And he had really laid out its premises very impartially for his own consideration. He was an eclectic by nature; as, alas! is the case with a number of naughty people. It is unfortunate, indeed, that righteousness so often lacks the sense of humour, which is the faculty for seeing both sides of a question. The want seems to give obliquity such a superiority—though it is a specious one, of course.
He could admit, then, the inevitableness of a deed, which had preserved an honour most dear and sacred to himself. He could not admit a claim to that honour personified, as the price of blood. Louis, the slayer of a woman’s husband, could not take that husband’s place. Were she, knowingly, to let him, her honour would be forfeit: were he to take advantage of her ignorance, he would be doing a vile thing. She was not for Louis: could never be, in any scheme of moral purifications.
For whom, then? Why, scarcely less vile were he, Cartouche, to seek to take advantage of his friend’s hard fortune (It will be observed that he somehow inferred for that problematic vileness its problematic opportunity—the ineradicable instinct, perhaps, of an amoroso, experienced in the ways of audacity, to whom a rebuff had always stood, and likely been always justified in standing, for an incitement to fresh aggression).
As to another question, that of his own relationship to the dead man, he utterly declined to recognise it as one involving his personal interdiction. The marriage had been a mere conditional contract, of the essence of a betrothal, and the conditions had not been observed. No moral prohibition, such as touched upon the forbidden degrees, was implied by it, he told himself: and told himself so, he insisted, merely to emphasise the singleness of his renunciation. He would have the full credit for his self-sacrifice. His responsibility was not to a sentimental scruple, but to his ideal of an immaculate honour in the woman he worshipped.
Remained the question of his attitude towards the murderer of his father, and of his royal commission to hunt down that unknown assassin. Well, he had both discovered and exonerated him; but the offence was still officially un crime qualifié. To condone it were to make himself an accessory.
He would condone it, however, since by so doing he testified to his loyalty to his ideal. Yolande’s eternal fame should owe him that sacrifice of his duty to his nobler conscience. By so little, at least, he would justify himself in the thankless wardenship of her honour; by so little he would make himself the right to claim her into an association with himself.
So far and so good for his solution of the problem. This dear prize was not for Louis; it was not for him. What, then, was to be its destiny?
There was his ideal. Eternal maid, by virtue of her deathless bondage to the past, she was to exist the unattainable goddess of all desire. He might not reach to her; but he might enforce his own precedence in her worship. He would be the high-priest of that altar, winning to his place by heart’s-devotion. He pictured her, a virgin for ever unfulfilled, the flying figure on the vase, and himself, the passionate shepherd, stricken to an endless rapture of pursuit. What sweeter, more idealistic heaven?
“She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss;
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.”