CHAPTER VIII
Louis-Marie was really ill, though his complaint, it seemed, baffled diagnosis. He was sunk in an extreme debility, which from a moral had become a physical one. There appeared nothing wrong with him constitutionally; but he dreamt, and saw vampires, and the substance of his eternal illusions figured in “blood-boltered” forms. Nightly they sucked him, and daily his increasing wanness testified to their inhuman appetites. He faded to a frail image of himself, very pitiful in its suggestion of a sick prince of porcelain. Any sudden noise, like the opening of a door, was enough now to make him start and shake with terror. A footstep outside the window vibrated in his nerves for minutes after it had passed. His heart was become a very seismograph to record alarms. But the unexpected entrance of anyone into the room most perturbed him. A furtive aghast look, an artificial rally and instant physical collapse, were the almost certain consequences of such an intrusion. Once, at a chance mention of Bonito’s name, he sunk back in his chair as if under a stroke. Cartouche, who was present and distressfully concerned, attributed his state to a sort of hysterical resentment against that minister of ill-luck, and struggled to overlay some conscious contempt of it with a real anxious commiseration.
“Have you soothed him, reassured him?” he asked of Molly Bramble, when that frail sweet of Nature came down to him to report upon the invalid.
“I have left him asleep,” she said.
He tramped to and fro in the little room, pondering a psychologic problem.
“He fainted when I told him of another loss—a real poignant one that time. Here’s a mere slip of Fortune—a few ducats rolled into the gutter. He’s already recovered more than their equivalent in abstinence. Are these good people so utterly wanting in a sense of proportion?”
“Think what it meant to him, Cherry!”
“And what did it mean, Mollinda?”
“Why, to go a-courting, to be sure, with that in his hand to recommend him.”
“Does he think she needs that form of persuasion? I would not condescend to break my heart on such a mistress. He’s no worse off than he was.”
“Well, he mayn’t be. But how about her?”
Cartouche stopped, and took the girl’s soft chin in his hand.
“Talk about what you understand, you little village wench,” he said. “You was bred in a cottage, and think in pence. A guinea is your standard of corruption. Noble natures are not bought with gold.”
She did not move: but her eyes, unwinking, filled with tears.
“Thank you for reminding me,” she whispered.
Remorse smote him; but still an angrier, or a worthier, feeling made him stubborn.
“Pish, Mollinda!” he said; “we’ve agreed to compromise there on a better sentiment. That proves you noble too, my girl.”
She looked him fearlessly in the eyes, though her own were like wet forget-me-nots.
“Do you know she’s here—in Turin?” she said.
“No.”
“Well, she is. You needn’t start and let me go. She’s nothing to you.”
“Why should she be? Who told you?”
“He did.”
She gulped, but did not stir.
“Tell me honest,” she said. “Is it for my sake, or for hers, that you’re so anxious all of a sudden to be good?”
He delayed to answer. She gripped him, quickly and fiercely.
“If I knew for certain what I’ve feared,” she cried low, “I’d kiss and cling until you gave me back what I’ve lost—I would, for all it damned us both together.”
She broke from him, and went hurriedly out of the room. Reaching the invalid’s door above, she paused to the sound of a little cry within, hesitated, and entered.
Louis-Marie was sitting up on his bed. His eyes were wide with fever. He greeted her appearance with something like a sob.
“Who is it?” he whispered. “Has he come? My God, don’t keep me in this suspense!”
She hastened to comfort him—the more emotionally; perhaps, because her own heart was very full.
“There’s nobody—indeed there isn’t.”
“I heard voices.”
“It was only ours—Mr Trix’s and mine.”
He sank back, with the sigh of a reprieved soul; but was up again almost immediately, stroking and fondling the girl’s hand. His eyes had grown flushed and maudlin out of relief. The sensuous fever of him was uppermost.
“Dear little nurse!” he murmured; “dear kind little Molly! You never fail to frighten the dreams away. I think you could cure me altogether if you would.”
She sat on the bed, suffering his caresses, because, as she wilfully told herself, they were lavished on her as another’s proxy. Would she could act so indeed, in the manner of those Eastern enchantments of which she had read, and secure that other’s compromise without hurt to herself! He was emboldened by her passiveness.
“Molly,” he whispered: “if you would only put your face—here, down by mine, on the pillow.”
She did not stir. He stole an arm about her.
“We could make it all right afterwards,” he said, with a thick little laugh. “If I once had that reason, as I have the power, to mend something I’d done, I think I could face the world like a giant. It’s only shadows that upset me. Perfection, I’ve come to see, was never meant for men. It’s better to sin a little, if one does penance for it—better than being a saint. We know that on good authority, Molly, don’t we? I’ll promise amendment—I will, on my honour—and—and—are you fond of jewels, Molly?”
She slipped from him, and to her feet.
“Are you dreaming still?” she said. “Do you take me for her? We don’t do these things in our class.”
She had had her little revenge, and flushed triumphantly to it. It were supererogation to confess—what he did not know—that she was engaged in these matters to another. But, after all, the creature was a man, and his offence therefore nothing very terrible. Of course, if it had signified treachery to his blood-brother, that were another pair of shoes. But, inasmuch as only the betrayal of his fine lady-love was implied by it—why, the Marchioness di Rocco might very well profit by learning that her supposed pre-eminence in men’s hearts was at least open to challenge. A light sentence—as she considered it—was enough to meet this case.
She stood away, panting—a very ruffled little amourette, and thrice desirable in those plumes.
“I wouldn’t promise on my honour, if I was you, my good gentleman,” says she. “’Tisn’t much to trust on, when you can speak to me like that, and you sworn to another. I wonder what she’d think of it all. You’d best go to sleep, and get the better of yourself.”
He caught at her, the poor devil, as she was going, all his gauche libertinism snubbed out of him at a breath. The loss of his self-respect was nothing to this sudden realisation of his contemptible immaturity in vice, and of her recognition of it. There is no such crestfallen dog in all the world as your seducer held up to ridicule by his intended victim. He appealed to her abjectly:—
“Don’t go—don’t! I am so ill. I didn’t mean what—what you suppose. My brain is all on fire. He wouldn’t allow for that!”
“He? Who?” she demanded, withdrawing from him. He still pursued her with his hands, distraught, half frenzied:—
“You’re going to tell him, I know; and he so believes in me. It would be cruel, wicked, to shatter his faith. You ought to think of the demoralising effect on him—and—and I’m not myself, you know that perfectly well. I say and do things I had never thought of once.”
“Do you mean Mr Trix?” she said.
“You know I do,” he cried. “It would be wicked to tell him!”
She stood conning him gravely a little. There had been no thought of tale-bearing a minute ago in her liberal heart. But now, for the first time, it began to consider that policy, in the light of a possible retaliation on a suspected rival. The “demoralising effect” on him, her Cherry, quotha! What, indeed, if she were to try that effect, with the result that it evoked jealousy there, anger, indignation, a declaration of his exclusive and never-foregone property in her, his Molly’s, person? It might serve for the very means to dissipate this sad veil of continence which had come to fall between them, and which, only out of the inherent purity of her love, she had agreed to respect. For spiritual relationships, it must be admitted, were water-gruel to this poor Mollinda, and tinctured with wormwood at that, when, as in the present case, they carried suspicions of the disinterestedness of the party suggesting them.
Should she go and tell him in truth? No, it wasn’t fair to this other fellow, for all the exhibition he had made of himself. But her conscious prettiness was something to blame, no doubt, in that matter; and, after all, he had been guilty of no disloyalty to his friend. Her ethics of the heart were Nature’s ethics, founded on a frank recognition of the logic of feminine lures, and the reasonableness of wanting to pluck inviting fruit when one was thirsty. A parched man could not be expected to drink water when wine was going.
Nevertheless, he deserved a measure of punishment, less for his fault than for his mean attempt to escape its consequences. A little suspense, she decided, just a moderate spell on the rack, would do him no harm—might even prove salutary.
“I’ll promise naught,” she said. “It would just amount to my allowing a secret between us; and you aren’t the man for my confidence—no, nor for any part of me. Besides, if you didn’t mean nothing, why should you be afraid? I’ll do as I think fit, and speak or hold as it suits me.”
She whisked away, leaving the adorable fragrance of a dream unfulfilled to clinch the poor creature’s damnation. She did not know, could not know, how thorough that was at this last. She would have been horrified, kind heart, to realise how her balmy breath had blown a smouldering fire into devouring flame; how it had sentenced this victim of “little-ease” to be transferred to the pillory. For indeed in that sorry yoke did she leave Louis-Marie exposed to himself, and, as he thought, to all the world.
There is a form of morbid self-consciousness which is characterised by a perpetual turning inward of the patient’s moral eye. The man subject to it sees—especially during the wakeful hours of the night—his own past deeds and words imbued with a meaning of which they had appeared quite innocent when acted or spoken. He writhes in the memory of mistakes of self-commission or omission, which no one other than himself, probably, is troubling to recall, or is even capable of recalling. What an ass somebody must have thought him under such and such circumstances, is the reflection most distressingly constant to his mind. Nevertheless, while eternally holding himself the irreclaimable fool of untactfulness, he remains to his own appreciation a thing of price, which he himself is for ever giving away for nothing Modesty is no part of his equipment though he is so sensitively conscious of his own failings. He cannot detach himself from himself, in fact, or, even once in a way, realise comfortably his own insignificance in the serene philosophy of the Cosmos.
So far for his tortured memory of solecisms, real or imaginary, committed by himself. When it comes to the question with him of a genuine conscience-stricken introspection, his reason is in the last danger of overthrow.
Now, Louis-Marie’s was a temperament a little of this order. It was the temperament of a man at once thin-skinned and bigoted, righteous and passionate. It had all the conceit and the sensitiveness of conscious virtue. The fellow could never forget himself, in the abstract sense—believe that people were not incessantly thinking and talking of him. A morbid diathesis is the inevitable result of such self-centralisation. Acutely sentient, it will learn to inflame to the least thrust of criticism, and to brood eternally over the pointlessness of its own ripostes. Then, at last, when it comes to sin, as it is bound some time to do, it will take its lapses with a self-same seriousness as it took its merits. It is always, in its own vanity, a responsible example; people are always regarding it. Its attitude, as a consequence, will become a pose; but by now it is a fair rind hiding a rotting kernel. The devastating grub has entered, and it dare not reveal itself by expelling it. It hugs its disease in secrecy, hoping against hope for some interior process of healing. How can self-centredom heal itself? There comes a day when the last film cracks, and its emptiness stands exposed to the world.
Louis-Marie, abandoned to his reflections, thought that that day had arrived for him. His hollow pretence was on the point of being laid bare; he was to be made the subject of a universal contempt and execration. A moment’s temptation had revealed him to himself for the sham thing he was—would reveal him to Gaston—would reveal him, in the certain course of scandal, to Yolande. For ever more now he must be an outcast from social respectability. His life, for all that it was worth, was virtually at an end.
Practically, too, it seemed almost. He fell back on his bed in a death-sickness, and lay there without movement, without conscious thought, for hours.
Cartouche, returning, very quiet and sombre, from his interview with a great lady in the Palace, heard him moaning to himself, as he passed his door, and went softly in. The room was in darkness; only a faint light from the lamps outside fell spectrally across the figure stretched on the bed. He crossed hurriedly to it and bent over.
“What is it, brother? Are you so ill?”
Saint-Péray uttered a little weak cry between terror and rapture.
“Gaston! is it you? I believe I am dying.”
“No, no.”
“I have so waited for you, sinking and struggling to keep above. This load! I can endure it no longer. You are so strong—I seem always to have clung to you—my brother—and you will take some of the burden? Yet how can I ask you! O, my God, my God! to what can I appeal!”
“Why not to my love, Louis?”
“Ah! your love!—there were older claims to it. You don’t know—you know nothing of it all—of what I am and have been—of what I am capable, even, when tempted. Or do you? are your eyes opened a little since—but what does it matter! I will confess everything; I—O, my Yolande! my Yolande!”
“Now hush! and listen—do you attend? I am but this moment come from her.”
“You—O, Gaston! fetch me a priest—I am going!”
“She loves you still—I say, she loves you still. Is not that the best priest—and doctor, too? I will go and fetch her.”
The sick man clutched at him frantically.
“And confirm my sentence? You shall not. Though it parts us for ever, I must speak. I could live, I think, if once this load were thrown. Gaston!—”
“I am listening.”
“It was I murdered di Rocco!”