“A fine moon-raking night, gentlemen,” he said. “By my faith, a very constellation of enthusiasts! What! is that you, M. Léotade? and armed with nothing more defensive than a telescope? Why, my friend, you can hardly realise the danger of these valleys. I’ll see you home, with your permission.”
Laughing, urging, persuading, deaf to their explanations and protests, he got them apart, and invited each to take the road to his separate destination, while he made M. Léotade his own especial care. In a minute or two the place was deserted. Only Bonito crouched, undiscovered, behind his rock.
“Too good a servant to your master,” he muttered. “But the rod is already in pickle for you, Mr Trix.”
CHAPTER IV
That rod, nevertheless, was not to come out of pickle for some six years yet. And, in the meanwhile, Cartouche remained Prefect of Faissigny. For one thing, King’s favourites are not easily deposed; for another, the light seat in the saddle is the sure one. Cartouche rode his duties springily, and appeared to take them with only a shade more seriousness than he took himself.
During all this time he ruled his Province with agile, nervous young hands, asking no favour and giving none. An easy subject for defamation, the malignity of his enemies missed no opportunity of distorting in the public view the most harmless motives of his actions. He might, he thought, have cared, under impossibly different circumstances. It mattered nothing to him now. He admired his own character too little, was too little impressed with the disinterestedness of most others, to resent aspersions on it. It would give a certain lady great satisfaction, he was sure, to have her opinion of him so confirmed. That was the only way left to him to prove his regard for her. Truly, life for the future was to be an upside-down affair—a test of wit, not principles.
He had no principles, he told himself; but only a commission—to administer the law, in the first place; to root out disaffection, in the second. He had a whimsical idea of confounding equity with justice, and making an elegant Sancho Panza of himself. As to the other task—that of combating the spirit of an age bent on immense social displacements, on the reconstitution of States, on the launching of democracy’s huge engine “down the ringing grooves of change”—he accepted it as airily as if it were one involving just a disputed question of etiquette.
It suggested a gallant picture—that of this slim rake (with death at his heart all the time) facing the rising tide of revolution with not so much as a Mrs Partington’s mop in his hand, but only a ribbon of steel there, and a song of gay contempt on his lips. He had little doubt but that the red waters were destined to submerge all Savoy in the end, and beat their crests against the Alps. Well, though he were but a coloured pebble in their path, he would delay them by that microscopic measure. He owed it as much to his own constitution as to the State’s.
In the meanwhile slander, nursed by deep policy, convicted him of the seven deadly sins and more. Advoutry, barratry, crapulence, debauchery—one might run down the alphabet of infamies, and leave the tale incomplete. There is no need to. It would be unedifying, and, as a fable, unnecessary.
Alas! that as such, it could even be held plausible in the district; but experience in Savoy put no limit to the infinite rascalities of Prefects appointed to represent a despotic government. As tyranny’s proxies, district autocrats, they were potential as Roman Tetrarchs for good or evil. They might honour their offices, and sometimes did; but more often they abused them. The enforcement of conscription, of the imposts, of the many heart-crushing taxes was all in their hands. They controlled the gendarmerie, and could substitute a military for a civil jurisdiction on slight provocation. They could hang, fine, imprison, whip, brand, bleed, and grow rich on extortion if they chose.