CHAPTER IV
That rod, nevertheless, was not to come out of pickle for some six years yet. And, in the meanwhile, Cartouche remained Prefect of Faissigny. For one thing, King’s favourites are not easily deposed; for another, the light seat in the saddle is the sure one. Cartouche rode his duties springily, and appeared to take them with only a shade more seriousness than he took himself.
During all this time he ruled his Province with agile, nervous young hands, asking no favour and giving none. An easy subject for defamation, the malignity of his enemies missed no opportunity of distorting in the public view the most harmless motives of his actions. He might, he thought, have cared, under impossibly different circumstances. It mattered nothing to him now. He admired his own character too little, was too little impressed with the disinterestedness of most others, to resent aspersions on it. It would give a certain lady great satisfaction, he was sure, to have her opinion of him so confirmed. That was the only way left to him to prove his regard for her. Truly, life for the future was to be an upside-down affair—a test of wit, not principles.
He had no principles, he told himself; but only a commission—to administer the law, in the first place; to root out disaffection, in the second. He had a whimsical idea of confounding equity with justice, and making an elegant Sancho Panza of himself. As to the other task—that of combating the spirit of an age bent on immense social displacements, on the reconstitution of States, on the launching of democracy’s huge engine “down the ringing grooves of change”—he accepted it as airily as if it were one involving just a disputed question of etiquette.
It suggested a gallant picture—that of this slim rake (with death at his heart all the time) facing the rising tide of revolution with not so much as a Mrs Partington’s mop in his hand, but only a ribbon of steel there, and a song of gay contempt on his lips. He had little doubt but that the red waters were destined to submerge all Savoy in the end, and beat their crests against the Alps. Well, though he were but a coloured pebble in their path, he would delay them by that microscopic measure. He owed it as much to his own constitution as to the State’s.
In the meanwhile slander, nursed by deep policy, convicted him of the seven deadly sins and more. Advoutry, barratry, crapulence, debauchery—one might run down the alphabet of infamies, and leave the tale incomplete. There is no need to. It would be unedifying, and, as a fable, unnecessary.
Alas! that as such, it could even be held plausible in the district; but experience in Savoy put no limit to the infinite rascalities of Prefects appointed to represent a despotic government. As tyranny’s proxies, district autocrats, they were potential as Roman Tetrarchs for good or evil. They might honour their offices, and sometimes did; but more often they abused them. The enforcement of conscription, of the imposts, of the many heart-crushing taxes was all in their hands. They controlled the gendarmerie, and could substitute a military for a civil jurisdiction on slight provocation. They could hang, fine, imprison, whip, brand, bleed, and grow rich on extortion if they chose.
In Cartouche’s time, the Prefect of Faissigny, it was to be observed, did not grow rich. He expended his shameful gains in riotous living, said scandal. Such gangs of chained convicts, again it remarked, had never yet been encountered on the public roads, wending their way to Chambéry and the state prisons. Such a healthy moral condition, it might have added, had never yet obtained in the Province. The majority nevertheless thought him a strong Prefect, if privately a bad man. The evidences for the former were unquestionable, and rather admirable; for the latter, not even circumstantial—but they were admitted. It is the human way to require convincing proof of a man’s virtues; but to accept his wickedness on hearsay. There was a vile story—of the Colonel Kirke order—which related of a father’s life sold to a child at the price of her honour, and the contract repudiated after receipt. The facts lay in the unconditional offer of herself to the young autocrat by a bold-eyed jade, who had been smitten in Court by the beaux yeux of her parent’s judge, and of his answering by impounding her for a time, while he despatched the old miscreant to his deserved ending on the gallows.
The truth is that this fable, with others as odious, was no more than a political expedient for procuring the Prefect’s downfall and removal. Mr Trix had proved himself an annoyingly sharp thorn in the side of Illuminatism, and that body was for ever wriggling and twisting to get rid of him. It was, as a matter of fact, in a particularly sensitive state during the first years of the young man’s ascendency, owing to an unhappy determination on the part of the Elector of Bavaria to put his heel on its head, which lay in his dominions; the result being that that same head—Weishaupt, by name, general and brain of the Society—had flicked itself away, none exactly knew whither; leaving to the corporate rest of it the solution of the problem as to how a body was to continue to answer, as a compact international entity, to an unlocalisable brain.
That bitter stroke was, indeed, the beginning of the finish with Illuminatism. The Society survived for some years longer; but more as a local than a universal power. It retained for a time a certain mystic influence on events, until in the end that influence, with many another as inherently socialistic, was absorbed into the elemental energy of the revolution.
A significant revelation, on the seizure of its papers in 1786, was its rôle of names. They included “princes, nobles, magistrates, bishops, priests and professors”—men of a condition weighty enough to carry them and their occult propaganda into the very heart of society; to bring their suggestions to bear, even, upon some heads that wore crowns.
There was one of those, pretty vain and silly, which did not fail, you may be sure, to make itself a subject for their practices. It had looked out of the windows of Piedmont on the tide rising down there in Savoy, and, with all the first tentative assurance, and none of the after humility of Canute, had commanded the waters peevishly to retire. They had not: on the contrary they had come determinedly on, until they threatened to find a way through the passes into Piedmont. The King was disgustedly amazed. He heard of peasants refusing to pay their lawful taxes; he heard of bread riots; he heard of a dissemination of pernicious doctrines, such as those which spoke of commonwealths, and the right of the many to exist other than by sufferance of the few. Was this the way to realise his ideal of a piping Arcadia? What were his provincial viceroys doing, so to let corruption over-run his duchy?
Innuendo whispered to him of one of them, at least. His Prefect of Faissigny, it murmured into his ear, was as responsible as any for the subversive creed that justice, to be effective, must be impartial. That gave him thought. He had made rather a pet of this man; although, it was true, his plans for his aggrandisement had fallen something short of their intention. Was he, this Cartouche, making his disappointment the text for a popular dissertation on the fallibility of Kings? He began to wonder if he had misplaced his confidence.
And the gay Prefect himself—the bright siderite of all this conspiracy? Something conscious of the forces at work against him, indifferent to results and for himself, he continued to administer his office in the way most characteristic of him. He had no ideals nor delusions. Equality to him, in a world nine-tenths asses, was a vicious chimera. He was a magistrate of the crown, and he simply sought to make that respectable in the popular view. The rights of man, in his, were solely to be governed justly. Roguery, in whatever form, must be suppressed. No man should be privileged to tyrannise. He gave practical effect to the loose tenets of reformers, who, obsessed with a personal vanity, could see nothing in them thus presented but a hide-bound reactionism. Many people, it is certain, think less of their own ideals than of the credit they may gain in pursuing them. They are quite blind to them when achieved by others.
Mr Trix’s Prefecture in Le Prieuré was a very Court of Barataria. It was flanked by a lofty stone tower, known as the Belfry, which had once formed part of a long-vanished monastery of Benedictines, and was now used as a lock-up, for those condemned to walk the long road to Chambéry. The committed to it seldom had reason to question the justice of their convictions, or to complain of consideration of extenuating circumstances having been withheld. Cartouche, proclaimed a libertine and martinet, had nevertheless a happy wit for justice. He could tell a rascal under a silk frock.
So much for his public life. What surcease of private pain he sought in its incessant action, in that airy yet vigorous administration of his office, might not appear. He was always reckless for himself, for his reputation. He walked like one gaily damned, conscious of his own bond to the devil. What did it matter what she thought of him now? What did anything matter in a world where man was held responsible for the resolving of irresolvable ethical problems. He supposed, and rightly, that she felt his mere presence in her neighbourhood to be an insult to herself. What if she were to be told the truth? It could never cleanse her of an indelible stain: it could never restore her to him for what she had been. Sometimes he told himself now that he hated her—that the proof of it was in his indifference to such reports of himself as might reach her ears. Was that a proof? He took pleasure, on her behoof, in refraining from forcing his slanderers to disgorge their lies. Did not she want him wicked? Every nail knocked into his character was a fresh vindication to her of her self-sacrificial love for another.
And there was a worse true story of him, after all, than any his enemies could invent. It was part of the irresolvable problem; but he believed she would answer it, if she knew, with a more utter condemnation of him than any he had yet suffered at her hands. That he had cast the girl away, because her disobedience to him had wrought an irremediable wrong to another, herself—would that appeal to her, even if in the hot blaze of the truth, for righteousness? She would answer, he knew, that he himself was the one solely responsible for the situation which his double-dealing with the woman most entitled to his candour had created. What justification had she herself ever given him for submitting her to the chance assaults of jealousy? If he had been honest with the wretched child, this climax had never reached its period. And, instead, he had made her the scapegoat of his own deceit.
He had. And yet, if he had not, if he had confessed the passion of his soul to her the victim of the passion of his body, how would that have bettered things for the victim? Would she, made vestal to that altar of his idol, have thought herself well compensated for her jilting? He mocked now at the absurdity of his old conception—Cartouche’s was it? or some sick neurotic monk’s? High-priest, he? What a figure of elegance, in urim and thummim and with a thing like a flower-pot on his head! He laughed tears of blood, recalling the ecstatic vision. Better to be accursed than ridiculous. Better Louis-Marie should have her, than she be made the sport of such a mummery. He did not blame his friend, week-knee’d robber as he was. He rather admired him, for his unexpected part. Would not he himself have dared all hell to win the passion of those lips—O, God! the passion! Would he not? had he not? He had at least bargained with the devil for her, and had prevailed just so far as that it was made his privilege at last to serve for deep contrastive shadow to that idyll of their loves.
For shadow: and for shadow within shadow? For all this time he knew he was a haunted man. That spirit of lost love betrayed—poor Molly! The blackest gloom in him was due to it. Not the way, he thought defiantly, to light him back to love. He wearied of its eternal presence; yet he could not shake it off. It leaned out to him from the dusk of mountain passes; it flitted before him through the sorrow of infinite woods; it cried to him for help from the hearts of squalid tenements, where villainous deeds were enacting. He had done that thing. It was past remedy—not past clinching his damnation. Why not then rest on that assurance, and cease to agitate both herself and him? Yet, step warily as he might, he could never escape her—that desolate phantom. Crossing beds of gentian, he would tread upon her eyes; the little freshets which he spurned from their wreathings about his feet, were her white arms; the low wind in the pines became her low English voice. Always faithful, weeping, appealing—never rebuking. God! was not this insatiable hunger in him enough anguish, without the eternal memory of that fruit, which he had plucked in his wanton appetite, and thrown away, just tasted, for the shadow of a sweeter! Not enough, not enough? Then to her hands be it after death to heap the coals upon his breast! He owned their right; would submit to them, and face the eternal ordeal. Only let them refrain now! Was he so prosperous, so happy, as to invite their vengeance prematurely? Torture too exquisite, it was said, became a transport. Did they want to qualify him for that balm in hell?
He execrated the shadow in his thoughts—its endless, voiceless weeping. He told it that he hated it. Let it take solace of his hate, as he of another’s. He meant it. Yolande hated him, and that she did was a wrung rapture to him at this last. By so much he had a place in her passions, where any other was impossible. He would never imperil it by controverting his slanderers. Let her think of him as wickedness incarnate, if only she would think of him.
Thus was the last state of this love’s agony; while he laughed, bleeding inwardly, and met his traducers on a hundred points of wit.
He had thought, now and then in his prostrate moments, that if he could only once trace home the shadow, he might find it to be, after all, no better than a black-mailing ghost. Supposing good fortune had attended her dismissal? It might; and he have saddled his conscience with a self-invoked incubus. Why not set himself to discover?
He dared not—that was the truth. He was a coward there; he feared the answer. Better even the shadow, than the revelations possible of the thing that cast it. He dared not.
For this reason, and others, he avoided Turin in these days. He was in the city only at rare intervals of time, when officialdom compelled him. Once or twice on these occasions he happened across the Chevalier de France; heard him rail to others of the ingratitude of children. The man had never forgiven his daughter her mésalliance; but, nevertheless, in repudiating her, in refusing to visit her, he was only, had the truth been known, making a virtue of necessity. Madame’s self-emancipation had taken strict account of his share in the events which had made it peremptory. He had to answer for it, to a daughter strangely converted to new conceptions of duty; strangely altered in many ways. She made him a princely allowance—which he spent en prince; she would accept him at di Rocco only on her own terms, and to those he refused to subscribe. He would not submit to the part of a mere honoured dependant on her bounty, franked by her husband’s grace. She denied him any closer rights. Therefore he kept away—it was best for both of them—and maintained his individual state in the Via della Zecca, sneering to intimates of the niggardliness which any promotion to affluence was sure to find out in women, posing as an injured father, enjoying his independence arrogantly in his dull selfish way.
Cartouche longed to insult him—could, indeed, have found plentiful opportunity to do so, had not the fact of his being her father withheld him. The Chevalier, on the few occasions when they met, always scowled at him askance, as if to imply how he knew very well that to this bastard, this faux enfant, this royal favourite disappointed of his daughter, was to be attributed his own disfavour with the King. But he was let live, for the sake of her whom he traduced.
* * * * * * * *
And so the gay Prefect, with that death always at his heart, and the tongue in his mouth a sword to wound, stood up against the rising tide, fearless before its roar and babble. He was well served by his police—admiring thralls to his courage, his quick wit, his retentive memory. In these days there was not much of secret information, touching the moral health of his Province, which did not reach his ears. Thus, he early learned of Bonito’s visit to the Château, and to draw some odd conclusions from its sequel. Their fruit will appear in the course of things. In the meanwhile, it was observed by him that some curious retrenchments reported up at the great house dated from that visit, and were seemingly coincident with a look, as it were also of retrenchment, in Madame Saint-Péray’s beautiful face. It had to happen occasionally that he encountered the Lady of the Manor in the exercise of his duties; and, inasmuch as she always disdained at such times to acknowledge, or even to see him, he had ample opportunity for studying her expression. That was beginning to shape itself, he could not but think, on the lines of some gripping inward reserve. It were too much to say that it betrayed any confirmation of the Chevalier’s coward accusation; but certainly it looked pinched and drawn, as if the sweet sap in it were somehow souring from its freshness. He wondered.
He wondered still when whispers reached him how Maire and priests, confident almoners of her bounty, were softly complaining of an inexplicable parsimony in a hand once lavish to munificence in charity. His wonder increased to hear the charge substantiated by her husband.
He had never avoided Louis-Marie; nor had ever put himself in his way. He had held his deed justified, and had told him so. For the rest, he was no precisian in matters of conscience; and if Saint-Péray could reconcile his marriage with his (as, by his growing air of resignation, not to say, of self-complacency, he appeared to be able to do), he had no mind to deny him his lovely provocation. He had never referred to the subject on their meetings—which were rare, because Louis was a dutiful husband. But once, to his surprise, his friend opened upon it voluntarily.
They had chanced upon one another on the road, when each was unattended. Something of an ancient warmth spoke in Louis’s greeting.
“Gaston,” he said: “we see so little of one another now. Is it because you blame me?”
“Si on est bien, qu’on s’y tienne,” said the other chauntingly. “Why allude to it?”
“Because I cannot bear to think I have lost your respect. Gaston, I must always hold that of more worth than—than some others do.”
Cartouche smiled.
“You are looking very well under the infliction, Louis. That is the moral of your loss.”
The young man broke out eagerly,—
“She was losing her faith in God: only I could restore it. I have always so longed to tell you. You know it was not the money! The first condition of our union was that it should be given all away—that curse turned to a blessing. I have never touched a penny of it—have never claimed the right to; only as her almoner. And now! O, if that dead man’s hand should still be on it, buying her soul to his in vengeance!”
“What do you mean?”
“I think I must always have someone to hold to, Gaston. You were so strong. I don’t know what I mean. Only now, when I ask her, for my own charities—often—Gaston, she says she has none to spare—no money—she!”
“She is a better business-man than you, that’s all. It doesn’t surprise me.”
“Perhaps. God bless you, Gaston!”
“Certainly, if He will. But I haven’t many dealings with Him. Bonne chance, old friend!”
Cartouche set his private agents to work; but the information he sought was long in coming to him. And in the meanwhile the tide rose up and up, under an ever more lowering sky, and the snarl of coming tempest shook the black waters. But, slow as the years drawled on for those up at the Château, to Cartouche they racketed past like a Dance of Death.