CHAPTER X
The trial of Mr Trix, ex-Prefect of Faissigny, for the murder of his patron, made a tremendous stir, not only locally, but throughout the Cisalpine Kingdom of Victor-Amadeus. It was really a trial of strength between the forces of revolt and those of reactionism—a tug of war between Piedmont and Savoy, with the Alps for toe-line. But from the first there was no doubt as to the issue. Wind, muscle, new blood, self-confidence, were all in favour of the Savoyard champions, while the acclamations of a whole nation, their neighbours and backers, thundered in their ears. Opposed were the degenerates of an effete régime; themselves not without a spitfire courage, but in physique no match for this new vigorous young Demos—for this bristling force suddenly sprung into life from seed of dead dragons’ teeth. To Savoy this opportunity to assert its virtual independence came at the ripe moment with the means to point the right moral. Cartouche offered himself providentially for the rope with which to test the relative haulage values of Progress and Conservatism. That was his obliging use at the moment.
He was not personally unpopular, save with the Illuminati, and other such fanatic extremists; and he was arraigned on a popular charge—that of having destroyed an enemy of the people. But he stood convicted of privilege—was an autocrat’s nominee—and the question at issue was not one of popularity but of principle. The severe justice of the people—now first coming into evidence—had to be vindicated; prejudice and partiality and other dynastic prerogatives had to be suppressed. Wherefore the matter was held to turn not so much on the guilt or innocence of the prisoner, as on the necessity of making an example of a King’s favourite. Liberty, Justice and Equality, as representing in the bulk the new heresy of humanity, were unanimous in demanding the sacrifice of this scapegoat to the sins of his class. He was offered up, in the public esteem, long before he was sentenced.
And the worst of it for reactionism lay in the absence of an effective retort. It could not move for the pardon of the prisoner, if convicted, without appearing to hold him justified of the worst offence against itself. On the other hand, to surrender him to judgment by default, would be to admit the right of popular jurisdiction. So it endeavoured to temporise, weakly, by citing the parties in the case to appear before the Criminal Court of Turin; whereupon le Prieuré answered by bringing the prisoner to immediate trial, and sentencing him to be hanged incontinent in its own market-square before the church.
So much for the political aspects of this cause célèbre. The private and personal only ceased to be subordinate to them with the certainty of the democratic victory. Then at last general interest began to concentrate itself on the scapegoat.
He proved himself, in one way, to be a disappointing scapegoat—lent himself to be done to death with scarcely a show of resistance. It appeared as if he recognised his doom for a foregone conclusion, and was determined to accept the clamour for his aristocratic blood as a sign of an improving taste on the part of Jacques Bonhomme. He signified his disgust of any rudeness directed at himself; but was always ready to applaud, and retort on, the least essay of wit. During the brief course of the trial, he always seemed more concerned for his coat than his character, for his pose than his peril. Sometimes his dark eyes would take eager stock of the gloating audience, as if they sought among it the evidences of some sign or hope beyond their expectations; but as often he would seem to rebuke their credulity with a little laugh and shrug, and would recompose himself, with a weary insouciance, to the fatigue of the business.
The little Court of the Prefecture was crammed on the fatal day. In addition to clerks, advocates, public representatives of the Government and private reporters for the King, so many idle visitors, attracted by interest or curiosity, had latterly flocked into Le Prieuré, that the accommodations of Justice were hard set to find standing room for all. The place, indeed, was an inferno; but, luckily for its unclean spirits, quick evidence against, and short shrift for, the prisoner were timely in releasing them.
The leading interest, before the appearance of the accused, centred in the pièce de conviction, which lay on a green baize-covered table before the President. It had been necessary, for obvious reasons, to withdraw the blade, seven years hidden, from the body of its victim. That lay in the churchyard under consecrated ground; while a second grave was already morally digging, in the unhallowed acre, for its murderer. If the fact might be held, in any degree, to justify the indifferent attitude of the defence, it was as certain that it vindicated in all its impartiality the “severe justice of the people.” Six foot of earth was as much the right of an aristocratic as of a vulgar assassin.
In the meanwhile there was the gold rat to show his teeth, and the red rust on the blade to suggest a horrible intimacy with the inner processes of the crime. They must suffice for curiosity until the appearance of the prisoner.
Monsieur the ex-Prefect, dished up at last to a ravenous company, surveyed the Court as he had always been wont to survey it, with a manner as from the chair rather than from the dock. He was perfectly cool and self-collected—dressed as for a gala—white-handed and sweet-scented—a fastidious macaroni—self-consciously caviarre to the general.
“Proceed, M. le Président,” he said. “I will venture to suggest to you the values of a dramatic brevity. I am entirely at your service—and the hangman’s.”
Dr Bonito, sitting slunk out of observation below the presidential chair, watched, across the room, the effect of this entry and rodomontade on a veiled female figure, which, standing among the spectators, had from the first caught his attention. Dull-sighted to all the world of beauty and sentiment, he was keen-eyed enough where his own appetites were concerned. He had early marked down this figure for his consideration, as a carrion-crow ogles a nesting rook. Its presence in this place did not surprise him. He might have wondered more if a case, so far-reaching in its sensational attractions, had failed to produce this apparition among many less interested. His curiosity was chiefly exercised as to its object in attending—whether from lust of triumph over, or from an inalienable infatuation for, a ruined betrayer. But he could gather nothing from its immovable attitude.
The Court took Monsieur the ex-Prefect at his word. Its processes were sharp, brief, and dramatic. By four o’clock in the afternoon it had sentenced the excellent petit-maître to his last dressing at the hands of the executioner.
Balmat had testified staunchly to the ownership of the knife; and the prisoner had applauded his evidence.
“Well spoken, Jacques. Thou art as upright a witness as a guide, Yes, the knife was mine.”
He had been advised by the President, M. Léotade, to sheathe his tongue.
“It is a weapon thou hast sharp reason to fear, Prefect,” he had answered.
There was some recapitulation of former evidence, which it is unnecessary to detail. Among others, the drunken rogue Target had been called, and Margot, his daughter. To all, it may be supposed, the drift of the inquiry was morally evident. They were summoned to condemn the prisoner—not to acquit him. It was very curious. Bonito, when it came to his turn, sniggered over the manner in which Fate had accommodated itself to his scheme of a persuasive magic. He recalled how he had engaged himself to put a spell on this man, so that he should volunteer a loathing of his office. He had not aimed at the moment at more than his deposition, which, so enforced, might have entailed troublesome consequences. Now, whatever ensued, Cartouche counted politically no longer. Whether he were hanged, or allowed to escape, he had ceased from the running. The gods had played into their oracle’s hands.
It was with a sense of this triumph upon him that he had risen to clinch the prisoner’s condemnation. His evidence was necessarily the most damning of all, turning as it did upon the question of motive. Every thin measured word that drew from him pulled the knot tighter about the foredoomed neck. He told of the prisoner’s anger over the projected union; of his fruitless plans to betray his patron; of his disinheritance and dismissal despite; of his suggestive words to himself, when they had met later in Turin. Finally, he also swore to the knife.
Cartouche, smiling, shook a finger at him rebukingly.
“I will meet thee on that issue some day, old comrade.”
He would speak nothing in his own defence.
He was proud to have deserved a thousand hangings at their hands, he said. He was indifferent on what indictment that truth was brought home to the world. For himself, he only regretted that he had left unhung among his enemies so much intelligence as was able to formulate a plausible reason for destroying him. They were not altogether such fools as they had appeared. A little wisdom made revolution a dangerous thing. He had foolishly hoped that he had eliminated the last of it, since it had hidden itself so successfully from him. Now he must congratulate that little on its taking him effectively, unawares, behind his back. But he warned it to seek a cleverer substitute for himself than M. Léotade.
M. Léotade in consequence had much pleasure in committing him viciously to the gallows.
Bonito, when the sentence was pronounced, stood up to watch its effect upon the veiled woman. She was nowhere to be seen. An hour later, the ferment and excitement having locally subsided, and the precincts of the Court been redelivered to quietude, he put the knife—which he had begged and secured—into his pocket, parted amicably with his colleagues, and set out on foot and alone for his lodgings. These, to suit his secretiveness and his parsimony, no less than his democratic unpretence—were in a little smithy on the Argentière road. He had put up there on the occasion of his former visit. There were conveniences about the establishment of Jean Loustalot, “Forgeron et Vétérinaire.” For one thing, loafers were not tolerated in its neighbourhood, for the reason that Jean—a suspicious saturnine man, of few words and lowering aspect—could not endure that idleness should borrow a lounging zest from his labours, as if he were a cursed puppet-man. For another, he was a soaker, of the solitary unsocial type, and, given the means, could always be persuaded—whenever his room was to be preferred to his company—to withdraw into the little dwelling-house at the rear of the smithy, and there drink himself swiftly and silently into insensibility.
Anticipating, in the present instance, an occasion of the kind, Dr Bonito provided himself, on his way out of the village, with a flask of spirits, which he deposited with the knife in his pocket. He then walked slowly on, with an air as of one who was loitering in the expectancy of being joined by a comrade. It was, in fact, no engagement with him, but a premonition having all the force of one. And the event came to justify it; though later than he had looked for. The encounter only happened when he was hard upon his destination. Then instantly he was conscious that a figure was waiting for him in the dusk of the road-side.
He paused a moment. Darkness like a precipitate was beginning to settle down into the valley. From the distant village came an excited bee-like murmur. Ahead of him, some fifty feet, a welter of shapeless light, the ring and clang of an anvil, marked where the smithy stood within a clump of trees. High up on the hill opposite twinkled the lights of the Château di Rocco. He took it all in; squeezed his lips between finger and thumb; and jerked himself suddenly forward. As he passed the expectant figure, he addressed it,—
“Wait, while I get rid of Jack Smith. I will call to you in a little.”
He went on, and entered the forge; took the flask from his pocket; held it up before the eyes of the panting Cyclops.
“I have a visitor, Jean. I want to be alone.”
The man, who had been softly manipulating the bellows, ceased of his hold on the instant. The handle, the fire, his brow, all went down together. With no more than a hoggish grunt, he seized the flask, and disappeared. Bonito went to the door, and called softly.
The fire had fallen so low when she entered, that they were only phantom darknesses to one another; but he kept a shrewd eye, for his part, on the undulations of the gloom which was addressed to him. He was the first to speak.
“So, you decided to follow, Priestess, and to satisfy yourself of the reality of your vengeance. I had half looked for you, I confess. Your presence in the Court did not surprise me.”
Her silence, something in the atmosphere of her regard, warned him to be vigilant and watchful.
“It was strange,” he went on, “how circumstances rushed to complicate my simpler purpose. Call it coincidence, if you will—’tis but another term for Providence. I’ll show you why—show you good reason to be grateful for the course that things have taken.”
“Do you know what I have in my hand?”
Her whisper came like a snake’s hiss through the darkness. It was his turn to be silent.
“I have my finger on the trigger,” she said. “I give you a moment to answer. Have you forgotten what you swore?”
“No.”
“Not to hurt him—and you have taken his life?”
“No, I say.”
“—As I am going to take yours.”
If soulless courage be a virtue, he could boast that one. He never flinched before the crawling horror of that unseen death. His voice, as he spoke, had not altered by a note, a tremor, from its accustomed harshness. Yet, all the while, he was desperately enough calculating his chances.
“That’s as you will,” he said. “Only I’d advise you hear me speak first. All considered, I’ve done my best for you.”
She gave a little wrenching laugh.
“Well,” he said: “Will you listen?”
“I’ll listen,” she answered. “I can aim better, being silent.”
“Make sure of me then. His life stands behind mine. Ah! does that shake you? Now, be reasonable, if you can. Was the glacier my creature, and coincidence in my pay? I might never have opened my lips, and they would have convicted your Cartouche a dozen times without. The people cried for him.”
“You knew the truth.”
“What if I did! Do you bear in mind how for years we have made a fortune out of its suppression?”
“I know how you have, dog.”
“I have kept you in comforts, Priestess—at least, I think, in comforts. No more of those, if our parts were once confessed; but straw and chains and rods, and a stone bed in Penitenza. The oracle would fall with the priest. What will you do when you have killed me?”
“Go to her up there, and tear the truth out of her throat, or end her too. He sha’n’t die unavenged—my God! do you hear me?”
“Melodrama, melodrama! Well, if you prefer it to the prose of commonsense! But for that, he might be saved yet.”
He heard how her breath caught at the word; and his own found relief in a little silent snigger.
“The truth?” he said. “She’d not yield it, to save a sinner at her saint’s expense, though you dragged out her tongue with pincers—I know the stubborn fool. But, grant she were to—what benefit to you, when they hanged you for my murder?”
“My neck for his.”
“Melodrama, I say. I say there’s a better way for you. Why, look you, I might have warned him, let him forestall his enemies, escape to France; and so, a condemned outcast, he had been lost to you for ever. Now you can save him—go with him, if you will, and win back his old passion out of his new gratitude.”
“I can—I? O, God! if I might!”
“I say you may. There, throw down your silly weapon. Our principles confirmed, your fool’s life counts with us for little. I’ll give you proof. I’ve already put it into the hands of her up there to deal with it as she will.”
“Her? His life?”
“His life.”
“You put it?”
“I.”
“She hates him.”
“Maybe. But she keeps a conscience.”
“What have—?”
“Why, can’t you understand that, the man convicted of the crime and hanged for it, my draughts on her would be dishonoured—she were a bank stopped payment. Fine reason, to be sure, for my seeking his destruction. I calculated better—I calculated on her conscience, I say—a perverse organ in a woman; but it stuck at his death, just that. It served me to commute my pension, so to speak—to exchange her the means to save him, once condemned, against a little bond—a promissory note—it’s here.”
He tapped his breast significantly.
“To save him!” she repeated stupidly.
“Why,” he said, “I told her ropes were cheap, nights dark—that there were no bars to his window; and I gave her an order made to bearer for a private interview with him.”
“She’s got it now?”
“Unless she’s used it already.”
“If she has! You’ve ruined her, I suppose—thank God for that!”
“I did my best. But the soil’s fruitful. The forest will rise again from its burning. If you’d be beforehand with her—claim his first gratitude—!”
He stopped; a little swift rustle had passed him, and he was alone.
He listened a moment; uttered a small dry chuckle; and then bestirred himself to get a light. He knew where the lamp hung on the wall, and in a little had kindled it. Looking, well-satisfied, round and about him, his eye caught the glint of a pistol lying on the forge. He took up the weapon, and examined it curiously. It was primed and loaded. She had meant it, then? He had been a little sceptical; but now he congratulated himself on his escape. He put the thing into his breast pocket. It was better out of the way, in case of accidents. She might return upon him, with God knew what fresh aberration in her brain.
The night air came in, chill and searching, at the open hatch of the door. He blew the smouldering ashes on the forge into a glow, and fetched a stool and sat down, leaning against the brickwork, to think things pleasantly over. He had no fear of being disturbed from without. Neighbourliness was the last thing encouraged by M. Loustalot. The smithy was no rendezvous for gossips—least of all after dark, when its remoteness and its master’s reputation made it a spot anathema.
His thoughts pursued his visitor. He wondered if, her mission accomplished, she would in truth succeed in winning back that errant passion to herself. On the whole, he rather hoped she would. It would serve to kill two birds for him with a single stone. She would keep Cartouche away, and Cartouche her. Neither, once escaped, could afford to return. That would be as it should be. He himself was in need of her no longer—had wanted, in fact, only a convenient pretext for dissolving their partnership. Here—his usual luck—that had offered itself opportunely. The sum, for which he held the Saint-Péray’s bond, was so large, that its investment would justify him in an immediate retirement from business. He had no desire, at the same time, to hamper it with the burden of a Sibylline pensioner. And so—yes, he hoped the two would escape together, never to reappear in Savoy. He had every confidence in their being permitted to. Even in a democracy it was no good precedent to hang a Prefect; any more than it was its good policy to alienate, at the outset of its campaign, by the vindictive sacrifice of its first prisoner taken, the sympathies of the temperate among reformers. He believed that Le Prieuré, in the person of its new Prefect—though intentionally uninspired by himself—saw this clearly, and would be satisfied with its moral triumph, since, whatever the real facts, the execution would be given a political complexion. He believed that, though the girl should carry into the prison a rope ladder bound about her waist, its visible presence on her would be winked at.
Winked at, forsooth! The thought tickled him. What a deal of winking there had been here from first to last. The association of ideas brought the knife to his mind, and he fetched it from his pocket and examined it curiously. There had been nothing but a morbid sentiment in his desire to secure it for himself. It gave him a gloating pleasure now to finger the long blade, and to think how the smears of its rust were the very dried essence of di Rocco’s heart. What secrets it might speak, through its seven years’ intimacy with that corrupt organ! “Wouldst thou not rejoice to utter them into mine—hard in—fast in?” he croaked, grinning, and apostrophising the rat’s head, as he held it out before him. “But there’s none to wield thee at the last. Bonito—poor old scorned and wronged Bonito—stands the victor and immortal!”
He had no taste for bed, in the present tingling poise of things; but presently, lost in ineffable altitudes of star-dreaming, he dropped into a doze where he sat, his head fallen back upon the forge.
* * * * * * * *
“Give me the order. You’ve not used it? Say you have, and I think I shall kill you.”
“I’ve not used it—not yet.”
“Not yet? You beast without a heart! You kissed me once—on my lips—I’d tear them weren’t they his! So you’d have let him die but for me!”
In the melancholy half-light of the room the two women stood facing one another. Here was tragedy in white and red—blood and spirit in gripping combat. It was veritably, in its aspect, in its significance, a struggle between life and death. The issue hung upon a word.
“O, my sister! I love too!”
It was death that spoke, flinging herself with a heartworn cry at the other’s feet.
A poignant pause ensued; the body of hatred strained and trembled; a cry issued from it; and, lo! out of the husk of the Pythoness, a cracked and scaly mask, came the soul of Molly Bramble. And the next instant the two poor creatures, as once before, were weeping and rocking in one another’s arms. They mingled their tears and speech incoherently.
“Poor soul! O, what a life! I deserve to be whipped, and more, for having helped it to its misery. But, there! we each struck for our own.”
“Did you help to it? Why not? he cursed you for my sake!—and I would have let him die. No, no—I didn’t mean to; but to go to him—myself!”
“There,—I understand. You’ve always held by Providence, poor fond simple thing!”
“Haven’t you? You’ve not changed in all these years—only to grow more beautiful. O, sister! tell me you’ve been good!”
“I’ve never shamed my love—a bitter struggle not to. I’ll say no more.”
“Take the order—quick. You may save him yet—his soul most of all. When he hears—My God! You’ll betray my Louis!”
“Not us! What’s a sin or two charged falsely against my Cherry! He’s known a’ many such; and laughed at them. I must get a rope.”
“It’s here—it’s waiting for you.”
“O, you dear woman!”
“—A thing of Spanish silk—as light as gossamer and as strong as a cable—a hundred feet of it.”
“What it must have cost!”
“It will go round your waist, under your petticoats. Come, while I fasten it. O, be quick! We mustn’t lose a minute. Leave it with him, and come back to me. Tell him there’ll be a horse waiting ready saddled for him in the road beyond the gate. You can join him later.”
“I’ll come back—never fear. I’ve that to tell you. That beast Bonito—”
“You know him? O, my sick head—of course.”
“We’ll be even with him yet. There I’m all twittering to be gone.”
“Go, then, in God’s name. Let them, for pity’s sake, have no suspicion of you. O, I doubt you can play a part!”
“Do you? Sweet innocent! There, I’ll not ask you for a kiss.”
“O, come to me, woman—woman! Love me; forgive me! We are one in our despair.”
“Despair you—I won’t. It shall all come right.”
“Don’t leave me! Why don’t you go? Every second’s precious. There, cover up your face—your sweet strong face. I shall be dead before you return. Don’t speak when you do until I bid you. I shall know by your looks how you have sped. There, it’s fastened. Make him turn his back.”