CHAPTER IV
And Yolande of the white hands! How was it faring with her, the lily gathered to perfume a Saturnalia, the victim of as heartless a casuistry as ever committed a clean virgin to outrage?
When she first heard of di Rocco’s fate, and of the unspeakable treachery on which it had foreclosed, she came for the moment as near a fall from “grace” as Louis-Marie himself. That duty to a father must be held the paramount duty, his will the household law, his judgment the ruling wisdom, nature and religion in her had once held for the first principle of conduct. Honour, self-respect, sworn faith—these, pious recommendations in themselves, were, if pledged without a father’s sanction, vain credentials. His curse could blight them all—convert their virtues into sins. From God, the primal Word, had come, in straight succession, his power to bless or ban. She had believed in this his right so truly as to cede her whole heart to him for immolation on the altar he had raised, letting it break rather than incur his malediction.
But when, having sacrificed these virtues to duty, she saw her moral debasement argued from the act, saw herself claimed, by very virtue of it, to the vile company of the un-self-respecting, held its legitimate sport, her soul stood up, revolting from its creed. She felt like one who, self-destroyed to save her honour, wakes up in hell.
She shook; she shuddered; she went white as death. She felt her feet in snares of celestial sophistry. Heaven had laughed to lure her to a church, which, when she entered it, had proved a bagnio. Following God’s lead, she had foundered in a swamp, and cleared her eyes to find herself the scoff of uncleanness, to know herself valued at the common currency of the common road. That this dead beast could have conceived a hope of her argued how, in his eyes, in the world’s eyes, her soul’s dread sacrifice to duty had cheapened, not exalted, her. He would not have dared the thought in the days before she had bared her white bosom to the knife. Her soul for the first time rushed to pity of Isaac on his altar. The father’s tragedy was all in all for history. What of the harmless child—the hideous revelation to him of what love could sacrifice to faith? No after-kindness could blot out that memory.
She hated herself at last, not because she had hitherto been self-absorbed, worshipping her own whiteness; but because she had not considered herself at all until this moment. She hated her body, a shrine on which her mind had never dwelt, until it woke to see it foul, a thing defiled in thought, a prey of beastly dreams. A shadow had dethroned her maidenhood. Henceforth she was Yolande of the soiled hands.
No man, perhaps, could gauge her sense of shame, or understand it. She had suffered no wrong in act. A miss, in his blunt logic, is always as good as a mile. But that in the eyes of woman it is not. She, whose innocence has just shaved a scandal, feels a like grievance against fate with her who has solicited and been rebuffed. In each case it is the outrage upon the woman’s self-respect which barbs the sting.
Unworthy of her lover! But how unworthy she had never dreamt, until she saw herself this lure to low desire. She had not even been coveted for anything she had cherished in herself of moral sweetness. The moral of all sweetness was carnality.
She had walked with uplifted eyes praising God, and had trodden on an adder. For the future she would look down to guard her feet.
It was all a chimera, that figure of a beneficent Father meting out justice and mercy, protection and reward. The lamb in the fold was cherished to make good mutton, and the shepherd’s love watched and warded him to that end. No picture of Christ carrying home the strayed weanling could cover that flaw in its divine symbolism. So with the pious aphorisms which were thrown in the eyes of men by interested priestcrafts to blind them from the truth. God helped those who helped themselves? Yes; who helped themselves unscrupulously to the best and least they desired. A bold thief was always popular in heaven. The Lord was a lord of bandits.
She had but to run upon this blasphemy at last, to recoil, gasping and half-stunned, from the dead wall of it. Whither had her madness led her? into what dreadful wanderings from the fold? She had sped blindly in the mist, and struck her forehead against hell’s gate. O, Father, rescue Thy lost lamb, so bleating to the wolves of her betrayal! Didst Thou not make a pit-fall for the dog-wolf himself, so that her fleece might escape his soilure and her flesh his ravening? And her gratitude was this—to cry out upon Thee because Thou hadst let a beast’s thought expose her to herself for beast. Yet what else, indeed, were she or any other, save for the measure of Thy purifying spirit in her? I have disowned Him, she thought, and by that act alone become the beast His spirit once redeemed in me.
She believed, then, that she had committed the unpardonable sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost. For days she lay prostrated, tended only by the little aubergiste, poor Margot, who had meanwhile her own difficulties to contend with—gossips to face and baffle; little lungings of innuendo to counterfoil; a drunken parent to answer for. The world was restless about that refuge on the hills: great issues were at stake there: the Law, the Church, the Home were all deeply interested in the potentialities of those white hands. This unattached star of maidenhood had become, at a stroke of heaven, the centre of a system. The lesser bodies, enormously attracted to it, spun and circled round incessantly. But for the present it was obstinate in veiling itself in clouds from their worship.
How long was her “retreat” to last? for how long would it be countenanced by those most concerned in terminating it? No convention of seemly mourning could apply to such a widow—widowed of a love before a husband. Le Prieuré did not expect that hypocrisy of her. But it wanted its Marchesa.
During all these days her father politicly kept aloof, awaiting the first signal of her surrender to him. He had learnt his lesson, and recognised how any approaches from him would but aggravate the malady of her despair. Target kept him, at very little cost, informed of madama’s state; and in the meanwhile he made a judicious ostentation of his poverty, implying, “See me here, the natural trustee of thousands, condemned, by a child’s undutifulness, to go in mended boots!” His patience under suffering made an impression.
But presently, quicker than his soles, it wore out. He would not climb the hill himself, but he commissioned a deputy, in the person of Dr Paccard, shrewd and kindly, to put a case for him. The old man gained access to the patient by a ruse (M. Saint-Péray’s landlord begged a word with her, was the message he sent in), and found her lying like a sweet thing thrown up by the sea, white and just breathing. She saw directly that the mad hope on which her heart had leaped was but another shadow of the shadows which were haunting her. Her eyes absorbed his soul.
He uttered some commonplaces of his craft. She stopped him.
“Why did you send in that message?”
He blushed and stammered: then rushed, characteristically, for the truth.
“I feared you would refuse to see me else. I lodged M. Saint-Péray, it is true, and loved and respected him. We are homely people, I and my daughter Martha. It was that simple quality which most endeared us to him. What he chiefly valued in my girl was the domestic probity which attached her, first of all sentiments, to the sentiment of filial duty.”
“Old man, I will not go home to my father.”
“O, madama! let me speak. One, even a Marchesa—”
“I am not a Marchesa—”
“One, I say, even a high lady, may profit by the example of simplicity. Do I not know, I—yes, very well—that Martha’s heart is engaged outside her duty? What then? She’s loyal to duty.”
“It is young Balmat, is it not? Wed her elsewhere; sell her clean body for a price—then come and tell me what she pays to duty. I was as good as Martha.”
He ignored her bitter words, urging his point across the interruption.
“Even a great thing for her, I’ll say, where duty is so tedious—just a little daily routine, the house, the kitchen, the conduct of small affairs. There might be compensation else in such a state—great compensation, even, where the life, the happiness, the salvation of many souls depended on one woman’s trust and example.”
She held him with her tragic eyes.
“There’s no salvation possible by way of me. Tell the Chevalier, Monsieur, if you speak for him, as I assume is your commission, to charge himself with all that duty—the lives, the title, the estates, the administration of them all—and leave me to give him thanks and die in peace. He’ll find full compensation for duty, I’m sure, in what duty has bequeathed him. Please will you go now, and take him that message?”
“Never—I say never, madama. This is a bad revolt—I am old, and I will say it. Is it, do you imagine in your perversity, to show honour to an honoured memory? If you think so, I will dare to say that I knew a noble heart better than you yourself, and I speak in its name when I mourn your refusal to take up your cross like a Christian, thanking God for having spared you the weight of an irreparable injury to its burden!”
She sat up, with glittering eyes. “You insult me,” she began, and burst into heart-rending tears.
He let the fit run out, before he spoke again gently.
“My old heart bleeds for your young tragedy. But, believe my word, by so much as I am nearer the grey shore which seems to you now so far, it is not measureless. If these thoughts were possible to your heart, the All-seeing was doubtless wise to forewarn it with a chastisement, which even yet was not the worst. Lower your head; come down from this false humility which only mocks at heaven. If your feet—for flesh is proud: who can know it better than I?—falter from the whole descent at once, make your first halt half-way with Martha and myself—live with us a little. I say at least for my own advantage; because, indeed, people would be sure to point at me for a self-interested politician, and that would hurt my honest fame. But come, I say—come down from these heights where your heart is locked in ice, and where the ghost of a dead wickedness holds it frozen with his frozen eyes, looking up through the dark window of his grave.”
She was staring at him, quite bloodless. But her lips whispered mechanically: “I cannot—I cannot come to you.”
“How can you pray or think aright,” he said, “or keep your health or reason, with that horror hidden, perhaps, but a stone’s-throw below you there? Its spirit rises, like an evil emanation; its—”
She stopped him, staggering to her feet. What fearful picture was he conjuring? In all her stunned misery, her mind had never once turned to the appalling thought of her close neighbourhood to that baffled evil. It had dwelt and dwelt, in mad iteration, on an earlier figure, on the tragedy of a fruitless sacrifice, on death, as it might find her in the hills.
But now!—to find her, perhaps—trip her on the thought, and entomb her! Was there, in all that vast cemetery of ice, a corner remote enough from him to keep their souls divorced? Horrors thronged into her brain once breached. What if her clinging to this spot were construed into devotion to his memory? What if he were not dead, after all, but were slowly toiling upwards to the light from some pit into which he had fallen? She had heard of things as strange. What—wilder terror! if he had never even suffered such a catastrophe, but were hiding somewhere out of knowledge, to descend presently upon his traducers and blight them with his mockery? It had always seemed inconsistent with his character, as resourceful as it was wicked, to let itself astray in the little confusion of a storm, instead of crouching while that passed.
She thought no more—tried to shut out all thought, shuddering with her hands against her eyes. The doctor saw his advantage.
“We have an empty room,” he said, “endeared to us by a memory. Come down, madama, and take possession of that memory. He would have wished it.”
She went with him. That marked the first step in her surrender.
The next was inevitable, fruit of a royal commission. It was not to be supposed that a wealthy and powerful noble of the State, new reconciled with its Government, too, could be allowed to disappear thus mysteriously and no inquiry held. Turin sent its juges d’instruction and officers of probate and verification to look into the affair. They examined innumerable witnesses, and into as many as possible motives. Cartouche they would have liked to question; but he was gone, none knew whither. So also was Louis-Marie; so also was Bonito. The thing might have taken an ugly turn, so far as any of the three was concerned, had not Nicholas Target been opportunely “pinched” at the psychologic moment. He focussed the mystery for them, brought it into form and coherence. It appeared, after all, to be one to be hushed up rather than ventilated. The matter ended for the widow with official sympathy and congratulations.
And she? how had she stood the long ordeal? They said her bearing was the very majesty of pathos—like Dorothea before her judges again. One can keep one’s countenance under torture, as the statistics of martyrdom prove. But every allusion to her assumed acquiescence in her own tragedy had been a white-hot rake to her side. They imagined her stately fortitude was a pose, a compromise between decency and the exaltation her heart could not but feel over the thought of what she had escaped and the prospect before her. That she must not undeceive them, must suffer the onus of coveting a position which her whole soul loathed and rejected, was not the least part of her anguish. Even if she had ventured to assert herself, to call them to witness to her renunciation of all which they held so covetable, her father was there to stultify her protests. She saw him daily—spoke to him, even. But there was a gulf between them. The atmosphere it exhaled was felt by the commissioners, and felt to be inexplicable. Some commiseration was shown for the victim of so unnatural a misunderstanding. His noble candour in giving evidence, his dignified endurance of that implied slander on his disinterestedness, excited a measure of sympathy—even of sympathetic indignation. Yet, for all his public vindication as a father, the triumph of his child’s cause seemed only to deepen the abyss which separated him from her.
Well, a thing grown past bearing is a thing ended. The torture consummated itself at last in anti-climax—in the official citation of Augias, Marchese di Rocco, to the Court of Inquiry, there to answer and show cause why Yolande di Rocco, née de France, should not enter into possession of his estates as his widow and sole inheritrix. Which summons the appellee having failed to answer, the Will was declared proved, the lawyers returned to Turin, and the lady to the privacy of her lodgings at Dr Paccard’s. And so the matter ended.
At least, so it seemed to. It was a unique situation: on the one side great houses, great wealth, great stakes in the country, and a fluttering crew of prospectors waiting to negotiate their values for the benefit of a mistress who disregarded them all; on the other the mistress herself living in humble lodgings on a few centesimi a day. And this state of things held for quite a month after the inquiry.
“It makes you an important person,” said Jacques Balmat to Martha. “You are approached and courted like a queen’s confidante. I hope your silly little head will not be turned by it all.”
“Jacques, she is dying of love, and what right have you or I to say that she ought to live?”
“The right, my girl, of dutiful children to uphold the natural law. She, too, is not so independent but she must owe her father a life. It makes no difference that he crossed her plans for herself. Besides, are we so certain that one we will not name has made himself unworthy of her? It rests on our conjecture, and that is the devil’s word for scandal. They whisper that the old man is dying.”
“My God! what is that you say?”
“I only repeat what I have heard. It is that madama’s obstinacy is slowly killing him. It is certainly aggravating, when one is starving, to see a fine feast spread just out of one’s reach.”
Martha went with her information straight to Yolande. That Marchioness of shadows was a good deal altered during the last month. Grief, where a flawless constitution defies its corrosion, retaliates by turning all into stone. She was white and unimpressionable as a statue. Martha dared an ultimatum.
“You would blame yourself, I am sure, my lady, if death were suddenly to end the misunderstanding between you and your father.”
The blue unearthly eyes were turned swift upon her with a look of horror.
“Death!” she whispered.
“O!” said Martha, weeping, “chagrin will kill a cat. What is it, do you think, to lie starving and abandoned outside the walls of the paradise you have staked your soul to win?”
“Abandoned!” repeated the other. “It is all his—he knows it—to do what he likes with.”
She had assumed, indeed, that all this time her father was established at the Château. Martha threw up her hands, protesting.
“Do you pretend to believe that he, so proud and stern, has accepted a trust bestowed on him like that? But believe it if you like. He will not be long in unconvincing you.”
“Give me my cloak. Do you hear? My God, how slow you are!”
* * * * * * * *
Thus was negotiated Yolande’s third and final step to self-surrender. She hurried through the familiar streets, a reincarnate ghost, shocked from her grave by a cry as superhuman as the one which stirred the dead in old Jerusalem—a cry of mortal desolation. God spare her the revelation which might have come to them—the knowledge that she had out-died her welcome!
The place seemed strange. There was an air of dust and neglect about the “hôtel.” The face of the woman who answered her summons was unfamiliar—a smug, frowzy, “laying-out” face in suggestion. The girl could hardly articulate the words which strove for utterance on her lips. But, commanding herself, she asked at last, and was a little reassured.
Yes, the Chevalier was in bed, in a poor enough way; but curable, no doubt, by one who knew the secret of his disorder.
She hurried upstairs to him, entered his room with a choking heart. He was lying back, propped on pillows. His face was stern and wintry, with a rime of unshorn hair on its jaws. His eyes, cold and unscrutinising, were like globes of frog-spawn, each with a black staring speck of life for pupil.
A withered crone, ostentatiously unclean, was dishing up for the patient a thin broth of herbs. Reason might have questioned of the meaning of her presence, or of the soup’s poor quality. De France was under no necessity for retrenchment just because he had been disappointed of a handsome legacy in trust. But remorse has no reason. Yolande saw nothing here but the tragic figure of an ambition her perversity had doomed. A dignified presence may command so much more than its due of sympathy for the common crucifyings of circumstance. Majesty covers a multitude of meannesses. She fell on her knees by the bed.
“Father, I have come to make my peace with you!”
The pupils of the Chevalier’s eyes, turned darkly on the suppliant, dilated imperceptibly.
“Who is this who enters to disturb my resignation? I have made my peace with Heaven.”
“No, no, father! No, no! I am Yolande, thy daughter, thy one poor child. Know me and forgive me. I have done wrong. O, my father, I have been wicked and undutiful, but God has cleared my eyes!”
His own were brightening wonderfully; the specks were grown to tadpoles. He snapped at the wheezy beldame with a sudden viciousness that almost made her drop the dish.
“Begone, thou old prying gossip! What dost thou here, pricking thy mouldy ears?”
She scuttled. He held out a waxen hand. Yolande imprisoned and devoured it.
“Art thou my child?” he said. “I had thought she had abandoned me indeed.”
She wept, bowing her head, and mumbling:—
“Not abandoned—only to that I thought your soul desired; the place, the riches, the—the honour. I had never supposed but you possessed them all—managed—administered them—”
“For you, my daughter? Even my love must reject a trust so offered. What honour could survive that imputation of self-interest? I would have consented to be your steward else—faithful on a crust, if love and confidence had sweetened it. But it does not matter now. Nothing matters any longer, since my child is here a penitent to reconcile me with the thought of our separation.”
“Father! O, my God! I have not deserved it. Look, I will nurse you back to health and peace of mind. I will be so humble and so loving. Father, do not die!”
He questioned her face searchingly. He saw her heart was his so surely, that any further fencing before he pierced it would serve but to prolong his luxury of triumph. Yet he fenced.
“To nurse me?” he said, smiling weak and saintly. “A simple task, Yolande. Even the remnant of fortune left me, after my debts are paid, might crown my few last days with feasting, if I wished it. But my wants are soon supplied.”
“Only live, dear father, and your fortune—”
She stopped, shuddering, and buried her face in the bedclothes. He scanned the back of her head curiously.
“My fortune!” he echoed. “Ah! I had once dreamed my fortune might have lain in helping to turn great evil into a blessing. I had seen, in my fond imagination, churches enriched, charities endowed, all that wealth and power had used to evil ends converted to measureless good. But it was a fantastic dream. We exalt ourselves, no doubt, in planning for the human emancipation. God has rebuked my vanity.”
She lifted her flowing eyes to him.
“Had you had such dreams? O, father! be my almoner, then, and let me live on the crust.”
He stroked her hair rapturously. Murder would out at last.
“You put new life into me,” he murmured. “You shall live on what you like. Only, for appearance’s sake, my child, make yourself the nominal minister of that atonement.”
And on these terms he carried her off to the Château.