Read Ebook: A rogue's tragedy by Capes Bernard

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Ebook has 449 lines and 23815 words, and 9 pages

"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!"

"She is a better business-man than you, that's all. It doesn't surprise me."

"Perhaps. God bless you, Gaston!"

Cartouche set his private agents to work; but the information he sought was long in coming to him. And in the meanwhile the tide rose up and up, under an ever more lowering sky, and the snarl of coming tempest shook the black waters. But, slow as the years drawled on for those up at the Ch?teau, to Cartouche they racketed past like a Dance of Death.

At the lower end of the Via del Po, where it debouched upon the river, stood, nicked out of the north side of the street, a little Square of houses known as the Court of Doctors. The buildings in this Square--for the most part unoccupied--were very high, very narrow, very crazy, and so few in number that no more than two or three of them counted to any one of its three sides, the fourth lying open to the stream of fashionable traffic which flowed by it all day.

Quidnuncs had always been a power in Turin; whence this one-time appropriation of a niche to their worship. The Court of Doctors, in its present aspect, was said to date from the Regency of Madame Reale--daughter to the fourth Henry of France, and wife to the first Victor-Amadeus of Savoy--to whose politic superstition it had been indebted for a sort of unofficial charter. For what destinies foreshadowed, for what poisons brewed, for what villainies set bubbling in crucible and alembic within its precincts its past history was responsible, only its own dark heart might know. To this day the atmosphere of that sunless well of brick seemed brassy with chemicals; its doorways emitted a faint stale scent of drugs; an air of stagnant mystery overhung its pavements. But it was mystery grown unnegotiable. The moon of its prosperity had set; black decay hung brooding on its roofs; the ministers to its former notoriety were flown. Not that empirics were fewer than of yore in Turin, nor less potent in their persuasions. But traps for credulity, like traps for mice, miss of their efficacy after a few score, or a few hundred captures; and the bait must be laid down in some other place and form.

There was one building in the Square, however, which of late years had been infinitely successful in reclaiming to itself a full measure of its own past fame, or infamy. This house stood, on the north-east side, one of three compact whose rears were to the river, from whose swift waters only a rotting wharf, sinking in sludge and slime, divided them. In front, panels of starry devices--suns and golden orbs, reeling in strange elliptics on an azure field--betokened the particular business of the house's master, while they gave the building itself a meretricious distinction over its frowsy neighbours.

That was a lofty attic room, panelled all round its walls with tall mirrors hidden behind black curtains; but those were so controlled, that all or any one of them, answering to a noiseless drop and pulley worked from without, could be made to gather softly away, revealing, unrecognised by the fearful visitor, the lustreless glass behind. One curtain, however, concealed a mid-wall alcove, a cimmerian cavity in which stood a tripod of cunning construction. For under its chafing-dish burned perpetually a concealed lamp, which kept the metal above it at a heat sufficient, at need, to ignite spirit cast upon it, or even gums and aromatic resins, the effect being as of a very immaculate conception of fire. But the dim blue flame thus evoked was of a luminosity just enough to reveal to the terrified observer the pale shadows of misbegotten horrors about him--his own reflection, if he had but known it, in such uncurtained mirrors as were not exposed to the direct rays of the burning naptha; but, so it seemed to him, a film had been withdrawn, in the silent rising of the draperies, from his own mental vision.

Crystal globes there were, moreover; strings of phosphorescent balls, which could be made to travel hither and thither on invisible wires; webs of luminous thread; entanglements of all sorts at command, the wizard himself, like a livid spider, poised in their midst. But, even so, great Spartacus despite, his skill and compelling magic, it is doubtful if, with all, the abode of mystery had won for itself any exceptional notoriety, had it not been for its loveliest mystery of all--that Hebe, who called herself Cassandra, and dropped flowers of prophecy from sweet lips, offering, it might be, asps in roses. She it was that, like a caged nymph butterfly, brought the males to beat their wings upon her crystal prison, scattering about it an incense of golden meal.

One dark evening, in the Spring of 1790, two gentlemen, coming rapidly down the Via del Po, turned into the Court of Doctors and stopped before the Wizard's door. They wore masks and dominoes. They were both small men, one lean and the other plump. The plump man was by many years the junior of the lean one. He was also by several social degrees his inferior, being no more, indeed, than our friend Caius Sempronius Gracchus house-steward to his Majesty; while the other was his Majesty himself, no less.

M. Mirobole clasped his fat hands and opened remonstrant eyes.

"Ah, sire!" he said. "Condescend to deem one truth better than a multitude of conjectures. These hundred shadows on your heart! What if he show you how one tree may cast them all--branches of a single hate, which, if severed at its root, the sunshine shall be yours again without a fleck!"

"You have certainly a reassuring confidence in your Magician, Viscount," said the King with a smile. Then he sighed. "Well, I have only to reveal myself if he presumes too far. Lead on, my friend."

M. Mirobole knocked instantly, and softly, on the tomb-like door. It answered with a startling unaccustomed promptitude to his summons; but his Majesty, never having visited here before, was without suspicion of any collusion implied in that show of eagerness to secure him. Forcing himself to resolution and treading on the heels of his companion, he stepped within the black jaws, which snapped immediately on their prey.

Almost simultaneously the tablet on the wall shone out. Craving his royal charge's close attendance, the Viscount led the way upstairs. He was familiar with the mysteries of the place; though, to be sure, there was no mystery in it all to be compared with that of his own blind faith in the charlatan its master. Presently the two were committed, scarce breathing, to the dark "operating" room.

"I do not like it," whispered the King suddenly.

There was certainly nothing very likeable in that profound gloom. It was so dense, so gross, as to appear palpable to him; sooty cobwebs seemed to stroke his face; he swept his hand over it disgustedly.

"Understand," he muttered, in angry agitation, "that you are my mouthpiece; that I will not be betrayed; that--Ah!"--he gave a little jerk and shriek--"something touched me!"

On the instant, light glowed out in the room--or rather diluted darkness than light--and in the same moment an apparition showed itself.

Bonito, in black skull-cap and black skin-tights, his unearthly face and long white hands showing in the gloom like detached members, made a sufficiently ghastly spectacle. Even the little Vicomte, accustomed initiate, could never surmount a certain terror of him under such circumstances. And the present ones found him exceptionally nervous.

"Hail, Spartacus!" he whispered, his voice fluttering like a leaf. "Thou seest before thee a petitioner."

"For what?"

The soothsayer's face seemed to hang, a livid intent blot, in the darkness, its lips alone alive.

"For the truth."

"Canst thou not, then, conceive it save out of Magic? The truth walks in the sun."

"Nay, but if the sun's eclipsed? We come to thee to light a candle to the truth obscured."

"I speak for him beside me here."

"What is his name?"

"Why, were not to withhold it to honour best your skill? Shall Spartacus show no better than the Egyptian's guile, fitting his prescience to his subject once identified. Name him, quotha! What need? Wiser is Spartacus."

"Yet not so wise, it seems, as M. Mirobole."

The King started violently.

"Knowest thou me, too, Magician?" he muttered.

"Ay, Monarch," answered the pale lips; "and thy purpose in seeking me."

"Sancta Maria! Tell me, then, what is that."

"For light on an ancient prophecy."

"It is true. God in heaven! What prophecy?"

"It occurs in the Almanac for 1700 by Duret de Montbrison; wherein it is stated that in the year 1792 the Monarchy of Sardinia shall suffer an eclipse."

The King was trembling violently. He regarded the soothsayer by now with a fearful reverence.

"Tell me, Magician," he said. "The courses of the heavens are, I know, inexorable. Yet may not the results of their forecastings, where directed upon perishable things, be nullified, if those objects be withdrawn? The shadow of its ages ceases from the felled tree. May it not be so?"

"It may be, King."

"Fatality creeps on me. The land is thick with threatening voices. I am like one in the dark, hearing whispers all about me--not knowing where to strike and where to withhold. If I could but tell the shadow--where it lies--and uproot the tree! Whence threatens this eclipse? Show me the place, if thou lovest rich reward."

The Wizard, looking upward, raised both his white hands. There floated into the dark above him luminous twin spheres attached, like a two-fold bubble.

"Seest thou those?" he said. "The one is Piedmont, the other is Savoy. So are the hemispheres of the human brain--of which one is dedicate to the fiend, and one to God. Between them is that eternal strife for precedence which we call man's dual personality. But in the encroachments of either upon either, who is to distinguish between the sources of good and evil. This tree may stand in Piedmont or Savoy. Answer for which, Cassandra!"

With the word, she was there before them. The curtain over the alcove had silently risen and revealed her. The flame in the tripod, going up like a blue draught, shot her tawny drapery with streaks of emerald. A broad cincture, heavy with large green stones, was looped about her hips. Her bare arms and bosom rounded into soft violet shadows. Amid the chestnut loopings of her hair a coil of little jewelled serpents shone entangled. She was lovely in her face--life blooming out of death--her lips incarnadined with lust of sorrow--large eyes of tragic blue. The King looked on her, fascinated.

"Priestess," said the Wizard, in a hollow voice: "answer, if of thine inspiration thou mayest, whence threatens the shadow of this Kingdom's foretold eclipse?"

As he spoke, there came out of the darkness a string of little stars, of softest radiance and many colours, which took noiseless flight about the Sibyl's head, and circled there in wondrous convolutions, faster and faster, until they seemed to whirl like lashing snakes. Then, in a moment, one of a red tint poised itself above her brow, and the rest fled away and were extinguished.

His Majesty, flaccid with awe, was by now in a condition to believe anything. And the priestess answered--in that old soft English voice. Poor Molly's broken "Frenchings" had by now mended themselves wonderfully; but no call to shriller accents could spoil the quality of the throat which uttered them.

"I see a figure down in Faissigny," she cried--"the figure of a man. It standeth in the sun like other men, and like other men doth cast its shadow. But, lo! the shadow of this man swells outward from his feet, onward and ever onward, until it engulfs the whole Province, laying it under tribute to his darkness."

"The Prefect!" muttered the King. He saw his confirmation here of some black suspicions.

"Ask her," he said, trembling, to the Wizard; "is the figure that of mine own Prefect of Faissigny?"

"Thou hearest, Cassandra?" said Bonito.

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