CHAPTER V
There was a little auberge on the Montverd, kept open during the summer months for the benefit of those (not many in 1783) who came to enjoy the view. There, in a green oasis, planted amongst the stupendous buttresses of the mountains, lived Nicholas Target and his daughter Margot, the latter a good sensible girl and the responsible aubergiste. The father was a drunken scamp, a guide by profession, but long discredited as such in the eyes of all but his daughter, whose faithful heart continued to make its compromise with the self-evident. The fellow spent his days, of slouching and soaking, mostly at the foot of the steep path which descended from the inn to the moraine of the Winds, where, in a tiny shed, he kept a store of woollen socks for the feet of those who desired to cross the glacier. This at least left the auberge free of his presence, and Margot to the peaceful entertainment of her guests.
Amongst these, on a certain tragic day, came to be included Yolande, new Marchesa di Rocco. Only the wonderful visitor came to stay, it seemed, and not merely to gather Dutch courage for the passage of the glacier. She took a bed at the inn, and cold command, as by right of her husband, its rent-lord, of its general conduct. She had always had an affection for Margot, the good girl, and this was her way of showing her confidence in her discretion.
“I want to be alone,” she had said; “and hither none comes but the stranger who cannot know me or my concerns. I look to you to secure me utter privacy—from man, from woman, from child, from the whole world. Only if my father comes must I see him, for I am his daughter. For all else be my true and faithful watchdog, Margot.”
Margot had of course heard of the tragic ending to that idyll on Le Marais. In common with her fellow-women she had deplored the finish to a pretty romance; but then, when one’s feudal lord stepped in at the door, love must fly out at the window. It was pitiful, it was sad, but it was inevitable. She promised with all her heart to contribute what gentle salve was hers to that open wound.
She said it with fervour, but in a panic. It was difficult for her to reconstruct, from this figure of bloodless hauteur, the sweet and kindly patroness of yesterday, who had never held herself other than such a simple girl as she was herself. Could shock so turn to stone? It was a catalepsy of the soul.
And Yolande made her home there in the auberge. With all Le Prieuré at her feet, she elected for this chill small refuge of the hills. She felt she could breathe there—was nearer God and her mother. She felt she could pray a little even, and with more chance of being heard in that austere silence. There was no sound of waterfalls in all the vast valley to strike between her and her isolation, rushing down into the hateful plains where men dwelt, dragging her thoughts on their torrents. What voices reached her came from above—the whisper of avalanches, the echoing crack of ice-falls in those enormous attics of the world. She was alone with her desolation among desolations.
Once, and once only, her father visited her there. He was very humble and deprecating. He had come to remonstrate, and he remained to weep. She saw his tears without emotion, and bid him kindly to the descent, lest the mists should rise presently and give him cold. He went without a word.
Did she ever think of Louis and that dead idyll? A will of self-reticence had so been born in her that perhaps she was able to hold his figure from her mind. If she had not, the memory of the cruelty of her part to him must have driven her mad. Not to think at all was her hold on reason—not to think what he was thinking, suffering, designing. That he could come to claim her yet, in defiance of law, orthodoxy and every right but the right of human nature, she could not believe, nor wish to believe. He was not so to be dethroned from her worship of him past. It would be another Louis than the Louis of her knowledge who could so dare. Yet was she not another Yolande? An awful rapture, should outrage have conceived a wicked will in him like hers! But Louis would not come. He was a purer soul than she, and prayed, always prayed, before he committed himself to action.
The far unconquered heights above her were her reassurance, she told herself, that he was of those who accept repulse unquestioning. His faith was always first in heaven, and its high reasons for baffling high achievement. Christ’s creed, and he a Christian. He could not love her so much, “loved he not honour more.” She bowed to that higher rival, and believed that the thing remotest from her wishes was to see her ousted. And her brain reeled to the sound of every footstep which came up the mountain.
Among them all she never dreamed of listening for her husband’s. That di Rocco had kept his word and left Le Prieuré on the morrow of the tragedy she never doubted. It was not he, but the interval which was to separate her from him which filled her thoughts. Nebulous, unformed, the idea was still never less than a fixed one in her mind that any consummation to that tyranny but Death’s was unspeakable. Whether his or hers it mattered nothing. The knot must be cut before it was double-tied; and in her heart she rejoiced to think of his succession to an empty bed. She did not suppose she could possibly survive the year—twelve long months of suspension between torture past and the prospect of the living “question” to come. She had only to be herself and die. “Duty” could not traverse that decision. Her heart was cold already.
Rare and alien the footsteps came up. One day it would be a traveller, one day a goatherd. The world went by her thinly, and vanished into the mists. She remained alone, and fell, after each interruption, into her old communing with Death. He was the only understanding friend left to her.
One day, as she was in talk with him, high on the hill where no one usually came, a stranger suddenly stood before her. Either the watchdog had been slack or the interloper cunning. He doffed his hat to her with the most sympathetic grace imaginable.
“You seek the auberge, monsieur?” she said haughtily. “It lies below. You are off the road.”
“And mademoiselle also?” he asked. “But supposing we each undertake to put the other on it?”
She had been seated on a stone. She rose hurriedly.
“The road lies down, monsieur.”
“As I would convince mademoiselle,” he said. “I have just come up it from a stricken friend.”
Her intuition touched some meaning in his words. She looked breathlessly at him.
“If you know me, monsieur, as your manner seems to imply, you will know that I am out of love with subterfuge.”
“I know you, mademoiselle, by sight and reputation.”
“Scarcely, monsieur, if you so address me.”
“Ah!” he said. “I do not hold by orthodoxy. And yet there was a time when I was tender of it. You would be madame on a surer title had I had my way.”
“Tell me who you are?” she demanded icily.
“It can hardly interest you. They call me Cartouche.”
Her face fell frowning.
“I have heard of you. I would not be ungracious, sir,” she said. “You saved a life that was once dear to me.”
“I wish I could say I saved it because it was dear to you. I had not seen you then.”
“You can dispense with your compliments, sir. Your reputation is sufficiently well known to me without.”
“Then doubtless mademoiselle is aware that disloyalty to friends is not a part of it. Moreover, it is a human eccentricity to love what we have saved.”
“It is easy to love some people.”
“It is easy, though our natures may be the remotest from theirs. Verjuice loves oil in this queer salad of life. But where I have come to love through saving, I would save again and yet again.”
“You speak a good deal of yourself, monsieur. Forgive me if I cannot quite share your interest in the subject. No doubt your friend appreciated your assistance in saving him a second time from destruction. It is fataller, I am sure, in such eyes as yours, to fall in love than into an abyss.”
“You misunderstand me—I hope not wilfully. I did not mean to speak of saving my friend from you, but for you. I do not mean it now. I am here to offer you my services.”
She drew herself up magnificently.
“I thank you, monsieur. I was to be excused perhaps, for wishing to read on the better side of an insolence. You had done well, according to your lights, I am sure, to strive to keep us apart—well to your worthy patron; well for your worthy self. I could have respected you at least for that consistency. But to offer to mend what you have helped to mar! I am at a loss to understand how I have invited this insult.”
A dark flush rose on Trix’s cheek. What was this new-born perversity in him which made him not only bare his heart to this sting of words, but, like a very anchorite of love, take pleasure in his chastising? Her frost fired him.
“You are bitter, mademoiselle,” he said. “I could answer, very truly, in self-defence that I was so far from choosing to have a hand in this business, as it has sped, that I foresaw from the first what has actually happened—that your exaltation would spell my ruin. I would answer that, I say, but that I own to no man’s power to ruin me.”
She was quite unmoved.
“Those who serve evil must bide evil,” she said. “If, as you would seem to imply, monsieur, your employer has made you the scapegoat of his reformation, I can only regret, very sincerely, my involuntary part in your dismissal. Believe me, I would give all my exaltation to reinstate you.”
“I used the term unthinkingly,” said Cartouche. “It was the formal phrase of a worldling. Will you persist in thinking me too bad to be moved by the distresses of virtue hard beset?”
“And how would you propose to help that poor virtue, sir? For what are your services offered? I will not even sully myself by understanding—unless to suppose that you design to make me an instrument of your revenge on one who has wronged you.”
The flush on his face deepened.
“You are an angel, madame,” he said grimly. “You claim your full prerogatives. I can never please you better, I see, than by avowing my knowledge of the gulf which separates us. I, too, will be myself, flagrantly and without compromise. My affections are all earthly. Very well, I love the man I have saved, because I saved him. I see him stricken down—helpless—his very reason threatened under a calamity worse than death.”
Her face had gone bloodless; she answered, faltering,—
“As to that, monsieur, assure yourself, assure him if you please, that nothing but a convention separates us now, nor ever will.”
He looked wonderingly at her. Did she mean to kill herself? He could quite believe it, as the more pardonable of two self-offences Then he breathed and laughed.
“A convention!” he cried. “I am nearer you by that admission. There is no moral bondage in conventions. Let me bring my friend to you and save him.”
She reared herself like a very snake.
“I would you had never saved him,” she said deeply; “I would you had never laid that claim on his regard. My only regret in dismissing you is that I re-condemn him to this corruption. Go, sir, and insult and trouble me no longer!”
He had lost, and turned to leave her. But for a moment he paused, in anger and confusion, to fire his final charge,—
“Very well, madame! Only be quite sure of the strength of that convention—as sure as your husband may be of its weakness. I do not think he will wait a year for the test. Farewell!” and he went.
And no sooner was he out of sight and hearing, than Yolande bent herself face downwards on the rock, and delivered her soul in a cry of agony,—
“Louis! my Louis! so ill, so broken! and I may not help thee, nor think of thee!”