Read Ebook: A rogue's tragedy by Capes Bernard

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Ebook has 449 lines and 23815 words, and 9 pages

n our bodies' loves, the blows and anguish which His flesh suffered to redeem them."

He rose, unquestioning, and knelt by the bedside. He prayed that she might not know, that his suspicions might be unfounded, that the burden of that knowledge might never be hers--not that he might find strength to ask her if it were. He prayed and prayed, until the chillness of the night air seized his frail body with a very ague of shivering. Then she, kneeling beside him, was smitten with remorse, and blamed her thoughtlessness, and got him into bed again with all speed, and watched beside him till he was once more warm and restful. Then, his comfort was so great, her beauty so pitiful, he held out rapturous arms to her, and wooed her to his heart. Shrinking, reluctant, she surrendered passively. Had he not wounded his soul to save hers? How could she deny him the fruits of that wild sacrifice. She was a murderer's wife.

But later, when he had fallen into a deep sleep, she rose softly from beside him, and crept to her oratory, and, kneeling on the icy stones before the statue of the Holy Virgin, broke into prayer, and a passion of tears,--

"O, Mother! show me how to love, and yet be clean!"

On a flat open width of the Argenti?re road, a mile or so to the north-east of Le Prieur?, a little company of astronomers was gathered to gaze at the moon. They carried glasses and instruments; there was not the least air of privacy about their proceedings; the spot selected was open to all. There was an extension in the long tear of the valley in this place, the increased interval between the mountains being occupied by a humpish land strewn with boulders.

About eight o'clock of a September evening, this group of enthusiasts--drinking in lunar obfuscation; its telescopes, like so many glasses brimming with moonshine, tilted to its eyes--was joined by a single individual, whose approach from Le Prieur?, it seemed, had occurred unnoticed by it in its preoccupation. Nor did his arrival affect it now, further than to its tacit acceptance of his company as of that of a recognised kindred spirit.

The newcomer, taking a short tube from his pocket, applied the smaller lens to his eye, and joined in the general scrutiny of that placid orb, which floated over the mountain tops in a liquid mist. Gradually, and scarce perceptibly as he gazed, the others edged about him, until all were within a common focus of hearing. Then one, who appeared to have some precedence of authority, opened his lips, but without removing his instrument from his eye.

"The oracle, great Spartacus--hath it worked?"

"It is working, Ajax."

"And Paris shall be deposed?"

"In time, in time. We move swifter to that end."

"Swifter, swifter? But while we gather speed, he strikes like the lightning."

"Defy him. Art thou not Ajax?"

"Ajax defied the gods. He had a quicker way with mortals."

"What words, what example are these from a Regent? Is not the dagger alien to our policy? Hast qualified in the tables of our law to no better end than this?"

"Forgive me, Spartacus. I spoke in heat. But this man, he harasses us; drives us from point to point; forestalls our meetings with his devil's wit, and rides the country like a scourge."

"A faithful Prefect."

"An Alva sunk in vice."

"He shall be deposed. I say it: Cassandra hath prophesied it: Priam inclines our way. We'll find a substitute anon more to our tastes. In the meanwhile, the sinews, the sinews, Ajax--they gather in strength--they--"

With the word he was gone--had dropped, slunk like a shadow behind a roadside boulder. The others, inured to all quick evasions and surprises, stood like voiceless statues, conning the moon. The next moment, a little company of horsemen, the hoofs of their beasts muffled, came picking their way out upon them from the black glooms of the stone-strewn hillocks. They drew up in the road, their leader foremost.

Laughing, urging, persuading, deaf to their explanations and protests, he got them apart, and invited each to take the road to his separate destination, while he made M. L?otade his own especial care. In a minute or two the place was deserted. Only Bonito crouched, undiscovered, behind his rock.

"Too good a servant to your master," he muttered. "But the rod is already in pickle for you, Mr Trix."

That rod, nevertheless, was not to come out of pickle for some six years yet. And, in the meanwhile, Cartouche remained Prefect of Faissigny. For one thing, King's favourites are not easily deposed; for another, the light seat in the saddle is the sure one. Cartouche rode his duties springily, and appeared to take them with only a shade more seriousness than he took himself.

During all this time he ruled his Province with agile, nervous young hands, asking no favour and giving none. An easy subject for defamation, the malignity of his enemies missed no opportunity of distorting in the public view the most harmless motives of his actions. He might, he thought, have cared, under impossibly different circumstances. It mattered nothing to him now. He admired his own character too little, was too little impressed with the disinterestedness of most others, to resent aspersions on it. It would give a certain lady great satisfaction, he was sure, to have her opinion of him so confirmed. That was the only way left to him to prove his regard for her. Truly, life for the future was to be an upside-down affair--a test of wit, not principles.

He had no principles, he told himself; but only a commission--to administer the law, in the first place; to root out disaffection, in the second. He had a whimsical idea of confounding equity with justice, and making an elegant Sancho Panza of himself. As to the other task--that of combating the spirit of an age bent on immense social displacements, on the reconstitution of States, on the launching of democracy's huge engine "down the ringing grooves of change"--he accepted it as airily as if it were one involving just a disputed question of etiquette.

It suggested a gallant picture--that of this slim rake facing the rising tide of revolution with not so much as a Mrs Partington's mop in his hand, but only a ribbon of steel there, and a song of gay contempt on his lips. He had little doubt but that the red waters were destined to submerge all Savoy in the end, and beat their crests against the Alps. Well, though he were but a coloured pebble in their path, he would delay them by that microscopic measure. He owed it as much to his own constitution as to the State's.

In the meanwhile slander, nursed by deep policy, convicted him of the seven deadly sins and more. Advoutry, barratry, crapulence, debauchery--one might run down the alphabet of infamies, and leave the tale incomplete. There is no need to. It would be unedifying, and, as a fable, unnecessary.

The truth is that this fable, with others as odious, was no more than a political expedient for procuring the Prefect's downfall and removal. Mr Trix had proved himself an annoyingly sharp thorn in the side of Illuminatism, and that body was for ever wriggling and twisting to get rid of him. It was, as a matter of fact, in a particularly sensitive state during the first years of the young man's ascendency, owing to an unhappy determination on the part of the Elector of Bavaria to put his heel on its head, which lay in his dominions; the result being that that same head--Weishaupt, by name, general and brain of the Society--had flicked itself away, none exactly knew whither; leaving to the corporate rest of it the solution of the problem as to how a body was to continue to answer, as a compact international entity, to an unlocalisable brain.

That bitter stroke was, indeed, the beginning of the finish with Illuminatism. The Society survived for some years longer; but more as a local than a universal power. It retained for a time a certain mystic influence on events, until in the end that influence, with many another as inherently socialistic, was absorbed into the elemental energy of the revolution.

There was one of those, pretty vain and silly, which did not fail, you may be sure, to make itself a subject for their practices. It had looked out of the windows of Piedmont on the tide rising down there in Savoy, and, with all the first tentative assurance, and none of the after humility of Canute, had commanded the waters peevishly to retire. They had not: on the contrary they had come determinedly on, until they threatened to find a way through the passes into Piedmont. The King was disgustedly amazed. He heard of peasants refusing to pay their lawful taxes; he heard of bread riots; he heard of a dissemination of pernicious doctrines, such as those which spoke of commonwealths, and the right of the many to exist other than by sufferance of the few. Was this the way to realise his ideal of a piping Arcadia? What were his provincial viceroys doing, so to let corruption over-run his duchy?

Innuendo whispered to him of one of them, at least. His Prefect of Faissigny, it murmured into his ear, was as responsible as any for the subversive creed that justice, to be effective, must be impartial. That gave him thought. He had made rather a pet of this man; although, it was true, his plans for his aggrandisement had fallen something short of their intention. Was he, this Cartouche, making his disappointment the text for a popular dissertation on the fallibility of Kings? He began to wonder if he had misplaced his confidence.

And the gay Prefect himself--the bright siderite of all this conspiracy? Something conscious of the forces at work against him, indifferent to results and for himself, he continued to administer his office in the way most characteristic of him. He had no ideals nor delusions. Equality to him, in a world nine-tenths asses, was a vicious chimera. He was a magistrate of the crown, and he simply sought to make that respectable in the popular view. The rights of man, in his, were solely to be governed justly. Roguery, in whatever form, must be suppressed. No man should be privileged to tyrannise. He gave practical effect to the loose tenets of reformers, who, obsessed with a personal vanity, could see nothing in them thus presented but a hide-bound reactionism. Many people, it is certain, think less of their own ideals than of the credit they may gain in pursuing them. They are quite blind to them when achieved by others.

Mr Trix's Prefecture in Le Prieur? was a very Court of Barataria. It was flanked by a lofty stone tower, known as the Belfry, which had once formed part of a long-vanished monastery of Benedictines, and was now used as a lock-up, for those condemned to walk the long road to Chamb?ry. The committed to it seldom had reason to question the justice of their convictions, or to complain of consideration of extenuating circumstances having been withheld. Cartouche, proclaimed a libertine and martinet, had nevertheless a happy wit for justice. He could tell a rascal under a silk frock.

And there was a worse true story of him, after all, than any his enemies could invent. It was part of the irresolvable problem; but he believed she would answer it, if she knew, with a more utter condemnation of him than any he had yet suffered at her hands. That he had cast the girl away, because her disobedience to him had wrought an irremediable wrong to another, herself--would that appeal to her, even if in the hot blaze of the truth, for righteousness? She would answer, he knew, that he himself was the one solely responsible for the situation which his double-dealing with the woman most entitled to his candour had created. What justification had she herself ever given him for submitting her to the chance assaults of jealousy? If he had been honest with the wretched child, this climax had never reached its period. And, instead, he had made her the scapegoat of his own deceit.

He had. And yet, if he had not, if he had confessed the passion of his soul to her the victim of the passion of his body, how would that have bettered things for the victim? Would she, made vestal to that altar of his idol, have thought herself well compensated for her jilting? He mocked now at the absurdity of his old conception--Cartouche's was it? or some sick neurotic monk's? High-priest, he? What a figure of elegance, in urim and thummim and with a thing like a flower-pot on his head! He laughed tears of blood, recalling the ecstatic vision. Better to be accursed than ridiculous. Better Louis-Marie should have her, than she be made the sport of such a mummery. He did not blame his friend, week-knee'd robber as he was. He rather admired him, for his unexpected part. Would not he himself have dared all hell to win the passion of those lips--O, God! the passion! Would he not? had he not? He had at least bargained with the devil for her, and had prevailed just so far as that it was made his privilege at last to serve for deep contrastive shadow to that idyll of their loves.

For shadow: and for shadow within shadow? For all this time he knew he was a haunted man. That spirit of lost love betrayed--poor Molly! The blackest gloom in him was due to it. Not the way, he thought defiantly, to light him back to love. He wearied of its eternal presence; yet he could not shake it off. It leaned out to him from the dusk of mountain passes; it flitted before him through the sorrow of infinite woods; it cried to him for help from the hearts of squalid tenements, where villainous deeds were enacting. He had done that thing. It was past remedy--not past clinching his damnation. Why not then rest on that assurance, and cease to agitate both herself and him? Yet, step warily as he might, he could never escape her--that desolate phantom. Crossing beds of gentian, he would tread upon her eyes; the little freshets which he spurned from their wreathings about his feet, were her white arms; the low wind in the pines became her low English voice. Always faithful, weeping, appealing--never rebuking. God! was not this insatiable hunger in him enough anguish, without the eternal memory of that fruit, which he had plucked in his wanton appetite, and thrown away, just tasted, for the shadow of a sweeter! Not enough, not enough? Then to her hands be it after death to heap the coals upon his breast! He owned their right; would submit to them, and face the eternal ordeal. Only let them refrain now! Was he so prosperous, so happy, as to invite their vengeance prematurely? Torture too exquisite, it was said, became a transport. Did they want to qualify him for that balm in hell?

Thus was the last state of this love's agony; while he laughed, bleeding inwardly, and met his traducers on a hundred points of wit.

He had thought, now and then in his prostrate moments, that if he could only once trace home the shadow, he might find it to be, after all, no better than a black-mailing ghost. Supposing good fortune had attended her dismissal? It might; and he have saddled his conscience with a self-invoked incubus. Why not set himself to discover?

He dared not--that was the truth. He was a coward there; he feared the answer. Better even the shadow, than the revelations possible of the thing that cast it. He dared not.

And so the gay Prefect, with that death always at his heart, and the tongue in his mouth a sword to wound, stood up against the rising tide, fearless before its roar and babble. He was well served by his police--admiring thralls to his courage, his quick wit, his retentive memory. In these days there was not much of secret information, touching the moral health of his Province, which did not reach his ears. Thus, he early learned of Bonito's visit to the Ch?teau, and to draw some odd conclusions from its sequel. Their fruit will appear in the course of things. In the meanwhile, it was observed by him that some curious retrenchments reported up at the great house dated from that visit, and were seemingly coincident with a look, as it were also of retrenchment, in Madame Saint-P?ray's beautiful face. It had to happen occasionally that he encountered the Lady of the Manor in the exercise of his duties; and, inasmuch as she always disdained at such times to acknowledge, or even to see him, he had ample opportunity for studying her expression. That was beginning to shape itself, he could not but think, on the lines of some gripping inward reserve. It were too much to say that it betrayed any confirmation of the Chevalier's coward accusation; but certainly it looked pinched and drawn, as if the sweet sap in it were somehow souring from its freshness. He wondered.

He wondered still when whispers reached him how Maire and priests, confident almoners of her bounty, were softly complaining of an inexplicable parsimony in a hand once lavish to munificence in charity. His wonder increased to hear the charge substantiated by her husband.

He had never avoided Louis-Marie; nor had ever put himself in his way. He had held his deed justified, and had told him so. For the rest, he was no precisian in matters of conscience; and if Saint-P?ray could reconcile his marriage with his , he had no mind to deny him his lovely provocation. He had never referred to the subject on their meetings--which were rare, because Louis was a dutiful husband. But once, to his surprise, his friend opened upon it voluntarily.

They had chanced upon one another on the road, when each was unattended. Something of an ancient warmth spoke in Louis's greeting.

"Gaston," he said: "we see so little of one another now. Is it because you blame me?"

"Because I cannot bear to think I have lost your respect. Gaston, I must always hold that of more worth than--than some others do."

Cartouche smiled.

"You are looking very well under the infliction, Louis. That is the moral of your loss."

The young man broke out eagerly,--

"She was losing her faith in God: only I could restore it. I have always so longed to tell you. You know it was not the money! The first condition of our union was that it should be given all away--that curse turned to a blessing. I have never touched a penny of it--have never claimed the right to; only as her almoner. And now! O, if that dead man's hand should still be on it, buying her soul to his in vengeance!"

"What do you mean?"

"I think I must always have someone to hold to, Gaston. You were so strong. I don't know what I mean. Only now, when I ask her, for my own charities--often--Gaston, she says she has none to spare--no money--she!"

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