labor, the shrill rattle of warning that used to sound from under every tuft of flowers or clump of grasses brushed by her draperies in passing, had fallen silent. Her paramour no longer dreaded a possible successor in every young and handsome man on whom she shed her smiles.

The green-eyed demon even left off taunting Dunoisse with de Moulny, still Representative of the Right for Moulny upon Upper Drame, and Secretary-Chancellor at the Ministry of the Interior; where the Count de Morny had been succeeded by M. de Persigny--less affected than his predecessor with scruples, you will remember, regarding the contents of a certain stately row of steel deed boxes that were crammed to bursting with palaces, cities, forests, villages, and farmsteads, and emblazoned with the arms of the House of Bourbon.

Rivers of plundered gold, derived from the sale of these great family estates, flowed away between Dunoisse’s fingers. None of it stuck to them, much to the surprise of Monseigneur. For Dunoisse wanted money; and the chief reason at length become known to his patron, who had a peculiar knack of getting at the secrets of men.

To repay the three hundred thousand thalers that had been the dowry of Sister Térèse de Saint François had been, ever since the hour of their meeting, the abiding steadfast purpose of her son.... He saw her sometimes in dreams, when he went home in the gray dawn from the palace, and threw himself down, half dressed, upon his bed to snatch a little fevered sleep. And he would seem to hear the tear-soaked, toneless voice saying that the only road to Peace was the thorny Way of Expiation.... He would feel again the light, thin touch upon his forehead, and would wake, crying “Mother!” as the black curtain blotted her from his sight. And at other times, when the man was bound to the revolving wheel of his endless labors, the diligent pen would be arrested as her dim wistful eyes came hovering between his vision and the page. Then he would drive her away, and fall to his work with desperate assiduity. For never, Dunoisse knew, would he be happy until he had earned and repaid every centime of that accursed dowry. That debt discharged, there would be a turn of the tide. De Roux would die; his widow would become the wife of her lover; there would be happiness, children, a home.... For these he spent himself, allured by the glitter of Monseigneur’s golden promises as other victims had been--would be until the end.

And in the fever of toil that consumed him, the man aged and wasted visibly. His black eyes lost their fire, his vivid coloring faded, his hair, no longer thick and glossy, showed broad streaks of gray. Lines graved themselves between his eyebrows, crow’s feet appeared upon his temples. The wings of the nostrils were pulled downwards by the unrelaxing, constant tension of the muscles of the mouth, as month after month Dunoisse sat diligently incubating the egg of Monseigneur.

It hastened matters sensibly, that physical decadence--that wreck of the man’s good looks upon the rocks of merciless mental toil. Society was charitable--Monseigneur was all kindness--but the betrayed husband and the supplanted lover are fair game, always: has it not been so since the beginning of the world?