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.