Read Ebook: Between two thieves by Dehan Richard

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Ebook has 3311 lines and 248111 words, and 67 pages

Hector pondered and rubbed his ear. De Moulny cackled faintly:

"He tweaked you well when he told you to wait, I see!"

Hector nodded, grimacing.

"To pull the hair, or tweak the ear, that was his Emperor's habit, when he was in a good temper.... My father copies the habit, just as he carries Spanish snuff loose in the pockets of his buff nankeen vests and wears his right hand in the bosom--so!" He imitated the historic pose and went on: "He kept it there as he pinched and wrung with the left finger and thumb"--the speaker gingerly touched the martyred ear--"laughing all the time. I thought my ear would have come off, but I set my teeth and held my tongue.... Then he let go, and chucked me under the chin--another trick of the Emperor's. 'A sprig of the blood-royal for Luitpold's blood-pudding! That is not a bad return! We shall have a fine Serene Highness presently for those good people of Widinitz.' And he went away laughing and scattering snuff all over his vest and knee-breeches; he calls pantaloons 'the pitiable refuge of legs without calves.' Now, what did he mean by a Serene Highness for those good people of Widinitz?"

"I--am--not quite sure." De Moulny pastured upon a well-gnawed finger-nail, pulled at his jutting underlip, and looked wise. "What I think he meant I shall not tell you now--! What I want you to do now is to swear to me, solemnly, that you will never touch a franc of that money."

"I have promised."

"A promise is good, but an oath is better."

Hector began to laugh in a sheepish way, but de Moulny's knobby forehead was portentous. That mass of gold, reclaimed from the coffers of the Convent of Widinitz seemed to him the untouchable thing; the taking it unpardonable--an act of simony his orthodox Catholic gorge rose at. So, as Hector looked at him, hesitating, he gnawed and glowered and breathed until he lost patience and hit the basket that held up the bedclothes with his fist, and whispered furiously:

"Swear, if you value my friendship! And I--I will swear, as you once asked me--remember, Redskin!--as you once asked me!--to be your friend through life--to the edge of Death--beyond Death if that be permitted!"

Ah me! It is never the lover who loves the more, never the friend whose friendship is the most ardent, who seeks the testing-proof of love or friendship, who demands the crowning sacrifice in return for the promise of a love that is never to grow cool, a loyalty that shall never fail or falter....

"'I, Hector-Marie-Aymont-von Widinitz Dunoisse, solemnly swear and depose'--where did de Moulny get all the big words he knew? ... 'swear and depose that I will never profit by one penny of the dowry of three-hundred-thousand silver thalers paid to the Prioress of the Convent of Widinitz as the dowry of my mother, the Princess Marie-Bathilde von Widinitz, otherwise Dunoisse, in religion Sister T?r?se de Saint Fran?ois. So help me, Almighty God, and our Blessed Lady! Amen.'"

He kissed the Crucifix de Moulny put to his lips, and de Moulny took the oath in his turn:

The Crucifix was duly saluted, the Rosary hung back upon the bed-knob.

"Embrace me now, my friend," said de Moulny, his blue eyes shining under a smooth forehead. Hector held out his hand.

"We will shake hands as English boys do. They ridicule our French way of kissing, Miss Smithwick says."

The nerves of both boys were tingling still with the recollection of the double compact they had sealed with an oath. Now they could look at one another without consciousness, and were glad to talk of Bertham, his English awkwardness and his British French. For mere humanity cannot for long together endure to respire the thin crystal air of the Higher Emotions. It must come down, and breathe the common air of ordinary life, and talk of everyday things, or perish. So Hector listened while de Moulny held forth.

"How you talk!" said Hector, flushed with admiration of his idol's powers of conversation.

"I like words," said the idol, lightly taking the incense as his due. "Terms, expressions, phrases, combinations of these, please me like combinations in Chemistry. I do not enjoy composition with the pen; the tongue is my preference. Perhaps I was meant for a diplomatic career." His face fell as his eyes rested upon the basket that humped the bedclothes. It cleared as he added, with an afterthought:

"Diplomacy is for priests as well as statesmen. Men of acumen and eloquence are wanted in the Church." De Moulny folded his lean arms behind his head, and perused the whitewashed ceiling.

"Tell me more about your cousin Bertham," Hector begged, to lure de Moulny from the subject that had pricks for both.

Hector translated the words into the original English and repeated them for de Moulny's amusement.

"It must be a queer place, that Eton of theirs," went on de Moulny. "When they leave to enter their Universities they know nothing. Of Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Arithmetic, they are in ignorance. Their rowing and other sports--considered by all infinitely more important than intellectual attainments--are ignored by the Directors of the School, and yet--to these their chief efforts are addressed; to excel in strength is the ambition above all. They are flogged for the most trifling offenses, upon the naked person with a birch, by the Director-in-Chief of Studies, who is a clergyman of the Established Church. And the younger boys are servants to their elders."

"We make them so here," said Hector pointedly. "We subject them to the authority that others exercised over us, and that they in their turn will use over others."

"Subjects are not serfs. These younger boys of Eton are worse used than serfs. They call the system of torture 'fagging'; it is winked at by the Directors," explained de Moulny. "To be kicked and tormented and beaten--that is to be fagged. To carry coals to make your master's fire, to bring him buckets of water from the pump, to sweep and dust and black his boots, make his bed and sleep on the floor without even a blanket if he does not choose that you shall enjoy that luxury--that is to be fagged, as Bertham knows it. They are infinitely worse off than we, these sons of the English nobles and great landed gentlemen. And yet one thing that we have not got, they have"; de Moulny thrust out his underlip and wagged his big head, "and it is worth all--or nearly all these things we have that they have not. They are loyal to each other. There is union among them. In Chemistry we know the value of cohesion.... Well!... there is cohesion among these Eton boys. How much of it is there here? Not as much as--that!" He measured off an infinitesimal space upon the bitten finger-nail, and showed it to Hector, who nodded confirmatively, saying:

"No!" said de Moulny, with a frowning shake of the head. "There is none of that sort of thing. Because--Bertham told me!--the boy who was proved to be guilty of it would have to leave Eton. Instantly. Or--it would come about that that boy would be found dead; and as to how he died"--he shrugged his shoulders expressively--"it would be as possible to gain an explanation from the corpse, Bertham says, as to wring one from the resolute silence of the School."

Hector knew a delicious thrill of mingled horror and admiration of those terrible young Britons, who could maintain honor among themselves by such stark laws, and avenge betrayal by sentence so grim.

"But there are other rules in the Code of Eton that are imbecile, absolutely, on my honor, idiotic!" said de Moulny. "Not to button the lower button of the waistcoat--that is one rule which must not be broken. Nor must Lower boys turn up their trousers in muddy weather, or wear greatcoats in cold, until their elders choose to set the example. And unless you are of high standing in the School, you dare not roll your umbrella up. It is a presumption the whole School would resent. For another example, you are invariably to say and maintain that things others can do and that you cannot, are bad form. Bertham saw me make a fire one day, camp-fashion, in five minutes, when he had been sweating like a porter for an hour without being able to kindle a dead stick. 'It's all very well,' he said, with his eyebrows climbing up into his curly hair, 'for a fellow to light fires; but to do servant's work well is bad form, our fellows would say.'"

"Why did you want a fire?" demanded Hector, balancing his rush-bottomed chair on one hind-leg.

"And the dog?"

"The dog was lying in a pool of blood on the beaten earth floor. A shoulder and the throat were terribly mangled, a fore-leg had been bitten through; one would have said the creature had been worried by a wolf rather than a dog of its own breed. And she was sitting on the ground beside it, holding its bloody head in her lap...."

De Moulny's eyes blinked as though the Director's blazing beds of gilliflowers and calceolarias, geraniums and mignonette, had dazzled them. Hector asked, with awakening interest in a story which had not at first promised much:

"Who was she?"

De Moulny stuck his chin out, and stated in his didactic way:

"A young girl!" grumbled Hector, who at this period esteemed the full-blown peony of womanhood above the opening rosebud. He shrugged one shoulder so contemptuously that de Moulny was nettled.

"One might say to you, 'There are young girls and young girls.'"

"This one was charming, then?" Hector's waning interest began to burn up again.

"Certainly, no! For," said de Moulny authoritatively, "to be charming you must desire to charm. This young girl was innocent of any thought of coquetry. And--if you ask me whether she was beautiful, I should give you again the negative. Beauty--the beauty of luxuriant hair, pale, silken brown, flowing, as a young girl's should, loosely upon shoulders rather meager; the beauty of an exquisite skin, fresh, clear, burned like a nectarine on the oval cheeks where the sun had touched it; beauty of eyes, those English eyes of blue-gray, more lustrous than brilliant, banded about the irises with velvety black, widely opened, thickly lashed--these she possessed, with features much too large for beauty, with a form too undeveloped even to promise grace. But the quality or force that marked her out, distinguished her from others of her age and sex, I have no name for that!"

"No?" Hector, not in the least interested, tried to look so, and apparently succeeded. De Moulny went on:

The hard blue eyes, burning now, encountered Hector's astonished gape, and their owner barked out: "What are you opening your mouth so wide about?"

Hector blurted out:

"Why--what for? Because you said that a raw English girl nursing a dying sheep-dog on a mountain in Peakshire reminded you of the Maid of Orleans and Our Blessed Lady!"

"And if I did?"

"But was she not English?... A Protestant?... a heretic?"

"Many of the Saints were heretics--until Our Lord called them," said de Moulny, with that fanatical spark burning in his blue eye. "But He had chosen them before He called. They bore the seal of His choice."

"You were going to finish: 'It is you who are to be a priest, not me...!'" de Moulny said, with the veins in his heavy forehead swelling, and a twitching muscle jerking down his pouting underlip.

"I forget what I was going to say," declared Hector mendaciously, and piled Ossa upon Pelion by begging de Moulny to go on with his story. "It interested hugely," he said, even as he struggled to repress the threatening yawn.

"What is there to tell?" grumbled de Moulny ungraciously. "She was there, that is all--with that dog that had been hurt. A pony she had ridden was grazing at the back of the shed, its bridle tied to the pommel of the saddle. Bertham approached her and saluted her; he knew her, it seems, and presented me. She spoke only of the dog--looked at nothing but the dog! She could not bear to leave it, in case it should be put to death by the master it could serve no more...."

Hector interrupted, for de Moulny's voice had begun to sound as though he were talking in his sleep:

"Tell me her name."

"Her name is Ada Merling."

Even on de Moulny's French tongue the name was full of music; it came to Hector's ear like the sudden sweet gurgling thrill that makes the idler straying beneath low-hanging, green hazel-branches upon a June morning in an English wood or lane, look up and catch a glimpse of the golden bill and the gleaming, black-plumaged head, before their owner, with a defiant "tuck-tuck!" takes wing, with curious slanting flight. The boy had a picture of the blackbird, not of the girl, in his mind, as de Moulny went on:

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