CHAPTER I
We mortals discuss the world as a subject of our common understanding, and no two of us see it with the same eyes. To Victor-Amadeus the third’s, for example, it was a stage for fêtes galantes; to the Chevalier de France’s a ball fettered to the ankle of an heir-at-law, infamously kept from his inheritance; to those of a certain “little corporal,” as yet unaccredited, it was a potential family estate; to Yolande’s and Louis-Marie’s a reformatory for original sin; to Bonito’s it was a footstool to the stars, to Cartouche’s an absurd necessity, to Jacques Balmat’s a glorious field for adventure.
In 1786 Jacques was the most famous man in Le Prieuré, and for long distances beyond it. In notability he had outstripped all these other claimants to our attention. For he had won his mountain and his wife, and basked in the lustre and the reward of a great enterprise greatly accomplished. Yet he took his reputation modestly, as became one who had looked on Death too often and too close to boast himself superior to that God. He’d propitiated, not defied him. There was something very solemn, very sobering in having gained that awful shadow for one’s friend. So he accepted his part without arrogance, but without hypocrisy.
“Ah! monsieur,” he said to Saint-Péray, lord-consort to his lady of the Manor: “you should have held on; you should not have lost heart; you should have been with me. There are no heights so inaccessible but that the good God will surrender them to our trust in Him as the first guide of us all. There is no corner of His world of which He hath said, ‘Faith shall not enter here.’”
Madame Saint-Péray (she had dropped—flung away, rather—her title) looked up from her needle-work, with a little frown, like an acute accent, nicked between her eyes. She was conscious, on this occasion as she had been on others, of that half protective half accusatory note in the young mountaineer’s respectful addressings of her husband, which somehow touched a corresponding chord in herself. It vibrated on a thought of weakness; it was the tremor in the heart of dying dreams; its first movement in her had been co-instantaneous with the fall of her saint from transcendent to merely human heights. Something of discharm spoke in it; a sense as of an idol convicted of petitioning his worshipper; a sense as of an unwilling accessory to another’s secret sin; a sense as of a responsibility incurred where help had been expected. These several emotions she found suggested somehow in young Balmat’s tone. Were they common to all sympathetic spirits brought into whatsoever relations with her husband? She feared so. She feared, more, that Louis-Marie liked it to be so. His caressing confidence in all others than himself constituted at once his strength and his weakness. He ruled by sweet dependence, and was satisfied to rule.
There were hints of a certain change in her in these days—signs of an enforced self-emancipation, which, in its process, had a little chilled the texture of her faith. It was, in its moral, like that hardening of the grain which only a close observer can detect in the “fixing” of a pastel. The bloom was a thought less virgin; the eyes less liquid-clear; the lips had tightened to a scarce perceptible primness. Her love was as single, as great, as self-sacrificing as ever. Only it had altered its habit to a sterner garb. It ruled where it had served; it had made a subject of him who had been its lord; it justified itself by every concession to the loved one but that of self-abandonment. And in such implied reproaches as those of honest Balmat’s it felt its attitude vindicated. “You should have been with me,” he had said. He should. If he had, if it had been in his nature to be, this twin history of theirs, she believed, had never come to find its tragedy and redemption. Louis at this moment had been her king—her tyrant, even; their parts had never of necessity been reversed.
Of course, in all this, she only skimmed the truth. There was more to be inferred, even than she supposed, from the young mountaineer’s tone. It implied, in fact, a troubled conscience, seeking to allay its own suspicions on the strength of a serenity in their object which must surely, it told itself, be incompatible with guilt.
For, indeed, a certain serenity had come to succeed in Louis-Marie the storms and anguish of a former state. His wife’s tender ministrations; a year of utter peace, of utter immunity from disturbance in their retreat, had restored him to a measure of self-confidence—even to a point of view something broader than that in which Cartouche had confirmed him. Now he was inclined to think that his deed had been not only righteous, but heroic; that his bearing of its burden in silence was a saintly discipline; that, in any case, his confiding of his awful secret, like King Midas’s barber, to the reeds, had acquitted him of the first responsibility to it. And the last was, after all, his most characteristic comfort. He grew well on it, as a worried schoolboy, quit of his imposition to a merciful parent, forgets his troubles in a moment.
There remained only, to disturb his conscience, the question of his conditional absolution, as decreed by Cartouche. Well, as to that, he had assured and reassured himself, his friend was scarcely matriculated in moral philosophy. But, even were he called upon by him to answer for his act, he had still this to plead—that he had not married Yolande, but Yolande him.
For the rest, slow growing sense of security had come to mend his sickness of another shadow. A year had passed, and it had not yet pursued him to his fastness in the Château di Rocco. He hoped now it never would. He hoped he read, in the social exile which their own mutinous act had decreed upon himself and Yolande, an abandonment of any interest in their further fortunes. God grant they might be permitted to make out their days in peace, justifying—as they for ever strove, and intended for ever to strive to do—in their devotion to their church, in a wide and noble beneficence, their inheritance of a wicked man’s possessions. For to this end only had they decided to take up the burden of an estate otherwise hateful to them.