LIX
The crash broke the spell that clogged Dunoisse’s faculties. He cried out in savage anger, and tore open the swinging, splintered window, and dashed out upon the balcony, stopping short in sheer astonishment at the spectacle he beheld below.
For the vast white square of the Market Place, that was centered by four crystal, springing fountains, and backed by an August sunset of pale green and clear rose and glorious flaming orange-red, was full of heads of women and men, some bare, some covered, so closely packed that an acrobat might have walked on them without leaping a single gap. And the faces belonging to those Teutonic heads and the vari-colored glittering eyes enameled in all the faces, were intent upon the room to which belonged the window with the shattered pane. And at the sight of Dunoisse the vast assembly sent out its breath as at a single hissing expiration:
“S’s ss!”
Beyond that, nothing more. But the very restraint of the vast crowd was worse than sinister. Plainly these lumpish Teutons were not there to waste valuable time in threats. Their silence menaced and appalled beyond all Gallic yells and execrations. And as Dunoisse stood speechless, staring down into all those tigerish eyes, a strong thin hand gripped his shoulder, and the Archbishop’s voice said in his ear:
“You witness the terrible effect of your own insane rashness--the sacrilegious presumption of your agents...! Present yourself upon the streets to-morrow--attempt to join in the procession--and the people will tear you to shreds! Be silent! I will speak to them!”
He plucked Dunoisse back into the room with one imperative hand, unhooking the shabby black cloak with the other. He shook it deftly from his shoulders, removed his soft felt hat, threw it aside, and stepped out upon the balcony, revealed as a small slight figure in a worn black cassock, red-piped, red-buttoned, and sashed, his high-domed baldish head covered with a purple skull-cap, the sacred symbol hanging by its golden chain upon his breast. And at the sight of him a change came over all those waiting faces, and a feline purr of satisfaction came from the great crowd.
The Archbishop said, in a mild and gentle tone, addressing the assemblage:
“My children, we are not ignorant of the cause of this demonstration. You are gathered here to protest, by force if necessary, against what justly appears to you a sacrilege of the most flagitious kind----”
In every attentive face there showed upon the instant a gaping hole. A roar of assent responded that shattered the leaping columns of the Market Place fountains into a rain of glittering fragments. Scared doves rose in bevies from the housetops, wheeling in circles under the rose-flushed sunset sky. The Archbishop went on, in a voice of astonishing resonance and power:
“My children, be at peace! No indignity such as you have had reason to fear will be offered to the Divine Presence of Our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament, or to the Immaculate Virginity of His Holy Mother!”
He lifted his hand.
“Therefore, I say to you, profane not the Eve of the Feast with violence! Disperse without casting one other stone. Be assured, Colonel von Widinitz-Dunoisse will not walk in the procession unless in a state of soul conducive to edification. I bid you now go home!”
The Archbishop might have been obeyed, but that a lean tall man in seedy black, with burning cavernous eyes in a lean, parched, yellow face, leaped up upon the bronze balustrade of one of the Market Place fountains, and cried, in a voice that cracked like a breaking stick:
“He has scattered money among you, and some of you have stooped to gather it! For shame! Do you not know whence those accursed coins were taken? Then I will tell you. From the dowry of the Carmelite Sister Thérèse de Saint-François! From the funds of the House of Mercy over whose closed doors the ivy is growing! From the Treasury of Christ!... Then hurl back the defiled and tainted coins with contempt and indignation! Drive forth the thief’s son with his harlot! Purge the town of them! Kill--a-a-a!”
The lean man threw up his hands at this juncture, and fell back frothing in epilepsy. But he had spoken words that had the effect of oil poured upon a slackened furnace. The hubbub of voices that ensued reduced even the Archbishop to dumb show. Stones began to fly, no longer leveled at the room behind the balcony, where the high-domed head and pale, worn profile of the prelate were descried, as he parleyed with the unwished-for visitors.... The lower windows suffered attack; and with the larger missiles came hopping the coppers and silver bits that had been scattered from Steyregg’s bag. Those who grudged parting most threw hardest of all.... The crash and tinkle of breaking glass went on until every window-frame in the frontage of “The Three Crowns” presented a central void befringed with splinters--until the landlord, hysterical with loss, rushed out bareheaded into the Market Place, and, falling upon his knees, solemnly swore that if the work of destruction did but cease, the loathed intruders should then and there depart from his house.
His piercing accents reached the beleaguered garrison in the room behind the balcony.... The Archbishop turned to Dunoisse, and said, slightly shrugging his shoulders:
“Compliance will be your only possible course.”
Dunoisse was about to expostulate, but Henriette panted at her lover’s ear:
“Yes!--let us go from this dreadful place! Oh!--mad that I was to have set my foot in it!”
Then Dunoisse rang the bell. With its broken rope in his hand, he shouted to the scared and chalk-faced waiter:
“Bring the bill! Order both carriages! Instantly! Do you hear?”
The affrighted man gasped out:
“Sir, they are ready!”
And almost instantly, as it seemed, the green chariot and the brown landau, horsed, and heaped with unlocked and unpacked portmanteaux, empty valises, and the garments and articles of toilet that these had contained, were rattled out of the posting-yard and brought to the front-door of “The Three Crowns.”
No bill appeared. The banknotes and gold Dunoisse would have thrust upon the landlord the man refused, perhaps out of conscientiousness, perhaps in fear of further damage to his property.... Throwing the money down upon the table, Dunoisse grasped his hat and cane, and offered his arm to Henriette. She placed her little hand upon it, and shrank in terror as a savage, ominous growl came from the angry throng outside.
“They shall not harm you!” Dunoisse muttered between his teeth, and urged her forwards.
“They will not harm you, Madame!” the Archbishop said, who had quitted the room a moment previously, and now returning, gravely offered his own arm to Henriette upon the other side. She cast him a swimming, eloquent look of reproach that said: “My touch pollutes,--you yourself have said it!” Then, as another growl came from the Market Place, she gulped her resentment down, and set her little frightened clutch upon the red-piped cassock-sleeve....
And so, protected by the Church that had denounced her, Henriette went forth, her livid lover bulwarking her frail charms upon the other side. At sight of her it was as if the great cattish crowd crouched before springing. It wagged from side to side, and the eyes in it flickered yellow and green. But the blood-thirst that parched those hot and savage throats was checked when the red-buttoned black cassock and high domed head were recognized by her side. The crowd fell back into its former stolid immobility, and Dunoisse opened the carriage-door, instead of the shrinking hostler, and the Archbishop handed in Madame de Roux, and, to the astonishment of all, followed her. Dunoisse took his seat in the vehicle at a sign from the prelate, who then gave the postillions--who had slewed round in their great boots, the better to view a sight so unusual--the signal to move on....
And then, at a walking pace, through a lane that continually opened in the great mass of grim-faced people, and as continually closed behind the green chariot and the brown landau--containing only the scared valet and the quaking maid--(the Marshal’s agents having mysteriously disappeared), both vehicles passed through the Market Place, down the Promenade, and rolled under the portcullis of the Peace Gate. Only when their wheels resounded on the gravel-covered drawbridge did the Archbishop give the signal to pull up. Bareheaded, Dunoisse lent aid to his descent, stammering out some broken phrases of gratitude.
“Sir, I have done no more,” said the Archbishop, “than was enjoined on me by my calling and profession. See to the lady, who has suffered much alarm. And--I have not yet given you the message from your mother. She has a dispensation to receive you. She will expect you at dark, at the Convent of the Carmelites in the Old Town. It must be reached by a different route, but that need not concern you.... Put up for the night at ‘The Heron’ posting-house, fourteen miles from here; you will remember the inn--you passed it on your journey. I have sent on a servant with swift horses in advance of you,--you will mount and ride back with the man; he will guide you in perfect safety! As for Madame, you need be under no apprehension--the landlord of ‘The Heron’ is a trustworthy person.... Dear me! What have we here? How truly deplorable a spectacle!”... Was there a twinkle of amusement in the bright gray eyes that regarded it?... “These two gentlemen who approach in such haste,” said the Archbishop, “I take to be those members of your party who preferred to remain behind!”
Despite the water that dripped from their garments, proving them to have been ducked in one of the fountains of the Market Place, and the adhering filth that proved them to have been subsequently rolled in the kennel, the two bounding figures were recognizable as Köhler and von Steyregg. For--having concealed themselves in the cellar of “The Three Crowns,” with the intention of remaining there perdu until darkness should favor their departure from Widinitz--the confederates had been discovered amongst the vats and barrels by a hireling; plucked thence and, thrust by the maddened landlord and his willing servitors forth upon the pavement, but a few minutes after the departure of the Colonel and Madame....
You saw the pair, running the gauntlet of thumps, buffets, clouts, and whacks, down the lane that kept opening in the crowd in front of them and closing up behind.... The suggestion of a citizen that they should be tumbled into the city fosse met with some approval, but the majority were against the proceeding. In that case the Archbishop might have intervened, instead of taking snuff and looking the other way....
The fugitives gained the rear carriage, and leaped in, each at a door, the impromptu harlequinade provoking roars of laughter. Neither had a hat, or breath to lavish. Steyregg had parted with an entire coat-tail. His Order was missing from its soiled, watered ribbon--a loss which caused him infinite torment. Köhler was collarless and bleeding from the nose.
The accommodation offered by “The Heron” posting-house, upon the forest-road fourteen miles from Widinitz, subsequently appeared to both the worthies too near the city to be healthy. Therefore, without taking formal leave of His Serene Highness or Her Excellency (so lately the recipients of their heartfelt homage), the Baron and the attorney hired a post-chaise; and, racked by grievous bodily aches and pains, it may be conjectured, as well as twinges spiritual and mental, pushed upon the road to France.
* * * * *
“And so,” said von Steyregg, upon the day that saw the return of the precious pair to Paris, “because of Prince Cocky-Locky’s béguin for Madame Henny-Penny, a plot of the first order is fudged, dished, and done for. Devil take the woman!”
Köhler returned, straightening a brand-new paper collar with a conquering air:
“She is a chic type, so no doubt he would be agreeable. Which of us is to tell Old Fireworks of the fiasco? That will have to be done!”
Von Steyregg retorted irritably:
“Tell--tell! Why the deuce are you so set on telling? Will he stump up a single shiner, once he knows of the mess?”
Köhler made a neat circle with his left thumb and forefinger, and winked through it. Both men, it will be perceived, had left their graceful phrases and courtly manners behind in Widinitz, with Köhler’s original paper collar and his partner’s left coat-tail. To the mute admission of the wink, von Steyregg returned:
“Very well, then! We have made a bit out of this--at least, you have----”
Köhler interpolated:
“Go it!”
“I am going to go it,” said von Steyregg blandly. “I have not seen my native Hungary for a long time, and the heart of the true Magyar, even amidst the most beauteous scenes of foreign countries, ceaselessly yearns for home. Impart the news of the disaster to Monseigneur if you feel disposed to be kicked!--or leave the too-painful duty to his puppy of a son!”
He turned, revealing an aching void where there had been a coat-tail.
“Tell me one thing before you hurry back to your native Hungary, you yearning Magyar,” said Köhler brutally. “Who was it kiss-kissed the people of Widinitz on to break the windows of the inn of ‘The Three Crowns,’ frighten Madame de Roux into hysterics, provoke Monsieur the Colonel into a display of determination, duck both of us in one of the public fountains, and toss me in a horse-blanket? For all his mealy mouth, I say the Archbishop!”
Von Steyregg said, rolling a bloodshot eye in rapture:
“Undoubtedly, the Archbishop! Assuredly, the Archbishop!” He heaved an elephantine sigh. “With a confederate like that priest to back me, I could break the bank of every gambling-hell in Europe. What a waste that he should be an honest man! Au revoir, dear friend! You shall visit me at my baronial castle in beloved Hungary, as sure as I am a Magyar of the pure blood!”
“Farewell for ever, old comrade!” said Köhler, with emotion, as he hailed a passing cab.
LX
That wild night-ride through the beech-forest back to Widinitz, and the interview with his mother at the Convent of the Carmelites, was ever to Dunoisse the most unreal, the most strange of all those adventures that seemed as though woven upon the loom of Sleep.
He remembered his lost mother as so tall--yet, when the dark woolen curtains hanging behind the double grating that halved the Convent parlor had been drawn back, revealing the two brown-robed, black-veiled figures--the shape that had put its veil aside with a little, shrunken hand, and called him by his name--had appeared to be barely above the stature of a child.
Not in the haggard, ashen-gray face, closely framed in the conventual folds of white linen--its features pinched and drawn, its eyes almost extinguished as though with constant weeping--was there anything left that recalled in the remotest degree the lovely, beloved mother of the old, unforgotten days....
Only the voice, so soaked with tears, so changed from that of her son’s remembrance, retained tones that well-nigh wrought Dunoisse to a wild outbreak of weeping, though sometimes in the dim and sunken eyes there shone a transient ray of the dear light of old.
If she had shrieked, it would have pierced the heart less than her immobile and rigorous quiescence. Yet her trembling could not be controlled by any act of will. Between the visitor who stood upon one side of the double grille, and the brown-robed, black-veiled figure seated upon the other, a current of hot air might have been rising, the shape so quivered and vibrated and shuddered before his eyes.
Ah! could he have realized the wild conflict of emotions surging under the white guimpe and the coarse brown habit.... But if the weak body of Sister Térèse de Saint François was shaken as a reed, her determination was immovable; her word was not to be gainsaid.
Never, never!--though the Plenum of the Federative Council should throw all its “Ayes!” into the scale that confirmed the females of the house of Widinitz and their heirs in the dynastic succession, would the nun-Princess consent to her son’s occupying the throne.
Saying the word so softly in her threadlike, feeble voice, her “Never!” reared between Hector and the hereditary dignities a Titanic wall of rock, that no tempered tool might pierce, no fulminate shatter and blast.
So it was quashed and ended, the vexed question of the Claim of Succession. And Dunoisse drew breath with almost a sensation of relief. Of reproach there was not a shadow in her voice or expression. She had not heard--possibly she had not heard?--that her son had not lacked a companion on his journey. Those scathing reproaches of the Archbishop’s were not to be voiced again by Sister Térèse. She spoke of the Marshal--asked of his health? Their son felt himself flushing guiltily in the sheer inability to reply with authority. Who knew less of Achille Dunoisse, well or ill, jaundiced or jovial, gouty or in good fettle, than the son he had begotten? Tardy Conscience, waking from a nodding sleep in the saddle, dug both spurs rowel-deep in Dunoisse’s smart sides. His eyes shunned the sunken eyes that questioned with such desperate eagerness, belying the sparse, meager utterance, the carefully colorless tone. He stammered a conventional reply.
“You will give him a message from me, when you return to him,” she said, and dropped the faded curtains of her eyelids between them.... “Tell him that I who know him to be infinitely generous and noble at heart”--Dunoisse barely restrained a start of incredulous surprise at the new idea of nobility in connection with the Marshal--“tell him that I was never led by any act of his to doubt the disinterestedness of his regard. And say to him, that what he wildly dreams may one day be brought about, cannot and will not! That in the parched and dried-up skeleton you have seen here at the Convent there is no beauty left to covet. Entreat of him to think of his wife and your mother as one who has passed forever beyond the gates of this world.... For I have chosen to be dead whilst living,” said the thread-thin, trembling voice, “that by the Divine Mercy not only I, but others--may not taste of the Death that is eternal.” She added, almost inaudibly: “My strength is not great, Hector. I have suffered much lately.... Take my blessing now, and go.”
She rose from what was now revealed as a wooden stool, and as her son knelt down before the inexorable grating, she thrust a slender, wasted finger between the iron wires of the lattice, and lightly traced the Sign of the Cross upon his brow. How its touch thrilled him--the withered little finger that Achille Dunoisse had kissed with such exuberant rapture! Her son would have pressed his lips to it, but that she drew it quickly away. He said in a tone of bitter sadness, for the slight involuntary recoil had wounded:
“Ah!--you do well to shrink from me, my mother!--could you know all!...”
She put up her little shaking hand, and swiftly pulled her close black veil down, and breathed from behind its screen:
“I do know all.... It is not for me to judge you--whose veins were filled from mine....”
“Mother!” broke from Hector hoarsely, for her terrible humility appalled him. It was as though she had bared her scarred shoulders in his sight, and bent her frail strength to the scourge. She silenced him by a gesture, and continued, in a whisper so faint that it barely reached his ears:
“But if you can--atone!”
The veil was lifted, the sunken eyes met Hector’s.... What infinite tenderness shone in their dark gray depths. She said, in the voice that fluttered like a cobweb in the wind: “For there is but one road to peace, and that is the Way of Expiation. My feet have stumbled amidst its thorns for many years now.... Farewell! Pray for me! Tell your father I----”
Dunoisse had no more words of her. The little figure had swayed and wavered, the watchful Sister in attendance had stepped forwards and thrown an arm about it and pulled the curtain-rope with her disengaged hand. And the black woolen drapery had fallen, with a rattling of metal rings,--and Dunoisse as he stumbled from the parlor, blinded by rushing tears, knew that he had looked his last, in this world, upon his mother....
But the details of that brief meeting remained as bitten in with acid on the memory of the son. An elderly woman, who served the Sisters as portress of the Convent’s outer gate, contributed a touch or two to the unforgettable picture; speaking, in tones of genuinely affectionate reverence, as she guided the stranger, by the light of the evil-smelling tallow candle in her iron lantern, through divers stone-flagged passages previously traversed, of Sister Térèse de Saint François.
* * * * *
“Who has been our Mother Prioress now ten years, and a holier and wiser never ruled the Convent. And how she wept, dear, humble soul! when the decision of the Chapter was made known to her at Vienna. She implored the Mother-General, upon her knees, to spare her the shame of being sent back to rule her superiors in piety and obedience ... but no! it had to be.... Thenceforth--until her strength gave out--the tasks that were too heavy for the most energetic were performed by the Mother-Prioress, who was the weakest of all. And to this day, when compelled to rebuke a sister for a fault, she will first beg her forgiveness; or, when any specially heavy penance will be enjoined upon another by the Father-Director, she will meet such a one as she comes from the confessional and whisper: ‘Tell me what it is, so that I may perform it with you!...’ One might truly say our Mother has a zest for mortification, and an appetite for fasting that is never satisfied.” The portress, whose rosy cheeks and plump figure testified to a discreet enjoyment of the good things of the world, sighed and shook her black-capped head as she added: “The gnädiger Herr knows that Saints are not made without suffering. Our Lord decreed it should be so. And--come the Last Day--if I can catch on to the skirt of our Reverend Mother’s habit--I dare to say I shall stand a better chance than most. Good-night, gnädiger Herr!--or rather good-morning!--for in another hour it will be day.” And the portress curtsied Dunoisse out into the clammy grayness that heralded dawn, and closed and locked and barred the Convent door. And as the stars paled and the wan moon reeled northwards as though sickened at the spectacle of all the deeds that are done by men under Night’s sable canopy, Dunoisse and Remorse rode back through the shadowy forest roads, to the inn of “The Heron,” where waited Henriette.
* * * * *
She had not been to bed. She had paced the single guest-room of the posting-house all night, waiting in passionate impatience for her lover’s return. When she heard his step upon the uncarpeted stair, she ran to the door and opened it, and shut it when he entered; and threw herself before it, and opened the flood-gates of her fury, that had been pent up all those hours....
“So!... You have returned!... I presume I am expected to be grateful! I, who have spent a night of horror in this miserable place with a pair of frightened servants for my sole protectors and companions....”
“Are not von Steyregg and Köhler----?” Dunoisse began. She answered before he had completed the sentence:
“They have taken what conveyance they could procure, and posted on to Paris; and had I been wiser I would have accompanied them.... ‘Had I been wiser’ do I say?...” She laughed angrily, plucking at the ribbon of velvet that confined her swelling throat. “One grain of sense would have saved me from the fatal error of accompanying you to that den among the mountains--that hot-bed of bigotry and intolerance--whence we have been--like a pair of lepers!--cast out.” Her teeth chattered, she struck her mouth with her little clenched fist as relentlessly as though it had been an enemy’s. “But you insisted,” she resumed--“I yielded to your persuasions.... Oh!--how hideously I have been repaid!”
His haggard eyes regarded her with a dreadful recollection in them. In her disarray and abandonment--the dishevelled hair, with its drooping curls and loosened coils, the pallor of fatigue that warred with the burnt flush of feverish excitement; the hinted lines and indicated hollows in the passionate, mutinous, changeful face that the merciless daylight revealed as it showed the crumpled silks and soiled laces of the dinner-dress that had been so fresh and dainty a few hours before--she was the Henriette of that morning of his return to Paris--save for the branding mark upon her throat. While in her disillusioned eyes he seemed almost plain, not at all heroic--desperately uninteresting--a poor creature stripped of all his princely garniture.... And she cried, in a voice unlike her own:
“For you have made me blush for you! Why could you not have gone out upon the balcony and spoken to the people? Where were your courage--your manliness--your strength?”
Dunoisse might have answered her: “With you!” but he bowed his head in silence under the lashing hailstorm of her reproaches. The springs of energy were dried up in him; he felt like an old man. She pursued, while her beautiful eyes shot baleful lightnings, and her little teeth gritted savagely:
“How can a woman of spirit love a man who is not manly? You will have yourself to thank for whatever happens now!... Where have you been all this night? What have you done? Into what new kennel of degradation will you next drag me? Or having gone so far, will you abandon your undeniable right, and seek no longer to obtain recognition of your Claim of Succession from the Council of the Federation? That you intend to do so I am quite prepared to hear!”
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?
Whispers began to circulate.... In the smoking-rooms of the great Clubs, in the social circle at the palace of the Presidency, Dunoisse’s rare appearances were provocative of the smart double entente, and the cynical witticism; flagged darts that, thrown without discretion, presently found their way to the raw quick under the thickened skin. The very day that showed the stupendous task all but accomplished, brought home to Dunoisse--by the medium of an unsigned letter in a delicate feminine hand--the knowledge that, in the estimation of his world, at least--he was held to have been supplanted by de Moulny. The closing sentence of the anonymous writer reproduced, almost in the very words, the unforgettable utterance of Henriette at the inn of “The Heron”:
“You only have yourself to thank for what has happened now!”
It seemed the very voice of his Fate speaking, and Dunoisse grew pale as ashes, and laid the letter down. He had been much weakened by his unremitting labors, and the drumming of the blood in his ears and the violent beating of his heart made him deaf to the quiet opening and closing of the door. But a voice spoke to him, and he looked up, with the sharp-fanged fox of desperate jealousy gnawing under his uniform, as it had possibly gnawed under that of de Roux, and became aware that Monseigneur had entered, and was looking at him with a somewhat sinister smile. He said--as Dunoisse stumbled to his feet and saluted--looking narrowly at the haggard handsome face, and smoothing his thick brown mustache with the little hand that was so like a pretty woman’s:
“So! We draw near the end! We have at last the goal in view, according to the report I received from you this morning.” He added, as Dunoisse bowed in assent: “Accept my sincere congratulations upon the excellent service you have rendered, General-of-Brigade von Widinitz Dunoisse.”
His glance, as keen as dull and lusterless, had recognized the writing of the letter lying on the blotting-pad. He had calculated, and rightly, that to grant the coveted step at the moment of revelation would inconceivably intensify the torment of its sting. He did not delay to receive the halting thanks of the victim. He went on in his cool, mellifluous tones, showing a docketed paper in his hand:
“You mention at the close of your summary of the work that has been accomplished, that without diligent and painstaking revision of the maps of Eastern Europe at present in use at our Military School, and employed at our War Department, the coping-stone of perfection must be lacking still.” He added, “This, I will own, surprises me, our Government Survey Department being considered--I believe with justice!--as pre-eminent in skill and accuracy. How, then, do you suggest that the maps should be improved?”
“Monseigneur, the network of intelligence being complete,” answered Dunoisse, “a minute sanitary survey of the ground most likely to become the scene of militant operations should necessarily follow. Fever-breeding districts must be plainly labeled ‘Pestilential,’--doubtfully-salubrious regions must be indicated for what they are.... No detail should be neglected. Special qualifications--precise scientific knowledge will be necessarily required of the Staff officer who is deputed to carry out this mission.” He added, “For upon the health of the Army depends its fighting-power. One cannot win battles with sick men!”
“An excellent apophthegm,” Monseigneur pronounced, with that peculiarly amiable smile of his. He tapped his teeth thoughtfully with the paper in his hand. “As regards the Staff officer who is to be despatched on this--would you call it a perilous mission?”--He went on, Dunoisse having admitted it to be a decidedly perilous mission--“I know of but one individual possessing the necessary, indispensable qualifications, and he is yourself!” He added, turning the poisoned poniard in the wound: “Fair eyes will weep at your departure, my dear Dunoisse--lovely lips will call me cruel. But undoubtedly--you must be the man to go!”
LXIII
So Dunoisse, with a step in rank in lieu of the promised heap of gold, and the suspicion rankling in him that his banishment had long been contemplated, went back to the Rue de Sèvres and found Henriette and de Moulny there together.
It was early upon a chill October evening. They were talking low and earnestly before the fire that glowed in its polished steel basket. The rose-shaded lamp threw a tender light upon the pair. And the portrait of the nun-Princess of Orleans, treading with dimpled, naked feet upon scattered crowns and scepters, looked down upon them with her triumphant harlot’s smile.
There was a silence, poignant and tense. They had risen upon Dunoisse’s entrance--both faces wore a set, artificial smile of greeting. He looked from one to the other and waited, the venomed sentences of the anonymous letter rankling in his sickened mind. He noted, dully, that Henriette wore a loose, flowing robe of creamy white, the skirt edged, the low neck and loose sleeves bordered, with a Greek key-pattern in dull gold; and that de Moulny’s tall, official figure--arrayed in the unrelieved magpie-garb of black-and-white that Fashion had but recently decreed as the only evening wear for the ultra-fashionable civilian--bulked gigantic in the small boudoir that was no longer gray, but pranked it gayly, as one of Monseigneur’s own pages, in a coat of green-and-gold. His own face was sharp and hard as though sculptured in Egyptian granite, and his black eyes were glittering and chill. And it seemed as though the silence would last unbroken forever.... The Sèvres clock upon the mantelshelf ticked, the wood-ashes fell from the grate with a little rustling sound.... Dunoisse could hear de Moulny’s deep, even respiration and Henriette’s agitated, hurried breathing. It seemed to him that his heart did not beat--that he himself did not breathe at all. And then the spell was broken by a woman’s soft utterance. Henriette said:
“Dear friend, your arrival is opportune. M. de Moulny has called upon me to entreat that I would use such influence as I am--perhaps mistakenly--credited with possessing--to effect a reconciliation between you both.... The misunderstanding that has divided you so long shall be cleared up, shall it not--as he wishes?” She added, looking from one man to the other with softly-beaming eyes: “I too wish this, so very greatly.... Will you not be friends, to please me?”
De Moulny’s deep voice said:
“Have we ever been enemies?”
And he held out to Dunoisse his large, thick, white hand with the fleshy, round-tipped fingers; and, as a man in a dream will unquestionably accept some inconceivable, impossible situation, Dunoisse took the hand in his. It loosely grasped and was withdrawn. Then, there had followed some moments of conventional, ordinary, social commonplace. They had discussed the Message to the Senate, and the protest of the Count de Chambord against the contemplated restoration of the Empire; the probable results of the plebiscite, and the superior becomingness of the Marie Stuart style of coiffure to a roll à la Chinoise. And then de Moulny had taken his leave, and, freed from the hateful oppression of his presence, Dunoisse could think clearly again.
Ah! could it be--without any bridging of the wide gulf of silence and neglect by any explanation--without any clearing up of that trifling matter of the command to fire, that had followed the pistol-shot at the Foreign Ministry nearly four years previously--could it be that Redskin and Alain were reconciled? With the anonymous letter festering in his memory--with the knowledge of impending banishment gnawing at his heart--Dunoisse answered No, no, no! to the question.... And then, a sudden, unexpected surge of joy lifted the poor dupe off the shoals of Disillusion, and swept him--how willingly!--back into the deceptive deeps beyond.
He broke to Henriette the news of the Eastern mission. She paled ... cried out ... threw herself half-swooning--bathed in tears, upon his breast. Cruel, cruel Monseigneur!... Her beautiful bosom heaved as she inveighed against the implacable tyrant at the Élysée. She vowed she would not submit to such a heartless abuse of authority.... She would go to the Prince, she declared--throw herself before him--plead upon her knees for a reversal of the pitiless appointment. And Dunoisse dissuaded her with difficulty from adopting such a course; inwardly blessing the power she reviled, for the discovery that, after all, he was loved....
And indeed, during the few, the very few, days that intervened between the reconciliation with de Moulny and Dunoisse’s departure, Henriette’s passion, that shriveled rose of Jericho, soaked in warm tears from lovely eyes, regained its pristine color, bloom, and fragrance. The ancient glamour was upon all earth and heaven, and the cup once more offered by those exquisite hands to the thirsting lips of her lover brimmed with the intoxicating wine of old.
LXIV
Their parting.... Ah! what pen could do justice to their parting, when, upon a certain fateful morning, some eight days subsequently to the decision of Monseigneur, Dunoisse tore himself away from Henriette and his revived and radiant happiness, and left Paris, en route for Eastern Roumelia, and the debatable ground one day to be contested by the forces of the Sultan and the Czar.
Not without pith of meaning is the old saw that warns the traveler never, once having started, to retrace his steps. But the overworked pointsman’s blunder that sent the engine of the South-Eastern express crashing into the rear-wagon of a goods-train outside the station of Joigny--a disaster without resultant loss of life to any portion of the human freight--must be held responsible for Dunoisse’s return.
His route had officially been pricked out viâ Marseilles and Constantinople. Owing to the lapse of hours that would intervene before the next Southward-going mail could be boarded, the bi-monthly steamer plying between the ports above named must certainly sail without Dunoisse. Somewhat bruised and shaken by the shock of the accident, and furthermore possessed with an intense nostalgia for Paris and Henriette, her lover yielded to the tempting, urgent voice; left his baggage--soldierly in its economy of bulk--in charge of the officials at Joigny--and burdened with nothing more cumbrous than a traveling-bag--took the next train for home.
* * * * *
The city clocks were striking twelve when he left the terminus of the Rue Mazas and rattled in a hired coupé over the Bridge of Austerlitz. It was a windless night of numbing cold, and the long double line of the quays, and the sluggish river winding between them, and the arcs of the bridges spanning the wide, turbid flood, were only indicated by their lamps, twinkling brightly as a jeweler’s emeralds and topazes out of wrappings of fleecy cotton-wool. No bivouac-fires reddened the foggy sky; no troops occupied the public places or patroled the streets; no blood-bedabbled corpses were being carted to the cemetery; yet Dunoisse was irresistibly reminded of the night of his return from London, on the morning that had followed the master-stroke of Monseigneur. Perhaps that association threw the first splash of cold water on his enterprise.... But he told himself for the hundredth time that he was going back to Henriette, who loved him; and that her joy at the unexpected sight of him would clear away all shadow of doubt and misunderstanding from between them for evermore.
It seemed a long drive. You are never in such a red-hot hurry as when you are speeding to the wreck and ruin of an illusion upon the jagged rocks of a test. But at last it was over. He dismissed his cab at the street-corner, in the interests of the joyful surprise he had in view--and reached the familiar gates on foot. No need to use the little pass-key, carried in Dunoisse’s waistcoat-pocket, and admitting by the smaller portal, framed in the corner of the larger one, for--thanks to some neglect of the portress--the little door stood ajar; it swung inwards at the first touch.... And thus Dunoisse stepped noiselessly into the dark, foggy courtyard, passed under the tall, stately, familiar portico--conjectured rather than seen in the draping veil of fog--and drew out the latch-key of the de Roux’s hall-door. But that door was also open--upon this night of wonders every obstacle seemed to dissolve like foam or mist-wreath under the touch of the man who was hurrying to prove his mistress faithful. For, stripped of all ornament or pretense, you have in these five plain words the reason of Dunoisse’s return.
The servants had gone to bed, or had been given leave to spend the night elsewhere. A small lamp burned feebly in the deserted vestibule, like Faith trying to keep itself alive in a soul that has learned to doubt. The drawing-rooms were in darkness, their wood fires mere cores of red under gray crusts of ashes. Beyond, the green-and-gold boudoir, with a brilliant fire and many lights, gleamed like some transcendent emerald at the end of a tunnel of ebony blackness. She was not there. But the door of the bedroom that was fragrant and pink as the heart of a blush-rose--that stood a little ajar....
Moving with long, swift, eager strides over the velvety carpets, Dunoisse reached the open door of the bedroom. With a heart that throbbed as madly as on the first night that had seen him cross its threshold, he looked in, and saw Henriette.
In sharpest contrast with the brilliancy of the green-and-gold boudoir, the rose-colored bedroom, save for the blazing wood-billets that dispensed a dancing light and a delicious warmth, was all in shadow. At an angle, facing towards the fire, stood a low, broad ebony couch without a back or foot-piece, covered in rose-color matching the shade of the draperies of the windows, the walls, and the tent that in the graceful fashion of the era, sheltered the bed. And Henriette lay--in beauty revealed rather than covered by a thin diaphanous robe of lawn and lace--outstretched upon the couch beside the fire, her shoulders raised upon its rose-colored cushions, her lovely head thrown back and drooping as in the chaste abandonment of sleep, toward the shoulder whose curving whiteness shone pearly between the tresses of night-black hair that streamed across it and downwards; partly veiling the white arm, and the delicate hand that rested, palm upwards, on the leopard-skin that was spread before the hearth.
Surely, surely, she was very pale.... But never had she seemed more alluringly, irresistibly fair in the eyes that drank her in, and could not slake their thirst in gazing. And surely she was very still.... The colorless lips, parted in a faint, mysterious smile, gave forth no sighing breath; the pulses at the base of the rounded throat did not throb perceptibly--the full, goddess-like bosom that gleamed through the mist-thin fabric of her robe did not rise or fall with the deep even respiration of natural, wholesome slumber. But not until Dunoisse had crossed to her side--bent down and set his burning kiss upon those smiling lips, did he realize that they were icy cold; that the teeth were rigidly clenched behind them, and that the half-open eyes were fixed in a glassy stare. And in the poignant horror of the discovery he cried her name aloud, and snatched the inert form into his embrace--lavishing frantic caresses and adoring words upon her--imploring her to revive ... to look at him ... to answer ... if only by a sigh.
In vain his prayers. The silent heart against which his cheek was pressed gave back no throb; not the slightest answering pressure might be won from the nerveless arms he laced about his neck--not the faintest nerve-thrill told of life in the beautiful body, whose most secret chords were so well used to respond to the urgent call of Passion. She was cold, white and silent as the dead.
Could this be Death indeed?... Dunoisse drove the haunting query desperately from him. He remembered with relief a flask of cognac that he carried in an inner pocket of his traveling-cloak; and tried, out of the silver thimble-cup that was screwed as a cap over the stopper, to pour a little of the spirit between the small, set teeth. When her head rolled helplessly on his supporting arm--when the liquid, finding no entrance, flowed away at the corners of the pale, stiff lips, adding a coarse spirituous tang to the delicately-fragrant atmosphere of the bedroom, the dreadful doubt assailed Dunoisse more fiercely. Baffled, sick with despair, he laid her back upon the couch, freed himself tenderly from the long strands of night-black hair that clung to his rough traveling clothes and tangled in his buttons--struck a match and lighted, with what a shaking hand!--the rose-tinted wax candles upheld by porcelain Cupids on the mantelshelf. Holding one of the candlesticks on high, he sent a questioning glance about in search of smelling-salts or some more powerful restorative. And not until then did the tell-tale disorder of the place yield up its ugly secret. He knew all.
The disorder of the luxurious bed ... the little table of two covers that stood near its foot, bearing a plate of caviare sandwiches partly consumed, a cut pâté and two champagne-bottles, one prone and empty, the other partly full, gave testimony there was no disproving. Even without the clinching evidence furnished by the heavy, fur-lined overcoat that sprawled over the back of a chair--the masculine stock that curled about an ivory hand, loaded with rings of price--the black satin cravat that lay upon the lace-draped toilette table, its twin diamond pins, linked by a chain of gold, winking and gleaming like mocking goblin-eyes. And was not that a man’s white glove, lying where it had been dropped upon the rose-colored carpet?... Mechanically Dunoisse crossed the room and picked it up. And it was no glove, but a crumpled note, penned in violet ink, in Henriette’s clear, delicate characteristic hand, on her white, satin-striped paper. And it told all, crudely and without reserve, to the poor dupe whom it flouted and mocked.
“UNRULY MONSTER,--
“Yes! ’tis true! Don Quixote has departed. Naturally I am inconsolable!--but since you profess yourself convinced of the contrary, you may come at the usual hour. The servants will be disposed of--the doors will be open.... When we meet, perhaps I may be----
THY HENRIETTE.”
LXV
He turned upon her with her letter in his hand; with fierce upbraidings struggling for utterance at his twisted lips; with a heart full of bitter hatred ready to outpour upon her. She quelled his madness--she struck him speechless--he tried to curse her, but could find no voice.
For a nameless, awe-inspiring change, had crept over her. The shell-white features were now pinched and drawn. Beneath the broad white brow the partly-open, coldly-glittering eyes were sunk in caves of bluish tinting. Hollows had appeared beneath the cheekbones; while about the mouth, whose drawn, livid, parted lips revealed the little clenched pearly teeth, that disquieting shadow, cruelly suggestive of dissolution and corruption, showed in a broad band; and beneath the swelling curves of her bosom a deep, abdominal depression now sharply marked the edges of the lower ribs. And thus Dunoisse, familiar with Death as a soldier may be who has met the grim King of Terrors on the battle-field, and in the camp, and on the pallets of field-hospitals, told himself that beyond all doubt Death was here.
And so it was that he could not curse her for a harlot. She was dead, and Death is pure.... She was dead, and Death is meek and helpless; at the mercy of the smallest, most despicable, weakest thing that walks or crawls or flies.
Looking upon Henriette, you would never have guessed that here lay a wanton, stricken down at the height of a delirious orgy of forbidden pleasure. Rather you thought of a snow-white seagull, lying stiff and frozen on a stretch of sunset-dyed seashore, or a frail white butterfly, dead in the heart of a pink, overblown rose.
So the madness burned itself out in the brain of Dunoisse as he stood looking at her. The blood in his veins ran less like liquid fire, the cold sweat dried upon his skin, the roaring in his ears lessened--he could now control the twitching of his muscles that had ached with the desire to kill with naked hands a man abhorred--to batter out all semblance of its luring beauty from the white, white face against the rose-hued background. If the prone figure had given sign of life!--but its pallor as of snow--its rigidity and breathlessness remained unaltered. And presently, looking upon her, lying there; laughter and tears, love and anger, forever quenched in her; disarmed of her panoply of conquering gifts and graces by pitiless Death, a bitter spasm took him by the throat and a mist of tears came before his eyes. He trembled, and for lack of power to stand, sat down upon the foot of the sofa, near where the stiff little feet he had so often kissed peeped out beyond the border of her robe of lawn and laces. His haggard eyes were fixed upon the cold and speechless mouth. And in its rigid silence it was eloquent.
* * * * *
“Dear friend,” the dumb voice seemed to say ... “sweet friend, whose pleadings won me to deceive--and whom I have in turn deceived--the heroic virtue of Fidelity having no part in the pliable, silken web of my nature--listen to me, and be, not pardoning--but pitiful!...”
“God knows,” said Dunoisse sorrowfully, “how I pity you, Henriette!”
“Born with the fatal gift of maddening beauty--endowed with the deadly heritage of irresistible fascination,” went on the silent voice, “ask yourself how it was possible for your Henriette to pass through life untainted by the desires--unbranded by the scorching lusts of men? Be fair to me, dear friend. Question--and give answer.”
Dunoisse asked himself the question. There was but one reply.
“Look around,” said the voice, “and you will see my prototype in liberal Nature. The bird that builds too low; the rose that does not hang her clusters high enough; the fruit whose very ripeness calls the wasps to settle and feast. Yet who says to the bird, ‘Build higher! Another year you will not lose your eggs so!’ Does anyone bid the rose change her nature and lift her perfumed blossoms far out of reach of plundering hands? What if one cried to the peach, ‘Do not ripen, stay crude and sour because thus you will not tempt the yellow-and-black marauder.’ Would not the pious tell us that to expect Heaven-taught Nature to alter her ways at our bidding were to be guilty of mortal sin? Then, what of us Henriettes--born to yield and submit, give and grant and lavish? Are we much more to blame, do you think, than the bird, than the rose, than the peach?”
“Oh, my poor, frail, false love!” said Dunoisse, “how wise Death has made you!” For his bitter anger and resentment were vanishing as the silent voice talked on:
“We drink in the sunshine of admiring glances at every pore,” said the voice. “We thrive on smiles and compliments. All young and handsome men--even those who are neither young nor handsome--are our comrades or servants--until the moment arrives when the comrade becomes tyrant, and the servant commands! Then, what tears we shed!--for our dearest dream is always of pure passion--unrewarded fidelity. We are continually planting the gardens of our hearts with these fragrant, homely flowers, and Man is always tearing them up, and setting in their stead the vine of nightshade, deadly briony, sad rosemary, bitter wormwood and sorrowful rue. And as long as the world shall last, the cruel play goes on....”
The half-open, glassy eyes were dry, but the silent voice had sobs in it. And it said:
“We give all we have for love, and the love is never real, only pinchbeck of flattery and kisses; or the cruel love of an urchin for a kitten--of a baby for a tame bird.... You who sit by me to-night, dear friend, have never loved me!... Have you ever sought to find my Soul within the house of flesh that caged it? Have I not seen you smile in mockery when I knelt down to pray?”
“You are wrong--absolutely wrong, Henriette!” he wished to say to her. But a scalding wave of guilty consciousness broke over him. He dropped his shamed face into his hands and groaned.
What had he ever sought of her but sensuous pleasure? She spoke truth--their intercourse had never risen for an instant above the commerce of the flesh, to the plane of things spiritual--he had never even thought about her Soul. Now he seemed to see it, a wandering flame no bigger than a firefly’s lamp, or the phosphorescent spark the glow-worm carries--wandering through the illimitable spaces of Eternity,--looking in vain for God. Whose very greatness made it impossible for the tiny, flitting thing to find Him....
* * * * *
“Forgive me, Henriette!” he faltered, pierced to the quick.
“There is more to forgive,” the still voice rejoined, “even than you believe. When you found me lying cold and stark in the midst of toys and trifles--when you read the letter that proved me treacherous and vile--think! was it genuine grief that you felt, or the savage wrath of baffled appetite? And even now----”
“Have mercy! Spare me that at least!” he begged. For he knew that in another instant she would bare his own mean, petty self before him--she would tell him that even then a strife was going on in him between a cowardly cur who wanted to steal away and leave her ... and a man of common honor and ordinary decency who said: “It is my part to stay!”
For both of these men knew, fatally well, that when the morrow’s sunshine should find her lying there--when the outcries of her terrified maids should summon eager, curious strangers to gather about and stare at their dead mistress; when the scandal of the manner of her death should leak out; the world and Society, that had so good-naturedly blinked at her liaison with Dunoisse, would not spare him his well-earned wage of contumely. There could not fail to be a Medical Inquiry ... the Police would be called in to clear up suspicious mysteries.... Also, de Roux would be recalled from Algeria ... there would be a duel ... consequences much more unpleasant than a duel.... For Monseigneur would not look with complacency upon the return of an emissary proceeding to the East upon a special mission.... Worse still, that stealthy return from Joigny might be held to have been prompted by a sinister motive. Men had been imprisoned--men had been hugged headless by that Red Widow the Guillotine upon less suspicion than Dunoisse had tagged to himself by the mere fact of his secret return.
* * * * *
The porcelain clock upon the mantelshelf struck one and the half-hour, as Dunoisse sat thrashing the question out--to go or stay with her? And presently he raised his wrung and ravaged face, and got up and stood beside the sofa, looking down at Henriette....
“Poor soul!” he said. “You knew me better than I knew myself. I am a purblind idiot, Henriette, who, having profited by your unfaith--looked to you to be faithful. Now I am paid in my own coin--it is my pride that suffers--not my love. For as you say, and rightly!--I have never loved you. Yet, love or none, because that other man has fled and left you, and because that viler self that lurks within counsels me to follow--I stay beside you here.”
LXVI
When the porcelain clock upon the mantelshelf had chimed the hour, a cautious footstep had crossed the flagged pavement of the foggy courtyard. Dunoisse had not heard it--he had been listening to that speechless voice. But now that the stealthy footsteps traversed the parquet of the vestibule--stumbled over an unseen ottoman in the darkness of the large drawing-room--threaded the next, and crossed the threshold of the green-and-gold boudoir, he heard it, with a creeping icy chill, and a rising of the hairs upon his scalp and body. He remembered that he had not shut the courtyard gate, or the hall-door behind him, upon this fatal night of revelation.... It occurred to him that some prowling night-hawk of the Paris streets might have entered in search of food and plunder, or that the intruder might prove to be a sergent de ville, or the watchman of the quarter, or even a gendarme of the city patrol.... But when a large, powerful, well-kept white hand, with fleshy, round-topped fingers, came stealing about the edge of the partly-open door, and pushed it cautiously inwards--Dunoisse, with a savage leaping of the blood, knew--even before a tall, bulky figure loomed dark upon the threshold, seen against the brilliance and glitter of the boudoir--that the man who had left her had returned.
* * * * *
That the man was de Moulny he had never for one instant doubted. Now the muscles of his folded arms tightened across his breast like cords of steel, his keen face was set like granite, and a cold, fierce light of battle blazed in his keen black eyes. It was good to Dunoisse that this hour should have come, setting Redskin face to face with his old, treacherous enemy, stripping all pretenses from their mutual hate. The loaded pistol in the inner pocket of his coat gave him the advantage--supposing de Moulny unarmed.... But he knew how to equalize the chances.... They would toss for the shot, or throw away the Colt’s revolver. Men can kill men with no other weapons than their muscular naked hands.
In the first moment of his entrance, de Moulny--newly out of fog and darkness--blinking from the radiance of the boudoir, did not observe that the bedroom held any occupant besides the rigid, white form upon the rose-colored sofa. His light blue, strained and slightly bloodshot eyes went to that directly. His jutting underlip shook, a question was written large upon the pale, heavily-featured countenance. “Has she moved or breathed since I left her?” it seemed to ask, and the negative of her immobility wiped a latent expectation out from it. And then----
Then a purposely-made movement of Dunoisse jerked de Moulny’s head round. A sudden reddish flame leaped into the pale eyes as they took in the slender, upright figure in the rough gray traveling surtout, standing at the foot of the couch with folded arms.... And though de Moulny did not palpably start, yet his big jowl dropped a hair’s-breadth. A slight hissing intake of the breath betrayed his perturbation and surprise.
“Th’h’h!”.... And then in an instant the old de Moulny was back, arrogant, cool, self-possessed as ever. His blue eyes were hard as polished stones as they met the black eyes of Dunoisse. He said, pouting his fleshy lips, sticking his long obstinate chin out, looking arrogantly down his big thick nose in the old familiar manner:
“An unexpected return invariably leads to unpleasant explanations. But in the present case I design to make you none, further than that I came here by appointment.” His smile was intolerable as he added: “Not for the first time. And I will meet you when you please, and where you please. You have your choice of weapons, understand me--from ordinary dueling-pistols to a buttonless foil!”
Dunoisse, lividly pale and sharp-faced, looked at his enemy, showing his small square teeth almost smilingly, breathing through his nose rather loudly, just as Redskin had done upon the day of the boyish quarrel at the School. Even as then, he was conscious of being a little sick at the pit of his stomach: the sight of de Moulny, big and blond and brutal, his light-brown, curled hair and reddish whiskers glittering with fog-beads, his hard eyes bloodshot with the night’s excess, his immaculately-cut black frock-coat buttoned awry, its collar turned up to shield the bareness of his thick white bull-neck from the chill night air, its lapels dragged over the breast to conceal the absence of a cravat, his usually irreproachable trousers and polished boots dabbled with the mud of the streets, affected Dunoisse with a physical nausea as well as a malady of the soul.... To the picture of the libertine confronted by the grim mower in the midst of his garden of stolen pleasures, was added a touch of absurdity in the little white-papered, red-sealed chemist’s parcel, held with a certain air of fastidious helplessness between a finger and thumb of one of the large, white, carefully-tended hands. And as though Dunoisse’s glance at this had reminded de Moulny of its destined use, he said, holding his head high, speaking through his nose, deliberately:
“Monsieur, since we have arrived at a complete understanding, it appears to me that delicacy and good taste should counsel you to retire, and leave me to minister to the very evident need of our lovely friend.” Meeting no response from Dunoisse, he added, with his insufferable smile, glancing towards the still sleeper on the rose-hued sofa:
“She swooned in my arms.... These delicate sensualists live hard--to put it brutally. ‘One must pay the piper,’ as the English say,--in the end,--for being perpetually attuned to concert-pitch.... And the servants had all been sent out of the way!... Imagine my predicament!... A senseless woman on my hands, and not another woman within cry.... Thus it was, that in my present, slightly compromising state of déshabille, I sallied out to fetch a surgeon--an excellent, discreet, and reliable person, who--as luck would have it--has gone into the country to operate upon a patient, and until to-morrow is not expected to return.... Failing him, I knocked up a chemist, who supplied me with these drops--warranted infallible”--he held up the little parcel--“adding some advice gratis as to treatment of the sufferer, involving--unless I err--friction over the region of that conjectural feminine organ, the heart....”
De Moulny, seeming bigger and more blond and brutal than ever, moved with his long, padding elastic step,--recalling the gait of a puma--to the sofa. Dunoisse, even quicker than he, interposed, and said, baldly and simply, speaking between his close-shut teeth, and looking straight in the other’s stony eyes:
“If you touch her I shall kill you! Take care!...”
“Oh, as to killing!” de Moulny said with a shrug.... But he did not carry out the intention expressed in that long, catlike stride. He moved to the hearth, where the wood-fire was glowing with a comfortable warmth that tempted him, and said, daintily picking up his splashed coat-tails, as he lolled with his heavy shoulders against the mantelshelf:
“Permit me to point out that your utterance savors of the dog in the manger. You have failed to revive Madame--and I am not to try. You would rather Death laid his bony hand upon that eminently lovely person than that I did.... Well!... Be it so!”
He shrugged with an elaborate affectation of indifference--even feigned to yawn. Dunoisse answered hoarsely, turning away his sickened eyes from him:
“Death has already touched and claimed her. She is Death’s--not mine or yours!”
De Moulny’s big jowl dropped. He shot into an erect attitude, dropped his coat-tails and made, rapidly and stealthily, the Sign of the Cross. His widely-open eyes, their distended pupils swallowing up the pale blue irises, seemed to leap at the white shape upon the sofa; and then relief relaxed the tension of his muscles, and his thick lips curled back in an almost good-humored smile. He said, in Alain’s old way:
“Nom d’un petit bonhomme!--but you are mistaken, my excellent Dunoisse!--fortunately most damnably mistaken, as it turns out! Even from where I stand, the quiver of an eyelid,--the stirring of a finger--the faintest heaving of the bosom I am not to touch, may occasionally be perceived. Use your own eyes, and they will convince you.” He went on jeeringly as Dunoisse, shaken by the furious beating of his heart, dizzy with the shock of the unexpected, and dim-eyed with newly-stirred emotion, moved unsteadily to the couch, and, stooping, noted the signs, faint but unmistakable, of reviving vitality in Henriette. “Aha! I am now enlightened as to the secret of your phlegm--your apathy--your air of fatalistic composure!--‘Dead,’ not a bit of it! She will live to dance over de Roux’s grave and yours, my good sir, and possibly mine.... But if she had been,” went on the big, blatant voice, with a scoffing gayety in it that set the still air of the rose-colored bedroom vibrating as though unholy wings had stirred it, “with that solid common-sense which she has found stimulatingly refreshing,--in contrast with the moonstruck vaporings of a person who, being present, shall go unnamed--I should have made myself scarce in double-quick time. For to be compromised with a living woman is sometimes sufficiently embarrassing, but when it comes to a----”
“Be silent--be silent!” said Dunoisse in the thick, quivering voice of overmastering anger. “Have you no sense of decency?--no manhood left in you?” he demanded, “that you mock and jeer at a woman who cannot even answer in her own defense? Our meeting cannot be too soon!--my friends will wait upon you in a few hours. Meanwhile, relieve me of your presence!” He pointed to the open door.
De Moulny, maintaining his position on the hearthrug, hunched his shoulders as though a shrug were too elaborate a method of conveying indifference. His solid jowl was doggedly obstinate, and a red light shone behind his pale blue eyes. He said:
“You have anticipated me--forestalled me, General, in pointing out that--to quote the old adage, ‘Two are company.’... Might I suggest that you should prove your own claim to decency and so forth by effacing yourself from a scene where--to put it obviously--you are de trop...! The equally obvious fact that your presence here will not conduce to Madame’s complete recovery, does not seem to have occurred to you. Face the situation. You took her from me--I won her back from you. A shameful struggle,” said de Moulny brutally, “a paltry triumph.” His thick lips rolled back in the contemptuous smile. “But be that as it may, the fact to be confronted, we have shared a strumpet, you and I!”
The words seemed so like a brutal blow in the white face against the sofa-cushions, that Dunoisse could not restrain an indignant ejaculation. De Moulny resumed, with the same intolerable coolness:
“Since neither of us will give place, one must listen to the other.... Whether Madame there hears matters very little to me.... There is very little of either delicacy or decency in the present situation. We might with truth be likened,” said de Moulny, “to a couple of dogs growling over a bone.”
He threw out his big arms and drew the air into his broad chest greedily.
“’F’ff! There is a certain relief in discarding conventionalities--in being, for the nonce, the natural man. For years, without a spoken word,--as men used before language was invented to swaddle Truth in--we have hated one another cordially, my very good Dunoisse. You had robbed me of a career--and though--when a rogue had come to me babbling the story of that trick of fence that did the business, I had stuffed his jaws with banknotes not to tell--one does not forgive a theft of that nature.... I think you upon your side resented--with a good deal of reason--a silly oath I had exacted--an oath you had at last the common sense to break. Nom d’un petit bonhomme! I should have broken it ages before you did.... But at least you learned the art of succeeding without money.... There is not one man in a million who understands that!...”
He stuck out his hammer-head of a chin in his old way of reflection.
“I should have let you alone if you had not--for the second time--come between me and my desire. That day at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, when the pistol-shot.... Aha!” cried de Moulny, Dunoisse having winced at the allusion, “I see our disputed possession has told you the pretty little tale.... But it may be, with some embroidery of imagination (if she overhears what I say she will thank me for putting it so charmingly).... Possibly with some divagations from the rigid rectilinear of truth! For it amounts to this, that de Roux had borrowed from the regimental money-chest; the money had to be replaced, if unpleasant consequences were to be averted. And knowing me to be the most recent and infatuated of all her worshipers, Madame applied to me to make up the sum.”
His smile was an insult as his cold eyes went to the face upon the sofa. And an indefinable change seemed working under the rigid features, as one may see to-day in the partly-masked face of the anæsthetized patient outstretched upon the operating-table, a reflection of the torture caused by the surgeon’s dexterous knife.
“Perhaps she lied--as women will--and really wanted the money for her bonnet-maker or her Bonaparte,” went on de Moulny. “Still, I knew de Roux to be not afflicted with scruples--he had scraped by the ears out of even more questionable affairs. And I saw my chance, and got together the money.... One was a poor devil in those days--and thirty thousand francs meant much. And she took them--and threw me over. As one might have expected,” said de Moulny, dourly, “if one had not been a fool!”
“She repaid--” Dunoisse began in a strangled voice; and then it rushed on him that she had kept the money. His eyes fell in shame for her. De Moulny went on:
“Pass over that affair of the order to fire. Did it do otherwise than make your social reputation--smooth your path to possession of the woman I desired...? By Heaven!”--the speaker’s pale eyes gleamed, and he clenched his white hand unconsciously,--“when you lied with such gorgeous effectiveness before the Military Commission of Inquiry, I could have bitten myself, as patients do in rabies--knowing that I had been forestalled again! After that, your road lay open--your names were bandied from mouth to mouth all over Paris.... Your intrigue was Punchinello’s secret; she made no mystery of it when we met. But”--the brutal smile curled the fleshy lips--“perhaps it may interest you to know that I was given to understand that your proprietorship was from first to last a question of Money. And that, supposing all those Widinitz millions had been mine to pour into de Roux’s insatiable clutches--Henriette would have been sold to a man she loved, instead of to a romantic weakling whom she despised and laughed at ... even from the first ... do you hear, my good Dunoisse?”
A hoarse sound came from Dunoisse’s dry throat. It deepened the ugly smile upon the sensual face of de Moulny. He said, opening and shutting one of his big white hands, with a mechanical, rhythmic movement as he went on, slowly, deliberately, pouring himself out:
“Why do men love women?” He added with an accent of utter contempt: “They are either fools or jades! Play with them--use them as tools--they can be edged ones.... But to love them--to set the heart on them--to stand or fall by their truth or treachery--that is not for a man of sense. When I loved Henriette--she fooled and flouted me.... When I had ceased to love, and only desired her--when the day came that saw hundreds of millions stored up under my hand at the Ministry of the Interior, I knew that my time had come--do you comprehend?” He rubbed his heavy chin reflectively. “She was more charming than ever--she wanted to find out how far I would go to get what I wanted--I suspected her of spying for the Count de Morny--I had long known her to be a tool of the Prince.... So I did not show her the keys of the Orleans strong-boxes--I did not even let her know where they were kept; but I made other concessions to her, concessions that I knew were harmless....” The pale, glittering self-satisfaction in his eyes was intolerable, as he added: “They served me excellently!--and for the time being pleased her just as well!...” He added, meeting Hector’s glance of loathing: “Possibly you think me a scoundrel?... I am completely indifferent to your opinion. To pursue.... She persuaded me to join the circle at the Élysée. We met at the suppers there.... You must know I am a gourmet and a sensualist. Those suppers were everything one could imagine of a Regency. The corruption--unimaginable. The license--complete....” It was as though de Moulny smacked his lips as he added: “Yes!--the Élysée is the shortest road to Hell I know of.... But it was not until the night preceding the coup d’État that I--attained the supreme end I had had so long in view.”
He breathed heavily, and blinked his pale eyes in luxurious retrospection. Dunoisse drove his nails deep into the palms of his clenched hands, restraining the almost irresistible impulse to dash his fist in the evil, sensual face.
“Be reasonable, my excellent Dunoisse,” he heard de Moulny saying, in almost coaxing accents. “Quit the field--accept the situation--remove from the path the obstacle of yourself.... For Henriette de Roux has long been very weary of you!... Only her exquisite womanly insincerity--the characteristic softness of her nature--have prevented her from forcibly breaking her connection--has held the hand that would otherwise have administer to you the final coup de grâce.” He added, with his smooth brutality:
“Endeavor to understand that your foreign expedition has been arranged for you!--to conceive that the anonymous letter you previously received was considerately planned in the notion of opening your eyes. And receive from me the very definite assurance that where you once were ruled I am the ruler; and what you once imagined you possessed I hold and possess, and keep while it pleases me. For Henriette de Roux is my vice,” said de Moulny, dully flushed now, and with his heavy face quivering. “No other living woman has such fragrance and savor, such daring originality in the conception of sheer evil.... You have never appreciated or understood her! You were the peasant set down to the pâté of truffles--the village fiddler scraping out a country reel upon a priceless Stradivarius--the thistle-eating ass who sought to browse on tuberoses and orchids!... What?... Have I roused the devil in you at last?”
For Dunoisse, with the savage, sudden lust to kill, thrilling in every nerve of his supple body, had leaped at the bull-neck, as a slender Persian greyhound might have launched its sinewy strength at a great mastiff; and locked together in a desperate grip, Alain and Redskin struggled for possession of the prize.
The slowly-dropping, envenomed taunts, the gross sensual hints, the vaunted luxury of possession had kindled and fanned Dunoisse’s own cooling passion to a white-hot furnace-flame. What did it matter if Henriette were vile, as long as she remained what this man appraised her--a perfect instrument for fleshly joy? She was his by right of ownership--no other man on earth--least of all this big blond brute, conceited, fatuous, arrogant in very depravity--should have and hold her but Hector Dunoisse.
So Redskin and Alain struggled for possession of her, panting and swaying to and fro amidst the delicate toys and plenishings of the rose-colored room; crushing frail chairs and spidery whatnots under the weight of their grappling bodies; grinding the costly trifles swept from tables and consoles into powder under their reckless, trampling, muddy-booted feet.
A vivid recollection of the duel at the School leaped up in Hector as he listened to de Moulny’s thick panting, and saw the savage, livid face, its paleness now blotched with red, coming nearer and more near.... And suddenly he realized that his antagonist was the stronger.... The supple muscular strength once distinctive of Dunoisse had deteriorated; possibly from excess of pleasure--from excess of labor it may be.... He nerved himself for a supreme effort, but the superior force and greater weight of his antagonist were surely gradually crushing him backwards across the sofa-foot, with those big white hands knotted in a strangling grip about his throat.
Choking, he freed one arm, and with fiery circles revolving before his eyes, and a deafening sound as of many waters in his ears, felt for the revolver in the inner pocket of his gray surtout. He meant to use it.... He would have used it, in spite of his determination, but that with lightning quickness his enemy divined his intention, and captured within his own the weaponed hand.
* * * * *
“Truly, old friend,” said de Moulny’s voice, thickly and lispingly, “one must needs be prepared for tricks when one happens to fight with you....” He crushed the imprisoned hand within his own, smiling evilly, and as Dunoisse, almost with a sensation of relief, felt the cold circle of steel forced home against his own temple, de Moulny spoke again:
“Do you comprehend, my excellent Dunoisse, what plan has just occurred to me? It is very simple--just a little more pressure than this upon your trigger-finger--and you will have committed suicide.... When they find you--(an ugly spectacle)--the revolver will be grasped in your dead hand--there will not be the slightest suspicion of foul play attaching to any other person. Nothing will be involved beyond the minor scandal of Madame’s discarded lover having shot himself in her room----”
He laughed silently, puffing short whiffs of breath through his clumsy nose, his bulky body yet heaving with the exertion of the struggle, his big muscles still taut with the effort of keeping the upper-hand. His eyes were very cold, and smiled cruelly. He said, looking into the fierce black eyes that stared up at him out of the discolored face of the strangling man:
“--But as I wish to spare her an ugly spectacle, and further, because I am original in my methods of reprisal....”
The Colt’s revolver, strongly thrown, crashed through the thick rose-colored glass of the one window that was not closely curtained, and, without exploding, was heard to fall upon the soft damp earth of a flower-bed underneath. And the choking grip upon Dunoisse’s throat relaxed--the weight of his enemy’s bulky body ceased to crush him....
“Get up,” said de Moulny coarsely, “and--since you will not take your dismissal from me--take it from Madame there. Look!... She is coming to herself!... In an instant she will speak!”
It was true. Long shudders rippled through Henriette’s beautiful, helpless body. Her bosom heaved with shallow, gasping breaths. The eyes between the parted eyelids rolled and wandered blindly. She moaned a little, as though in pain.
“Awake, my white leopardess!” said the voice Dunoisse so hated. “Unclose your petals, my blood-red, fragrant flower of Sin! Mock your lovers no more with that white sculptured mask of chastity, my imperial Messalina!... Say to this poor wretch, awaiting your sentence in anguish: ‘Another lover is preferred before you.... You have had your night of rapture.... Depart! and let me see your face no more!’”
She only moaned, and feebly beat her head from side to side upon the cushions. Her eyelids trembled. Spasms, like shadows, passed over the ivory face.... Her mouth hung a little open, as her lungs drank the cold foggy air that poured in through the shattered window.... And a new idea struck de Moulny. He looked at Dunoisse, standing white and haggard and shame-stricken on the other side of the sofa. And he said, in a changed, less smoothly brutal tone, and without his hateful smile:
“This is a strange, unusual method of settling a dispute for possession, but unconventionality pleases me.... Understand, I am ready to abide by the issue, be it what it may--nor have I any objection to pledge myself by an oath....” He glanced at the wall beyond the bed-foot, where Dunoisse knew well there hung an ivory Crucifix. The figure was covered with a drapery of black velvet. And at the sight the banished light of mockery came back into de Moulny’s hard blue eyes.
“Ah, no! There shall be no oath, my good Dunoisse,” he went on, almost gently.... “Both of us have proved the brittleness of such things!... But listen, and if my plan appeals to you, accept it.... When----” He rose up, and turned his eyes to the sofa. He asked himself, musingly, with cold considering eyes studying what lay there: “Was I mistaken, or did I hear her speak?”
She had only moaned, and muttered something incoherent. De Moulny went on:
“Long years ago--when one whose name is too sacred to be uttered within these walls--lay in a swoon as deathlike and protracted as this”--his big hand motioned towards the sofa--“the first name she uttered upon her recovery, was that of her youngest son.... And I knew then--though she had never made any parade of difference between us,--that of all her children she loved me best. Then listen. Whose name this woman speaks, his she shall be, soul and body! Is that agreed, my virtuous Dunoisse?”
The cold blue eyes and the burning black eyes met and struck out a white-hot flame between them.
“It is agreed!” said Dunoisse in a barely audible voice.
“Her husband is out of the running,--a scratched horse,” said de Moulny, sneering and smiling.... “He has battened on the sale of her beauty, and climbed by the ladder of his shame. Therefore, should those pale lips frame Eugéne--it counts less than nothing.... We stand or fall by their dropping into the hair-weight balance of Destiny a ‘Hector’ or ‘Alain.’”
A silence fell. The ashes of the dying fire dropped upon the tiled hearth with a little clicking echo.... Three rivals waited by the moaning figure on the sofa in the disarranged, disordered bedchamber.... De Moulny, and Dunoisse, and Another Whose Face was hidden by a veil....
“Ah, Jesu Christ!...”
* * * * *
The Name came from the pale lips of Henriette in a sighing whisper. Then silence fell again like a black velvet pall.... Dunoisse and de Moulny, the fire of lust and anger dead ashes between them, looked with awe and horror, each in the other’s face. And stronger and clearer upon the strained and guilty consciences of both, grew the impression of an unseen Presence, awful, condemnatory, relentless, all-potent, standing between them in the rose-colored room.
* * * * *
De Moulny spoke at last, in a shaking whisper, a strange light burning behind the eyes that were like polished blue stones:
“Do you hear?... She is God’s, this woman for whose body and soul we have disputed.... Christ has claimed her!... She is no longer yours or mine!...”
* * * * *
He thought he spoke to Dunoisse, but Dunoisse had already left the Rue de Sèvres behind him. With despair eating at his heart, and Remorse and Shame for traveling-companions, he had resumed his interrupted journey--he was speeding to the Pestilential Places of South-Eastern Europe to carry out the secret mission of Monseigneur.
LXVII
Have you forgotten a trooper of Her Majesty’s Hundredth Regiment of Lancers, who, being secretly married to his mother’s milkmaid, and detected by a pigman in the administration of divers conjugal endearments--sanctioned by Church and State, but unpardonable in the hollow eyes of Sarah Horrotian--was, by maternal decree, incontinently driven--with his young bride and his good horse Blueberry--forth from the gates of Upper Clays Farm?
* * * * *
The wedded pair supped and slept that night at Market Drowsing, in a garret of the Saracen’s Head Inn. So many thirsty callers were attracted to the bar of this hostelry by the news--disseminated as soon as told--of the rupture between Sarah Horrotian and her son, that the landlord, for the accommodation above-named, refused payment.
“For--my part I praise ’e for the step you’ve taken! All same,” the landlord added, with a touch of the Sloughshire caution, “theer be no need for ’e to go telling Widow Horrotian as much. For her puts up her shay and pony here regularly on market-days--and custom is custom, be it large or small.”
At dawn, fortified by slaps on the back and a good many handshakes, as well as cold bacon, bread and butter, tea for the bride and ale for the groom; man, woman, and horse took the road for Dullingstoke Junction, whence Mrs. Joshua Horrotian was to proceed by rail to the cavalry depot town of Spurham, and await at an address supplied by her husband, his slower arrival by road.
It was a raw, cold, weeping day. A numbing wind blew between its sleety showers. As they paused on the bridge that spanned the swollen river to look their last at the farm perched on the high bleak ridge of the sixty-acre upland, a scarlet mail-phaeton rattled past behind the flying heels of its pair of spirited blacks. The trooper, recognizing the squat and bulky figure buttoned in beside the driving groom under the phaeton’s leather apron, wrapped in a dreadnought cloak and sheltered under the vast green silk umbrella dutifully held over him by the servant who occupied the back seat; reddened to the rim of the idiotic little muffin-shaped forage-cap of German pattern approved by Government, but Thompson Jowell gave no sign.
“Damn my tongue!” had come from Josh in almost a mellow tone of retrospective ruefulness.
“Whatever for, dear Josh?”
Nelly turned on her love rounded eyes of alarmed astonishment. He answered, wiping with the back of his sinewy hand a splash of Jowell’s mud from his sunburnt cheek.
“Because I doubt I ha’ made me another enemy with it, and that’s one too many, Pretty--as things are just now.” He whistled a stave of “The Ratcatcher’s Daughter” with defiant melodiousness, then broke off to say with a broad, irrepressible smile:
“To think of my having twitted of him wi’ buying spoiled hay and mildewed barley, and pitched them kilns that are worked in a name that isn’t his’n at Little Milding--along of the empty jam-tins and dead kittens and so on that ha’ been sarved out to us chaps in the Government Forage trusses--at his head. Egad! I can hardly believe it o’ myself!”
With her bonnet thrust back and falling on her shoulders, and the sweet rosiness hunted from her cheeks by the revelation of his terrible presumption, she panted softly:
“Dear Josh, you never!...”
“Ay! but I did though,” the soldier retorted, “as true as I live!”
“And him that great and rich and powerful,” she breathed. “Whatever will he do to ’e? By way o’ revenge, I mean--come he gets the chance.”
“Why, he med make more bad blood between me and mother--if so be as that’s to be done,” said Josh, meditatively tapping Blueberry’s shining neck with the end of the bridle he held--“or drop a word at Headquarters that ’ud sow salt in my bed.” He added: “By jingo! if--as seems likely--I be doomed to spend my long life sogering, I’ve done none too well by myself. Or you, poor girl, I doubt!”
His tone of pity hung bright drops on her dark eyelashes. She murmured, stroking the blue cloth that covered the broad shoulders:
“How can e’ fare to say that? Haven’t ’e married me? And the long life you talk of will be ours, dear love!--not yours to live alone.”
“The harder for you, maybe!” he said, bending his brows and setting his strong jaw doggedly. “If I were free of the Service, to earn enough to keep you in comfort would be an easy job for hands as strong as mine. But with ’em tied to the lance, carbine and sword--and my legs bent round a horse’s belly--all I am worth in the opinion of my betters is one-and-tuppence a day. You ha’ got to go into decent lodgings somewheres,” pursued the trooper, “till I can get the ear of the Officer Commanding our Squadron--and my Captain being his friend, and a free-spoken, kindly young gentleman--med be he’ll take an interest in our case. If so, the fact o’ my having gone and got married without leave--and I could punch my own head for a fool’s for having done it!--might be blinked at and got over like,--though it comes next to Insubordination and Neglect of Orders on the long list of a soldier’s sins. In which case--inquiries being made and satisfactorily answered--you’ll be allowed fifteen pence a week. It ain’t a handsome income,” commented Josh, “when you remember it’s supposed to find ’e in house-room and food and firing, but at any rate it’ll eke out what we have. Even if I’m disappointed about the Captain’s buying Blueberry, I’ve a pound or so put by in the little green purse you netted, against a rainy day. And if this bain’t the kind o’ weather that calls for it I’m a Dutchman! No!--don’t you begin to talk about your blessed little savings,” the soldier added hastily, “laid up out o’ the four pounds odd to-year my mother’s paid ’e!... There may come a use for them, before you know!”
She faltered, with the banished roses crowding back into the sweet oval cheeks, and the shy hazel eyes shunning his warm blue ones:
“And shall I have to live in lodgings always?”
“Why,” said Josh, setting his strong face ahead as he marched steadily by the side of Blueberry, “if I have luck in getting a good word from Captain Bertham, you may be took upon the strength of the Regiment as a Squadron Woman by-and-by. Which means you’ll live wi’ me in Barracks, and share a room with eight or ten married couples and their families, and maybe a bachelor or two thrown in, in case we’re too private and decent-like among ourselves.... West Indian slaves, I’m told, are allowed separate huts by their masters when they’re married. But an Army blanket or a patchwork counterpane hung on a clothes-line,” said Joshua Horrotian, with a resentful light burning in his wide blue eyes, “is good enough--according to the grand gentlemen who sit in Cabinet and call themselves the Government--to hide the blushes of a soldier’s wife!” He added, with a latent grin hovering about the mouth that was shaded by the bold dark red mustache: “Not that it ’ud take an over-and-above sized one to hide Mrs. Geogehagan’s. She bain’t a blushing sort--though I’ve seen Geogehagan’s ears as red as two boiled lobsters when she’ve took it into her head to pull ’em--the masterful catamaran!”
“Whatever for?”
The trooper’s solid shoulders shook a little. The grin was no longer latent as he replied:
“For the preservation of Discipline--or because the Corporal had stopped in Canteen when he’d ought to ha’ been helping her peel the taters or wash the babbies.... ‘Give me your ear!’--she says to ’n--and he gives it, as meek as a mouse. Ha, ha, ha!” He ceased his laughter to say in a tone not at all mirthful: “And mind you!--she’s the sort of woman you’ll have to live alongside of, if you’re lucky. As for the rest.... But there!--I’ve took oath to cure myself of griding and grumbling.... ‘Discontented,’ that’s one o’ the things Mr. Jowell called me yesterday, and for all I know the man may be right.” He filled his big chest with the keen air and puffed it out again, as though he blew away his discontent with it. “Look here! Let’s make-believe, as the children say, that all’s for the best that’s happened. I’m game if you are!”
“And sure to goodness,” Nelly put in, as the big hairy-backed hand gave the upward twist to the dark red mustaches, and the firm mouth it shaded curved in the old smile, “what wi’ Jason’s ragging and your mother’s nagging, I could no ways ha’ bided to The Clays for long.”
“No more you could, now I come to think of it!”
In cheering the drooping spirits of his bride he had heartened himself; and now he turned a brightened face to Nelly’s, and said in tones that had the old hearty, buoyant ring: “True love drove our nail, Pretty, and Good Luck may clinch it. I said to that big gentleman I angered yesterday wi’ my plain talk--as how I’d leave the crimson silk sash and the officer’s gold epaulettes a-hanging at the top of the tree for some cleverer fellow than me to reach down. But wi’ you standing at the bottom to cheer me on,” said Josh, with a great revival of energy and spirits, “damme if I don’t have another try for ’em! So remember,--the toast for my next mug of beer--which must be a half-pint, seeing as I’m a married man and can’t afford luxuries--should go: ‘Here’s to Promotion--and may it come soon!’ Hup! will ’e, Blueberry!” The soldier added as the young horse obediently quickened his pace. “You’re our best friend just now, it strikes me. For if so be as the Captain’s pleased wi’ you and buys you--there’s his money to put with the rest into the stocking--not to mention his good word for your master’s wife. Look at his ears, Pretty,” adjured Josh, beaming and patting the glossy gray shoulder. “Don’t the twitch and set of ’em seem to answer, that what he can do he will?... Talk about Dick Whittington’s Cat--and Puss in Boots, this here horse o’ mine is worth a shipload o’ such miaulers. When we get to Dullingstoke,--and it’s not but three miles farther,--suppose you hear the bells o’ the little yellow iron church in the Stokes Road begin to ring out ‘Turn again, Joshua Horrotian, Regimental Sergeant-Major!’ don’t you be surprised!”
LXVIII
But although the twitch and set of Blueberry’s ears did not fail of their significance--though the young horse was duly purchased by the kindly Captain for Josh’s troop, and the good word of the officer was not wanting in the interests of the clandestinely-married couple--the day that was to confer upon Nelly the privileges of the barrack-room and the right to revolve in the select if limited social circle where Mrs. Geogehagan reigned in virtue of her rank as Corporal’s lady--did not dawn for many, many months.
The sweet came before the bitter. Though the rose-colored glasses through which couples wedded for love invariably view the scenery of the honeymoon, could hardly disguise the fact that the lodgings--a two-pair-back in a dingy street of rickety houses in the purlieus of the Cavalry Barracks at Spurham--were squalid, dingy and dubiously clean. Yet the neighborhood presented advantages. Regimental visitors were frequent. Healths were pledged with these in foaming pots of ale and stout from one or other of the prosperous taverns in which the neighborhood abounded. And not infreqently the parting guest--counting on the liberality of a man who was not only newly-married, but had the price of a horse in his pocket--appealed to Josh for a loan, and got it. Do you call the lender spendthrift and the borrowers shabby spongers? They would have ministered to their comrade’s need--supposing their pockets had been full, while his were empty. ’Twas a way they had in the Army when Queen Victoria was young and pretty.... ’Tis a way they have still, though her grandson reigns in her stead.
You are asked to imagine the palpitating wonder and delight of Nelly’s first plunge into the giddy round of garrison-town pleasures. The Circus presented charm but not novelty--because every year when the plums were ripe, and the Fair was held at Market Drowsing, Banger’s Royal Terpsichorean and Equestrian Grand Gala Entertainment encamped upon a marshy patch of waste in the town suburbs, and foreign-complexioned men with earrings, carrying whips of abnormal length, came to The Upper Clays to bargain for oats, hay, mangold-wurzel, and cabbages--the last-named commodities constituting the elephant’s favorite bill-of-fare. Free admissions to the sawdust-strewn, horsey land of enchantment within the big creaking tent of patched canvas were granted upon these occasions--not to stern Sarah, in whose gaunt eyes spangled females capering in pink tights upon the backs of ambling piebalds, represented the peculiar progeny of the Babylonish Whore--but to her maid and man. For Jason’s chapel-going never cured him of the horseriders. In the secret estimation of the piggy man the New Jerusalem was but an immensely-magnified, unspeakably more glorious Banger’s. Not but what the lithe and supple gentleman in a sheath of glittering scales--who doubled himself into snaky knots while spewing fire--was hardly the sort of personage one might expect to meet with up here....
You are asked to be present in imagination upon the gallery benches of the Theater Royal, Spurham, upon the never-to-be-forgotten occasion when Josh took his bride to the Play. The blood-curdling melodrama of “The Ruffian Boy” constituted the principal item of the programme. Miss Arabella Smallsopp of the Principal London Theaters having been specially engaged to appear in the character of “Ethelinda,” the Baron’s Bride.
To look down from the gallery--sitting perched up there so high--and beside a husband so big, so manly, and so handsome in his uniform that the old lady in the squashed bonnet and nose to match, who sold you winkles, oranges and nuts, cried “God bless him!” as he rated her for giving short measure in the latter commodity--was in itself an experience thrilling enough to make you gasp even supposing the extraordinary mixture of paint, varnish, gas, drains, damp clothes, and heated humanity that was supplied to the patrons of the gallery in place of air, had not tickled your nose and stung your throat and eyes, making you cough and sneeze and blink....
Only two defacing smudges marred the shining page whereon Memory recorded the history of that evening. Incident No. 1 occurred shortly after a row of heads and shoulders, with musical instruments of various kinds attached to them, which Josh explained to be the Orchestra, had sprung up like mushrooms at the bottom of a big black ditch, below the line of smoky tin-screened lights twinkling at the bottom edge of a great Curtain--with a palace in an astonishing garden, and a lake full of swans, and groups of dancing ladies painted on it; marvelously beautiful, but wi’ so mortal few clothes on as to make a body ashamed to look.
It was just before a lank gentleman with upright hair had popped into a seat raised above the level of the previously-described heads and shoulders, and briskly rapping with a little black stick upon a desk, had caused the Orchestra to burst into a jumble of Popular Airs, described by a waggish young man on the back benches as a “musical bluemange,” beginning with “My Heart’s in the Highland,” continuing with “The Marseillaise”--for some reason or other vociferously applauded--and ending with “Rule, Britannia” and “Britons Strike Home.”
A young female--not so very young neither--Mrs. Joshua Horrotian couldn’t help but notice!--in spite of her vividly red-and-white complexion, and a profusion of light ringlets, tumbling out of a smart bonnet of pink satin trimmed with green ostrich feathers--a gaudy, tawdry young woman of the class we were then, as we are now--content to call unfortunate--closely followed by a tall, lean, pimply-faced young trooper in the beloved blue, white-faced uniform of the Hundredth Lancers--came squeezing her way between the row of knees on one side and the row of shoulders on the other--and plumped herself down in the vacant place by Joshua Horrotian’s side.
To the stolid vice of the country-side Sarah’s late milkmaid was no stranger. Abey Absalom’s too-yielding girl, Betsy Twitch the weeding-woman, were not the only specimens of female frailty to be found in the neighborhood of The Upper Clays. Fairs and public holidays, stirring up the muddy dregs of Market Drowsing, showed, while the naphtha-lights still flared amongst the booths--while unsteady revelers staggered homewards between the hedgerows--spectacles sordid, brutal, and obscene enough to have been worthy of the brush of some bygone Flemish painter of revels and kermesses....
Nelly had known from childhood that certain men and women habitually committed sin together; sin for which the women were locally denounced as “right down bad uns,” or “demmyrips,” or purely as whores--while the men reaped no blame whatever. She was too simple to dream of injustice--she sometimes wondered why, that was all.
The first glance had told Nelly that Pink Bonnet was a “bad un.” The whiff of cheap musk that emanated from the tawdry garments--the smell of spirits that breathed from the leering painted lips, had sprung the rattle of warning, before--in a voice brazen and hoarse with drink, excess, and midnight brawling, Pink Bonnet addressed Joshua Horrotian as “her ducky,” and asked him to “stand a drain.”
Never, never! would Nelly forget the turn that creature gave her--not if she lived to be ever so old....
With Josh, as red as fire, or the coat of the infantryman sitting in front of him, saying in a sheepish, bashful voice, not at all like his usual robust one:
“Excuse me, Miss!--I’m a married man!”....
Why Pink Bonnet, on the receipt of this intelligence, should become vociferous and abusive, calling Josh a low, imperent soger, and a great many worse names, Mrs. Joshua could only wonder. Indeed, so forcible and lurid became her language, that cries of “Order!--Or-der!” rose up about them; and the row of backs of heads in front became a row of faces, full of round, staring eyes and grinning mouths. And then a huge man in a Scotch cap and shirt-sleeves looked over a wooden partition at the back of the gallery, and presently came striding down the narrow gangway, followed by a chimney-pot-hatted policeman. And Scotch Cap said, beckoning with one immense finger: “Come! Out o’ this, Polly, since you dunno’ how to behave yourself!” Upon Polly’s launching into a torrent of sulphurous invective, the policeman added, warningly: “You ought to know by this time, my gal, that cussing makes it worse!” And as Polly--still fulminating threats of ultimate vengeance, wreaked upon somebody’s eyes, heart, and liver, was hustled out and vanished, followed by her tall, pimply-faced companion, Nelly whispered to Josh, as a vast breath of relief heaved the big ribs that pressed against her side:
“Her were quite a stranger to ’e--weren’t her, Josh, love?”
And heard him answer, as he wiped the standing sweat-drops from his high, tanned forehead, with a big hand that shook a little:
“I never saw her before in all my born days.”
LXIX
But of course Josh knew Pink Bonnet--with the peculiarly intimate knowledge that is entertained by the soldier for the garrison prostitute. He pitied himself for the rough cross-chance that had brought her to the theater--with the man who had taken the place he had indifferently vacated--and set her down, blazing with gin and jealousy, on the bench, cheek-by-jowl with the man who had thrown her over to marry a cleanly maid.
Ah, poor young wives! How little they dream of the muddy secrets hiding behind the clear, candid eyes they gaze in so trustfully--how little they suspect what lips the beloved lips have kissed! If you told them: “This hand that strays in your hair has tangled in the tresses of the harlot,” they would laugh you to scorn, or scorch you with their burning indignation; so unshaken is their faith in the manly hearts of whose swept and garnished chambers none ever held the key before them--whose most hidden secrets they believe they have been told. Alas! the poor young wives!
As for the husbands of the wives, by a law immutable as the foundations of the world we tread on, Pink Bonnets must be paid for in the end. Find me a smart to outdo that of lying to the dearest who never dreams of doubting you! thought the trooper, in homelier phrase than this. Sickly heats coursed through his thick veins, and the taste in his mouth was bitter as Dead Sea waters. The big, tawdry theater, packed full with eager pleasure-seekers, gave a sense of emptiness that frightened him.... Nelly nestling by his solid side, seemed miles and miles away.... For the shadow of an old, wellnigh forgotten sin had come between them, and was pushing them apart. To counteract the mental conviction of guiltiness he repeated to himself all the trite clauses of the Code of Manhood, and employed, in imaginary defense of conduct denounced by an unspecified accuser--all the clinching arguments he knew.
“Ye wouldn’t have a man live aught but a man’s life would ye?”
Followed by:
“’Tis true I ha’ run wild a bit--drank a bit,--betted a bit--frequented loose women, and the rest of it!--but so have all the young chaps I ever knew or heard of. Why should I set up to be better than the rest?”
Then:
“Women ye see--they be made different from men! ’Tis easy for them to run straight--that is, for the good ones. They can resist temptation better than us--being so much weaker and less sensible than we!”
The Curtain went up as the unseen person with whom Josh argued--and who never answered any of his arguments,--was getting the best of it, to the trooper’s mind, Mrs. Joshua clutched the big blue cloth-covered arm with a little squeal, as the Interior of the Robber’s Cave amongst the Rocks was revealed by the combined light of a calcium moon and a brazier with rags dipped in spirits-of-wine blazing in it. Anon, to his band of cloaked, bearded and villainously slouch-hatted myrmidons, entered--to tremulous music from the fiddles, down the rocks, Giraldi Duval the Ruffian Boy.
Never was such an out-and-out scoundrel. For certain unspecified reasons it was comforting to Joshua Horrotian to have somebody to disapprove of just then. The light and trivial sins of a whole regiment of British soldiers, would, if piled into the balance against the crimes of the Ruffian, have certainly kicked the beam.
It was necessary to assure Mrs. Joshua, holding on to the stout blue arm and shivering deliciously, that the whole thing was make-believe. That the Ruffian--unloading pocket after pocket of stolen jewelry and bags of guineas--bragging of his enormities, and quaffing draught after draught from an immense gilt goblet painted red inside--was a respectable gentleman “off.” That he had not just drunk a stranger’s blood with his thirsty dagger in mistake for the beauteous Ethelinda’s; and that Innocence and Virtue as personified by that fair creature--whose scorn had driven the Ruffian to raving madness--though doomed to suffer hideous things in the course of the evening (unless the playbill deceived people who had paid their money for places) would certainly triumph in the long-run.
How enchanting Ethelinda was, when the Castle Hall, having hurried on from both sides and fallen down in the middle--and a brace of retainers in black wigs having brought on a table and two chairs--she appeared in pale blue satin, spangles, curls, and feathers, leading the Baron’s children--Ethelinda being the Baron’s lady, it was even more possible to cry out upon the Ruffian--and telling the faithful Catherine and her dearest prattlers all about her latest escape from Giraldi’s unhallowed hands.
The Baron was sure that in spite of the valor of a husband’s arm, the Ruffian would have another shy at running off with the lady; and so he did, in the very next scene, dressing up in old Margaretta’s cloak and hiding in her cottage; and terrifying Ethelinda into vowing never to quit her Baron’s castle again, even though myriad summers decked the land with flowers and feathered songsters upon every tree tempted the ear with joyous songs of love--until the Ruffian should have yielded up his ghost upon the gallows.
* * * * *
Depend upon it, our forerunners of the forties were not half so ignorant and unsophisticated in matters dealing with Dramatic Art as we suppose them to have been. They knew, as well as we do, that Life, as represented on the stage in that era, was impossible, unreal, and absurd.... But just because it was so unlike Life they loved it. They preferred Action to Art--and got it.... They reveled in impossible, absurd sentiment, and high-flown hyperboles. Impromptu love-matches, extravagant, gaudy crimes, and greased-lightning repentances gave them the purest joy. When you went to the theater you left Reality behind you. You expected the combined smells of paint, glue, and varnish to be wafted over the footlights. The last thing you wanted was the odor of new-mown hay.
The Gothic Chamber in the Baronial Castle was another thrill--the evening was a succession of them--with more of the tremolo passages from the fiddles in the Orchestra, heralding the advent of the Mad Lady--whose daughter--you have of course forgotten--had been immolated by the Ruffian in mistake for Ethelinda. To see the poor thing trailing about looking ghastly in white draperies, staring glassily at nothing in particular, and blowing lamps out with deep sighs, drew pitying tears from Mrs. Joshua, and even caused Josh to sniff and gulp and surreptitiously wipe his eyes. Both were certain she would be seen more of presently; and so she was--coming on in the very nick of time--just as the Ruffian, armed with a drawn sword, had burst from behind the tapestry in Ethelinda’s bedchamber--to terrify him into rushing off, just in time to meet the Baron, with his drawn sword, in the Gothic Gallery.
Clish--clash! went the broadswords in the dark--stage darkness at that era being but a shade or two less obscure than a November afternoon.... Chains, repentance, vengeance for the Ruffian, union, joy, felicity for the Baron and Ethelinda. And the Drop came down upon a general picture, to rise again and sink once more, and rise--ere the tidy semicircle of legs of both sexes had quite disappeared from view--amidst round upon round of clapping; piercing whistles---the pounding of approving sticks, enthusiastic umbrellas, and urgent boot-heels, and reiterated shouts of “Bravo!” and “’Core!”
The interlude of “The Lancers” followed, and then the great queen curtain fell amidst the strains of “God save the Queen,” and then the sensations of the evening were over. All save that last one at the very end.
It happened when the packed gallery-audience, howling like Siberian wolves from sheer high spirits and good temper--swept down the long steep flight of stone stairs and out into a muddy side-street, and filling this mean alley from wall to wall, crushed out at the upper end of it, to encounter the turbid flood of humanity roaring from the gullet of the Pit Entrance that gaped just beyond the gilded portals by which the gentlefolks who came in carriages and wore Evening Dress, and didn’t seem to enjoy themselves half as much as folks who sat in cheaper places--were admitted to the Grand Tier.
There was a good deal of joking, laughter, squeezing, and jostling, and some pocket-picking beyond a doubt.... The shiny chimney-pot hats, smug whiskered faces, and bright brass collar-numbers of policemen bobbed up and down amongst the crowd--there were several ugly rushes, accompanied by oaths and screaming; and Josh and Nelly, carried off their feet by one of these, were swept up some steps leading from the gilt-pillared portico previously referred to, as some well-dressed Circle and Box people were coming down them, headed by a tall and handsome young gentleman, who, with a gallant air of being in charge of something particularly precious and breakable, was bending down to whisper to the young lady who leaned upon his arm....
Josh hadn’t the faintest intention of bumping into the lady, a slender, pretty young creature in a white velvet mantle--trimmed beautifully with swansdown--and who was wearing a garland of pale blush roses on the loveliest fair hair you ever did see. But as the trooper ruthfully stammered his apologies, the gentleman--becoming aware of the blue, white-faced uniform, brusquely interposed, saying in a tone by no means pleasant to hear:
“You infernal scoundrel! how dared you jostle the young lady? What do you mean by it, you blackguard, hey?”
Josh answered with a sullen frown:
“I’ve said a-ready, sir, as I didn’t go to do it, and that I’m as sorry as man can be!”
The gentleman retorted, in a cold savage way, speaking between his set teeth:
“If you had meant it, you dog, you would have been soundly thrashed for your insolence. As it is--take that!”
That was a sharp blow across the trooper’s mouth from the lady’s fan, carried in the white-gloved hand of her gallant. The ivory sticks broke, and the blood sprang, and Nelly cried out; and then, as the gentleman hurried the young lady down the steps--at the bottom of which a brougham waited--with a liveried servant holding open the door:
“You didn’t hurt the man, Arthur, did you?...” Nelly heard the young lady ask, and the answer came brusquely:
“No! though the blackguard deserved it.... Broken your fan though! Pity!... Never mind!... You shall have a prettier from Bond Street, when I get back from Town....”
Then the carriage door banged, the crowd seemed to melt away, and Mr. and Mrs. Joshua Horrotian were hurrying through the muddy ill-paved gas-lit streets, home to their lodgings. From whose dinginess the rosy glamour of the honeymoon had quite, quite fallen away....
As Josh, by special permit, was not due in Barracks before next day’s Revally, the newly-wedded couple supped on cold scraps put by from dinner,--or pretended to, for the trooper’s cut lip hurt him, and Mrs. Joshua couldn’t have eaten a mouthful, seeing him so cast down--not if you had tempted her with Turkey Soup--as understood to be consumed by the Lord Mayor of London out of a gold spoon--and Roast Venison--and betook themselves to rest. Nelly had comforted the swollen lip with old linen rags and hot water; but the swollen heart of its owner was not to be eased, even by her gentle touch.... Long after her soft even breathing had convinced him that his young wife slept, the man lay open-eyed and wakeful; staring at the narrow line of watery moonlight that outlined the edges of the square of dirty blind....
And presently he knew that Nelly had not been sleeping; for he heard her sob out in the darkness the question that could not be kept back.
“Oh, Josh, dear love! Why ever did he do it? Why should even a grand, rich gentleman have the right to treat my husband so?”
She hardly knew the hard, stern voice that answered:
“You ask why he called me dog,--and struck me? Being th’ dog’s wife, med-be ye have a right to know! ’Twas because the gaslight showed my soldier’s cloth and buttons.... We’re housed like dogs, and fed like ’em--and take our pleasures come-by-chance as dogs do--and are sometimes whipped as dogs are.... Why shouldn’t he call me dog? He was in his right--I was in my wrong! There’s little else to say!...”
She sobbed out some indignant, incoherent words of protest. He filled his vast chest with a long, deep quivering breath, and sent it slowly out again, and said, still sternly, but less bitterly:
“In th’ old days, dear lass, when, as I’ve heard tell, Leprosy were common in England, smitten folks went about th’ roads and byways, sounding bell and clapper to warn wholesome people out of their tainted way. In some such manner--as I have no learning to word as should be--my uniform, that ought to be my honor, is my shame, in the eyes of my superiors and even many o’ my equals. And gentlefolks like him and his, shrink from the rub o’ the soldier’s sleeve as if it carried th’ pest. Now you and me’ll speak no more of this, my Pretty. Let it be buried deep--and covered up--and hid away.”
She promised amidst tears and wifely kisses, and thenceforwards the sore subject was touched upon no more. But Nelly was to learn that there are some things that, however deep their grave be dug, and though whole tons of figurative earth be heaped above them, cannot be kept buried. Long after the trooper’s wounded lip had healed and the small scar left by the ivory fan had paled and vanished, she saw the bleeding scar.
LXX
Blueberry’s purchase-money had long been spent--Josh’s hoarded pound or so had melted, crown by crown, out of the green netted purse,--the last shillings of Mrs. Joshua’s small store of savings had been swallowed up by those three shrieking needs of Humanity--more particularly Humanity reared under the inclement skies of Great Britain, for Food, Fire, and Shelter--before capricious Fortune relented in some degree towards the poor young lovers; permitting the missing certificate of their marriage at the yellow iron church at the bottom of the Stoke Road near Dullingstoke Junction, to be discovered within the covers of that sacred volume, the trooper’s “small book,” tucked snugly away in a fold of the parchment binding.
A copy of this talisman being forwarded by Josh’s friendly Captain to Sarah Horrotian, with a request for a written testimony to the respectability of the young woman who had married her son, elicited from the widow an inky chart indicating vanity, light-mindedness, lack of religious fervor, ingratitude to benefactors, and carelessness in making-up the market-butter, as the principal rocks and shoals upon which the esteem of an employer would be most likely to suffer wreck. Beyond these categorized failings, in Christian justice (since the young woman was proven virtuous and no to-yielding trollop) Sarah had no more to add.
Perusing her epistle, Josh’s troop-Captain whistled plaintively. For the crime of getting married “off the strength” was in those days, as it is in these, the blackest sin upon the soldier’s list of minor offenses. Confronted with a problem of no ordinary toughness, the Captain betook himself and his difficulty to the Adjutant, an elderly officer of astuteness and experience, who, while maintaining a well-earned reputation as a rigid disciplinarian, had a heart in the right place. Over cigars and brandy-and-water the case was thrashed out....
“’Man is, as I understand you, in the very devil of a tight hole,” said the Adjutant, knocking a two-inch ash off a long, dry, deadly-looking Trichinopoly cheroot. “Only thing possible for you to do for him under the circumstances would be _im_possible--for a conscientious officer--you quite understand? So I take it you’ll simply wash your hands of Horrotian and his love-affairs--instead of sending in the mother’s letter as testimony of character--and applying to Headquarters for permission for your beggar to get spliced. Having obtained that, you would--supposing you to be the kind of man I quite understand you not to be--put in the Certificate of Marriage--previously being careful to upset the ink-bottle over the place where the parson filled in the date!... Understand, I speak unofficially, when I say that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the mild deception would pass muster. Specially in the present case--the C. O. being uncommonly groggy about the eyesight; and objecting to spectacles on the grounds of their giving away a man’s age. Officially speaking, if such a course of conduct were brought to my knowledge, I should instantly report it--do you understand me? And the consequences would be serious--consumedly serious, my dear fellow! For Rule and Routine are not skittles to be bowled over by privates who have kicked over the Regulations and married without the permission of their Commanding Officer. And Favoring is a thing to be avoided--I’m sure you’ll understand!”
The Captain understood perfectly; and, though he rather overdid it with the ink-bottle--causing not only the date, but the names of the contracting parties to vanish under a sable lagoon of carefully dried writing-fluid--the charitably-conceived plot was successful, from beginning to end.
Those iron wheels of Administration--sorely hampered, even in these modern days, with that entangling medium known as Red Tape--did at last revolve without crushing the last hope of an ill-clad, hungry girl who was soon to be a mother. The hand of Official Authority was extended to Mrs. Joshua Horrotian with a weekly stipend of fifteen pence. By grace of the Officer Commanding the Squadron, Nelly--no longer of the depressed sisterhood of dowdy Paris yearning outside the sentried gate of that grim Paradise, the Cavalry Barracks--was admitted; privileged to bear her remunerated part in the getting-up of officers’ linen, the lavation and mending of troopers’ undergarments, as in the sweeping and scrubbing of passages and floors. Yet another day dawned that saw her an inmate of the long, bare barrack-room, where Mrs. Geogehagan--in virtue of her social status as Corporal’s lady--resided with her husband and her young family, in a neat three-sided villa of patchwork quilt, at the upper, fireplace end....
* * * * *
When the pale-faced, shabbily-dressed, shy young woman was brought in with her light box and her meager bundles, by her husband, the room seemed already full of soldiers and their wives and children. The din of voices beggared description. Moggy Geogehagan was crying herrings at the top of all.
It is not to be supposed that the herrings were actually in evidence; but the raucous shriek with which Moggy--ere wooed and won by her Corporal--had vaunted these marine delicacies--fresh and saline--was justly famed throughout her native city of Dublin. It leaped three streets, to waken shattering echoes in the alleys beyant them--the suburbs knew it--you heard Moggy coming, leaving a trail of fish and headache behind her all the way from Donnybrook to Irishtown....
* * * * *
The troop-room was entered from the upper end of a long, slate-flagged, ground-floor passage, smelling of potato-peels and boiled cabbage, and with coal-bunkers at the more distant end, under the iron-shod, iron-railed staircase. The walls were whitewashed, with patterns of damp bricks showing through; and had no other ornament than iron shelves and hooks, from which depended shining arms and various soldierly accouterments and trappings; the floor was of bare boards, clean-scraped and well-scrubbed. Long rows of cot-bedsteads, made in telescopic fashion so as to occupy half the space during the day that they took up when expanded by night, were ranged along the walls, with rolled and strapped up mattresses upon them; and not all the beds were screened off by rope-suspended counterpanes, or cast-off horse-rugs, from the rake of the public eye. Down the middle of the room ran heavy wooden tables on iron trestles, affording accommodation--on the backless benches that appertained to them--for eight married men with their wives and children; and the two bachelors who occupied opposing couches at the draughty end nearest the door.
Three or four men, and perhaps half-a-dozen women were sitting on the benches. Moggy Geogehagan herself, a short black pipe in her mouth, superintended the cooking of some pap for a regimental baby, in a small tin saucepan on the hob. Geogehagan--a stoutish, baldish trooper, with large red ears--Nelly could not but suspect the fundamental reason of the excessive development of these organs--was sitting on a three-legged stool, engaged, by the aid of a lighted candle, in dropping sealing-wax on the end of a new clay pipe.
There was a momentary lull in the deafening Babel. Then:
“Hooroo, Jude!” said Mrs. Geogehagan, with graceful brevity, rising up to the full extent of her six feet odd of stature, setting her vast elbows akimbo, and surveying the scared intruder with the eye that did not squint while the other swiveled round to make sure that her cookery was not burning. “Will any gintleman or lady presint condescind,” she pursued in a tone of raking irony, “to be afther inthrojuicing me to the bit av’ gintility that’s dhropped in to pay us a marning call?”
“With your good leave, ma’am,” put in Josh, with a more submissive tone and less confident air than Nelly would have ever expected of him, “this is my young wife, who--as I’ve explained to you already--has had the good fortune to be entered on the Regiment’s Married Roll, after nigh on two years of delay. And I take the liberty, among comrades, to hope she’s not unwelcome to any here present?--knowing of no reason why she should be!”
* * * * *
He looked about him, and there was an assenting murmur, and the seated men got up to shake hands, and the women, after a moment’s hesitation, did the same. All save one, more tawdrily dressed than her companions, and with a great many light yellow curls, who kept her face turned persistently away.
“Gi’ me your hand, Mrs. Horrotian, ma’am!” said Mrs. Geogehagan, advancing with great ceremony and stateliness. She added, as Nelly complied--in a soaring shriek that made Mrs. Joshua jump and flush nervously:
“Jems!”
“Is it me you’re wantin’, Moggy?” said bland James Geogehagan.
“It is!” said Mrs. Geogehagan severely, “an’ the Divil mend your manners. Rare up on the ould hind legs av’ you, and bid this dacent young wife av’ Horrotian’s welcome to the Rooms.” She added, as the Corporal complied: “For we may bless ourselves there’s men in the Rigiment that has more dacincy than to stand up for-ninst the clargyman or the priest wid a wagtail av’ the gutther! I say ut in the brazen face that’s lookin’ at me now!”
There was no mistake about the face that confronted the indomitable Mrs. Geogehagan, ambushed in a forest of egregiously-curled light ringlets, with blazing eyes set in it, and flying the scarlet flag of battle in cheeks that wore the brownish stains of ingrained rouge. Nelly’s hazel glance went to it timidly; and then--even if the pink bonnet--sadly the worse for wear--had not hung on a peg driven into the whitewashed wall behind, she would have recognized it with the same sinking of her heart. For it belonged to the flaunting woman who had accosted Josh upon that unforgettable evening at the theater; the patchouli-reeking, gin-perfumed creature who had thrust a red, ringed hand under the trooper’s stiff, reluctant elbow, and had called him ducky, had asked him to stand drink.... Oh! how glad was Mrs. Joshua that hand had not been offered like the rest!... Never could she have demeaned herself to touch it, not for diamonds and gold....
Meanwhile it had been dawning in the slow brain of the tall, thin, pimply young trooper who had been Pink Bonnet’s companion upon that memorable night, and was now sitting affectionately in her pocket, that the utterances of Mrs. Geogehagan were leveled at his wife. He had applied for permission to marry, and the inquiries of the Commanding Officer had been satisfactorily answered. There were persons who made quite a capital living--in those days as in these--out of whitewashing the feathers of the grimiest of soiled garrison doves.
You saw Trooper Toomey, yellow in the face and scowling, lumbering up at the nudge of an imperative elbow, from the form he had bestridden, with the air of a man nerving himself for a fight.
“Look a’ here, I’m blasted if I’ll stand this!”--he was beginning, when Mrs. Geogehagan cut him short.
“Toomey, me fine man,” she said almost mellifluously, “av ye show them dirty teeth av yours at me, ’tis taking lave of your mouth they’ll be with the dhrive in the gub I’ll land you,--so shut ut--an’ sit ye down!”
Thus cautioned, Toomey snapped his lank jaws together, threw his long leg across the form, and sat down sullenly, leaving Pink Bonnet to enter the arena alone.
In high, shrill accents she demanded to be informed without reserve whether she, the speaker, was or was not the lawful married wife of a low-bred white-livered ’ound what was afeared of standing up for her against them that for all their back-talk and sauce--was nothing but Irish Scum--and would, if all was knowed that might be knowed!--be held unworthy to sweep up the dust of her feet, or to eat off of the same table with her!...
“Hooroo, Jude!--an’ is that the talk you have?” retorted Mrs. Geogehagan, with overwhelming irony. “Married you are, bedad!--an’ proud av it as a mangy bitch wid a new tin collar. As for Toomey there!--sure, pay-cocks wid their tails spread is less consayted, I’ll go bail!” She broke off as the Dinner Call sounded; plunged at the hanging tray above the long table, and began--as did several of the other women--to rattle down the plates and basins, crockery mugs and wooden-handled knives, in an orderly jumble upon the upper end of the board, while the sulky Toomey, seizing upon two very large, very bright, and very deep tin dishes, and hanging a tin pail over his arm, hurried out to the cook-house to get the mess for the Room. And in his absence, such men as had been taking it easy without their belts, coats and stocks, put them on again, and the women tidied their hair.
* * * * *
You subsequently beheld Mrs. Geogehagan in her glory, serving broth, boiled meat, cabbage and potatoes, in strictly equal helpings, into the various bowls and platters assembled on the board. This onerous task being completed to the general satisfaction, the men chose their portions first, and were succeeded--according to the husband’s seniority of rank--by their wives. Then Mrs. Geogehagan, standing beside her Jems in front of the short form that stood at the upper end of the table--pronounced a pithy grace, which ran--unless my memory trips--something after this fashion:
“May Christ and the Four Evangels bless this mate!... Bad scran to that villain av’ a throop-cook! Sure, the praties is burraned agin!”
LXXI
The door was thrown open by an Orderly Sergeant during the progress of this, Mrs. Joshua’s first meal in Barracks, and a gruff bellow of “Attention!” caused a cessation of the clashing of knives, and a general uprising about the table heralded the entrance of the Officer for the Day. He was a blushing subaltern, fair-haired and nicely-mannered, who said a pleasant word of welcome to Mrs. Joshua, and, being preceded out of the room by the Sergeant, earned a favorable comment from Mrs. Geogehagan by not forgetting to shut the door.
After dinner the men adjourned to the Canteen for malt liquor, and the women strolled out, or gossiped among themselves. Tea-time meant for nearly all of them a snack of bread and cheese, washed down with beer--the fragrant leaf being eight shillings a pound in those days. Yet Moggy Geogehagan never failed to dhraw a raking pot upon the fire-cheek. She would as soon go without duds, she proclaimed, as widout her dhrop av’ tay. To porther, consumed in the pewter pots with a cauliflower head on, Moggy was, as was her Jems, exceedingly addicted. Sometimes under the influence of the beverage the worthy couple quarreled. And upon these occasions--probably feeling the need of maintaining herself in an upright position--the Corporal’s huge helpmeet would ask him for the loan of his ear.
Helping to undress, wash and tuck the children into their truckle beds, and washing-basket cradles, gave the young wife quite a homelike feeling. It was at Roll-Call--when every trooper not on duty stood to his bed and answered to his name--that the cheeks of Sarah’s ex-dairymaid began to tingle and burn.
She had screened off her bed and her husband’s with an old curtain and her shabbiest shawl, by the aid of clothes-line and corking-pins, nails and hammer.... Now, when the Sergeant had followed the officer out, and Josh--having been warned for First Relief of the Guard--had hurried on his greatcoat, belt, and pouches,--taken his lance, sword, sling-carbine, plumed cap and gloves from the iron shelf and the hooks in the wall immediately above the bed-head,--stuffed a hunk of bread into his pocket, kissed her and jingled out with another man detailed for duty--it dawned on Nelly--silent in the midst of all these women and their men--who laughed, quarreled, kissed, sang or cursed freely and unrestrainedly, and without the slightest regard for the convenience of their neighbors or the feelings of the diffident stranger--that she and Josh had got to go to bed to-night, and every night for years to come, in the midst of this deafening din; under all these curious, or indifferent or evil eyes....
You are to imagine the two great foul-smelling tubs brought in--and the imperative trumpet-call “Lights out!” turning the perpendicular crowd into a horizontal one--the smelly, noisy gaslit hell--for it seemed nothing less to Nelly--into another of stifled laughter and whispered words ... of blackness, and stench, and worse.... You may suppose the homely domestic Virtues ranged side by side with the fouler vices on the huckaback-sheeted, brown-blanketed, straw-stuffed palliasses. Be a little sorry for the country girl, accustomed to retire at curfew--rung even to this day in remote English villages--with her flat candle-stick to her clean and quiet chamber over the great farm kitchen; and sleep in lavender-smelling linen, lulled by the rush of the Drowse under its three bridge-arches, unawakened by the crying of the hunting owls as they moused along the rick-eaves and raided the sparrows’ nests....
* * * * *
The great tubs were not the only things that reeked in the long, stuffy, vile-smelling room. Things were said that scalded the ears of the young wife, things were done of which she had never dreamed....
If she had had her man’s strong arm about her, she would have hidden her face in his breast, and, with his hard hand covering her little ears, have sobbed herself to sleep. But she was alone--in a void of dreadful darkness, populous with goblins hideous and grim.... Realizing this, and being well advanced upon the road that ends in a full cradle or empty arms, an hysterical access seized the poor young thing.
Her sobs, her cries and writhings--for strange, sharp, piercing pangs began to be added to the mere mental tortures--at length attracted the attention of those who waked, and roused those who snored.... Iron bedsteads creaked, relieved of heavy bodies--a candle-end flared in a lantern at the Corporal’s end of the room.... The stalwart figure of Moggy Geogehagan, arrayed in an ancient watch-coat, with her head tied up in a red-spotted handkerchief, and a blue yarn stocking tied round her neck--a certain cure for cowlds!--was illuminated by the candle’s yellow flicker, demanding to be inforrumed av the rayson av the outrajis hullaballoo?
Receiving no reply, the indomitable Moggy strode to the quarter whence the crying came. You saw her lift the hanging shawl and disappear behind its meager screen. From within her voice proceeded, pitched in a key less raucous than was usual:
“’Tis her Woman’s Hour that has come too soon upon the poor young crayture!... Let a brace av dacent women that are mothers, come quickly widin to me here!”
Ah! they were no longer troll-wives, grim female goblins of a strange nocturnal underworld! With one touch of the magic wand of Sympathy, brandished in her big red fist, did Moggy Geogehagan transform them into beings of warm human flesh and blood.
They left their beds and gathered round the flimsy tent of shawl and counterpane that housed the timid sufferer. Brawny women and scrawny women, little women and big women; women half-naked and not at all ashamed; women who habitually retired to rest as fully clothed as any Boer’s vrouw. Pity and Compassion, hidden in these rough natures as silver in lead, or gold in quartz, or the ruby in its rough brown matrix of corundum, came shining to the light. The sheep with the goats, the “dacent” with the disreputable--they vied with each other in doing what they could. Even Pink Bonnet rose to the emergency, vindicating her oft-vociferated claim to be a woman, after all....
* * * * *
There was a gaunt bare whitewashed room with a rusty stove and a double row of moldy pallets in it, that was termed--with irony none the less grim because unconscious--the Barrack Hospital. No place was set apart where the soldier’s wife might be tended in sickness, or bring forth her babe in peace; but thanks to Moggy Geogehagan and the two dacent women, and the rest that made a living wall of themselves between the poor young mother and the strange male eyes she dreaded so--the pale, rainy dawn that climbed over the high spiked walls of Spurham Cavalry Barracks, brought with it a new young life.
Thus Joshua Horrotian, coming back, yawning and shivering, at the expiration of his allotted term of hours On Guard, was met upon the threshold of the troop-room by the lady of the villa near the fireplace, big with news that made him stare.
“’Tis a grand boy, God bless it!--though he kem before he was joo, bedad!” trumpeted Mrs. Geogehagan, opening a chink in the clean, but yellowed flannel petticoat that had something that squirmed inside....
“And God bless you for a good woman, Mrs. Geogehagan!” stammered Joshua Horrotian. He added: “But oh! my poor girl! To ha’ gone through her trial under the eyes of a crowd o’ strangers, was cruel hard on her!”
“Hutt!” said Moggy scornfully, hushing and rocking the baby. “’Tis as well to get used to the worrust at firrust. What’s natheral can’t be desprit,” she added, quoting a favorite proverb of her land. “And she has sinse, and pith in her, begob she has! ‘Scrame out!’ I sez to her in the nick of the danger--‘if ye’d ever rise from that bed, scrame out, and not in!’ And scrame she did till the hearers blessed themselves. Pass me your arrums to rack, an’ take the child!”
But Josh, looking dubiously at the sleeve of his great-coat, whereon the lice of the guardroom crawled, hesitated to obey....
“Phyaugh!” said Moggy, with a toss of the head--adorned with the red-spotted handkerchief--that brought a quantity of coarse black hair, mightily resembling the tail of her husband’s charger--tumbling down her back. “What matter for the like av thim ginthry! All the weeneen asks is an honust man for his dadda, and a dacent young crayther for his mammy--such as her widin there,”--she jerked her head towards the distant end of the troop-room--“wid a breast av milk to bate the Queen’s” (who was popularly understood just then to be rearing a royal bantling after the natural method). “Hould out your han’s, I bid ye,” commanded the golden woman, “and take and bless your son!”
Joshua obeyed, for she would have cried herrings upon him in another minute.... And as he took the squirming bundle, he sniffed, and something splashed upon the yellow flannel petticoat. But Moggy had turned her back on him, and was racking the arms away.
LXXII
At St. Paul’s Cathedral, beside the glorious bones of England’s elder idol, the Admiral of the empty eye-socket and the vacant sleeve, the grand old white head of England’s soldier-hero was laid to rest. The Army was Chief Mourner, the Nation followed him to the tomb. Britons had heartily hated him as Minister--as military leader they adored him. Nothing was remembered in that parting hour but what they owed to him. His funeral wreaths were hardly withered when,--with some noise of cheering from the Officers’ Mess at lunch-time, echoed from the Sergeants’--who were having dinner--caught up by a squad dismissed from drill, and vociferously joined in by heads that were thrust from troop-room windows, it was made known at the Barracks of the Hundredth Lancers that the gentleman who had got himself elected President of the French a year or so previously, had now proclaimed himself Emperor of that nation. Upon the subject Mrs. Geogehagan was as bitterly sarcastic as Mrs. Geogehagan alone could be.
“Hooroo, Jude!” said she. “Cook him up wid a crown on! Sure there will be no houldin’ him now--such will be the proide and consayt av the cobbler’s dog!”
“And will it do us any good--the gentleman’s being made an Emperor?” asked Mrs. Joshua Horrotian, who was sitting on her bed, nursing the infant Sarah, while little Josh, now a sturdy red-haired toddler of two years old, was dragging a headless wooden horse about the well-scrubbed floor.
“Why, none as I can think on,” somewhat moodily returned Mrs. Joshua Horrotian’s husband, who sat upon a bench not far off, engaged in doing what he would have technically termed “a bit of sogering”--represented in the polishing of divers chain-straps, buttons, badges, and belt-buckles to the brightest point of brilliancy attainable by the use of scraps of “shammy” and whitened rag.
“Unless,” he added, “being well-disposed towards our country and our people, he med-be were to ask us to go snacks with ’n in a European War. With the Pruskis or th’ Ruskis--that be showin’ their teeth just now at the Turkeys--there baint much to choose between Foreigners anyway,” said Joshua oracularly. “Not but what,” he continued, with an afterthought, “they French Frogs be foreigners, too. And us have fought ’em in the Duke’s day--and learned ’em the taste of a beating. ’Twould be oddish, now I come to think of it,” said the trooper musingly, “for we to take ’em for Allies at this time o’ day! And howsomever friendly this new Emperor may call hisself, there baint no gettin’ away from the truth of his being the nephew o’ the man as we boxed up in St. Helena--and his being, by reason o’ that, a poor, out-at-elbows, shabby kind o’ beggar--till his luck took the turn. ’Taint in Nature to suppose he’s as uncommon fond of us as he makes out. I’m dodgasted,” said Josh, employing the Sloughshire imprecation, “if I should be in his place! What be ye thinking of, my Pretty?”
For Nelly was looking at him across the baby, with a dubious wrinkle between her hazel eyes.
“Could I love ’e, I do wonder,” she breathed in the ear he leaned to her, “supposing you’d went and killed a live man!”
“It wouldn’t be a man, Pretty--it would be an enemy!” explained the trooper in all sober faith.
“But a man for all--of live flesh and blood!” Her sweet underlip turned downwards like a grieved child’s. The trooper said, after a slight reflective pause:
“Why, dash my button-stick! I never thought of the beggar in that light. Howsomever, the chances are that th’ boot might be on t’other leg--as far as the killing went. Halloa! Why, what’s this for?”
He had been leaning forwards, looking at the baby, and his handsome head was very near the bosom whence it drank. So, pierced by the stab of that light careless reference to the grim chances of War, Nelly had thrown her strong young arm about her husband’s neck, and snatched him to her, panting:
“Oh, if he ever dared!... The wicked--wicked----”
Mrs. Geogehagan, squatting on her own bed mending her Corporal’s overalls, cried herrings in reprobation:
“Wickud, is ut? Sure, and wouldn’t his wife--whoever she was, poor craythur!--an’ whatever outlandish, quare kind av lingo she might use to spake her mind in, be afther havin’ an aiqual right to say the same av your man?”
Mrs. Geogehagan went on to say that Active Service, meanin’ liberal Bounties, and more Pay, and the chances of Promotion, the jooty of every raal soldier’s wife was to lep out av her skin wid joy at the wind av the worrud av a War.
The intelligence being shortly afterwards conveyed to Moggy that “ould Boney’s nevey” was seeking a consort among the marriageable daughters of European Reigning Sovereigns, she cried more herrings on the outrajis impidence of the man.
“A mane little jumped-up spigareethahaun!... Offerin’ himself to ivery King’s daughter in Creation before the sate of his throne is warrum!... Begob! we’d have him axing Queen Victoria herself to stan’ up before the priest wid him--supposing herself wasn’t suited wid a betther man!”
His Imperial Majesty’s repeated failures to secure a suitable alliance caused Moggy exquisite gratification. She relented towards him a little upon his officially-announced determination to follow the dictates of his heart, and tread the flower-strewn path of connubial happiness, indicated by the implacable hunting-whip of Mademoiselle de Montijo. Public Securities went down two francs; Court jewelers, dressmakers, tailors, modistes and florists, wine-merchants and confectioners, danced like happy motes in the golden rays of Imperial Patronage; and Marquises, Dukes, and Counts of Napoleon I.’s creation--who had crept out of dark forgotten corners when the Empire came in again--cleaned the dust off their forelegs, and spread their crumpled wings, and buzzed like joyous bluebottles about the tables being spread for the Wedding Banquet. Most of the nobles of the defunct Monarchy danced to the tune Monsiegneur played them. But the ancient Duchesse de Viellecourt and the venerable Marquis de l’Autretemps, and the younger scions of the Old Régime--these would not shake a leg for him, however he might pipe.
But Paris was very gay indeed, blazing with new uniforms and newer bonnets,--bristling with lances, bayonets, and expectation.... The bustle and clamor were prodigious, the rattle of drums and the blare of trumpets, the squealing of feminine sightseers crushed in the crowd--the cursing of male citizens whose toes had been pounded by rifle-butts, made thick the air. Swarms of foreigners, avid to behold the pageant, filled the hotels and boarding-houses to bursting--you may imagine the accent of Albion predominant in the salad of mingled pronunciations--you may suppose the gold of the Briton clanking royally into the Gaul’s trouser-pockets and tills.
Upon the carriage of the Imperial cortége,-- (each drawn by six white horses) the arms of the Bourbons had been effaced in favor of the Imperial Crown. Over which the golden letters “N” and “E” had been tastefully emblazoned on a chaste cerulean blue background.... The carriage was drawn by eight prancing steeds, adorned with nodding plumes. And its domed roof was topped with an Imperial Crown of dimensions that caused the vehicle to sway and to wobble; so that the Eagle perching at each corner, and the Loves and Graces painted on its panels of mother-o’-pearl and golden lacquer, shuddered as though palsied with ceremonial stage-fright.
Sixteen colossal gilt eagles perched on the hoary towers of Notre Dame, brooding with outspread wings of blessing over the nuptial solemnities. Everything that could be draped, was draped with green velvet powdered with golden bees. The nave was carpeted with green. The Canopy above the Imperial Throne, and the Matrimonial Chair upon the dais (covered with a white carpet spotted with black, to represent ermine)--was of crimson velvet, bee-besprinkled. Above the Canopy was another Imperial Crown, on which sat another eagle--apparently of solid gold.
Referring to the Imperial Wedding number of the Ladies’ Mentor--into which entrancing periodical Mrs. Geogehagan,--acting during a delicate domestic crisis as nurse to a new baby of the Colonel’s lady--occasionally got a peep--it appears the Empress--already admitted to that title by the civil ceremony, was dazzling and spirituelle in a dress and train of white velours épinglé, and a diadem of superb diamonds, with a veil of point d’Angleterre. The Emperor,--admitted to be at considerable disadvantage in point of height as compared with his stately bride,--wore the Grand Cross and Collar of the Legion of Honor, with many other Stars and Orders, above the uniform of a French General of Division,--ending in white doeskins, high boots with four-inch heels, and spurs.
Five Cardinal-Archbishops and ten Bishops tied the sacred knot between them. Hooroo, Jude! Mrs. Geogehagan blessed herself to think of that. And so, attended by Ladies of Honor, Ministers, Marshals of France, and other State dignitaries, with Foreign Envoys and Minister Plenipotentiaries, the wedding-guests and a tag-rag and bobtail of Notabilities, Personages, and gilded and upholstered Functionaries--the splendid procession returned to the Tuileries.
Nothing--observed the Imperial Press organs--could be more proper than the attitude of the people. Not a single hostile expression was heard by the official reporter along the route. A statement of the purest verity, for although the troops and the salaried hoorayers shouted “Vive l’Empereur! Vive l’Impératrice!” at certain fixed intervals, the frozen silence of the people as that leaden, puffy face of Monsiegneur’s passed by in the great creaking gilded coach beside the snow-white face of the beautiful Empress--was unbroken and profound.
He had become, perforce, accustomed to these silent acclamations, as, nodding as mechanically as any China Mandarin, he would be carried through the streets of the capital he had besmeared with blood. For though he had gagged the Assembly--swept the boulevards with discharges of grape, ridden down and sabered Frenchmen and Frenchwomen in broad daylight--locked the doors of the High Court of Justice--faked a Senatus Consultum, forged signatures to the Ballot Papers of the Plebiscite by the cartload; refurbished old Napoleon’s dusty throne--mounted the seat--clapped his wings and cockadoodled the Prince of Knaves into the Emperor of Traitors--he could not make his people cheer.
Students and grisettes, artisans and their sweethearts, might exclaim at the beauty of the Empress and the splendor of her jewels. Not one woman envied her--not one man would have changed places with him. Wherever his puffy face and leaden eyes turned, as he bowed from side to side with the mechanical courtesy of a clockwork puppet or the Mandarin of China--not a hat was raised--not a handkerchief waved,--not a voice wished him long life or happiness. The regard that met his was as bleak, and cold, and nipping as the bitter January day.
He could intern those who had offended him in distant provincial townships. In cells of civil prisons, in dungeons of Military Fortresses, he could immure others, for the term of their natural lives. He could sentence yet others to be hugged to death by the Red Widow, or have them shot; and he did constantly. But none the more could he make the people cheer.
There were faces more exalted that as coldly regarded his pretensions. To wit, those Reigning Monarchs, parents of marriageable daughters who had declined the honor of his hand. Also the young Emperor of Austria, and the King of Prussia, and more formidable than all these put together, the grim Colossus of the icy North.
By Nicholas Romanoff, Autocrat of all the Russias,--who lived as plainly as the humblest of his soldiers, and died on a sack of leather stuffed with hay--the Tsar to whom Monsiegneur--when merely Monsiegneur--had made secret and ineffectual overtures with a view to the dismemberment and division of the Ottoman Empire--the brand-new Imperial Majesty of France was treated with a distant civility that galled and stung--as possibly it was meant to do.
England, the ancient, tried, and proven ally of Russia, was presently to bind herself in monstrous alliance with the crowned adventurer. The chaste Victoria was to dance at his Embassy--visit his capital--kiss him upon both cheeks--strange pasture for lips so stainless!--and call him “Sire my Brother.”
But to Nicholas--until he became “Sire my Enemy,” he was never to be anything but “Sire my Friend.”
LXXIII
In the summer of the fateful year of 1853, a city of canvas tents sprang up, like a growth of giant mushrooms, on Chobham Common, and the evolutions of the troops encamped thereon, converted that usually bare and arid expanse of heath into the semblance of a vast market-garden crammed with perambulatory beds of the gayest and most flaunting flowers. Ere long a Grand Military Display took place under the eyes of British Royalty and various Foreign Crowned Heads--not to mention a hundred thousand representatives of the British Public, whom coaches, carriages, brakes, vans, gigs, market-carts, shandrydans, nags, and the humble efforts of Shank’s Mare had brought to the scene of action.
Do you hear the trumpets crying and the bugles calling, and the batteries of the Royal Artillery thundering from the sandy heights overlooking the arena of mimic warfare? while withering volleys of blank cartridge from a line of white-duck trousered Infantry two miles long, shattered the glass of windows at Bagshot Hall (and, it is said, at Farnborough) and--to the profound relief of the Special Artists employed by the illustrated newspapers--caused the subsequent charge of the Cavalry Brigade commanded by H.R.H. the Duke of Bambridge, to be executed under cover of a dense and impenetrable cloud of smoke, jagged through with spurting jets of fire.
The same sort of thing--strange to record--was taking place on the other side of the Channel. Upon the extensive green billiard-table of the Bruyeres, sufficiently near the French Military barrack-camp of Helfaut, the training-maneuvers of some ten thousand representatives of every service branch of the French Army were duly succeeded by a Grand Inspection, carried out by Monsiegneur the Marshal de St. Arnaud, Minister of War. A sham battle followed in the presence of the Emperor and Empress, fresh from a triumphal tour throughout the North of France.
You are to suppose the heavy brazen field-guns belching and bellowing, whole miles of Minié rifles blazing and cracking, the crowds of spectators scattering for their lives as the Chasseurs de Vincennes advanced in column at the gymnastic pace of one hundred and eighty steps a minute, and the mounted Chasseurs charged, thundering over the wet soggy ground. Decorations were distributed to distinguished commanders, and a few smart sous-officiers in brand-new uniforms. Louis David painted the beautiful Empress in the braided tunic of a Hussar, wearing a beaver with a military plume, and mounted on a handsome charger. What earthly brush, asked the Imperial Press organ in a gush of inky rapture, could do justice to the grace of the Emperor?
In sober truth, the little, big-headed man with the long body and the short legs, was a finished master of the equestrian haute école. Few men in France could handle a horse better; and as he passed along the lines upon some splendid animal, he would turn its head towards the eagle-topped standard of each regiment, compelling his beast to bow and caracole as its rider did homage to the avuncular emblem. This circus-rider’s trick, no matter how often repeated--never failed to elicit a genuine shout of “Vive l’Empereur!”
And what of the Northern potentate, England’s old friend and ally, for whose warning and instruction these remarkable international demonstrations of military power had been devised and carried out? Physically the biggest man in his vast Empire, there was no moral littleness about Nicholas. He was wary and subtle and diplomatic, but he was not cunning or sly. He was a galloping terror to dishonest, peculating officials--it is on record what retribution followed his hawklike swoop upon the Imperial Dockyard at Cronstadt, where stores and materials of war--being conveyed in at one of the three gates, and duly registered by the clerks of the Receiving Department, were by a second gate, convanient--as Mrs. Geogehagan would have said--smuggled out again, and brought back per medium of the third; once more to be debited against, and paid for by the Russian Government. Also, there was at this date--sweeping the streets of Sevastopol in company with other persons, distinctively attired, shaven in sections, and adorned as to the legs with irons--a convict who had--previously to the Tsar’s last visit to that important naval stronghold--shone glorious in bright green cloth, belaced cocked hat, and golden epaulets, as Governor of that place.
For--though this Tsar would have dearly liked to be sole master of Europe--though he would have gladly renamed the Bosphorus and built a new St. Petersburg at the mouth of the Dardanelles--though it would have gratified him to add Afghanistan and India to his dominions--though he was often unscrupulous in the spreading of nets for the catching of able men--though he would sacrifice soldiers in hundreds of thousands, did he deem it necessary for the safety of his State and his religion--though he punished Treason--real or imaginary--with the knout and imprisonment, Siberian exile or death--one cannot deny him to have been a high-minded and honest-souled, if prejudiced and narrow gentleman; who strove, according to his lights, to be just towards men, and upright before God.
There was not a drop of coward’s blood in him--those who hated him most were ready to admit that. He would, in his grandson’s place, have gone out from the Winter Palace alone to meet the strikers who carried the ikons, on that 18th of January, 1905. He threw all Russia into mourning, but he would never have marked upon the Calendar that red St. Vladimir’s Day. Nor, having converted a peaceable demonstration into a general massacre of children, nursemaids, discontented workmen, and harmless citizens--would he have sat shuddering and shaking in his guarded palace, and left his mother to play the man.
* * * * *
Though getting somewhat stout, stiff, and elderly by this time, Nicholas was still what Mrs. Geogehagan, seeing his portrait in the illustrated newspapers borrowed from the Mess by the Colonel’s lady--approvingly termed “a fine upstanding figure av a man.” After the Peace of 1815, being then a handsome young Colossus of twenty, he had cut a dashing figure at the various Courts of Europe.... English Society had adored and fêted him--adipose elderly dowagers who had at that date been famous dancing beauties, boasted of having been his partners in the then newly-imported waltz.
* * * * *
In the Memoirs of the late Dowager-Duchess of Strome--who as Lady Margaretta Bawne, was a Maid of Honor to Princess Victoria, and subsequently Lady of the Bed-chamber to the young Queen--you will find in the chapter headed “How We Danced when I was Young” a vivid description of a waltz experienced with the superb Grand Duke at one of Almack’s Balls.
“It was,” says the venerable raconteuse, “like dancing with a human cyclone. After the first glissade and twirl my sandals quitted the floor--seldom to revisit it until the stopping of the music put a termination to the furious revolutions of the dance. During the ordeal--witnessed by an admiring crowd comprising several Crowned Heads and half the notabilities of Europe--I lost my slippers--my coronet--my combs--and finally my consciousness--which returned to me--in a shock of alarmed modesty--with the resounding salute imprinted on my cheek by His Imperial Highness at the final arpeggio.”
Lord! how we had flattered and praised and quoted him--the huge hard man whom, for some occult reason, we now stigmatized as “The Northern Barbarian.” He had ceased to dance when he commenced to reign--unlike Sire my Friend, who gyrated for the admiration of his Court--as he made his charger caracole for the approval of his Army. The Emperor who, unarmed and unattended by even an aide-de-camp, had quelled an insurrection among his Guards by giving the order to pile arms in that bellowing Minotaur voice of his, would have ridden over--not before--those soldiers who did not cheer.
He had no reason to be pleased with the Ruler of the Ottoman Empire--whose tottering throne he had bolstered in 1833 and again--in alliance with England and the two leading Powers of Germany--in 1840. A Firman issued by the Sultan, according to the Latin Church the Key of the great door of the Church at Bethlehem, and a Key to each of the doors of the Altar of the Sacred Manger--and bestowing upon France the permission to inlay on the floor of the Grotto of the Divine Nativity an arrogant Silver Star,--doubtless emblazoned with the Imperial Eagle--had kindled the Autocrat of all the Russias--in his anointed character as Supreme Head of the Orthodox Church--to flaming indignation. Nor had the diplomatic representative of Great Britain at Constantinople--by terming the resulting dispute “a wordy war of denominational trivialities”--cast else but oil upon the roaring flame.
Later, when Moslem troops under Omar Pasha were dispatched by the Sublime Porte--acting under advice from a certain suspected quarter--to operate against the Greek Christian rayahs of Montenegro--a pretty euphemism for the plundering and burning of farms and villages--the torture of men--the violation of women and the cutting of children’s throats--the Barbarian of the North dispatched a small installment of fifty thousand troops into the Danubian Principalities--picketed the shaggy horses of his Cavalry with their noses against the frontiers of Moldavia--ascertained that upon a certain date the foundries of Rostof and Taganrog would infallibly carry out their contract to deliver a mere trifle of nine hundred thousand iron projectiles of all sorts and sizes--and sat down to play the game.
With movings of Divisions and Brigades, and marchings and counter-marchings. With Imperial Inspections, Reviews, and sham fights on a scale as colossal as himself. With repetitions of that effect of the vast market-garden of perambulatory beds of the most brilliantly-hued flowers, when a hundred thousand troops of all arms were maneuvered at the Camp of Krasnoé Sélo. Replying to great Naval Demonstrations at Spithead and Queenstown, Havre, and Brest and Toulon, culminating in combined visits of the French and English fleets to Turkish waters, with ominous increase of activity at Cronstadt and Revel, and menacing, ominous movements of steam and sailing-squadrons in the Baltic and on the Black Sea.
LXXIV
The well-oiled machinery of his Secret Intelligence Department--that kept him informed of every movement not only of those Powers who were his enemies, but of those who might one day become so--had long ago placed on the Barbarian’s table, proofs that the grain, forage, and salted-provision merchants of the Levant were finding a customer upon a Brobdingnagian scale in Sire my Friend at the Tuileries. That the freightage, railway charges, and import-duties upon these had been reduced to a mere nothing by Imperial Decree, and that immense cargoes were daily shipped to Marseilles and Toulon, to be stored in huge Government magazines that were being built on all sides as though in preparation for war. A little later came the news that the salted-provision, forage, and grain-merchants of Roumelia, Bulgaria, Wallachia, Transylvania and Galicia were basking in the patronage of the same liberal buyer; whose granaries and storehouses had sprung up like mushrooms on the Turkish coasts of the Black Sea. As also depots of horses, cattle, timber and wagons; the contractors who had supplied these things being bound by Secret Contracts under divers penalties....
“Not to supply grain, stores, requisites, and material to Us,” said the autocrat, shrugging a gentle shrug of calm, suave indifference, and blowing his nose in his copious, characteristic way. “Does this Bonaparte suppose the resources of my Empire to be so small that it would be possible to cripple ME by taking these precautions? Really, he lacks intelligence--or is very badly informed.”
And as a Barbarian may smile, knowing All the Russias, Poland, the Grand Duchy of Finland, and the vast grain-producing area of the Caucasus his to draw upon--(even had his State magazines and the huge storehouses upon the coasts of Mingrelia and Guria not been bursting with flour, groats, biscuits, hay, and straw) the Tsar smiled, leaning back in the big battered, chipped, ragged-armed chair that he liked best, and chewing at the feather-end of a disreputable old quill pen.
He was closeted with Gortchakoff in the Imperial study in the Winter Palace. You saw it as a big plain room, full of heavy writing-tables and bureaux. Laden bookcases full of works on Drill, Tactics, and Fortification climbed to the scagliola ceiling-frieze, and between these were stands, supporting glass cases containing colored wax models of Cavalry and Infantrymen, stiff as life, and fully accoutered, whilst battle-paintings executed by native artists--wherein the Russian Forces were depicted in the act of conquering enemies of various nationalities amidst seas of carmine blood and clouds of flake-white smoke--hung on the walls above. In an adjoining room, furnished with soldierly simplicity, the ruler of seventy-four and odd millions of men slept on a narrow camp-bedstead, with no other covering than a single rug, and in winter his fur-lined cloak. And--perhaps because his huge hereditary dignities came to him through the tainted blood of scrofulous, insane, and degenerate Romanoffs--the innumerable handkerchiefs with which the despot stanched his constitutional catarrh were scattered, thick as the leaves of Vallombrosa, on the tables, chairs, and floor.
Gortchakoff, ex-Imperial aide-de-camp and Governor-General of Western Siberia, diversely represented by our Illustrated Papers--much to the confusion of Mrs. Geogehagan--as a mild, plump, spectacled, smiling personage, and a gaunt, grim, trap-jawed Fee-Fo-Fum--had, as newly-appointed General-in-Chief of the Southern Forces--been summoned to take leave of his master before setting out--as simply as a junker returning from furlough--per telega and by relays of post-horses, for the frontiers washed by the Pruth. Now, at the close of the Imperial utterance recorded, to which he had listened in a bolt-upright attitude of respectful attention, he coughed dryly; and pulling a document from a sheaf of tied and docketed papers, placed it before the Tsar, whose head--even as its owner sat in his chair--overtopped his own.
Nicholas sniffed several times as he perused the document, which was worn in the folds and incredibly greasy; was written in the Little Russian dialect of Bessarabia, and proved to be a contract between a certain Kirilov, an Akerman dealer in timber, and the official representative of Sire my Friend, who signed himself in a bold, free, looping hand:
“H. M. A. Von Widinitz-Dunoisse. General of Brigade of the French Army. Acting Head of the Eastern European War Survey and Army Supply Department of the Imperial Government of France.”
“By St. Peter and St. Paul!” said the Tsar, blowing his nose noisily; “this Bonaparte has imagination. ‘Not to furnish supplies to the Chiefs of the Army of Great Britain, or assist her military forces in any way whatsoever!...’ Let me see the date of this!”
It bore date of three years back. A paper precisely similar--save that it was written in the Slavish Latin of Wallachia, and that the contracting party was a wealthy Boyard of that country--who bred and sold sheep, cattle and horses on a vast scale--was only three months old. The spectacles of Gortchakoff glittered like diamonds as he saw this fact sink through the calm blue eyes of the cold-faced handsome Tsar, into the big brain ramparted by the lofty forehead. Not long would Nicholas remain in doubt as to the breed of chicken that would soon chip the shell of the egg of Monseigneur.
* * * * *
“August.... Dated on the 30th of August at Kustendje,” said Nicholas, reaching out his hand to take a fresh pocket-handkerchief from a little pile of these necessaries. He added: “A vessel of our Black Sea Steam Navigation Company touches at that port once a fortnight, taking mails and passengers for Varna and Constantinople.” He added: “The railway between Paris and Marseilles is nearly completed.... This Dunoisse would be in touch with the Tuileries, easily--passably easily. He would be kept informed of the march of political events.... And Sire my Friend, was at Dieppe in the beginning of July--Lucien Buonaparte the guest of the Queen of England at Windsor.... The Secret Treaty of Alliance was signed.... The combined Fleets were anchored in the Bay of Besika. And yet, in the event of war, the ally of France is to be denied assistance!... What does it mean? Let me think!...”
He had so much of the Oriental Satrap about him, that even his terrible Grand Wazir was no more than a piece of furniture when he desired to commune in private with the other man who dwelt within himself. The short daylight died as he sat, huge and massive and silent, profoundly thinking. The great Winter Palace leaped into a blaze of brilliancy, but the core of it, the study where the Tsar sat plunged in meditation, became so dark that you could not even distinguish the gleam of Gortchakoff’s spectacles as the late Governor-General of Western Siberia stood, stiff and immovable as a statue of ebony, beside his Little Father’s chair.
“Umph! Are you there, Peter Michailowitch?” said the deep voice out of the heart of the blackness, and the Prince answered with chattering teeth--for no one daring to enter unsummoned the room where the Tsar sat closeted with the newly-appointed General-in-Chief of his Southern Forces--the fire in the great stove of gilded porcelain had died to a pale red glow. “I have thought it out, and the man is even less of a gentleman than I have esteemed him. He would play the old game of the ape who made the cat pull the chestnuts out of the fire--the confidence-trick of the London swell mobsman.... Listen! England is to pay for her triumph at Trafalgar and the defeat of Waterloo through this alliance with Sire my Friend. She is to be drained of her blood and of her gold until she sinks down dying--and then he will offer me Great Britain with her East Indies, and the Danubian Provinces of Turkey in exchange for Constantinople, Asia Minor, and the Holy Land--he will be anointed Emperor of Palestine upon the Savior’s Sepulcher, and if the child prove a son--create him Crown Prince of Bethlehem----”
“Supposing you, Bátiushka,” deftly put in Gortchakoff--who called him Little Father simply as a soldier or a peasant would have done--“choose to accept his terms?”
“That will I never, so help me God and Our Blessed Lady the Virgin!” said Nicholas, rising to his colossal height and crossing himself as he bowed in the direction of the ikons. He added: “This is an able man, this General Dunoisse, who spins his web for him. Of course, he is of their Training Institute for Staff Officers.... I should like to have that man.” He added, simply and Orientally: “I will have him. Get him at any price!”
“He is not to be bought, Bátiushka,” was the answer.
“Absurd, Peter Michailowitch!” said the autocrat. “All men are to be bought. This one as well as the others.” He added, as a stray gleam of light from a wind-blown lamp in the great courtyard evoked no responsive twinkle from the Prince’s spectacle-glasses: “Unless you mean that he is dead?”
“Look, Sire, when there is light, at the signature to the later document,” said Gortchakoff. “It is the feeble scrawl of a dying man. This officer had undergone many hardships in the past three years--surveying and traveling alone--or with only a peasant to guide him--he knew the country from the Balkans to the Sea of Azov--he had the Danubian Principalities at his fingers’ ends--he was, as Bátiushka says, a man worth any price. But--the day after the last contract was signed he left Kustendje for the delta of the Dobrudja. He had made his way up there from Varna on foot--and he had the fever of the country upon him”--Gortchakoff shrugged--“but he did not stay for that. He pushed on into the Dobrudja, taking the road that goes by the Chain of Lakes--and then the wilderness opened and swallowed him. And--that is now three months ago, and he has not been spit up yet.”
“Akh!” said Nicholas, who was to lose thousands of men in the poisonous marshes, as on the waterless steppes of that same region. “But I should not make sure that he is dead, even now. Men who do not value life are difficult to kill. My Russian soldiers hold it cheap when it comes to a question of obeying the orders of their Emperor.... They will prove themselves in 1854 what they were in 1812. And though Austria desert me and Prussia play the knave, I have Three Allies,” boomed the great bull-voice through the chilly darkness. “Pestilence, and Hunger, and Cold--that never yet failed to serve a Russian Tsar. As for England--I tell you, Peter Michailowitch!--between Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and her Army Contractor”--it would appear that this remarkably well-informed Barbarian had even heard of Jowell--“she will yet climb her Calvary with her Cross upon her shoulders--we shall see her crucified between two thieves!” He rose, and said, clapping his General-in-Chief quite genially upon the shoulder: “This room is cold, and I have a deputation from the Peace Society of England waiting to address me. Come and listen to these Quakers--they seem very honest men!...”
He received the three representatives of the English Society of Friends courteously and kindly. He heard the Address with tolerance and patience. Somewhat after this fashion he replied:
“I do not desire War, but since England and France have sided with the enemies of Christianity; and, without warning to Russia have sent their fleets to Constantinople and thence into the Black Sea--to encourage the Turks and impede our battleships in the protection of our coasts--it would appear that both these Western Powers seek War. I will not attack--but I shall act in self-defense! Now, since I think you have not met my wife and daughter, will you come and be introduced to them? It will give them very great pleasure, you may be assured.”
LXXV
In August and September a marvelous comet flamed over the British Isles. There were great strikes in the Cotton Districts of the North, and haggard eyes of starving idlers, and hot and steaming faces of begrimed and furious rioters were lifted to the wonder at great open-air meetings; or from the crush that thronged the yards about the burning mills, and kept the engines back.
Livid sufferers, writhing in the deadly grip of Cholera in foul uncleanly tenements of provincial towns, or squalid garrets and reeking cellars of common lodging-houses in great sooty London, would raise themselves upon their beds of noisome rags--in some brief respite from hideous spasms--to stare at that strange menace through the broken skylight or the iron street-grating. But Mrs. Joshua Horrotian never lifted her head from her work. For little Josh and the baby Sally were both dead and buried, and their mother was stitching her fingers to the bone to pay for the mourning and the tiny double funeral; and never even glanced up, when Moggy Geogehagan--who in defiance of Barrack Rules was hanging half out of the window--bade her come and look at the quare ould kind of gazabo did be hangin’ up in the sky.
It was not the Blue Gripes--as the rank-and-file had learned to call it, out at Buenos Ayres and on Service in East India--it was not the Cholera that had left this mother’s arms empty and in her heart a vast and dreadful blank. It was something you called with a shudder and under your breath--“The Bad Throat”--an invisible, impalpable Something that rose up in the night beside the crowded cots in the damp, foul, insanitary, whitewashed sepulchers that were called Barracks--and gripped little children oftenest, yet sometimes grown men and women--in a strangling clutch so that--with awful suddenness--they died.
We know, at this date, the name of the unseen demon to be Diphtheria. We exorcise it with trap-drains and Sanitary Precautions--we fight it with gargles of chlorine and Jeyes’ Fluid, moppings out of mercurial perchloride and--in the more serious cases--injections of the antitoxin. But in spite of all that Science has done for us, we cannot keep out the grim invisible intruder. And still it is the old story of the strangling clutch and the swift death that follows, although we have grown so wise....
This new Barracks--it was rumored, when the Route came for the Hundredth Lancers to remove to another Cavalry Depot--had had a bad name for ever so long. “Children did not thrive,” it was said--meaning that they died like poisoned flies there. So, before the remove, Joshua Horrotian and his wife had concocted, indited, and dispatched a letter to the widowed Sarah, his mother, asking her to give the babies shelter and house-room at The Upper Clays, at least until wholesome lodgings could be found.
When the answer came, it was a bald, bare, bleak refusal. You read the stiffness of the widow’s back in it, and the cramped clutch of the hard, bony fingers on the seldom-used pen. You saw the gaunt black eyes glooming in their hollow caves under Sarah’s tall, narrow forehead between the scanty loops of black hair that was growing gray.
What you never would have guessed was that Sarah’s mouth twisted with anguish as she penned the sentences of denial; and that her hard eyes were dim with tears. For the woman’s bowels yearned over her unseen grandchildren. She would have been kind--pardoning even as the parent of the Prodigal in Scripture. But the Prodigal should first have come and laid his hands between her hands, and said, “Mother, I have sinned!”
So the invisible spider-thing that spins a yellow web in the children’s throats, so that they are suffocated slowly under the eyes that love them, killed both the little ones in a few hours. Tracheotomy--resorted to by a few daring Continental operators at this date--the Regimental Surgeon had never heard of. So it was as I have told.
The girl was gone, with a gasp or so and a brief convulsion. The boy fought manfully for continued life. He thought he had a bone in his throat, and kept begging his mammy and his daddy to take it away because he was choking. When they die--believing that you could have helped it if you had only chosen--quite a special brand of vintage goes to the brimming of your Cup of Despair.
And the woman had loved with such excess of maternal passion these children begotten by the man her husband, that when they went they seemed to take with them his share of love as well as their own.
She had “gone numb” as Mrs. Geogehagan expressed it. The power to think, or feel, or see anything beyond the open grave with those two little white deal boxes at the bottom of it, was denied.... She grew thin, and dowdy, and slovenly; and her husband moodier and more sullen and lowering of aspect, as day succeeded day. No promotion had come to the trooper since his clandestine marriage with Sarah’s milkmaid--the single good-conduct badge now vanished from his sleeve of coarse blue cloth. For he drank now, in bouts, and by fits and starts. Drunkenness, the soldier’s common vice, would not have prejudiced him in the eyes of his commanding officers, in those days, when the nightly feat of topping up the regulation three bottles of Mess Port with copious libations of whisky-toddy, and staggering back in jovial curves to quarters, was accomplished by many a brave and honorable son of Mars. But in his cups Joshua was betrayed by his countenance and his unrulier tongue.
According to Mrs. Geogehagan, the Oracle of Troop Room No. 4, it was the big black scowl Horrotian did be having on the face av him, no less than the unsaysonable spaches he’d let fly when he was carryin’ a dhrop too much--that prejudiced the non-commissioned officers, and caused so many sable entries to be made on the Troop Defaulter’s Sheet, to bear fruit in Extra Fatigue Duty, C.B., and Punishment Drill.
A hint from Moggy Geogehagan was a slog from a cabbage-stump. Roused from her stupor of bereavement by such an application, Mrs. Joshua ventured--during the course of a Sunday walk with her husband--to repeat this utterance to him.
“My face!” the trooper echoed bitterly. “You found no fault with it when ye married me five years ago. What has happened to it since? The bit o’ glass in the lid o’ your workbox shows it much the same, I reckon.... And if ’tis sullen and rebellious as you say--and makes me enemies among the officers and men--who stamped that look upon it? Med-be you’ll tell me you don’t know! Ay! but I know! I have the name on my tongue’s end this minute. And speak it I would, if I was to be shot the next! ’Tis Jowell!--Thompson Jowell, and may the Almighty damn him for it!--that can take his pleasure in grinding, and hazing, and trampling of me down!”
“Oh, hush!” cried Nelly in terror, and below them the lips of the sea said “Hus’s’sh!” against the shingle--for the Garrison town that boasted the insanitary Cavalry Barracks being situated on the Chalkshire South Coast, their Sunday stroll had led them to the low white cliffs that overhung the beach. There were fortifications here, and the grassy slope they sat on was fragrant with wild thyme, and short-stalked June clover, and gay with yellow dandelions and coltsfoot, and the air breathed salt from the heaving bosom of the sea. The sky was clear fresh blue, with floating scarfs of gossamer mist upon it. Sheep grazed near, and, with pyramidal heaps of whitewashed forty-pound shot between them--three great iron cannon of the Coast Defense--imposing enough outside, but rusty-throated as that old clamorous Fear of Invasion by the Bonaparte on the other side of the Channel--looked between the rounded breasts of their weather-worn embrasures--placidly out to sea.
“Believe it or not, as you like,” the trooper went on with increasing heat and indignation, “since I married ye I have kept a guard upon my hasty temper--and often bitten my tongue nigh through, rather than speak words that might ha’ been hurtful to us both. I ha’ lived decent, and cleanly, and orderly, and sober----” He flushed a dark red and boggled at the last word, but the faded prettiness of Nelly’s face was turned from him seawards, looking wistfully beyond the white horses that rose and fell upon the horizon, towards the grayish haze that people said concealed the Coast of France.
“Till lately,” the trooper amended, “neither officer nor non-commissioned officer o’ mine has had just cause to complain o’ me. But I am breaking under what I have to bear, an’ maddening under it fast. I am hounded, and drove and put upon--I say it afore the Face of my Maker, as no Christian man should be!”
His pent-up wrath made him choke and stammer. He unhooked his stiff collar with a shaking hand, and loosened his stock, and threw it on the grass. His wife gave him her handkerchief, and he mopped his streaming forehead with it, and went on talking, gesticulating with the great brown fist in which he held it--and sometimes pounding the fist upon the sod.
“Do ye ask me how I know ’tis Jowell that’s my enemy--that’s undermined my credit and blackened my good name--and lighted this furnace of hate in me that burns without quenching day and night? Can I doubt it when I never take my turn to draw troop-rations without being asked by that black dog Mullett,” (a Squadron Quartermaster Sergeant who was particularly responsible for many of those sable entries in the Troop Defaulters’ Book) “to look and make sure the Government hasn’t cheated me in the quality o’ the Commissariat flour and meat, and so on?--when I can’t feed my horse without being asked whether I’ve found any empty jam-tins, old hats, or dead kittens trussed up in the Forage Contractor’s hay?”
One may here endorse the trooper’s statement, Mullett being really one of Thompson Jowell’s merry men. Mullett soared to be Regimental Quartermaster-Sergeant presently, and would have retired, and opened a snug public-house immediately after the War of the Crimea, but that another kind of opening presented itself, and he was tumbled in, in company with honester men, and covered up; to wait the Great Reveille.
“Lord knows,” pursued the angry speaker, “as how I wish my silly tongue had been cut out, before I taunted a man powerful enough to ruin me--with what my betters are too sensible even to hint at--the fact that for the Nation’s honest money, Mr. Jowell, and others like him, sell bad, poor, rotten goods! But the vengeance he’ve took--and still takes--is mean, and low, and cowardly!” said the trooper, emphasizing each adjective with a tremendous blow of the huge brown fist upon the mild green face of Mother Earth. “And if some day I be drove to tie a loop of whipcord to the trigger o’ my carbine an’ hitch my toe in it--Jowell will be the man as blew my brains out--though the Military Commission of Inquiry and the Jury of the Coroner’s Inquest may call it Suicide!”
“Oh! my dear husband--no!”
Nelly shut her eyes, and shuddered at the ghastly picture the rough words conjured up before her. Her numb heart beat a little quicker at the discovery that she still had something dear to lose that Death might rob her of.
“Send I don’t meet that man,” pursued the trooper, with a dark frown and a gesture of his strong right arm that augured ill for Jowell, “when my heart is bursting with the wrongs he’s heaped on me, and I’ve a weapon in my hand! The dog he’ve given a bad name to might swing for him yet, med-be! Meantime, supposing it be true as my mother believes--that ’tis possible to call down Judgment on the wicked merely by wishing it with all one’s heart and soul--and since through him I’ve lost my own two children, I’ll wish--for that bad man has got an only son and sets his eyes by him--may the sins of Thompson Jowell be visited on him by means of that same son! Send I may live to see young Jowell in rags; an’ with an old boot on one foot and an old shoe on t’other, asking--and asking in vain--for a handshake from an honest man! As for his father, may the Hand That’s Above us scourge him with rods of shame and retribution! May he drink of the cup that I ha’ drunk of, and drink it deep and long! So be it. Amen! Come, let’s be stepping back-along to Barracks.”
They never called it Home.
LXXVI
The Tsar was genuinely puzzled to know--War having been declared between himself and the Sultan--why he could not crumple those thirteen vessels of a Turkish Convoy bound with troops, arms, and ammunition for a certain important port on the coast of the Black Sea without provoking such a deafening outcry from Gallia and Britannia; and, indeed, what the Daily Press of both these countries persisted in calling the “outrage” of Sinope, seems at this distance of time no more than a provoked and unavoidable measure of defense.
A Comic Illustrated Paper of the date represents the Sultan as a curled darling in short socks, strap-shoes, petticoats, and pinafore, sniveling, with his little fist in his weeping eyes--the while he blubbers out to grinning, knickerbockered Russia:
“Hoo--boohoo! You’ve broken my nice new Fleet!... Wait till I tell Nursie France and Auntie Britannia--they’ll give you a good spanking, you--boohoo!--naughty Boy!”
* * * * *
For some reason there was hurry. The Holy Standard was unfurled and the Sacred Shirt displayed; the Moslem, who had suddenly become so dear to us, plunged, with renewed vigor, into hostilities; the Russian Ambassadors quitted London and Paris; but weeks before Great Britain and France leagued themselves with the Infidel against Christian Russia, and War was proclaimed by the Lord Mayor of London from the steps of the Royal Exchange, Her Majesty’s Foot Guards received orders to proceed to the East, and the Second Battalion of the Cut Red Feathers marched out from St. George’s Barracks; and the Third Battalion of the White Tufts marched out from the Tower; and the First Battalion of the Bearskins Plain marched out of Windsor--slept a night at Wellington Barracks; and with bands playing “Cheer, Boys, Cheer,” “We are Going Far Away,” “Oh, Susannah! Don’t You Cry for Me!” and “The British Grenadiers,” they were off and away for Gallipoli via--why via Malta?
You may conceive the cheers, the tears, the shaking of the earth by the even tread of battalions of marching men; the waving of hats and pocket-handkerchiefs; the wives, and children, and sweethearts crying and clinging to husbands’, and fathers’, and lovers’ arms. You may imagine the roaring trade done by the venders of oranges, whelks, polonies, pettitoes, and other portable refreshments; and the generosity with which these were pressed upon the rank-and-file; and the lavishness with which the thirst of the British soldier--great even in piping times of peace--was assuaged by copious draughts of foaming beer and liquors even more potent....
The Bearskins Plain got the best send-off, for from Bird Cage Walk to Buckingham Palace, and along the Strand to Waterloo, many thousands of people were gathered to give them God-speed, and the Mall was made gay with bunting and streamers. Jowell, Sewell, Cowell, Towell, Bowell, and Co., of whose cunning, and greed, and rapacity most of these departing warriors were presently to perish--filled an official window in Pall Mall with gorgeous waistcoats and patriotic enthusiasm.
* * * * *
“Noble fellows! God bless ’em!” they cried, and shed tears and waved their pocket-handkerchiefs. They slopped over with patriotic sentiments as the champagne slopped over their glasses; while they told each other how soon those steadily-marching legs would bring their owners back. The whole thing was extravagantly simple. The British Army had but to proceed to the East--quite an enviable trip now the spring-time was approaching--show itself--conquer by the mere show; and return to be thanked and praised.
They were to return so soon, and the climate of Eastern Europe was believed, even in March, to be so warm and genial, that nothing in the way of extra covering had been issued to England’s darling sons. Sire my Friend, had equipped the French Army with a complete outfit of serviceable winter clothing. Stout and easy-fitting boots protected its feet, great-coats of heavy waterproofed material were supplied it against the nip of cold or the exigencies of wet weather. Even the Infidel had purchased for his troops, fifty thousand ample capotes of leather lined with sheepskin; but Britannia relied exclusively upon the glow of martial ardor for the generation and preservation of caloric. Hence it came about that whole battalions of the legs that were presently to march away, marched in the trousers of white duck, in which they had returned from service in Bermuda, China, and the East Indies. And the rest in a shoddy summer cloth of dirty bluish gray.
It is odd how universal was that conviction that the Expedition to the East was to be nothing beyond a flying visit. When the cheering broke out at the Officers’ Mess House--the Rathkeale Ragamuffins being at that moment quartered at the Victoria Barracks, Dublin; my Aunt Julietta,--who dined with the children at one o’clock, and frugally supped upon cold mutton and the remains of the rice-pudding or custard in the petrified or gelid state, whilst her Golightly was enjoying his seven courses, cheese, and dessert in the society of his peers--my Aunt, learning that the dreaded summons had come, greeted the reappearance of her lord with an outburst of hysterical emotion. Upon which Captain Goliath, whom you may suppose well primed with Mess Port, and subsequent whisky-toddy; jested at her wifely tears, and made light of her tender terrors.
“I tell ye there’s no danger!--they’ll simply send us out and order us back again. We’ll never get a shass at them--more’s the pity!--much less a prod. They’re cowards, rank cowards! They’ll turn tail and run at the first British cheer we’re after giving them. We’re simply being sent out--do you hear me?--to be sent back again. Sure, now, when ye married me, Juley, me own darling!--you didn’t suppose ye were taking anything but a soldier, did ye now? Killed is it? Killed!... Nonsense, ma’am!--there’ll be no killin’ at all, at all! Compose yourself, Mrs. McCreedy--for your own sake and the baby’s! Don’t you hear me saying that they’ll simply send----Will You Be Quiet And Listen to What I’m Telling You!” bellowed Captain Goliath, at the full pitch of a remarkably powerful pair of lungs.
But my Aunt Julietta, unwilling to lose so favorable an opportunity, here went into hysterics after the latest recipe published in the pages of The Ladies’ Mentor, and screamed, cried, and laughed so vigorously, that--had not the alarmed and flustered Captain seized and applied the Cayenne pepper-castor in mistake for my Aunt’s silver vinaigrette of Red Lavender--unfavorable results to the expected olive-branch of the McCreedy stem might have supervened.
But my Aunt--in paroxysms of sneezing--recovered sufficiently to scold her clumsy hero; and the Captain departed; to return towards the small-hours in a condition which his military body-servant erroneously described as “fresh.”
Ah, poor gentlewoman! how my Aunt winced at the coarse pleasantries of the man, and the hiccupping genialities of the master! How many times since she pledged to the idol of her soul the fondest vows, etc., had not that idol proved himself a mere lump of sodden, heavy clay.
She dismissed Private Fahy, ungratified in the wish--audibly expressed--for a hair of the dog that had bit the Captain--and herself undressed her prone and wallowing warrior; got him to bed, and while he snored, knelt beside the pillow his hoggishness defiled, and prayed to Heaven--pure, simple, loving creature!--that War might spare him to his wife and children, for many a long year to come!...
For the rest she was as “callum as you please, and as brave as a liness” to quote the Captain; when he gave her his parting hug on Kingstown Harbor Quay.
The month’s installment of a Serial Tale then running in The Ladies’ Mentor contained a harrowing description of a similar leave-taking between husband and wife. But it seemed to my Aunt Julietta that the gallant and high-souled Colonel Reginald de la Vaux and his young and sensitive bride said too much--and said it too coherently to be quite real.
They ought to have gulped out trivialities until the last minute, such as: “Don’t forget the whisky-flask!--it’s in your great-coat pocket.” “Not me, egad! trust a British soldier!” and “Do, now, remember, love!--always to change wet socks!” Then, as the Fifes and Drums squealed, and company after company marched up the gangway, and the Colors were displayed on the quarter-deck, they should have choked and grabbed each other. And with the rasping scrub of a wet mustache upon her mouth, and the smell of wet umbrellas and oilskins in her nostrils, and the strains of “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” and “Cheer, Boys, Cheer” in her ears; and the tears rolling down her cheeks as heavily as the rain dripped from the eaves of her bonnet--as the big steamer moved slowly, remorselessly away from the quay amidst cheering and good-byes--my pretty Aunt was left standing in a puddle--much to the detriment of a smart pair of velvet boots.
* * * * *
Heaven knows how long the poor soul would have stood there, but that her children’s nurse--a Sloughshire girl, married to a private of the Rathkeales--who made one of a group of disconsolate dripping soldiers’ wives--perching amongst piles or crates and timber-balks and coils of tarry rope to see the last of their men--ran to her, crying wildly: “Oh, ma’am!--ma’am!... my Tom!... Will he ever come back, do you think, ma’am?... Shall I ever see him again?...” And my Aunt wakened out of her desolate stupor, and took the weeping creature’s cold wet hand, and kissed her swollen cheek, and told her: “Of course you will, Mrs. Kennedy! They’re only sending them out to the East to send them home again!”
* * * * *
Ensign Mortimer Jowell--who for two years now had held Her Majesty’s Commission, did not sail with his regiment. A common, infantile complaint, characterized by a rubious rash and yclept the measles--had stricken the only hope of the House of Jowell down on the very threshold of Active Service, much to his indignation and chagrin.
The young man’s bosom-friend and brother-officer Ensign Lord Adolphus Noddlewood, marched in the uniform of a private of the Cut Red Feathers, from the train to the Docks between two of the men of his own company, thus avoiding a sheriff’s officer who--armed with a writ issued by Nathan and Moss of Giltspur Street--had been sent down to arrest this gay young nobleman.
But Morty, frying with fever and boiling with vexation, must perforce remain a prisoner in the huge palatial four-poster in the luxurious bedroom of the suite of private apartments which the fond father had caused to be specially decorated and furnished for his only son at the Jowell mansion in Hanover Square. Instead of farewell banquets washed down with the golden, creaming nectar of Sillery and Épernay--followed by bumpers of the Port of Carbonell--the young man perforce must subsist on blameless slops of chicken-broth and barley-water--must be regulated with saline doses of the cooling, nauseous, fizzy kind....
His mother presided over the medical regimen; administered the medicines, turned the pillows--pounded into feather-pancakes by her boy’s aching bullet-head--read him the newspaper-accounts of the departure of his comrades--washed him--scolded him--bore with his fevered grumblings; and--reverting to the days when the big young man was a mere topknotted youngster in plaid frocks, diamond socks, and strap-shoes--heard him say his nightly prayers.
In those early days referred to, young Mortimer--proving himself a true sapling of that sterling stem of stout old British oak, his father,--had been wont to derive profit of the solid, terrestrial description from these orisons, by tacking on to the supplementary petition for parents, requests for toys and treats particularly desired.
“Please God bless my mother, and make her buy me that new engine I saw in So-and-So’s shop-window”--was naturally followed by fulfillment.... Faith is the first of the theological virtues.... What Christian mother would have her boy grow up an atheist? Arguing thus, the poor lady would purchase the engine; and Morty’s prayers would be without addenda for a night, or maybe two. But before a week was over the maternal head, this infant Samuel would be praying for a new gun or a new puppy--and the thing would begin all over again....
To do Morty justice, he loved the meek, sad woman, despised by Jowell as being devoid of “spirit” and “go.” She never dreamed--when her darling went to Rugby--how many pugilistic encounters his promise of never forgetting his daily prayers was to cost a boy whose dogged obstinacy of nature led him to shun the concealment offered by blankets, and persist in saying them out of bed.... It is on record that the boys Morty pounded presently followed his example; while the boys who pounded him had suffered so many contusions in the course of the contest, that they had no urgent desire to provoke a renewal of war.
Do you hear the embarrassed, clumsy accents of the large young Ensign, mumbling that simplest, noblest, and most Divine of all petitions? Do you see that sorrowful, plain, dowdy woman, sitting in the shadow of his sumptuous brocade bed-curtains, cherishing the big, powerful, hot young hand?
“‘But deliver us from evil.’... And make me a good boy--no! hang it!--I mean a good man and a good officer.... And make me well quick, and let me get to our fellows Out There--before all the fun of the fighting’s over!--And don’t let my mother fret and worry herself--and bring me back safe home to her again. For Christ’s sake, Amen!”
That brought the tears, hard as the mother tried to stop them--pattering, hot, and quick, and heavy, on her brown silk lap. She held the big hand until his tea came--fed him with strips of toast soaked in the blameless infusion--ere she crept away to compose herself in the solitude of her own huge palatial bedroom, before going down to preside over her silver teapot--set at the end of a vast expanse of dining-table spread with the customary complements of the distinctive British meal. The redness of her poor eyelids could not be concealed by any innocent application of cold water and Johann-Maria-Farina, and, at the sight of them Thompson Jowell--who came home early from the City in these days of his son’s sickness--dropped upon the hearthrug the newspaper he had been perusing, and--nimbly as the Zoological Society’s Rhinoceros might have quitted his private pond in the Regent’s Park Gardens--floundered out of his armchair.
“What the devil’s this, ma’am?” he blustered, staring at his wife with eyes rendered even more froggishly prominent than usual by apprehension. “You’re not going to tell me the boy’s taken a turn for the worse, and is in danger?” He added, as she reassured him on this point: “If you had, I wouldn’t have believed you! Tom Tough, my name is--when it comes to a question of constitution--and my son takes after his old Governor! But, Lord!--you’ve given me a start.”
He broke off to swab his face, and the hand that wielded the silk bandanna handkerchief, shook quite as though the great Contractor had been a being of common flesh and blood. It was to shake more, erelong. For, as though that curse of Trooper Joshua Horrotian had had real power to bring Misfortune down--strange ill-chances and cross-happenings, eventuating from the dubious business-methods of the parent Jowell, were to place in very frequent jeopardy the one person, of all living beings--whom the man desired should go scot-free. For all the gold that War would pour into his coffers, Jowell would not have risked a hair of the head of this beloved son....
* * * * *
He had always thriven upon disaster. Mildewed harvests brought him golden ones, even as the murrain among cattle and the rot among sheep glutted the storehouses of Cowell with barrels of Prime Salted Beef, and tins of First Class Preserved Mutton, for the nourishment of the British Army. And the skins of the diseased beasts above-named, being sold to Shoell, at a friendly lowness of price, were converted into Boots and Saddlery and so on....
Towell and Sewell, buying whole cargoes of Damaged Cotton--salvage from the spinning-mills that were always being set on fire and flooded with water--and the waste of countless Woolen Manufactories--the first to be woven into soldiers’ shirting, the second to be manufactured into shoddy cloth of gray or blue or brick-dust-red to upholster martial bodies withal--flourished on the same principle of Give as little as you may and Take all you can get.
Bowell, who took over obsolete or damaged medical stores and necessaries from Britannia’s Hospitals and Infirmaries and Workhouses, and sold them back again without a blush upon his tallowy countenance; Powell, who bought thousands of tons of waste and spoiled paper from the Horse Guards and the Admiralty and other Government offices--where paper is wasted and spoiled--and transformed it into cardboard wherewith to strengthen busbies, shakos, helmets, and cocked-hats, and render them proof against bullets and grape, stroke of saber or cut of sword--were in like manner enriched at the mere cost of discomfort to many men, and a man’s life here and there.... But until the War broke out, and the Genius of Jowell spread its leathery bat-wings and soared--none of these enterprising spirits had ever dreamed what wealth, beyond the dreams of avarice, might be gathered and piled up, at cost of misery to thousands, and innumerable lives. When they realized this, they bowed their foreheads in the dust before the roomy patent-leather boots of Jowell, and mumbled them. He grew great in their eyes, and greater still. The sun rose to light his path, and set because he had done with it for the present.... They whispered to each other--behind their ringed and stumpy hands--that he was the devil, the very devil, sir! And as the earthly Vicar and representative of that dark potentate they worshiped him, having forgotten GOD.