CHAPTER XII
If the Chevalier de France was destined a second time to suffer humiliation through his daughter’s perversity, that daughter herself was spared the social ostracism which would surely have overtaken one less admired in the shadow of the King’s displeasure. The out-of-favour minister, despoiled of his official nimbus, had to borrow what satisfaction he could from the collateral distinction conferred upon him through his relationship with so exquisite and precious a creature. That was a very bitter mortification to so arrogant a man; though, to be sure, his exaltation in the first instance had hardly owed itself to his personal merits—a fact which he had no excuse but an impenetrable vanity for overlooking. For the bestowal of the portfolio, it had been plainly intimated to him, was conditional on his leaving his majesty a perfectly free hand to dispose of that of the Marchesa; nor had he been ignorant, even at the first, of the name and reputation of the royal nominee.
But his pride was the haughtiest of casuists in all matters touching itself. The end it sought—that is to say the re-investiture of de France, the ancient house, in its former power and possessions—must be held not only to justify, but to glorify, the meanest means to it. Any step, if in that direction, was a step sanctified of its purpose to him, though to take it, he must tread on the mouth of human nature. “Evil, be thou my good!” might have stood for his motto.
And now, to owe what respect it remained to him to command to the affluent graces of the child whose mutinous conduct had deposed him from the leading position! It was intolerable—it was monstrous. His sense of personal wrong stung him to a protest, which, if he could but have comprehended, was the very worst he could have made in his own interests. But vanity is blind.
And that same rebellious child—child, indeed, in her young body’s immaturity, in her tragic innocence, in the sweet flower of her face, whose blossoming conveyed such dreams of fruitage—woman, only, in the independence which her heart had wrung from sorrow—what had been her sin? Why, that she had persisted in holding honour something higher than its vestments.
And so de France was tolerated, his fall condoned, for Yolande’s sake. She was the hallowed toast of Turin in these days—its nymph-angel—passe-rose—its Dorothea, symbolising paradise in her cheeks. Who would not be a recusant advocate to win one flower from that nosegay of pinks? The story was about. She had refused to sacrifice to the heathen gods, and the King had decreed therefore her social racking. The King! A King of powder and patches. Perish his decrees! Perish also our dear Cartouche, to a babble of lampoons and pasquinades! The pretty mongrel had done sensibly to put his tail between his legs and run away.
Then were withers wrung, heads broken, duels fought about Golden Danae in these weeks of her brief reign. She knew nothing of it all, thanks to her sad self-absorption as much as to her innocence. Torn by women’s tongues, wounded by gallants’ swords, her reputation gave her no concern save for the wounds herself had caused it. She had no faith, could never have, but one. And she had abused it. Her state, her wealth, her very fairness, poor trappings of her shame—she wore them all as a sinner wears the outward garb of penitence. Sheet and candle they were to her, for token of her public penance. To her the whispering inquisition of the crowds she moved amidst were articulate in nothing but rebuke. Its notes of admiration and of compliment were addressed to deaf ears. She looked kind looks from inward-dreaming eyes; spoke gentle mechanic words of kindness out of a constant instinct; but her sweet body was always like a lonely haunted tenement, shut to the world. Its spirit dwelt for ever away, in a place of solemn crags and shadows.
Waiting, waiting—and for what? That was the tragedy of it all—the hopeless hungering for the fruition of a thing unfructified. When she died, surely this poor ghost of her would become a tradition of the Montverd—a shadow on a rock, a darkness that no sun could dissipate, listening, listening always for the footfall that never came.
“How beautiful are the feet of the peace-givers!” O, Louis, Louis! if thou couldst only be heard coming up the hill to comfort this torn heart with a word of forgiveness! His face rose for ever before her, holy, righteous, denunciatory. Too pure and pious a thing he to presume on God’s prerogatives, or not to hold himself from contact with this sin by whom his faith had been contaminated. A dreadful thought—of all wild thoughts the most despairing; that maybe she had darkened this same faith in him; driven him to take the name of God in vain. If only he would deign one word to reassure her as to that! She could be content thereafter, she thought, to go down into loveless oblivion. Unworthy of him; thrice unworthy in that her mutinous heart had once conceived a dream of him grown masterful out of wrong. That would not have been her Louis, whose ways were always strong in meekness. So waiting—always fruitlessly waiting in spirit on the Montverd, her eyes would seek the unconquered peaks, her ears address themselves to the eternal silence of the valleys—listening for the footstep. It could never, never sound—and yet she listened. That was to be her punishment—endless listening; until, perhaps, she faded into the ghost of dead love’s echo.
Yet moments of passion, when the human nature in her rebelled against the intolerable cruelty of it all, were not unknown to her. Then she would dare to think of him as something other than a saint—her chosen, her dear heart’s lord, whom wicked sophistries had cast from his right part of fulfilling the woman in her. Then she would cry to herself that she was virgin still—in all but her desecration by a foul convention; was even a thing could be held worshipful by scruples less exacting. It was in these moods, by some moral process (obliquity she thought it, when they had passed), that the figure of Cartouche would rise before her as she had encountered it on the hillside.
Why should it intrude itself upon that thought of a less exacting worship? Answer, her heart’s alarum, answering to a look, a breath, the first shadow of a truth. Or answer, truth itself. She knew she had conquered where she loathed to conquer.
Such things must be, and be endured, because they cannot be cured, even in the tiny wound of self-consciousness they inflict, and which will continue to irritate, occasionally, when analogies are in the air. Thus, during these moods, the thought would come—and be hated, duly, for its persecution—that there might even be certain qualities in wickedness worth virtue’s acquiring—independence, resolution, force of character, to wit. Not that, for that, she held herself the less insulted in a base regard. But the thought would recur.
And then there came the day when, pale, suffering, reproachful as she fancied it, the face of her love stood out between her and a tumultuous crowd; and in that sorrowful vision all other visions were instantly absorbed and lost.
The shock of it, patent in her stunned manner, had affected anyone less self-centred than the Chevalier. He thought she was frightened by the surge of things, and lent his high arrogance to reassure her. She hardly heard or saw him. He was in Turin.
From that moment the desire for the footsteps grew intense. She had hoped, or had told herself she hoped, that he had forgotten her; and, lo! in every line printed on that lonely face she recognised the indelible scoring of her sin. He loved her still, and by every token of his love, stood forth a conscious shame.
She was in deep waters then, and cried to heaven to save her.
It answered with the offer of Cartouche’s hand.
We know how that suit sped. But it bore some fruit of tenderness towards a hopeless passion—as how could Yolande be woman and not feel it? And it brought more—a recrudescence in her of those thoughts which touched on the comparative qualities of good and evil. This man—he must have the seed of virtue in him, so to have promised self-redemption by way of a bitter loss. That was strength. Perhaps he had had his excuses, after all. She prayed for him—prayed heaven, moreover, to accredit her with her share in his reformation. He was her Louis’s friend—had spoken probably in ignorance of his friend’s presence in the city. And he had promised her—
What had he promised? O, love! thou crown and symbol to all time of specious egotism! He had promised, on the virtue of that very suffering she had caused in him, that it should all come right. His strength was in the phrase—the strength of ungodliness; and—she built upon it. While she abhorred his character—had not scrupled to insult and misread it to the vilest conclusions—she built upon its characteristic qualities. Built? What? No consciousness of any building in her, she would have declared. But—“It will all come right!” Nay, had it not been, “It shall all come right”? O! how she sighed over her own impotence to stem the masterfulness of these sinful wills! Was she for ever to be their helpless shuttlecock? No hope for her but the cloister.
So, she and Louis-Marie, saintly casuists turning to face one another across a tragic interval, pictured Cartouche, the friend, the lover, for the scapegoat of their love’s reparations. Some men would make burnt-offerings of themselves. It was not for them, ingenuous in the ways of worldliness, to question the methods of their atonement.
One night she, this dear casuist, had driven home (ah! the bitter irony of the word!) to the Via della Zecca with her father. Great clouds sagged from the sky, bellied over the house-roofs, swelling to their delivery of fire. Moans of their enormous labour shook the air, jarring on one’s teeth like glass—a night of heavy omen. Its spirit drove with them, menacing and oppressive. The Chevalier himself was a thunder-cloud, swollen with sense of injury. He scowled silent in his corner.
They had been at the Italian Comedy (to see The Representation of a Damned [female] Soul, and the audience pull off their hats, literally, to St John for his handsome conduct of her case), and thence had driven to a Conversazione at the house of the British envoy to the Court of Turin—whence these tears.
The Casa di Rocco reached, the Chevalier alighted, as was his custom, first; but, seeming to remember himself, bowed apart while the mistress of the house descended, and entered the portal. She flushed, but made no comment; and he followed in her footsteps, furious now to vent his chagrin on the least menial slight to his importance. He was very handsomely dressed, and appeared to assume, by every pomp of circumstance, the right of the mastership of the household.
The two were ushered into the salon, a room ablaze with tapers, and there left to their august disputations. The tempest threatened very near—vibrated in the windows like the pedal-stops of a vast organ.
There was wine on a table. The Chevalier, offering to pour himself out a glass with a white, not very steady hand, refrained, and looked towards his daughter.
“Have I your permission, madam?” he said. “My natural fatigue must not let me forget that I am a pensioner on your bounty.”
She fanned herself quietly. There was a light in her patient eyes, but he was blind to the warning sign.
“What have I done to deserve this?” she asked softly.
His self-control was a bubble. He dashed the decanter down on the table, and advanced a little towards her, quivering with mortified anger.
“You ask me that?” he said. “Whence have we come this moment? From what circumstances of slight and humiliation to the parent, whose devotion to his child has procured him a return which should make her blush for her ingratitude.”
She was still very quiet. I think she was at length awakening to the irreclaimable selfishness of the man before her; but her disillusionment fought against the last bitter concession to itself. For pity and poor heart’s sake she must struggle still to temporise—not to let go her final hold on duty. She forced a little painful smile; but her honesty would allow nothing to subterfuge.
“If you allude,” she said, “to his Excellency the envoy’s attentions to myself, I beg you to bear in mind, father, that I was taught a little English by my gouvernante, and that doubtless the poor man courted the sound of his native language, though on such imperfect lips.”
He smote fist into palm.
“Am I a child to be quieted with equivoque? I speak not of his attentions to you, but of the contempt for myself which they were designed to emphasise.”
“O, no, father! Indeed I am sure you are mistaken.”
Then the storm broke. Its pressure within him had rushed to relief by any outlet, even a pin-prick.
“And which you tacitly condoned,” he screamed. “Have I carried my honour, sensitive to a breath, a hint, a thing high and exclusive, untarnished through all these cursed years of adversity, and not to know when it is impugned? But you will be blind because you desire it—because your personal scruples—sha! are against a paltry sacrifice which would help to reinstate your father in the position which is his by right, and from which he could rise to recover something at least of the ancient influence of his house. No daughter of that or of mine—I say it before God. I am in the mood, I think, to curse you.”
She had risen to her feet, ghastly white, but with something born, and in a flash, into her expression which had never been there before.
“I think, if you did,” she said, “the curse would be let recoil on a shameful head.”
He uttered a terrible exclamation; but she silenced him.
“You talk of your honour. What is man’s honour to a maid’s? Yet, for your honour’s sake, you could sell mine—a father sell his child’s! Once you did it, and I was obedient, though it broke my heart.”
“I will not listen,” he raged.
“You shall listen,” she answered. “I could have borne to suffer and be silent—that first irremediable wrong. I believed your honour pledged, and I gave myself to redeem it—you know under what persuasion. But now—having once sold me—me, your child—to dishonour for your honour’s sake—to think to trade upon my forfeited self-respect, as if myself, not you, were answerable for it!—to build yourself a name on mine so fallen!—O, shame, shame, my father!”
She quite overawed him. He had evoked the spirit of his house in her to startling effect. He had no answer but oaths and hysteria.
“Woman!” he shrieked.
“I am sixteen,” she said. “You call me as you have made me—is it to my reproach or to yours? But, if I am woman, in her sad name I claim her saddest rights—freedom through martyrdom. I will be independent; I will be mistress of my soul; I will not hold myself a convicted wanton at your honour’s bidding. This man you offer me—this man whom you would bid to cast down my body for a stepping-stone to your own ambition—do you know what he is, has been—his life, his reputation?”
He was silent, but only because his rage grew inarticulate.
“I am not so hardened,” she went on, “but that I can shrink and shudder in the shadow of such a name. He to be worthy of me—me!—O, father!” (She wavered for one instant.) “Have I not been willing, eager, that you should take everything of mine—everything, everything—only not this one poor possession that I cannot part with, and remain your worthy daughter?”
Her eyes were moist, she held out piteous hands to him. But his passion by now was swelled to a monstrous thing, deaf, blind, suicidal.
“Stand off!” he shrieked, backing from her as if he loathed her contact. “You are worthy of nothing but a father’s curse.”
She shuddered, and stood rigid. In that moment they fell apart, never to be reconciled again.
“I warn you not to speak it,” she said—“not till you know the thing you’ve done, the lives you’ve ruined, the broken faiths for which you made yourself answerable to God when you threatened me with that coward’s act. Before you pledged me I was already pledged—my heart, my soul. You did not know it—I have accepted this heavy punishment for heaven’s retribution on me for that sin of silence. I accept it no longer. Love’s honour and love’s vows would, I know, have counted for nothing with my father. But they still hold me to the past for all my faith is worth. We had met by accident—we had no thought, O! no thought to deceive you—only we delayed, forgetting in our happiness. He was a Monsieur Saint-Péray—a name as noble as the man himself—too good and true for such as we to honour. And I broke my faith to him, and you were the cause.”
He raised his hand, gasping. She went on, before he could speak:—
“I tell you now there is no man, shall never be to me in all the world a man with claims like his. If he would have me, the stained and humbled thing I am, I would give myself, in tears and gratitude, to redeem his broken past. But I am unworthy of him; and you have made me so.”
Then he spoke—a babble of raging words. But his lips forbore the curse—perhaps from real apprehension, perhaps from policy. He was not one to burn his boats, even in a fit of madness. In the end, he fell, quite suddenly, upon self-control, and stood like a shaking spectre of himself.
“Very well,” he said—“it is very well. You are your own mistress. You will wed this man, this saintly paramour of yours, if he will consent to make an honest woman of you. I have no more to say.”
“No,” she answered: “you have said the last.”
He stood a moment uncertain, turned, and left the room.
She remained motionless as he had left her—a minute, two minutes: then suddenly was looking about her with a curious quick action of the head.
Hunted! alone! quite desolate! Where could she turn for help, support? O, God! the wickedness—the wickedness! Save her someone!—she could hear the hideous panting of the chase—quite close! she—!
The entrance of a servant restored her to some self-command. The man, after one inquisitive furtive look, dropped his eyes and abased himself.
He deprecated Madonna’s resentment; he had hesitated before intruding himself; but these young women! they were so persistent, so full of self-assurance, so convinced that their missions were imperative. He had done his best to get rid of her, but in vain.
“Of her? of whom?” demands Madonna, quieting her lips with her handkerchief.
He shrugs his shoulders and his eyebrows. The young woman would give no name. She had been waiting for hours. But now, vouchsafed the assurance of Madonna’s refusal, he will go and dismiss her at once and finally.
“Show her in to me here,” says the Marchesa, and the man bows and withdraws.
The little interval, the necessity of self-control in it, brought her to herself. When the visitor was ushered in, she was seated—to all appearance a lovely waxen image of serenity. She lifted her eyes and saw a fair young girl, cloaked and hooded, standing before her. The servant closed the door and shut them in together.
“Well, my child,” she said, affectedly incurious: and indeed it was a child, like herself, whom she addressed. “What do you want with me?”
The glow and splendour of her surroundings must have their foremost influence on Molly, petted loveling as she was. Her senses must gape a little, before the woe and despair in her could find their way to utterance. Then, all in a moment, the shock of an unforeseen difficulty had overwhelmed her on the threshold of her mission. She uttered an exclamation—“Alack-a-day! she can’t speak English!” and fell a little away, in consternation.
“English!” Yolande frowned. The word was curiously ill-timed. She looked intently at her visitor. “English?” she repeated: “Are you an English girl? So? Well, you see I understand you. What is it you want of me?”
“My man.”
It came in an irresistible cry, fierce, emotional, from the girl’s heart. She gasped after it, actually as if a spasm had rent it forth. Then she bent, and looked, with tumultuous irony, into the other’s face.
“Ay,” she said, “it’s beautiful enough—like a wax doll’s—as smooth and as hard, I warrant.” But neither the wit nor the passion in her could keep that mood. She stood up again. “I want my man,” she cried. “Give him back to me! I was the first with him!”
Yolande, pale and indignant, rose to her feet.
“What is the meaning of this?” she said. “I know nothing of you, nor of whom you are speaking.”
“I’m speaking,” cried the girl, “of him they call Cartouche. Ay, you may start. It’s a name should make you blush for love forsworn!”
Yolande made a swift movement, as if to summon aid. The girl intercepted her, fell at her feet, clung to her skirts.
“No, no. Don’t call. Let me speak. I’ll be good and quiet, I will, if you’ll only listen. I didn’t mean no impudence—not to such as you. O, lady!—for dear pity’s sake—hear me out!”
“Who are you?”
“I’ll tell you, though he kills me for it. I’m his woman—his kept woman. There, you’ll not think the worse of him for that. We count for little with the quality, when they come to marry—like a man’s brooch, or the buckles in his shoes. We were right enough as a fashion for yesterday; but to-day, when our turn’s over, ’tis bad taste even to speak of us. But there’s something different here, there is. O, my lady! you did ought to consider it before you rob me of him.”
Some terrible emotion, between loathing and pity, was struggling in Yolande’s heart as she looked down on the imploring figure. An instinctive horror in her fought against its own understanding—would not believe—temporised with the truth, speaking in a voice of shuddering pity,—
“A woman!—you, poor child!”
The other misconstrued her.
“Why not? We can’t pick and choose in our class. But we’re no more blind and deaf than you to what’s the best. Only, if we want it, we must pay. I was just a village girl, and him a gentleman. Don’t you blame him for it. I gave myself to him, and with my eyes open. We know the odds we take. They must marry some day. But to throw me over for you—you whose true love I’ve took and cared for at his bidding, and tried to nurse back into faith and hope of you that jilted him, while all the time you’ve been undermining me with my own! O, lady! haven’t you a heart? To hear him, that other, calling on your name! to know him dying there, and all for love of you, while you dally with this that’s mine!”
She broke down, and buried her face in her hands, weeping. And her listener! Through all that distorted outcry some passion of the truth must penetrate her. Cartouche! At first, only a sense of utter outrage in that name predominated. A libertine! unredeemed and irredeemable! a practising intriguant, even in the moment of his suit to her! That at least was clear. She hated herself for that one impulsive thrill of kindness towards him. This ruined life at his door! And he had dared to approach her with such a lie in his heart—to affect repentance—to—Ah! what was that—this thing which was worse than all?
She withdrew her skirts a little. Her hand was ice. Her words fell like snow-flakes, soft and cold.
“You are mistaken, girl. There is nothing—never has been, never could be, between myself and—and the gentleman you named.”
Molly looked up, amazement and incredulity in her eyes.
“Doesn’t he love you?” she said.
The little Marchesa swept her skirts away.
“Don’t touch me!” she whispered terribly. “I am soiled in seeing you, hearing you. The word is fouled upon your lips. O, my God! these vermin in Thine image! Am I like them? Have they the right to claim me to themselves?”
She stamped in fury.
“Leave me! Go to your own! Don’t dare to link my name with his again.”
The girl had risen to her feet. Quite cowed as she was for the moment, a joy was in her heart to hear herself so repudiated in that company. Her worst fears were laid: her venom was turned to honey. She whimpered a little, in a panic half feigned, half felt,—
“There, I don’t want to. I’m going, for sure.” Then a spit of courage came to her—“and I’ll tell the other he may just die for all you care”—and she turned.
But, before she could reach the door, a swift step followed, and a soft white hand, ringed and scented, was placed upon her shoulder. She hesitated an instant, faced round, and the next moment the two, high saint and lowly sinner, were clasped together weeping.
Poor Molly knew her place. She sunk at the other’s feet again, till Yolande knelt beside her, and put her arms about the shameful head.
“Poor child! poor sinful woman,” she said, to a flurry of sighs and sobs. “O, what was I to hold you so apart! But you don’t understand—you can’t, God pity you. The worse for him that killed your innocence.”
“He—”
“I’ll not hear his name.”
“He was my only one; and—and, for your sake, he’s been wanting to make me good.”
“Has he? There’s a way.”
“Maybe. But not the way you mean. That’s closed to such as us.”
“Alas! What way, then?”
“Make yourself impossible to him.”
“I? Sweet saints, give me patience with this poor ignorance! How can I make her comprehend that I could never be more impossible to him than I am.”
“O, yes! you could.”
“There, there, child! How?”
“O, mistress! don’t you know?”
“Know what? Why am I letting you talk to me like this? I’m all groping in a maze. O! haven’t you a father?”
“Yes, for sure.”
“Give up your sin. Go back to him and ask his pardon.”
“You don’t know him. His pride’s above his station. He’d ne’er suffer me again to come anigh him.”
“Wouldn’t he? What a thing’s this pride in men!—a vengeance, not a judge! Fatherless, then! O, O! that’s to be lost and helpless—crying to a void—sinking, sinking; and not a straw to hold by!”
“Ah, hush ye, pretty one—hush ye!”
The Magdalen, with winking wondering eyes, was become the comforter. She clasped the cold hands within her own warm palms, and mumbled them, and loved their softness. Yolande, her head bowed, sat grieving still a little.
“To look all round, and not to know where to turn—no guide, no help out of this maze!”
She snuffled, and mopped her eyes; then struggled to regain her estate. “There, child! my heart bleeds for you! What is your name? O! I forgot; you haven’t one”—for, indeed, to this sweet orthodoxy, an unchurched passion was a nameless thing—a maiden title forfeited to anonymity.
“I’m Molly Bramble, please my lady.”
She hung her head. The other pursed her lips a moment.
“Well, well, child—we’ll call you as we call our dog or parrot—terms for distinguishment.”
Then the moth plunged for the light, about which she had been desperately fluttering this nervous while.
“You mentioned of your nursing someone? or perhaps I confused your meaning?”
“Ay, did I. You know him. Saint-Péray.”
The other put her away and got hurriedly to her feet.
“You’re nursing him! You?”
“He brought him to me—told me to; told me to help him back to be a man, and win you yet.”
“Who brought him? Who told you?”
“There: I wasn’t to speak his name.”
“Nursing him? Where?”
“Why, in the little villa that he keeps for me.”
“That he keeps? O, my love, my Louis!”
“Ah, ah! you love him still. You make my heart sing, you do!”
“O, Louis! O, mon bien aimé! que les artifices des méchants t’ont environné! You must not be left: you must not stay there: you do not know. The villain! the false friend!”
“O, O, my lady!”
“Is he not? He dared to ask my hand.”
“O! it’s true then!”
“Two nights ago.”
“Ah, me! that explains it.”
“What?”
“Why, what he told me before he left next morning. ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ says he. ‘She’s not for him no more. What you’ve said you’ve to unsay. They must be kept apart at any price.’ They were his last words before he went.”
“Were they?—those?”
“His very words.”
“Yesterday?”
“Yesterday morning.”
“O, my child! give up this wicked man, to save your soul!”
“No, I’ll stick to him.”
“Poor prodigal, enamoured of the husks.”
“He said he would be good for your sake. You owe him that.”
“For my sake?”
“Ay, even for true love’s sake, maybe—though it wounds my heart to speak it. There’s a way you could show him.”
“A way? I? to what?”
“To mend a wrong. O, dear good lady, I’ve seen your eyes confess!—never deny it. One marriage brings another—it might, it might even lead to that—O, mistress, mistress!”
“You are mad. You don’t know what you say—you know nothing.”
“I know your love is dying there for love of you.”
“Dying? No, no!”
“Come to him, and see.”
“I cannot.”
“He must die then. He’ll not last till morning else. ’Twas for that I dared this all.”
“O, what am I to do?”
“No one need know: a great lady like you.”
“You say he’d marry you?”
“I say one marriage brings another.”
“O! Sweet saints, direct me! Lead my distracted mind! I cannot come with you, I say!—Wait while I fetch my cloak!”
* * * * * * * *
Fiorentina, bidden to hold her tongue to Louis-Marie, told him everything—under promise of secrecy: how that one was coming in a little to break his brain’s web and kill the wicked spider—a physician, maybe: maybe a wise woman; for indeed physicians were not “her,” and the signorina had stated distinctly, in answer to his cries, that she was going that moment to fetch her to cure him.
Fortunately or not, he heard her without comprehending. He was lying apathetic by then, quit of the “fellow in the cellarage.” That thundering whisper silenced, all commoner voices served him but as opiates. By-and-by he fell into a doze; and the little camerista drew his curtains, and lit his candles, and went below to gossip with her house-mate.
The storm laboured up and over, mingling with the sick man’s dreams. The rush of tempest smote on ice. He was alone in a surging darkness. It cracked, with a roar of thunder, and spilled a dead body at his feet. Madly he strove to spurn the thing—into monstrous-seeming abysses—for all their blackness they were shallow troughs. Or else the glacier rolled like water, and threw it up. He trampled it in fury—it writhed away, reshaping. Then it took to laughing; and the laugh was echoed from hard by—and there was Bonito hiding in a drift. He woke with a scream.
But he was sleeping again, when the little camerista hurried up, and looked into his pale exhausted face, and touched some pillows into comfort before leaving him.
Sweet dreams this time, but still of weeping rains. Only they fell softly on a Chapel roof. She was not there beside him, and he wondered why she lingered. Till, glancing at the coloured statue of the virgin, he saw it stir and smile, and stretch out wistful arms to him, and heard it breathe his name—“Louis, Louis!” And it was she herself, descending and coming to him; but, before they could reach and touch, she had vanished.
“Louis, Louis!” Her voice wept far remote, an infinite yearning, faint and always fainter; till suddenly, with a crash, the roof was rent, and a flood of fire rushed in, revealing her—quite close to him—a breathing apparition—all love and sorrow paining her sweet eyes.
He lay and did not stir. “Yolande!” he whispered.
She sighed, and clasped her hands; she answered with the plaint, if not in the words, of love-lorn Madeline:—
“O, leave me not in this eternal woe,
For if thou diest, my Love, I know not where to go.”
She moved, and was kneeling by him, pleading with hurrying sighs,—
“The sin was mine—the sin was mine! And, O! a fruitless sacrifice! So pale, so worn—O, thing without a heart, to have caused this cruel sickness in my love!”
“Yolande!” A wilder thrill gave out the word.
“Louis; if thou couldst still find that in me worth living for! Ah, do not die! I would be so loving and so penitent. Not forward—no. The shame in me’s an ecstasy. I cry to have you humble me.”
“Lily of Savoy—the white lily—and mine!”
A gloating transport whispered in his voice.
“Thine still, dear love; and, for all her shame—inviolate.”
She hid her face to speak it. This was no swooning vision, but reality. No matter whence she had come, or at what instigation—the death-warrant was cancelled. Life at her words flowed back to him, lapped in a sensuous dream. Doubts, fears, proscriptions were all forgotten. His pulses beat to madness: a delirious hunger of her swelled his veins. This sweet fruit of his desire! It were as if the heavy-bosomed grapes, made animate by Love, had drooped of their own pity to the lips of Tantalus. Should he not crush them in his mouth? unquestioning, praising the heavenly mercy, not abusing it with one self-scruple as to his deserts? It was characteristic of him, at least, so to surrender his will to circumstance. He flushed as if intoxicated. He leaned impassioned towards her: “My wife!” he whispered, and drew her to his heart.
She raised her streaming eyes,—
“What you have suffered for my sake—and not the least to find you here.”
“Here, Yolande? the best that could have happened to me.”
“O, my love! you must not say it. It is a wicked house.”
“Yolande!”
“O, God! my saint is innocent! Louis! this man, your friend, and the poor girl—!”
“What of them?”
“They live in sin together—O, my lamb among the wolves!”
Old tremors, old lost scruples seized him at the words. He clung to her.
“Take me away, Yolande. I am so sick and helpless.”
“Yes, yes, my love, my husband! Come with me.”
“No, I am too ill. To-morrow. Don’t leave me, now you’ve come.”
“O, I must! Louis!”
“Then I shall die. ’Tis only you can save me—make me a man again.”
“O, love! you kill my heart!”
“To save me, Yolande! To save yourself that new self-reproach if I died without.”
“And if you were to die in spite?”
“O, love! that cried to me to humble it! We will be man and wife to-morrow. I shall live for that—I must. The thought will lay the spectres that would kill me else. Yolande! you will not let me die?”
“O, Louis! let me rather.”
“Come to me, my dear, my love, my wife—there, sweet, my wife, this seal upon your lips!”
* * * * * * * *
In the grey of the dawn, cold and austere after tempest, the signorina Brambello hurried forth to procure an accommodating priest. He was easily found, easily bribed, easily persuaded into quick conclusions. The two were joined before the altar of San Maddalena, a dingy chapel in an obscure neighbourhood, and Molly and Fiorentina were the witnesses.
At the end, in the sombre porch, the pale bride turned upon the English girl.
“God, in His mercy, so give thy sin to mend itself—my sister!”
She hesitated an instant, then threw her arms about the other’s neck, kissed her on the mouth, and hanging her sweet head, went with her husband down the steps into the silent street. And his face also was bowed, as he walked feebly beside her.