CHAPTER II
The Château di Rocco stood well back, among pine woods, from the little village of Les Chables on the Argentière Road. Above it sloped the stony steeps of the Flegère; below were huddled neglected terraces, like dams to check the further descent of the house into the valley. It might, in its relation to the huge quarry which contained it, have been part of the mountain itself, a vast boulder torn away from its parent rock, and retaining in relief the form of the socket from which it had parted. Towers, pinnacles and walls, heaped up like an enormous ice-mould, seemed to have shaped themselves to the uproar of avalanches, and falling torrents, and the thunder of the wind which uproots whole hill-sides. Yet it was so old itself as to have withstood a legion of assaults and survived unshaken. It had been the stronghold of the di Roccos from the days when the passes of the Alps were a very active trust in the keeping of the border lords, and was still a formidable veteran of its stones.
Within, a world of sombre and tarnished magnificence witnessed to the hands of great mechanics of the past generations. Only the spirit which could minister to such traditions was debased beyond recall. What strain was responsible for its existing lord’s, who could say? The miser, like the comet, is a recurrent phenomenon, eccentric in his orbit.
The Château, all in all, was a savage, stone-locked, cold-harbour of a place, the teeth of whose very ghosts chattered as they walked its vaulted corridors. It was haunted throughout by sounds and whispers of cold—the boom of subterranean waters; the high rustle of snow; the growl of ice splitting in the great glaciers opposite. The wind whistled in its halls, lifting the skirts of the tapestry in a sort of stately dance, as if the phantom figures thereon were at a minuet to warm themselves. There was not a closet in all its recesses which might have been called cosy, nor a rat behind its wainscoting which had grown sleek on plenty.
Dr Bonito, private physician to the Count, was himself as waxy a spectre as any which inhabited there. His face was like a topographical map, with all its features in low relief—wrinkles for rivers, dull eyes for lakes, a nose like a rudimentary volcano. There was no expression whatever on it but what seemed to derive from drought and starvation, and no colour but a bilious glaze, which pimpled here and there into red. A death-mask of him might very well have stood for a chart of the dead moon.
The doctor was said to be a Rosicrucian, a member of that queer sect (then somewhat out of date) which mixed up alchemy with ethics, and thought to coin a millennium out of the alloy. Or it had thought to once. Rosicrucianism was not founded, professedly, to interfere with the polity or religions of States, but simply to pursue the True Philosophy—to “follow the Gleam.” Yet no secret society, I suppose, has ever failed, when success has brought it self-conscious of its power, to abuse its mission; and certainly Dr Bonito, as a latter-day Frater Roseæ-Crucis, distilled other and less perfumed waters than utilitarianism from his alembics. He was an empiric, in fact, and lived on the gross superstition of his employer—barely, it is true, but resignedly, since Di Rocco had promised him a legacy proportionate with his services in keeping him alive, and a very bonanza should he conduct him well over the Biblical span. For which reason Bonito scarcely resented his present treatment, because he counted every penny now withheld from him as a penny invested against his future.
Plumpness, under the circumstances, was hardly to be expected of him; but the doctor was so very thin that, when he hugged himself, his elbows seemed to meet in his waist. Mr Trix (as he liked to be called), sitting opposite at a little table, with a solitary candle burning between, laughed to see him so caress himself.
“You have no bowels,” he said, “consequently no hunger. What is the matter with you then, old Bonito?”
The physician, who, in order that he might cherish his numb fingers, had put down on the table an instrument which he had been engaged in correcting—an astrolabe so antique in construction that it might have dated from Hipparchus—answered, with a peevish wince of his breath,—
“Hunger, child? What dost thou know of the hunger of the soul?”
“Something,” said Trix.
“Something!” echoed the other. “Ay, the baffled appetites of one whose sensorium is but a mirror to reflect back into his brain the visible lusts of the flesh.”
Mr Trix laughed again, pulling at his long pipe. He had a reckless young dark face, jet-eyebrowed, winsome out of wickedness, and handsome enough to be a perpetual passport to his desires. His form, properly slim and elastic for the “blade” that he was, was “sheathed,” quite elegantly for di Rocco, in cloth of a fine black, and with a ruff of Valenciennes lace at its breast. A glass and a bottle of old wine stood at his elbow.
“True,” he said, “I deplore the loss of our late good company. And so do you, my Bonito, if for a different reason. I miss its penny-wisdom, and you its penny-fees. But however our respective souls may feel the present pinch, they would do well, it seems to me, to prepare for, even to provide against, a worse. I think Di Rocco looks very bloated and shaky of late, don’t you?”
“Ah! you wish him to die first!”
Bonito rose to his feet and went pacing vehemently up and down. Trix, watching him, said quietly,—
“You are very wrong. I wish the padrone no harm whatever—least of all the harm of this ludicrous misalliance.”
The physician stopped suddenly.
“It is quite true,” he said. “I know the conditions. We should both be disinherited—taken by the scruff and kicked out. The notary has already been advised.”
“What then? The stars are always common land.”
“Do you think so, my friend? There are no pastures so exclusive, nor so costly in the grazing. Why else have I served parsimony these long years, as Galeotti served Louis Gripes, if not for promise of the late means to their attainment. Let us be frank; why have you?”
“For fun,” said the young man, “or my duty to an older scapegrace. I don’t see the possibility of either in a regimen of Mademoiselle de France.”
Bonito, sitting down again and leaning his elbows on the table, searched hungrily the brown eyes which canvassed his imperturbably. Suddenly he dealt out a question,—
“M. Louis-Marie Saint-Péray?”
“Well?”
“Have you come across such a gentleman here?”
Trix nodded.
“Eh! you have?” said the other. “Well, what do you know of him?”
“That he is a young gentleman of France, of slender means, which he expends largely on impracticable enthusiasms.”
“Anything more?”
“That he is in Le Prieuré for the second time, to attempt the assault of Mont Blanc.”
“Ay, and what else?”
“Incidentally, that he will never conquer anything.”
“Why not?”
“Because he is a creature of fervid aspirations and lame conclusions.”
“Has he taken you into his confidence?”
“More; into his arms.”
“How was that?”
“He would cross the Glacier of the Winds without a guide; he fell into a crevasse which, luckily for him, his alpenstock bridged. But he could not get out until I pulled him. There’s the thing in the corner. Do you see it? I gave him my hunting-knife for it, the one with the jade handle and little rat’s head in-gold. Nothing would satisfy him but that we exchanged blood tokens.”
“I don’t doubt it. A fair exchange, and M. Cartouche all over.”
“Why, thou unconscionable hunks! didn’t he give me, for his part, what he had reason to value most in the world? ‘Use it for my sake,’ says he, ‘so that I may dream always of my two best friends going hand in hand.’ There were tears in his eyes. Do you think he will ever ascend Mont Blanc?”
“Maybe not. But his aspirations mount higher.”
“You mean to the de France. Ha, ha, old fox! you have not had me, you see.”
“He has confessed to you?”
“No, I swear. But the sacristan of Le Marais is an exuberant toss-pot, and apt to overflow in his cups. My information is from him.”
“What information?”
“Why, that miss and my friend have very much the air of being lovers secretly pledged to one another.”
“It is a fact. But how does he know it?”
“His chapel is their pious rendezvous, sweet souls. There they met first, and there they meet still.”
“It is well they take their loves to church—a good sign. He will want to make an honest woman of her.”
Cartouche grew suddenly and fastidiously articulate.
“I will beg you to bear in mind, Dr Bonito,” he said, “that M. Saint-Péray has made his honour my own.”
“That is admirable indeed,” answered the physician. “But has he introduced you to the lady?”
“No,” said Cartouche, irresistibly tickled for the moment. “There are limits even to his friendship.”
“You do not know her?”
“Not even by sight.”
“She is very pretty, Mr Trix.”
Cartouche, staring at the speaker a moment, took his pipe from his lips, which as always, when his mood grew ugly, seemed to thin down against his teeth.
“What are you hinting at?” he demanded low. “A pox on your innuendo! Out with it!”
The physician grinned unconcerned.
“Only,” said he, “that I hope, when you do see her, it will not make you wish to take your blood-brother’s place in the spoiling of di Rocco’s romance.”
Cartouche leaped to his feet.
“Beast!” he hissed. “If thou hadst as much nose as a barber could lay hold on, I would take thee by it and shave thy cursed throat!”
The other did not move.
“As to my nose,” he said, “it serves its purpose.”
“I don’t doubt it,” cried Cartouche. “The smallest vent is enough for slander. When have you ever known me wrong a friend in his love?”
“Never, indeed—where the wrong’s been expected of you. Perversity’s your crowning devil. You’ve suffered some losses for the pleasure of confuting your oracles, I know. Well, you’ve only to confute them here, to earn my gratitude, at least.”
“A dog to suggest such a villainy!”
“What! to you? Ho, ho! Have you ever heard of carrying owls to Athens? But let it pass. It’s all one if we are in accord as to the impossibility of this alliance between Mademoiselle and our patron, and the timeliness of our young mountaineer’s intrusion. You choose to believe that you will serve monsignore best by helping M. Saint-Péray to the lady. Well, believe it, and save us our reversions by an act of virtue.”
Cartouche, yielding to humour with a sudden laugh, yawned and stretched himself.
“After all,” he said indolently, “there’s no such sporting science as casuistry. Di Rocco is certainly an old bottle for this heady young wine; a villainous scarecrow to be asking for a patch of this bright new cloth. The pattern is out of suits with his raggedness, and calls for a seemly pair of breeches. We’ll save him his character in spite of himself.”
“It would be a veritable act of grace,” said Bonito.
“If we could only do him that good by stealth,” said Cartouche, relighting his pipe.
“La-la-la!” cried the physician, softly. “Why need we appear in the matter at all?”
“What do you mean?”
“It is only a question of terms with Le Marais—of sufficiently gilding the countenance it will give to a stolen union. They have no particular tenderness there for di Rocco, whose ugly countenance, for his part, is the only thing he has ever given them. The rest lies between you and your blood-brother.”
“I can bring a horse to the water—”
“Bah! he will drink. It is a Pierian spring. You will know when you see.”
“Shall I? And how about the lady?”
Bonito chuckled.
“For choice she has di Rocco!”
A voice at the door, little, and gloating, and jubilant, took up the word,—
“Di Rocco, di Rocco, di Rocco! What about him, you rogues? What about the knave of hearts, the gallant, the irresistible, the latter-day saint of love, who is going to be so blessed that he will need no physician, nor no runagate scamp to remind him of his days of unregeneracy?”
Bonito, risen, shot one significant glance at Cartouche, and then lowered his eyes as his patron entered.
“Monsignore’s suit has sped?” he murmured.
“Drawn by doves,” crowed the Marquess; “flown straight as a bee into the bosom of love, where it stops to hive.”
He crossed to the table, took up the bottle, cried, “Ha, you inordinate dog!” to Cartouche; slapped him on the back with, “A thief of a cellarer, go hang!” and blew out the candle.
“Who can’t drink by moonlight,” he cried, “is no chaste Diana’s servant. I’ll have to immure thee, dangerous rogue, among thy bottles.”
The moonlight, as he spoke, striking from a white window-sill, threw up all his features grossly. He looked like some infernal sort of negro, flat-nosed, monstrous-lipped.
“It was my candle, padrone,” said Cartouche, placidly sucking at his pipe. “I think I will light it again, and this time at both ends.”
But di Rocco, paying no attention to him, was flicking at the astrolabe on the table.
“This folly, Bonito,” he said. “I am at an end of it all. What did it ever foretell me but lies?”
The physician rescued his instrument gravely.
“Nay, monsignore,” he said. “It cannot lie, so its parts remain true. Yet I confess it strained my credulity to the extent this night that I was fain to bring it in and examine it.”
“And what had been its message?” sneered the Marquess, uneasy while he scowled.
“That monsignore’s death must follow close upon his marriage,” said the Rosicrucian, calmly.
Di Rocco tore the instrument from his hand and dashed it upon the floor.
“Liar!” he screamed. “I know thy tricks and motives. Did it foretell this end to them? Begone, thou ass inside a lion’s skin, lest I spit and trample on thee! Begone, nor look upon my face again!”
Without a word Bonito stooped and gathered up the wreck of brass, then, clutching it, walked softly from the room.
Cartouche pulled calmly on at his pipe.