Part 8

But it was only the oil dropping from his wig and running down his face. He attended personally to its lubrication in these days, and far too liberally. In a moment he looked up, the transcendent light returned to his eyes. He hummed a livelier air. Self-gratification beamed from him. It was something, after all, in this world, he reflected, to have that indomitable spirit which could rebound, like an india-rubber ball, from the blows of Fortune, the rebuffs of false friends, and exhibit always the same polished, undinted surface. He had not allowed hard Fate to subdue his spirit, to impair his wit, to hammer him into forgetfulness of his duty to his own original ineffable self, and he prayed only that the doom of the butterfly might overtake him long before age came to blunt his exquisite perceptions of fitness, his fastidious taste, his delicate palate! What if one were to come to realise, in moments of lucidity, one’s debased reputation, out-of-dateness, personal uncleanliness, perhaps?--O horrible, horrible! He shuddered; he touched the immaculate frill at his throat, smoothed the satin on his thighs with a trembling hand. An ugly dream! Thank God he could congratulate himself, had always been able to congratulate himself, on an intellectual strength capable of carrying the extremest extravagance of foppery. He had shaped himself deliberately to a fame he would never have attained on the force of his wit alone. And yet he had always remained a gentleman, and a gentleman could never come to forget himself. Intellect and character both told against any such possible demoralisation.

Loustalot threw open the door wide, and announced in a loud voice, “Her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire!”

With a bright smile and extended hands the Consul tripped forward.

“Ah! my dear Duchess,” he said, “you are welcome a thousand times. A chair, Loustalot.” (He seated himself close beside the lovely visitor.) “I was dreaming of old age,” he said, “and imperishable youth comes to rebuke me. Your Grace, more loving-kind than Aurora, once bestowed immortality on me, but with a better percipience than the goddess when she doomed her poor Tithonus to perpetual dotage. This is no dry grasshopper’s note, but the same liquid cackle that greeted our sallies at Chatsworth. Do you remember the French Marquis, whose hair-powder we dusted with sugar, and how at the breakfast-table, the heat and _sueur_ having melted it, the flies settled until the poor man’s head was like a plum pudding? _Hélas!_ the jocund spirit survives; only the environment dejects. But now that your Grace----”

“Milord Byron!” announced Loustalot at the door. The Beau rose, and advanced with infinite courtesy. Always the pink of breeding, he had yet an especial part to play before this pale, distinguished guest, whose compliment on the “exquisite propriety” of his dress and conduct had once reached his ears, never to be forgotten.

“I greet your lordship,” he said, “with a particular confidence, since for the nonce a goddess does the honours of my poor abode. Ah! that Sèvres biscuit figure--a girl bathing, after Falconet. It will appeal to you--a new acquisition. You know my fancy for canes and snuff-boxes and china--trivial pursuits, but more profitable than fox-hunting.”

“His Grace the Duke of Bedford!” bellowed Loustalot.

Brummell, having deposited the poet in a third seat, hurried to the door.

“Bedford, my dear fellow,” he whispered, horrified, “do you realise that the collar of your coat is turned up at the back? It recalls to me the most supreme moment in my life. I was due at Lady Dungannon’s reception, and circumstances had forced me--hush! the admission is inexpressibly painful--to, to take a hackney coach. However, I believed that I had successfully evaded detection, and had mounted the stairs into full view of the drawing-room, when a servant whispered in my ear, ‘Sir--do you know that you have got a straw in your shoe?’ Conceive, if you can, my horror. I shall never forget that moment.”

The memory, indeed, appeared so to weigh upon him, that for a little he forgot his company, and sat apart from it in dreary abstraction. The name of Mr. Chig Chester being called withdrew him from it, and he rose gaily.

“Our redoubtable gamester and sportsman,” he said, returning with the visitor. “We have material here for a table, Duchess. But remember, in Caen we play only for love and crackers.”

He dissolved into a fit of chuckling laughter, until the Lady Jersey was announced. And then came others--my Lord Petersham, the Duke of Rutland, Scrope Davies, Mrs. O’Neill, the Duchess of Gordon, and half a dozen more. The little room was soon too full for its capacity; but the spirits of the courtly host surmounted all difficulties and made a positive grace of inconvenience. He tripped, he chatted, he was perpetually talking and on the move, exchanging badinage with one, recalling incidents of past happy days with another, pointing out the treasures of his modest sanctum to a third--a picture by Morland, a clock by Verdier, a Louis XV _bonheur du jour_. Exile, he wished to show, had not dulled his appreciation of the beautiful, or shaken his position as a wit and supreme arbiter of the elegancies. Now as always it was a privilege to claim his acquaintanceship, to be seen on his arm; now as always his smile or his frown could make or break.

In the midst, a candle guttered heavily on the mantelpiece, and a little girl, the landlord’s petted one, ran into the room.

“Monsieur Brummell,” she cried, “Monsieur Brummell, you have not yet given me the sou you promised for _nanan_.”

He caught her by the arm.

“Hush!” he said. “Do you not see the company?”

She stared round with wide, wondering eyes.

“What company, Monsieur? I see only a row of chairs!”

“Look again, Babette.”

“I am looking hard, Monsieur.”

The Beau, releasing his grip, sank into a seat. Before him on the wall loomed a cheap mirror. He saw the reflection in it of a broken, toothless old man, semi-palsied, dirty, degraded. His scratch-wig, poked awry, was foul with rancid grease; his shoes were lustreless and in holes. He raised dim, wandering eyes, and marked the squalid, unfurnished walls, the one whist-table with a broken leg, the three common shells on the mantelpiece flanked by a couple of reechy tallow candles in brass sconces. And--yes, the row of empty chairs. Staring like one awakened, he uttered a dreary little laugh, and beckoned to the child.

“Come, Babette,” he said, “and we will hunt for the sou. Let us hope it has not slipped through the hole in my pocket. I had been playing, child--playing with the shadows of some little dolls, long, long dead everyone of them, and my company, after all, turns out to be one lonely old man, with a tattered coat and a single pair of trousers, which Madame Fichet has to patch while their owner lies abed.”

Paganini

It was in Florence that Baronte at last ran to earth that terrific secret which for ten long months had eluded and maddened him. Here, in the summer of 1819, was present once again that fiend incarnate of melody, that monster Paganini--and more astounding, more inexplicable than ever. He had taken the city captive as utterly as any Marmaldo; he drew its people, extravagantly laughing and sobbing, in the wake of his devil’s music. And Florence was Baronte’s native town, and it was here, he had felt, that his quest must end, though even at the gates of Death. And, behold! Fate, even in the shadow of his reason’s overthrow, had vouchsafed him at length and at least an approximate solution of the mystery.

What mystery, then, and what secret? Why those that touched upon the source of the Maestro’s superhuman powers--nothing more nor less. But, for whatever was their ethical value, they had haunted Baronte’s soul for full ten months--ever since that night, in fact, when he had first heard Paganini play in the Scala Theatre at Milan. And from that night onwards he had followed his evil genius, as he regarded the man, from town to town, feeding yet hungering, drinking yet thirsting, loathing and lusting at once.

Baronte was himself, though an amateur, a rare violinist. He knew as well as most the extreme capacities of the instrument, and the sympathies possible to be created between its sensitive mechanism and the interpretative soul of its player. But here was something which as much surpassed the conceivable limits of human execution as it surpassed mortal understanding in its expression of superhuman passions and emotions. It was not instrumentation to which one listened, but temptation--melodious frenzy, an ecstatic lure to things forbid, rendered not by, but through a human medium. The great Master, it was very certain, was in league with the devil to betray mankind through the most voluptuous of its senses, and in no other way could the miracle be explained. Baronte felt it in every nerve of his responsible being, and sought nothing but a confirmation of his suspicions to dare a martyr’s fate. Young, emotional, fanatic, with haggard face and brilliant eyes, he retained all of that religious fervour which had once kept him hesitating on the threshold of the Church, and which still yielded to nothing but his passion for music.

And at last he stood on the brink, as he believed, of the great discovery. The dread secret lay to be exhumed, he had convinced himself, from the recesses of the little black morocco handbag which the dark Master perpetually carried about with him.

It might contain some demoniac philtre; it might conceal some vessel, like the Fisherman’s flask, loaded with the concentrated essence of all wickedness. It was certain that the bag never left its possessor’s custody day or night; that he bore it with him on his rare excursions abroad; that he hugged it to his pillow throughout the hours of darkness. Baronte knew all this from his confidant and sympathiser young Varano, who had hired, at his instance, a room adjoining the Maestro’s, in the hotel occupied by the latter, and who had been able to keep a pretty incessant watch, through an unsuspected crack in the party panelling, on his tremendous neighbour. It was this friend who had described to him the sympathy apparent between Paganini and his hidden fetish, who had whispered to him awfully of day-long prostrations on a couch, broken only by spasmodic writhings, by fiendish ejaculations and brief explosions of laughter, or by wild apostrophisings of the _thing_, held up in worshipping hands before two gloating eyes. It contained, without doubt, the key to the mystery--only how to find an opportunity to examine it? That was as yet as stultifying a problem as itself. And in the meantime the Maestro’s engagement was drawing to a close.

One night before the end Baronte sat in the theatre. It was packed from floor to ceiling, and his restless vision hunted, as always, among the massed audience for some confirmation of a shadowy legend. It related, this legend, of a beautiful weeping girl, and of a man, her companion, bleak, sardonic, with whom the player would be seen to exchange a smile of ghastly import, and of the sudden inexplicable disappearance of the two. He believed the story--and he did not believe it; as he believed and disbelieved that other tale of the shape dimly adumbrated behind the Master’s figure and directing its bowing. The whispers of libertinism and nameless cruelties which pursued the great performer’s footsteps affected him no more, either way, than these others. It was sufficient, in his conception of evil, to credit the fiend with a capacity for achieving without betraying himself, of directing the touch on the instrument, of _being_ the instrument itself, the imagined Guanerius, if he chose.

And then instant silence, a shock, a thrill, and Paganini stood before the expectant house.

Music! He appeared the antithesis of every grace, of every emotion associated with its production--an impossible grotesque, like a clown got up as a fiddle and proposing to play upon himself. There he stood in the glare of the footlights, as ungainly an anomaly as the mind could conceive. He was tall, he was supernaturally gaunt and angular; his long kit-shaped face, pallid as Death’s own, seemed pierced with two blackened sockets for eyes; his hair, lank and raven, straggled upon his shoulders. He was dressed in a tight-buttoned black swallow-tail and black trousers, loose for the period and awkwardly short at the ankles. As the storm of greeting subsided and the orchestra crashed out its symphony, he settled himself upon his right hip, like a badly articulated skeleton, and, raising bow and fiddle, dived his long chin into the latter, and, with a grinning snarl upon his face, poised the former, like a veritable fiend of extravaganza.

Baronte knew it all so well, and waited impassive for the sequel, his eyes canvassing the breathless house rather than the performer. And then suddenly the bow descended, with a blow like a melodious sledge-hammer, and the wild, lovely orgy had begun.

Paganini surely had never played before as he played that night. It was all stupendous, unsurpassable, horrible. The very violin seemed to bend and spring beneath his hands like the body of a young witch, alluring, eluding, brutifying. At the finish it was with a feeling of utter emotional collapse that Baronte crept from the house and sought his lodgings. This thing must end, he told himself--somehow this thing must end, and to-morrow.

In the late morning he rose--to ominous skies and a sensation of stifling heat. A haggard ghost of himself, he sought the Master’s hotel. He knew the obscene creature’s customs--to fast at times, to gorge at times, to lie brooding all day, hating company as he hated priests and doctors; sometimes to break abroad in a wild convulsion of energy, and go tearing none knew whither. And to-day Fortune, whether for good or evil, favoured Baronte. As he approached the hotel, with the intent to take counsel of his friend Varano, he saw the demoniac figure itself issue from the portal, and hurry with distracted visage northwards. He hesitated a moment--then started in pursuit.

Near the bridge Alle Grazie stood three men--an itinerant butcher, a bird-vender, and one, a pert, showy vagabond, with a pallid face, and the dirty little finger-nail of his left hand grown long as a charm against the evil eye. The butcher, in blue jacket and leathern cap, carried in one hand a single joint of meat upon a hook, and in the other a shrill small horn on which to blow its praises; the bird-seller, a stalwart, bronzed young fellow, with gold rings in his ears and his shirted torso half bared to the heat, bore over his shoulders a yoke of cord, from each of whose ends hung a netted sieve alive with twittering songsters; the loafer carried nothing but himself, and that cheaply. As the figure of the Maestro, hopping like a great crow, approached and passed, the bird-seller stared, the butcher gaped, and the loafer, crossing himself with a muttered prayer, sprang back into the roadway--and collided with Baronte, who pushed him aside and sped on.

“The devil!” gasped the loafer; and the bird-seller laughed deridingly.

“In escaping the smoke you have jumped into the fire, gossip,” said he. “The second was the true devil.”

He looked it, indeed, if his burning eyes were any criterion, as he hurried in the wake of the receding figure. It led him across the south-eastern angle of the city to the gate of the Pinti, through which it passed like a striding shadow, and thence, turning northwards, took the winding ascent to Fiesole. Baronte followed, with what purpose he himself did not know.

It was a terrible day, lowering, oppressive, fateful with tempest. And all in a moment the heavens were delivered. They burst in a crash of rain and fire that made the reason stagger. Through the smoke of flung water Baronte could still see the figure mounting before him, gesticulating, whirling its long arms, from time to time uttering peals of loud laughter that mingled unearthly with the tumult of the storm. And then, all in a moment, it was gone.

A ruined villa stood up stark and streaming against the sky. Baronte, panting to the shelter of its broken walls, was suddenly aware, in a brief lull of the storm, of a voice clamant hard by. It wailed, it laughed, it sobbed; it uttered, it seemed, inarticulate blasphemies; it sought to out-roar the thunder, to out-screech the wind. With an answering cry the young man ran round--and staggered to a stop before the vision which his eyes encountered. For there, prone among the tumbled masonry and the long weeds and grass, lay the figure of the black Master himself.

It was flung upon its back, writhing as if in torment. It screamed; it hugged and crumpled itself into grotesque contortions; it gnashed grinning teeth; its eyeballs glinted like porcelain in the lightning.

“_Ah, póvero me!_” screamed Paganini. “Why did I forget the bag! _Eccomi perdûto!_ I am lost--I am lost!”

With a gasp Baronte stepped back, undiscovered of the other. The next moment he was racing down the hill towards Florence.

At the door of the hotel, wild and drenched, he ran upon young Varano, and, clutching him by the shoulders, glared into his eyes.

“Quick!” he panted. “He is up there on the hill--I have seen him--and without his fetish. Quick! Our opportunity has arrived.”

Varano nodded pallidly.

“I know,” he whispered. “I was coming to look for you.”

Together they stole up to the Maestro’s chamber; opened the unlatched door like thieves; entered, and discovered the forgotten bag lying upon a chair. Dreading he knew not what terrific revelation, Baronte pressed the snap and disclosed----

Down in the vestibule a moment later they ran upon the landlord.

“_Benedetto, mi’ amico_,” said Varano smoothly, “can you tell us what is ‘Leroy’?”

“Of a verity, Signore,” answered the man. “‘Leroy’ is a quack remedy, a sedative, and very good for relieving pain. You should ask the great Maestro Paganini, whom it is my distinction to lodge, and who applies it to a bowel complaint from which he has long suffered terribly. He is never without a bottle or two of it in his little black bag.”

Napoleon

It was the 4th of July, 1809, and a thunderous, close evening. In Lobau, the largest of the five islands on the Danube, where were the imperial headquarters, the huge machinery of war, human and insentient, was getting up steam, so to speak, for the morrow’s milling, and eliciting, as its flywheel slowly revolved, an automatic response in all its myriad parts from Pressburg to Vienna. The occasion, it might be said, was an emergency occasion. If the Emperor, himself commanding, had not been thrashed by the Austrians, under the Archduke Charles, a couple of months earlier at Aspern, his retreat upon the islands had looked so much like a defeat, that for the moment his supremacy, moral and material, hung in the balance. For the first time the Grand Army had suffered a shock to its _amour-propre_ and its hitherto invincible faith in its leader. A little might turn the scale, and send all its disintegrated legions scuttling back to Strasburg.

That the impenetrable “Antichrist” himself was fully aware of the nature of the hazard there is no reason to doubt, or that he was concentrating all the deepest faculties of his genius on the delivery of a blow which should be immense and final. He was much alone in his tent, and his orders were laconic and momentous. The ordinary mind cannot picture such a situation, and dismiss its surrounding distractions--one might say its hauntings. There were the arsenals, the forges, the rope-walks, the sheds for boat-mending, the canteens and parks of artillery all over the five islands; there were the boats themselves in the river, scores of them, and the massive chains which bound them into bridges; there were the ammunition wagons and their loaded boxes, the forests of piled arms, the tossed oceans of tents, the miles of tethered horses, the ring-fences of palisades; and there were the troops for last, enough to people a great city, and each man of them as cheerily busy as if he were one of an exodus of Israelites picketing on his way to the promised land. Seven weeks before this same island of Lobau had been littered with the legs and arms of those wounded at Aspern--limbs hastily severed and flung helter-skelter among the grass of its meadows. Its soil was soaked with blood; thousands of mangled men and horses had sunk screaming in the waters which thundered by its shores; a hail of iron had smashed into it and its even more luckless neighbours; fire from burning mills had roared down upon its bridges, melting men and metal into one horrible annealing; it had heaved and vomited with the filth of war. And had all that hideous picture a place in the background of the mastermind, or had its present aspect, of busy preparation for another scene as sickening, or worse? One sorrow may have haunted him, one bloody ghost out of all the multitudes--the figure of his old comrade Marshal Lannes, as he had seen him borne hither on a litter of branches and muskets on the fatal day--one shattered horror more to feed the carnage. He had been moved a moment, had wept, and kissed the dying man. An unconscious thought of him may have lingered still like a melancholy shadow in his soul. But, for the rest, one may be sure that he looked over and beyond all these things, as a great architect sees through the maze of scaffolding the glory of the fabric his soul has raised. This man, it is to be supposed, ever regarded a battlefield but as a map, so clear to his mind that, as the opposing troops manœuvred on it, he could check or reinforce them, show them the way to defeat or victory with his eyes shut. He was a calculating “freak,” and as such superhuman--or superdiabolic.

As the dark gathered, lit only by the flickering lightnings, an immense hush fell over the islands. Every lamp and fire was extinguished; the multitudinous tramp of moving hosts mingled with the boom of the river, and became part with it; the song of the bugles, soft and short, mounted on the wind, and fled with its shrilling through the branches of the trees. One might never have guessed the universal movement that was taking itself cover, as it were, under these silences, as if the islands themselves had been unmoored, and were drifting soundlessly, with their freight of death, towards the shores.

In the midst, a little cry, sharp and sudden, rang out in the neighbourhood of the Emperor’s tent--it might have been a trodden bird’s; it passed, and was not repeated. A young officer, de Sainte Croix, of the personal staff, hurried towards the spot. It was he, vigorous and enthusiastic, who had often gained the Emperor’s approval by climbing tall trees on the island to watch the Austrian preparations on the distant plain. He found a sentry standing by a clump of bushes, and another, one of the Old Guard, lying prone at his feet.

“Malediction!” he whispered. “Who had the daring?”

The man saluted.

“It is Corporal Lebrun, Monsieur. He gave one cry--thus; and I saw him fall. He was hit over the heart at Essling, and only his cartouchier saved him; but he has complained since of an oppression. I think the closeness, the thunder----”

The officer interrupted him:

“That will do. You had no right to leave your post. Return to it.”

The soldier saluted again, wheeled, and retreated. De Sainte Croix bent over the fallen man.

“How is it, Lebrun?”

The corporal lay with a ghastly face, his breath labouring, his chest lifting in spasms. He was not a young man, yet prematurely aged, toughened, grizzled, tanned like old leather in the service of his god. There was a wild, lost look in his eyes which betokened the coming end. He struggled to speak.

“Lift me up, monsieur, in God’s name!”