CHAPTER VII
There was a night of hurried storm long remembered in Le Prieuré. All during it the wind drove up in squalls, like the thunder of passing artillery, unlimbered over the mountains, crackled into brief tempest, and swept on. Billows of black smoke marked its passage, each in its retreat leaving a vacuum of dense silence, until the next, rushing in to occupy it, awoke the echoes with new uproar. The roofs smoked under the cannonade of hail; the glaciers foamed like torrents with the dancing pellets; the brows of the hills seemed to melt and flow down. Everything would be sudden, stunning, overwhelming for a space; and then—exhaustion, and the drip of wounded trees alone breaking the quiet.
Le Prieuré, weather-hardened, inhabiting under the sky-light of Savoy, thought nothing of all this, sleeping with its face to the clouds. What made this night of many nights notable to it was the period it marked in the course of a human tragedy, which had certainly seemed to cry to heaven for some such solution of its riddle. For, so it appeared, out of all the dogs of storm unleashed to hunt the hills, one had found the quarry sought by many; and had dragged him down, and torn and devoured him, so that not a bone remained to mark the spot of his undoing—di Rocco’s.
The morning succeeding opened chill and austere—a brave day for a journey. Monsignore’s equipage, ordered overnight, was ready betimes to convey him to Turin, whither urgencies State had called him. The lean horses champed their rusty bits; the lean postillions whoa’d, and cursed their cattle sympathetically for their ill-lined stomachs. When mid-day came and with it no di Rocco, they dared the devil for the sake of a toothful of oats and polenta, and drove back grumbling to the stables.
Monsignore did not come, then or thereafter. Monsignore was never to be seen in life again. At first the story of his disappearance was received with utter incredulity. One could not conceive a figure so potent, so absorbing, the sport of any such casualty as might overtake a little soul in its little pride of doing. He must be keeping out of the way intentionally—watching, from some cunning eyrie, to pounce upon the first self-committing wretch who should venture to presume upon his supposed removal from the board.
A hope, in that case, predoomed to unfulfilment. For, even when curiosity woke on surprise, and gossip on curiosity, and emphasis on gossip, his name was never bandied about but with decency. Le Prieuré, rough as its rocks, was too manly to flog a dead lion, or even a dead boar. There were no unworthy comments on the snatching of that terrific presence from its midst—not in the first surmise, nor in the last moral certainty. For so at length it came to be.
How the whisper grew, the shadow thickened, one might scarcely tell. It took form, no doubt, in the winks and becks and exaggerated secrecies of a sot, too brain-sodden himself at first to grasp the full significance of his innuendoes. But as a word or two, caught from the blabbings of sleep, may linger suggestively in ears that listen, so Nicholas Target’s tavern maunderings came presently to be suspected of embodying in their text a very momentous cypher.
The fellow, bewildered between apprehension and vanity, was unable, nevertheless, to forego that hint of his marketable values, nor his intention to negotiate them when his way became clear to him. It became clear, brilliantly clear, all in a moment, when he felt himself nipped by the scruff, and, twisting about, saw that the law had got hold of him. With whine and collapse, then, he let full daylight into so much of the mystery as it was in his power to resolve.
On that night of rapid storm, ran his confession, he had been engaged by Monsignore to bring him secretly into the presence of the Marchesa, where she had sought refuge in his little auberge on the Montverd. The lady was to be taken by surprise; for which reason his daughter Margot had been despatched into Le Prieuré on the pretext of some business which would detain her. For the same reason of privacy, Monsignore had elected to avoid the popular route up the hill. He, Target, was to meet him at the place called the mauvais pas opposite, and conduct him thence across the glacier to his own side. He had known nothing of any engagement on Monsignore’s part to hold himself aloof from the Marchesa; or, if he had, it was none of his business to cross the caprices of his over-lord; nor could there be any real sin in procuring a wife for her husband. His conscience was as clear on that matter as on the question of his sobriety, which at the time was absolute.
So he had met Monsignore—with difficulty, for, as it turned out, the night was terrible: he had met him, and was already proceeding with him down the moraine, when he, Target, had slipped and fallen. Monsignore was very furious at that, and had cursed him for a drunken sot, which was quite untrue. They had proceeded, however, and were actually on the glacier, when by great ill-fortune he had fallen a second time. On each occasion the lantern he carried had been extinguished, and had had to be relighted. Monsignore, on the repetition of his mishap, had flown into an ungovernable rage, snatched the light from him, and, driving him from his presence with blows and curses, had bade him seek his own way to the rocks, for that he would trust himself to his guidance no longer. The man was a demon in fact, and he had fled from him. Instinct had guided him to his cabin by the moraine, where he had crouched, waiting for Monsignore to follow. While he dwelt there, there had broken over the glacier one of those furious storms of hail and wind, which for a time had made thought impossible. Its cessation was not followed by the arrival of Monsignore: in fact Monsignore never followed at all. Knowing the resolute cruelty of his passions, he, Target, had not been long in guessing at the reason. He must have foundered in that terrific blast—have wandered astray, with quenched light, and pitched into some crevasse.
Long he had waited for him; and, at last, in an interval of calm, had sought back, so far as he might dare, across the glacier. He had peered, he had shouted. He had left at last no boulder or familiar crack unsearched when the first weak wash of dawn had come to his aid. It was all unavailing. The glacier, it was as morally certain as anything circumstantial could be, had bolted Monsignore; and there was an end of him.
So Le Prieuré agreed, awake at last to the full significance of the shadow which had been stealing in step by step to overwhelm it. Its verdict was untraversable, as plain as reason: Monsignore had perished.
There was no need to question the essential truth of the drunkard’s story. Target could have had no possible interest in committing or leading his patron to destruction. A just retribution had overtaken an illustrious sinner against his word. Di Rocco, the monster, the miser, was a thing of the past. Heaven, in its own stupendous way, had decreed the manner of his death and burial.
Moral certainties are, however, by no means legal. A man is not dead in law without proof of witness, even though his carcase lies on the table before it. Much remained to challenge, to certify, to cite and answer by default, before the widow could come into her own. In the meanwhile the Chevalier de France was not backward in righteous and indignant denunciation of his dead son-in-law’s abuse of faith. At the same time he was even extravagantly exacting in the question of the acknowledgments due to himself in his position of natural guardian to the Marquess’s august “relict.”
The village, perhaps, did not at the outset take him quite so seriously as he expected. It was more curious to learn how M. Saint-Péray accepted this provisional change in his fortunes. But there Martha Paccard proved herself a very Cerberus in guarding the approaches to her charge. She was agitated, but quite resolute about it all. Only between her and young Balmat was there ever an interchange of meaning glances, and once or twice, in moments of emotion, some fearful comment. She cried, too, in private a good deal, however brave a face she might turn to the world. For, as a fact, none but these two knew how Louis-Marie had slipped out alone on the night of the tragedy, and had returned home as secretly by-and-by, death white and drenched to the skin.
Then the next thing Le Prieuré heard about him was that he had left the village and gone none knew whither.
At that, for the first time, men and women united in putting him on one side as an irreclaimable faint-heart.
But, for all the rest, Vogue la galère! Di Rocco was dead, dead, dead!
* * * * * * * *
One summer afternoon a young man stood on a projecting rock which overlooked the Glacier of the Winds at a point, on the north-east side, at no great distance below that whence his patron had, a few nights earlier, descended to his death. Right in front of him the vast river of ice, creeping to its fall over a precipice, was rent and splintered into a throng of monstrous pinnacles, one or other of which would ever and again lean, topple, and go spinning down the shallower bed below in a thundering shatter of fragments. This happened more than once while he lingered, and on each occasion he winced, and stepped back, and then expanded his chest, and watched for the next ruinous downfall. But at length, with a sigh, he prepared to go.
“So breaks away the past,” he thought. “What will the future reveal? Well, I am still Cartouche.”
He turned, turned again, and showed a wicked face to the glacier.
“He was good to me,” he murmured. “If Bonito did it, bad for Bonito. I shall know some day. Goodbye, evil father of a worthless child!”
He went down sombrely into the valley.
END OF PART I.