CHAPTER VII
The Prefect of Faissigny, commanded, for the second time within a week, and with a flattering grace of intimacy, into the King’s presence, discovered an exquisite butterfly where he had left a chrysalis. The royal head—erst as round and blue as a Turk’s—was adorned with a bob-wig in buckle, from whose toupee a couple of pearl pins stuck out like clubbed antennæ; the royal limbs and body were glossy with embroidered silks; on the royal coat of maroon-coloured velvet sparkled a diamond star. Twin satellites of this sun, moreover, twinkled, like new-discovered planets, in the royal ears—a sincerest flattery, which his Majesty did not grudge to pay to so unique a pink of the elegances as M. Trix.
As he advanced to greet his visitor, he held a wisp of point d’Alençon a little raised between the finger and thumb of his right hand, while his left poised a gleaming snuff-box at a like angle. His manner was as charmingly playful as his “style” was unexceptionable. As a monarch he had no rival to challenge his pre-eminence in the Kingdom of puffs and patches.
“Welcome, my dear Prefect,” he said. “You come as irresistible as Apollo in Arcadia. I vow I am jealous of you, since seeing our adorable Daphne. Alas! that Fate hath imposed upon me the rôle of Father Ladon. But it is some compensation to have a god for suitor.”
“Your Majesty flatters and confounds me in one.”
Cartouche’s eyes were bright and nervous. He had not a full command of his lips.
The King smiled.
“Confounds you, Monsieur? How is that?”
“Daphne, Sire, if I am not mistaken, took refuge in a laurel tree, rather than suffer the god’s pursuit.”
“Bah!” The King shrugged his shoulders. “And she bewailed, I’ll swear, her foolish precipitancy for ever after. But the laurels in this case, Monsieur, are for your brow.”
“I do not feel like a conqueror, indeed.”
“Fie, fie, Monsieur! Is it necessary to remind M. Trix of his Cervantes? Faint hearts and fair ladies, forsooth. O, you have a character to maintain, I assure you! But certainly such beauty cuts the sinews of self-confidence. Well, it is no matter. You have only, as it happens, to receive the keys of the capitulated citadel.”
“I do not understand your Majesty, I declare.”
“Our Majesty, Monsieur, has already thrown the handkerchief for you, and one without a crown in its corner. That was a self-denying ordinance, for which we will not altogether insist on your gratitude. But, in plain language, sir, we desire this union, and have made no secret of our desire.”
“Sire!”
“Hush, Monsieur, or she may hear! You would not damn your reputation with a show of diffidence? Hush!”
Cartouche looked at him aghast.
“She is present? She—Sire, Sire!” He made a hurried step forward.
The King, smiling, motioned him aside, and tiptoed to a door. The two were quite private and alone. The royal closet was destined, for the moment, for Love’s confessional-box—ordered with a view to the stimulating of emotional disclosures and throbbing confidences. It was evening, and the tapers, shrouded in their silver sconces, diffused a soft motionless glow over a piled luxuriance of stuffs and cushions; over a carpet tufted thick as turf; over hangings of purple velvet. They woke slumberous gleams in furniture; flushed the drowsy faces of satyrs on polished bureaux; creamed the bare legs and breasts of nymphs; touched the cheeks of grapes, piled in a gold salver on a table, with little kisses of light; slipped into the warm depths of decantered wine, and hung tiny crimson jack-o’-lanterns there to lure the already half-drunken senses to red ruin. No drugging pastille ever vulgarised the air of that enchanted chamber; but a sweet and swooning perfume was contrived to steal all over it, as if a bed of lilies of the valley lay beneath the floor.
And, in a moment, she was there, before Cartouche’s eyes—the loveliest, most lovable shape to be conceived in such a setting.
For an instant desperate and defiant, he feigned to himself to claim her appropriately to it—its sensuousness and artificiality. Her lily complexion was toilet cream; her lips, too startlingly scarlet, were painted; the flowers in her cheeks were well assumed, since they owed to the rubbing of geranium petals. All these, with that gleaming gold for crown, that spun starlight of her hair, were but so many modistic arts, to which her simple dress of black supplied the clue. Out of that dusk sheath her shoulders budded with a double emphasis of whiteness—a cunning scheme of contrasts.
And so he lusted to slander her to his own heart; and would have cut that same heart out only to lay it at her slender feet and feel them trample it.
And she could be so stately, though a child. Giving the King her hand, she held him vassal to its whiteness, and smiled a gracious smile when he raised and kissed it reverently. She had become woman at her tender years—but through the hate and not the love of man. She had borne sorrow and was a virgin still. Passion fell dumb before that poignant motherhood: desire slunk ashamed before her eyes.
The King handed her forward, with a sort of conscious chassé. He was at pains to practise every punctilious elegance in his reception of this untutored girl. He looked even nervous and a little inferior. But custom gave him command.
“There are occasions, Madam,” he said, “on which even the King is de trop. I leave it to a lovelier monarch to reconcile the parties in this suit, sure that my affection for both, their sense of duty to the State, their own passions and interests, will move them to a compromise. Respect that Judge, my children, for whom I dethrone myself; and accept his ruling on a cause which I have very much at heart.”
With that, he released the Marchesa’s hand, and bowed profoundly, and withdrew. She made no gesture to retain him. The two remained standing as he had left them, silent and far apart.
A storm of emotions swept through the chambers of Cartouche’s brain. He shook in its thunder. What was the power in this child, this white-and-pink wax doll, to humble mighty worldlings in her presence, bring them to her feet—not to sue, but to deprecate all suit of her as guilt—not to pray; only to adore, and own themselves unworthy?
She had beauty; and it was not a snare. She had virtue, and it was not a pose. ’Twas her inaccessibility made her covetable, O thou fond Ulysses!
But he did not desire her for himself, he thought. And yet, after all, why should he not? She was unattached; fair quarry to the free-lance; no other man’s preserve. He had the right of chase with the whole world—no bond to honour, even, since she had let another cross the claim of his friend. He would never have suffered that for himself. She would never have dared that sin against Cartouche. He gloried suddenly in his name. If he could only have met her first—a man worth a woman’s modelling, not a saint invertebrately blessed—a passion, not a sentiment! Was it too late even now? To gain the whole world in her and lose his soul! She could make an immortal lust of damnation—cancel eternity to a moment. He thirsted for that moment almost beyond endurance.
What was her power? He had accepted this interview, when thrust upon him, with a cynic mock for its pretence, a tolerant anticipation of the moral drubbing it was to procure him. He knew that, in her regard, not all his brilliant worldly gifts and qualities weighed as one grain in the balance of good things. A word from Louis’s lips, a look from Louis’s eyes, would have sent him and all his vanities kicking the beam. He could not get behind that essential righteousness. It was impervious to all cleverness, all intellect, all reason even. She was a fool; but a beautiful unattainable fool is as transporting a siderite as any other. Wisdom loved a fool—not for the first time in man’s history: he loved her, because her folly was inaccessible by him.
Some say that sex is accident—a chance development; that we are all bi-sexual within. Woman, prescriptively, is the one to covet most the unattainable, to pursue the most where most scorned, to love most the partner who most abuses her love. But what, if you please, does man? It all turns, in fact, upon the ineradicable human lust for adventure, the weariness of the rut, the reach at something out of reach. Yolande, as virtue, was forbidden fruit to this vice. Therefore he desired her, madly, fiercely; but, at the last, with a saving grace of humour.
He found himself, out of that, presently, and moved towards her, very formal and demure, though his heart was on fire. At a pace or two distant he stopped.
“Madam,” he said, “the King wishes you to marry me.”
He could see a shadow flutter in her white throat.
“I ask myself, Monsieur,” she said softly, “how I have offended the King?”
“Madam,” he rejoined quietly, “I told him that you would not marry me.”
“I ask myself,” she went on, seeming to ignore him, “what I have ever done to justify these shameless solicitations by the shameless.” Her frigid self-possession, as a quality of sixteen, was a quite pitiful abnormity. “You are by all accounts, Monsieur,” she said, “a student of the world. What is it in a woman that seems to mark her down your legitimate sport? Have I these unconscious attributes? Tell me, only in your own excuse.”
“I have said once before, Madam, that you are an angel.”
“Then do angels beck, like wantons, at the street corners? I am no angel, Monsieur, and your assurance proves you know it—claims me, through my own act, to be the butt of your scorn and mockery.”
“If you could see into my heart—”
“It professed to speak once of loyalty to a friend. Hold by your plausible surface, Monsieur. I would not stir those depths, if I were you.”
“Then, Madam, would you leave truth to perish in the mud. My heart is foul, maybe, but there is that to redeem it at the bottom.”
She stirred a little, turning on him.
“Truth, sir! Has it lain buried there since that time when for once it rose to foretell an outrage, which—O, Monsieur! I have not forgotten your words—your last, when you parted from me on—O, indeed, it is possible to accommodate a prophecy—to verify through a confederate a villainy which one has foreshadowed—my God! if that is Truth!”
He went as white as stone; he looked as petrified.
“What! Madam,” he said, in a quick, whispering voice; “do you pretend to deem me capable of that baseness?”
He gripped her hand suddenly, so as to make her wince; then flung it from him.
“I scorn you not for your act,” he cried, “but for your cowardice in striving to make me its scapegoat.”
He stepped back in great emotion; and she herself was agitated only a little less. Her young breast rose and fell in hard pantings: the force of her self-control revealed itself in this sudden struggle for breath: and in the end her passion mastered her. She turned a face of lovely fury on him.
“You, Monsieur! the scapegoat?—so wronged and misunderstood?—the poor innocent bearer of other people’s sins? Tell me, are you not that man who came and offered his services—O, God! the slander of that word!—to a soul most wounded in her faith, and therefore, as he thought, most susceptible to the sweet druggings of dishonour? Are you not that man who would have had me break my vows, stultify all that tragedy of renunciation, on the strength of a wicked sophistry? A noble friend to Honour—that man, who, baffled in his devil’s purpose, must revenge himself by instigating another to desecrate the shrine he could not force himself! A friend—”
He put out his hand, and touched her once more—quite gently this time. But there was some quality in the touch the very antithesis of that which had impelled his former violence. The girl faltered under it, and her speech shivered into silence.
“You are mistaken, Madam.” He measured out his words with a soft and painful accuracy. “If I proposed to commit you to what convention styles dishonour (forgive me for using the word once more) it was in order to save from worse defilement that very shrine at which I worshipped.”
She started, and flushed.
“Monsieur!”
“Nay, hear me out,” he said, in the same quiet tones. “Even the first of Tabernacles is not soiled in the poor sinner’s worship. My heart has always held your image, Madam, the loveliest of its possessions—and not the less because it cherishes a hopeless dream. I would have served that dream loyally for love’s sake: I would have given my life and soul to keep it pure. If I thought to persuade it to fly to its natural sanctuary, there was a priority in vows to vindicate my daring. Have you ever considered, Madam, how you broke one oath to love to swear another to dishonour?”
She uttered a little cry—moved a step forward—clasped her hands to her bosom.
“Understand clearly, Madam,” he said: “I loved you, and would have yielded you to my friend. I had no alternative, indeed; but that is not to justify your slander of a renunciation, which was at least as holy, according to its lights, as yours. I did not urge your husband to that wickedness. If I hinted to you of its possibility, it was to open your eyes to the truth—to save my dream from a last contamination—to confide it to the shrine the most meet, and the most entitled, to hold it perfect for my adoration. There was no selfishness in that sacrifice. Though it closed the gates of Paradise upon me I was content, so long as the vile thing was shut out with me. I could have heard the singing of your loves within, without a bitter thought. But that you cannot understand. No virtue, in your narrow standard, can exist in worldliness. It must be all one or all the other—vice or sanctity.”
She was pale and trembling. She made a little involuntary gesture of her hands, half pleading half deprecating, towards him. He was cold as steel.
“As to this royal crochet of our union,” he said quietly—“it turns upon some fancied policy of State, to which I am no partner. I am as innocent of its instigation as of its methods or mistakes. It hinted, a moment ago, that you might be kind to me. I was as incredulous then, as I am convinced now that no tolerance towards sin is possible to your nature. I have worshipped at an exclusive altar, and my faith is construed into a sacrilege. You are insensible, Madam, to the exaltations of a great passion. I do not plead to you: I reject you. Even the weakness of my friend—for he is weak—raises him in my eyes above your cold, methodic virtue. I do not think you are worthy of him.”
She bowed her head, weeping.
“I know it,” she whispered.
And at that he was disarmed. He stood in great agitation a moment; then burst out suddenly:—
“Madam, Madam, if it is any consolation to you to know, such passion brings a self-redemption. I am not, cannot be the man I was—never again. Spare me that gentle association with yourself—your memory—I’ll persuade the King—Madam, it shall all come right—it—”
His voice broke; he hesitated a minute, struggling with his emotions, then hurriedly left the room.
And Yolande of the white hands hid her face in them, and for long remained shaken with sobs.