CHAPTER I
Turin, wedged into a corner between the Po and Dora, with all its ranks of lines and squares criss-crossing the angle like the meshes of a snow-shoe, was a depressing city to be abroad in on a rainy night. It was characteristic of it, of its unenterprise and unoriginality, that it had never deviated from the pattern set by its Roman founders. It suggested, when the rain poured persistently, a vast congeries of waterworks, with reservoirs and pumping-stations all drawing from the rivers. Its barrack-like uniformity of buildings; its shyness of imposing façade; its system of parcelled-out dwelling-blocks, called appropriately “Islands,” which were ruled, scrupulously rectangular, along the wide channels of its streets; its eternal monotonous brick and heavy porticoes, all combined to produce an effect of unlovely utilitarianism. Artistry, struggling here and there to emancipate itself, and soar above the level roofs on wings of brass and timber, had always halted, in the end, on a blank expression of futility, and retired within doors, there to fulfil its soul of the splendour which it had shrunk from daring without. For some reason, of taste or policy, architectural display was not favoured in Turin. Its fanes and palaces were all so many uncut diamonds—dull surfaces to hearts of fire.
There was something in all this, no doubt, significant of the character of its government; for, as art flowers at its richest under despotisms, so, oppositely, its growth is most stunted in the temperate climate of democracies. Turin, it is true, was not of those latter; yet it was as true that its lords had never learned to rule independently of their people. Even as kings, though when sovereign by a generation or two, they had not come to take themselves very seriously. They seemed to reign, self-consciously, by virtue of a plebiscite; they avoided superficial ostentation; they kept all their grandeurs for privacy.
There had been those among them who had planned, fitfully, to face all this heavy monotony with light and lightness, to overlay it with skin of marble, stone, or even, as a last lame resort, with stucco. Their ambitions had declined upon a policy of laisser faire; in many buildings the very holes for their scaffolding remained unfilled—ineptitude yawning from a hundred mouths. Turin, under the rule of Victor-Amadeus III., was still Rome before Augustus, lacking its splendid autocrat. At the same time there was this much to its credit: it had never bred, or allowed to self-breed within its walls, a race of tyrants.
The Savoy princes were the militant monks of history, always keeping a reserve of cloister for contingencies. They were recluses by conviction, freebooters by constitution. The first duke of them all had died a hermit. The grandfather of the present King, the “Piedmontese Lear,” had abdicated (prematurely) on a religious sentiment. It had been his pious intent to efface the feudal system, age-dishonoured. It was the policy of his grandson to attempt its restoration. He made a mistake, being a vain, weak man. It is not the wisdom of the proletariat, but the folly of its rulers which opens the ways to revolt. Worse than the grudging of wise concessions is their rescinding when they have become establishments. Victor-Amadeus made much of his army, which was a warlike father’s perfected bequest to him. He also made much of his nobility, with the result that, according to the popular waggery, there was, in his reign, a general to every private. So he consistently favoured birth, ignored intrinsic merit apart from it, alienated the sympathies of his people, and opened his passes thereby to the hordes of the French Revolution. It was always a figure of speech to say that he strode the Alps. He had lost his French stirrup long before he knew it, and was jogging lop-sided to his fall.
In the meantime, lacking the soul of Augustus, he left Turin much as he found it, and, in place of bread and circuses, fed up discontent on the public lottery. His kingdom was rotten when it tumbled.
Montaigne in his time found Turin a small town, situated in a watery plain, not very well built nor very agreeable. Some two hundred years later the ineffable Count Cassanova passed a verdict on it not much handsomer. It was densely populated and full of spies, he said. It boasted, as a fact, at the latter date, a population of some ninety thousand souls. But it was not crowded nevertheless, except to one who saw eyes at every turn. A city’s numbers are not to be calculated by one who moves exclusively in its markets. Turin’s population, if regularly distributed over its area, would have shown most of its quarters relatively empty.
It looked its best on a moonlight night, when along its canal-like streets the cobble-stones glinted and sparkled like very ripples on water, and the great hulks aligned on either side became shadowy leviathans anchored at rest. Its worst was kept for twilight drenchings, when the mists trooped down from the distant Alps and, blotting out the intervening slopes—the Superga, the hill of the Capucins, and others, a green high-stretching swarm—made one shoreless swamp of all the level town.
On such an evening, a man, going, with humped shoulders and dripping hat, down the Via del Po, which was one of Turin’s principal thoroughfares, cursed the city’s original settlers with all his soul of venom. He was, nevertheless, so bent on a particular errand, that nothing less than a flood would have diverted him from it. Presently he ran to a stop before a dimly-lighted shop window, and peered eagerly up at certain labels and vouchers which were pasted to the glass within. There were other inquisitors at the same business, quite a throng of them, and one and all, including the newcomer, like rude and ravenous poultry.
The shop itself might have been, in its dinginess and gloom, a mere money-changer’s office; which at the same time it was in a measure, only on a national scale. There were pious frescoes daubed on its walls, as if in irresistible association of hucksters with the temple. On either side of its door was hung a slim red board, the one headed “Torino,” the other “Genova.” Each board was ruled into five sections, and each section contained a number. These numbers represented, more or less, the victims of what the wags called the torture of the wheel. The office was, in fact, one of the many bureaux of the never-ending State lottery.
The stranger having examined, to his hunger or satisfaction, the numbers on the boards and the hieroglyphics in the window, stepped back into the rain with a click of his strong teeth together.
“Weeding, weeding!” he thought, exultant and rageful in one. “Next week will reach the grand climacteric—for me. My God! and what then?”
As he reflected, or muttered, chafing like a fettered beast, the form of a man, advancing up the street, came between himself and the light. Instantly he started, uttered a violent exclamation, and quickly pursuing the figure, accosted and halted it.
“M. Saint-Péray!” he cried. “So, after all, you have come into retreat in our capital!”
Louis-Marie regarded the speaker ghastlily. The young man’s face, in the shaking lamp-shine, seemed to twitch like the face of an epileptic. It was white and haggard, and indeed scarcely recognisable for the face which had kindled to the mountains of Le Prieuré a month earlier. He made no answer.
“A la bonne heure!” cried the other, very careful all the time not to let his capture escape him. “I had wanted much to come across you, and never so much as at this moment. Conceive my ridiculous position, monsieur! Realise me, here on this spot, debarred the heavenly mansions for lack of the necessary trifle of gate-money!”
“You are—Dr Bonito?” began Saint-Péray, clearing his throat to the effort.
“And flattered in your memory of me, monsieur,” interrupted the doctor, with a little bow which seemed to creak at the joints. “As you will recollect, I read nativities, I foretell events, however a capricious destiny may alter her tactics to procure them. For instance, you will remember, I prophesied the consequences of a certain achievement, which prediction was none the less verified because, as it happened paradoxically, the consequences anticipated the achievement. What then? It is the end which justifies the seer. The lady, you will scarcely deny, is a widow at this moment.”
Saint-Péray put his hand to his pocket.
“You want money,” he said hoarsely. The other stopped him with dignity.
“A loan is the word, monsieur—a little oil for the lamp; a little grease for the wheel; une épingle par jour; a sprat to catch a whale. You observe where you passed me just now?” (He pointed to the bureau.) “My star culminates there, monsieur, in a week. So surely as the heavens cannot lie, the numbers revealed at the next drawing will spell my apotheosis. In the meanwhile one, even a seer, must buy one’s promotion. The gods are very human. I have only approached this climax at the cost of all my little savings. If you will condescend to drink a glass of vermouth with me, I will explain. There is a café hard by, and the night is cold.”
Louis-Marie seemed drained of will or resolution—a flaccid, half-dead creature. He followed whither he was told, and drank his vermouth and élixir de China—one glass, then another and another. A spark woke at last in his ash-blue eyes. Bonito, watching it, kindled reassured.
“The Fates, after all, have been kind to you, monsieur,” he said, gently touching the other’s arm with a long thin finger, as a spider experiments with a fly before he rolls it up. “There lives a spotless widow in Le Prieuré, and wealthy beyond words. You could not yourself have managed it better, if you had been a villain.”
Saint-Péray started, half-rose from his seat and sank down again.
“If it is villainous to have lost belief in God,” he muttered, “I am a villain, and no longer worthy to utter her name—nor even to resent its utterance by you.”
“As you please,” said the doctor, coolly. “I served virtue in serving M. Saint-Péray, and so would serve again without asking thanks. But to become an apostate and be damned at the instance of her whose name you are unworthy to utter—that seems to me like meaning heterodox and acting paradox.”
The spark had spread to Louis-Marie’s cheek.
“I desire, monsieur,” he said loudly, but quaveringly, “that you will state what you wish of me without further comment on my affairs.”
Bonito was not ruffled, though immensely dry and articulate.
“Very well, Monsieur,” he said; “though you will forgive my proposing to amend your resolution by inserting the word present between the words further and comment. The time will come, perhaps, when you will see my disinterestedness and your own interests more closely. In the meanwhile I go wanting my gate-money.”
“Well? for your apotheosis, sir?”
“Exactly; by way of the lottery. The last of my scrap-metal, like the sculptor Cellini’s in the crisis of his fortunes, has gone into the mould. It needs but a finishing contribution, a final sacrifice, and the Perseus of my destiny will rise on winged feet. Other men have their systems, worldly and fallible. Mine derives from the stars and is infallible.”
Saint-Péray laughed shakily, starting to scoff, but compromising with discretion. His soul was always malleable by another’s strong conviction.
“What, then, is this lottery?” he asked.
Bonito threw up his hands in mock-incredulity.
“You have been in Turin this month, and have not discovered its distraction of distractions! Alas! what a comment on your own! The lottery? I can explain it in a word—the very grandeur of simplicity; the art which conceals all art. Imagine, Monsieur, a wheel which contains numbers up to ninety and a single zero within its hollow circumference. Of these numbers, five are withdrawn weekly (in Turin or Genoa, turn-about), recorded and replaced. Well, you or I select five numbers—any, after our fancy—register them at a bureau, and receive a counter-check in exchange. Now, supposing two out of those our numbers shall occur in any one drawing, we score an ambo, and receive two hundred and seventy times the amount of our stake: if three, or a tern, we receive it multiplied five thousand five hundred times: if four, or a quatern, sixty-thousand times. On the other hand, if no such combination occurs, we forfeit our stake, to renew it, if we please, week by week, month by month, year by year. There is no end and no limit. Enfin, the zero occurring in any drawing forfeits all stakes of that week to the Government. There are complications, such as distributing one’s chances over the five numbers; but the principle is what I say. I throw for a quatern, and I shall gain it. Its sum will be, relatively, the sum which you shall be good enough to advance me. Join with me, if you will, and foreclose on Fortune. You will be rich, presently, beyond the dreams of parsimony. Wealth attracts wealth. You will lose nothing thereby, if I may say it, as a suitor.”
Wise men are often ready to listen to empirics who cite the occult with an air of finality. Louis-Marie was not very wise, and was thereby the nearer superstition. His faith had told him to discredit soothsayers: but for the time he had lost his faith. Like all good men thrown from their self-respect, he greatly exaggerated his own potentialities for wickedness. This man, he thought, had rightly foretold a misfortune. Might he not with equal certainty predict a fortune? There was some material balm in that. If he was to lose his soul, would not to gain the world better compensate the interval than a life of inglorious brooding? As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb: he called the words to memory with a new sense of daring. What a folly was piety—a hair-shirt on a heathen preordained to damnation. It was no God, no Father, who could set snares for the feet of his children. There was no God, unless a Prince of evil. Let him serve the chance. Live the world and the lottery!
The spirit he had drunk revelled in his starved unaccustomed brain. He thrust his hand into his pocket, and drawing out all it contained, offered the sum to Bonito, with a half-maudlin laugh.
“Half for myself and half for you, then,” he said. “I make you my broker with Fate.”
The sum was large enough to awaken a glitter in the Rosicrucian’s cold eyes. Something, the nearest approach to warmth which his heart was capable of feeling, tickled in his breast. He showed, for the moment, quite genial, quite impulsive.
“Always understand, Monsieur,” he said, “that I am actuated by the most earnest desire to serve you. We have a point of sympathy in our common wronging by one who shall be nameless. Let me here suggest, with only the lightest touch on a sensitive place, that women generally are not attracted by extreme ethical correctness, nor won by diffidence so much as overbearance. Believe my sincerity when I assure you that nothing would gratify me more than to see the ultimate accomplishment of a union, to which no bar but that of sentiment can ever—”
Something, some shadow of reawakening terror in the face opposite him, warned him that it would be present wisdom to pursue the subject no further. He “doubled” instantly.
“But I will say no more there,” he interrupted himself. “It is enough for the moment that I undertake to prove myself” (he touched the pocket of his coat) “your efficient friend and steward.”
An uproar of approaching voices broke upon his word. The café hitherto had been but thinly peopled, mostly by weather-stressed citizens, who had been conversing apart, low and rapid, on the subject of the eternal lottery, while they sipped their liqueurs or bacchierino, and flourished their cigarettes back and forth to their lips. Now, “Cartouche!” exclaimed someone, and the sombre quietude seemed instantly to splinter into light. The mirrors cleared to reflect it; the sensuous figures in the pictures woke to a Bacchanalian dance. Louis-Marie stared, speechless, at his companion, who, for his part, appeared as dumbfoundered.
“Sentite!” he muttered. “Scaramucchio! Si, ê vero!”
The tumult, as he spoke, had broken in, running with the feet and voices of half a score young men, a contingent, truculent and vivacious, of the bellimbusti, or “bloods” of Turin. And in the midst appeared Cartouche, commanding, insolent, policing a captive, a youth of the same guild, but, unlike the rest, in a state of moral and physical collapse. He, the latter, struggled, sobbing hysterically, in the determined grasp of his gaoler, while the others hovered, cackling and circling, about their neighbourhood.
“Listen, my Severo,” said Cartouche; “thou shalt drink first, and destroy thyself afterwards, if thou wilt.”
“He has lost his whole fortune in the lottery,” whispered one onlooker to another.
The wretched boy fought to escape.
“I will drink the river,” he gasped; “no dog shall prevent me.”
Cartouche’s hold tightened.
“Call me not a dog, little Severo,” he said, “or perchance I may show my teeth. Be wise, while there is time. There are beer and grassini still in Turin, and trollops enough at a penny. Beggary will yet buy thee all that Fortune is worth but the silly gilding. Nay” (he darkened), “if thou wilt be stubborn for death, insult me—I am more certain than the river—and save, at least, thy immortal soul.”
The boy, writhing round and sputtering with his lips, managed to strike his captor lamely on the cheek. The next moment he was free, and cowering into himself, the wind all clapped out of his heroics. The whole company stood silent and aghast.
Cartouche unbuttoned and slipped off his surtout, hung it over a chair, adjusted the ruffs at his neck and wrists, smoothed a crease from his slim black undercoat, and shifted the bright steel hilt of his sword an inch or two forward—all quite quietly and deliberately. Then he spoke with a very soft courtesy.
“That was the pious course, little Severo. Now shalt thou compromise with thy Maker for no more than a spell of purgatory. It will not be much, I doubt, with one so excusable for his youth.”
His blade came out with a silk-like swish. Death, in the venomous sound, hissed into the youngster’s ears. He looked up, his face as white as paper.
“I seek the river, not thy sword, M. Trix,” he quavered.
“That is unfortunate; because I seek thy life, little Severo.”
The boy looked round fearfully: his companions, set and terrible, hedged him from the door. He gave all up in a pitiful cry,—
“I was wrong: I don’t want to die! Cartouche, I don’t really want to die!”
“That is sad indeed,” said Cartouche. “You will have to summon all your resolution.”
His face changed suddenly.
“Will you draw, sir,” he said sternly: “or am I to cut your throat like a sheep’s?”
“It is murder,” cried the boy. “I call all to witness it is murder!”
Some exclamations of contempt alone answered him. Rallying, under the shame, to a last agony of resolution, he drew his sword and advanced. His under lip was shaking and dribbling; the bosom of his linen was torn; he looked like a death-sick girl.
The blades crossed. Cartouche held his motionless a moment while the other’s vibrated on it like a castanet. An answering small laugh went up. Then he engaged deftly, in a wicked little prelude of cat’s-play; and then—
It was at least as great a shock to him as to any other to hear a sudden leap and rush, and see his sword torn from his hand and flung to the ground. For the moment, a fury of hell flew to his eyes and blinded them; the next, he saw Louis-Marie standing before him, white, and terrible, and denunciatory.
“Save thou thine own soul!” shrieked Saint-Péray, “nor lose it, saving this child’s. O, my brother! drive me not to this last despair of cursing all I have loved. Give me the boy’s life.”
A stun of utter stupefaction had fallen on the company. For the instant everything stood stricken—a strange and pregnant tableau. But in the still hearts of all was a terror of the inevitable crash which must rend in an instant the appalling hush.
To their confusion, scarcely less astounded, the crash did not follow; but, instead—miracle of things!—the disarmed one drew a deep breath, and smiled.
“It is a trifle; take it, my brother!” he said.
Even with the word he saw Saint-Péray sway where he stood. He darted forward and put a strenuous arm about him.
“What is it, Louis?” he whispered.
Saint-Péray’s fluttering hands went feebly about his neck.
“I have saved a life? O, God, dear Gaston, tell me that I have saved a life!” he whispered in wild emotion.
Cartouche, glaring around, caught sudden sight of Bonito standing slack-jawed in the gloom. The doctor, seeing himself discovered, came forward.
“Hist!” he muttered. “Our friend is in a poor way, Mr Trix, and needs looking after. Get him to come outside with us.”
“You have certainly saved a life, brother,” murmured Cartouche—“though, I am afraid, not a very worthy one.” Then he said aloud: “To pass, by your favour, gentlemen! But deal gently with my character, I beg you. I am still in evidence to answer for it.”