He had. And yet, if he had not, if he had confessed the passion of his soul to her the victim of the passion of his body, how would that have bettered things for the victim? Would she, made vestal to that altar of his idol, have thought herself well compensated for her jilting? He mocked now at the absurdity of his old conception—Cartouche’s was it? or some sick neurotic monk’s? High-priest, he? What a figure of elegance, in urim and thummim and with a thing like a flower-pot on his head! He laughed tears of blood, recalling the ecstatic vision. Better to be accursed than ridiculous. Better Louis-Marie should have her, than she be made the sport of such a mummery. He did not blame his friend, week-knee’d robber as he was. He rather admired him, for his unexpected part. Would not he himself have dared all hell to win the passion of those lips—O, God! the passion! Would he not? had he not? He had at least bargained with the devil for her, and had prevailed just so far as that it was made his privilege at last to serve for deep contrastive shadow to that idyll of their loves.
For shadow: and for shadow within shadow? For all this time he knew he was a haunted man. That spirit of lost love betrayed—poor Molly! The blackest gloom in him was due to it. Not the way, he thought defiantly, to light him back to love. He wearied of its eternal presence; yet he could not shake it off. It leaned out to him from the dusk of mountain passes; it flitted before him through the sorrow of infinite woods; it cried to him for help from the hearts of squalid tenements, where villainous deeds were enacting. He had done that thing. It was past remedy—not past clinching his damnation. Why not then rest on that assurance, and cease to agitate both herself and him? Yet, step warily as he might, he could never escape her—that desolate phantom. Crossing beds of gentian, he would tread upon her eyes; the little freshets which he spurned from their wreathings about his feet, were her white arms; the low wind in the pines became her low English voice. Always faithful, weeping, appealing—never rebuking. God! was not this insatiable hunger in him enough anguish, without the eternal memory of that fruit, which he had plucked in his wanton appetite, and thrown away, just tasted, for the shadow of a sweeter! Not enough, not enough? Then to her hands be it after death to heap the coals upon his breast! He owned their right; would submit to them, and face the eternal ordeal. Only let them refrain now! Was he so prosperous, so happy, as to invite their vengeance prematurely? Torture too exquisite, it was said, became a transport. Did they want to qualify him for that balm in hell?
He execrated the shadow in his thoughts—its endless, voiceless weeping. He told it that he hated it. Let it take solace of his hate, as he of another’s. He meant it. Yolande hated him, and that she did was a wrung rapture to him at this last. By so much he had a place in her passions, where any other was impossible. He would never imperil it by controverting his slanderers. Let her think of him as wickedness incarnate, if only she would think of him.
Thus was the last state of this love’s agony; while he laughed, bleeding inwardly, and met his traducers on a hundred points of wit.
He had thought, now and then in his prostrate moments, that if he could only once trace home the shadow, he might find it to be, after all, no better than a black-mailing ghost. Supposing good fortune had attended her dismissal? It might; and he have saddled his conscience with a self-invoked incubus. Why not set himself to discover?
He dared not—that was the truth. He was a coward there; he feared the answer. Better even the shadow, than the revelations possible of the thing that cast it. He dared not.
For this reason, and others, he avoided Turin in these days. He was in the city only at rare intervals of time, when officialdom compelled him. Once or twice on these occasions he happened across the Chevalier de France; heard him rail to others of the ingratitude of children. The man had never forgiven his daughter her mésalliance; but, nevertheless, in repudiating her, in refusing to visit her, he was only, had the truth been known, making a virtue of necessity. Madame’s self-emancipation had taken strict account of his share in the events which had made it peremptory. He had to answer for it, to a daughter strangely converted to new conceptions of duty; strangely altered in many ways. She made him a princely allowance—which he spent en prince; she would accept him at di Rocco only on her own terms, and to those he refused to subscribe. He would not submit to the part of a mere honoured dependant on her bounty, franked by her husband’s grace. She denied him any closer rights. Therefore he kept away—it was best for both of them—and maintained his individual state in the Via della Zecca, sneering to intimates of the niggardliness which any promotion to affluence was sure to find out in women, posing as an injured father, enjoying his independence arrogantly in his dull selfish way.
Cartouche longed to insult him—could, indeed, have found plentiful opportunity to do so, had not the fact of his being her father withheld him. The Chevalier, on the few occasions when they met, always scowled at him askance, as if to imply how he knew very well that to this bastard, this faux enfant, this royal favourite disappointed of his daughter, was to be attributed his own disfavour with the King. But he was let live, for the sake of her whom he traduced.
* * * * * * * *
And so the gay Prefect, with that death always at his heart, and the tongue in his mouth a sword to wound, stood up against the rising tide, fearless before its roar and babble. He was well served by his police—admiring thralls to his courage, his quick wit, his retentive memory. In these days there was not much of secret information, touching the moral health of his Province, which did not reach his ears. Thus, he early learned of Bonito’s visit to the Château, and to draw some odd conclusions from its sequel. Their fruit will appear in the course of things. In the meanwhile, it was observed by him that some curious retrenchments reported up at the great house dated from that visit, and were seemingly coincident with a look, as it were also of retrenchment, in Madame Saint-Péray’s beautiful face. It had to happen occasionally that he encountered the Lady of the Manor in the exercise of his duties; and, inasmuch as she always disdained at such times to acknowledge, or even to see him, he had ample opportunity for studying her expression. That was beginning to shape itself, he could not but think, on the lines of some gripping inward reserve. It were too much to say that it betrayed any confirmation of the Chevalier’s coward accusation; but certainly it looked pinched and drawn, as if the sweet sap in it were somehow souring from its freshness. He wondered.