CHAPTER I
On the day when Augias, Conte di Rocco, was raised to the Marquisate and made a member of the Government of Victor-Amadeus III., titular King of Sardinia and Duke of Savoy and Piedmont, an express was despatched from Turin by that newly-aggrandised nobleman to the Chevalier de France in his Hôtel Beausite at Le Prieuré, demanding in marriage the hand of the Chevalier’s only child and daughter, Yolande of the white hands.
No more than a day later the brass-new Marchese in person came treading on the heels of his amorous cartel (for, indeed, that seems the word for it), and had his formal interview with the solitary parent—for Yolande was long motherless. This happened in the year 1783, when a certain democratic simplicity was beginning to temper the extravagances of fashion. Monsignore di Rocco, therefore, had that much excuse for his rusty buckles, his cheap wisp of a cravat (in which a costly diamond burned), his hired equipage and single equerry, or valet d’écurie, who was literally his stable-boy. Otherwise, as the great man of the neighbourhood and a suitor to boot, he might have been accused of that sorriest form of ostentation, which is for rank to parade its independence of recognised convention.
On the other hand, M. de France’s “Hôtel” was just a decent abode at the southern end of the village, rich in nothing but the magnificence of the view from its windows.
The Marchese was already expected, and certainly with no delusions as to the manner of his appearance. M. de France gave no thought to anything but his visitor’s expression as he advanced to meet him in the little “salle d’audience” into which di Rocco had been ushered. Of the two, even, the bearing of the Chevalier, though he was no more than a simple gentleman of Savoy, was the more overbearing in its self-conscious vanity.
He gave the other stiff welcome and congratulations on his exaltation. One would never have guessed that he knew himself very plainly for the mouse, sweating and desperate, in the claws of the great cunning cat which he took and pressed.
But the Marchese, with a high little laugh, broke through the proffered formality.
“Here, here, to my breast, father-in-law!” he cried, and seizing, strenuously kissed the Chevalier on both cheeks, verily like a cat in a sort of blood-lust.
The thin white face of M. de France pinked as he stepped back. His hollow eyes glared, his stern lips trembled, every fold of his threadbare dressing-gown seemed to flatten, as if the wind had been taken out of it. But an habitual self-discipline came to his aid with an acid smile.
“Pardon me,” he said. “You take me by surprise. The term is premature. You young men are so impulsive.”
The enormous sarcasm was in itself a confession of surrender. He would never have essayed it, save in the knowledge of the price he had at hand for acquitting himself of any and all such debts. For di Rocco was, as a matter of fact, old as times went, a scarred and puffed ex-libertine of sixty—a monster of unloveliness, moreover.
He was hideous as Dagon, in truth, half man, half fish, with strained cod eyes, a great wobbling jaw, and lips which had shaken themselves pendulous on naughtiness and laughter. Sordid, slovenly, unclean in mind and body, inordinate as a drayman in bulk and physical strength, a voluptuary, miser, and a fecund raconteur, his rank and wits had, through a well-filled life, been procurers to his inclinations at a nominal cost to himself. His parsimony, not his vices, had alone debarred him from taking that position in the State to which his wealth and social talents had else easily exalted him. At the same time it had always made of him a slumbering force, full of interest and potentialities.
The real power of wealth lies, indeed, not in expenditure but in possession. There is a sacredness about the crowded granary which affects even the starving. There is no fool so despised of the democracy as the spendthrift fool; and, when its time comes, it is the plutocrat it bleeds with an apology.
The Conte di Rocco possessed the tastes of a sybarite with the soul of a usurer. He lit his debauches with candle-ends, and could singe the paws of his tame cats with a most engaging humour whenever he desired chestnuts for nothing. The army of pimps, followers, led-captains and parasites which had always attended his ignoble career, cursed him eternally through jaws as lank as those of Falstaff’s ragged company. But it served him, nevertheless—on the security, it would appear, of phantom post-obits. Everyone hoped some day to have his picking from the carrion of that great carcase—even, it may be supposed, his physician Bonito, whose face in the meanwhile was like a cheese-paring.
And it was this paragon, grandissimo for all his imperfections, who had nominated himself to be the husband of Yolande, the loveliest young lily of Savoy.
How it came about was thus.
Sated, or merely whimsical, or, perhaps, as some said, in a sudden mood to withdraw himself timely from the world in order to “patch up his old body for heaven,” the Count had, about the end of 1782, retired upon his estate and grand Château di Rocco on the Flegère, with the intent, it seemed, to make it thenceforth his permanent abode. Here, having cashiered, or temporised or compromised with, or anything but paid off, the bulk of his disreputable valetaille, he resolved upon the simple life—of candle-ends. And here he made the acquaintance of M. de France and his lovely child, with the former of whom he was able, moreover, in some fits of moral reactionism, to play the effective usurer.
The Chevalier was a creature of enormous pride, though of fortunes fallen to the lowest ebb. But he could never forget that his ancestors had lost Chambéry to the Dukes of Savoy, nor his present despicable position in a State whose highest attentions to him might hardly have compensated for the dignities of which it had deprived his family. He had served with credit, under the reigning King’s predecessor, in the wars of the Austrian succession, yet not with such compelling brilliancy as to enforce recognition from Victor-Amadeus, when that prince came to succeed his father. Neglected, impoverished, De France had withdrawn from a Court whose master was always more concerned with problems of ceremonial than of statecraft, and had retired into necessitous oblivion. Debts, contracted in the days of promise, came winging paper billets after him, and his situation was soon fairly desperate. His wife died, and he gave her grand-ducal obsequies. His child must always go attired in the right trappings of her rank. He called his villa an hôtel, and his parlour an audience-room. Through everything he was gnawed with an eternal hunger for the recognition which would not come his way. He loved his daughter as vain men love their rank, holding it supreme above emotion, humanity, a thing untarnishable but by contact with the base. The possibility of a consort for her in Le Prieuré was a thing not to be thought of. The fact that she was only fifteen and dowerless was inessential. She was Yolande de France.
And then one day old di Rocco asked for her hand.
M. de France was not so surprised as sarcastic. He knew all about the Count and his supposed reformation.
“You would do a final act of atonement, monsignore,” said he, “and dower a penniless girl?”
“I would do more,” answered the Count. “I would burn those bits of paper of yours.”
The Chevalier’s eyes glittered, but his face remained like hard ivory.
“Pardon me,” he said, “there is a difference in your ages.”
“Ah! monsieur, it would be obliterated when the rivulet mingled with the river.”
“You have lived fast.”
“The sooner to reach my redemption.”
“You are out of favour with the Court.”
“Pouf! Call it what you mean—black disgrace—and yet I tell you that I hold its favour in the hollow of my hand.”
The Chevalier’s eyes glistened more.
“I do not doubt your powers of propitiation; else, with grateful thanks for the proffered honour—”
“Exactly—you must decline so sinful a connection. Make it a condition if you will: reconciliation with the Government, and Yolande; or failure, and no Yolande. I am confident. I know myself and others. I will be Marchese in a week, and M. de France will have won his first step towards the position from which he has been too long excluded.”
“H’m!”
“Moreover, he will have acquired a devoted and generous son-in-law” (the Chevalier smiled), “whose first act will be to settle the reversion of his entire property on his own widow.”
“You are serious? And if I decline?”
“I shall leave everything—including bills, acceptances, securities, all the little pigeons waiting in my casier to be plucked—to M. Gaston Trix.”
“Who is he?”
“I am very fond of him. They call him also Cartouche. What does it matter? The hawk is not named hawk in every country of the world. Here he is this—there that. Trix was Cartouche in Chambéry, Scaramuccio in Turin, anything elsewhere. His mother was English; he was born in London; his father forgot to leave his address. Yes, I am very fond of him.”
“Count, you have never yet honoured one of the sex with your hand?”
“Alas! it has lacked cleanness.”
He held it out. It was obvious he spoke the truth.
“I have been a sad rogue,” he said. “It would be useless for me to deny it.”
The Chevalier put the confession by rather hastily. It would appear that his conscience may have resented its intrusion. It is such an advantage, after having realised a personal ambition, to be able to say, “I knew nothing of any moral objection until too late.” But that is just what some queer providence or fatality will never give one the opportunity of asserting. He flushed a little and said, with a stiff air of demand,—
“Monsignore, what attracts you in my daughter?”
The powerful old roué’s face became a mere leering slop of roguery. There was the picture, for anyone who cared to consider it, of concupiscence in its dotage. He had come, in the very exhaustion of his faculties, upon an unheard-of stimulant of loveliness; but sacred, and the more appetising for being so. Any sacrifice was worth to gain this ante-room to heaven. He felt once more the poignant ecstasies of hunger and thirst, he whose sense of surfeit had seemed confirmed to everlastingness. There is no need to enlarge upon his state.
“Ah, monsieur!” he said, “can you, who live in daily contemplation of such perfection, ask? Believe me, the question alone is the riddle; the answer possesses a thousand tongues of rapture and adoration. Would I could speak in them all, that I might ease my breast of this load of undelivered homage which stifles it. I swear, on my honour, there is no interpreter between earth and paradise but Yolande. You will bestow her on me—conditionally?”
M. de France didn’t see, or wouldn’t see, that he was being bribed. There is a point of magnificence, perhaps, above which corruption is elevated to sublimity. What earthly sacrifices can approach the gifts with which the gods reward them? He actually smiled, wintrily but condescendingly, on the other’s enthusiasm.
“Well, well, monsignore,” he protested; “what would your ardour say to a compromise?”
“There is none possible.”
“A betrothal, for instance, on the conditions you were good enough to suggest? I am flattered—it goes without saying—by your proposal. I admit myself distinguished, actually and potentially, in the connection. But the child is but fifteen.”
“I can never consent to it. It puts ten thousand obstacles of accident and caprice between me and my attainment of beatitude. Mademoiselle to-day is an angel, but every feather of her wings, so tied, would invite the cupidity of worldlings—those robbers of the heavenly roost. I know them well. I must, indeed, have the first and last right to protect her.”
“Must, Count? Is she yours or mine? I have said enough, and you, I think, more than enough.”
His brows and his mouth closed down. His vanity could be a very obstinate devil. Di Rocco felt that he had touched his limits.
“Ah! my friend,” he pleaded, “love’s best proof of itself is in outrunning discretion. I went, in truth, too far. Let me hark back to reason. I pledge you my credit that within a month my father-in-law shall be War Minister. Di Broglio wearies of his office, and waits but for an efficient successor. Give me, I entreat you, that warrant to enlarge upon your claims.”
“No, no, the poor child—scarce arrived at woman’s estate.”
“Then let her come to it, for me, unabashed. Make her mine ceremonially, and I swear on my honour to postpone the consummation for a year.”
“Ah! And if you fail?”
“I ask no pledge until my success is assured.”
The Chevalier gnawed his lip, looking on the suitor. He saw an old, fat, unlovely man, scarred by the claws of depravity (one of his eyes was bulging askew, as if actually half torn out by them). But the indelible stamp of rank and wealth redeemed the worst that could be in him. He told himself that it would be a high mission for his Yolande to make of herself the instrument for this monster’s salvation. It had come to be her only chance—and his. Besides, she was a de France, and surely eager for the restoration of her family’s rights.
He stopped there, by a strong effort of will, and pronounced—on his word of honour from which there could be no receding—his inexorable fiat.
“Accomplish what you promise, signore, and she is yours on the condition you propose.”
Nevertheless, he felt something as nearly approaching meanness as it was possible for his pride to feel when the Count returned triumphant with the glad tidings of his success.
“Bid mademoiselle attend me here,” he said coldly to the servant who waited on his summons.
Di Rocco rubbed his dry palms together, tingling through every nerve of his dishonoured old body.
And in the doorway, like Dorothea the martyr, stood the white lily of Savoy, wondering with wide eyes on her judges.