Di Rocco turned to the wall. When he looked round again, Cartouche was gone. Then the old libertine sat down and wept. But tears in such are nothing but the provocation to fresh evil emotions.
CHAPTER VII
There was a night of hurried storm long remembered in Le Prieuré. All during it the wind drove up in squalls, like the thunder of passing artillery, unlimbered over the mountains, crackled into brief tempest, and swept on. Billows of black smoke marked its passage, each in its retreat leaving a vacuum of dense silence, until the next, rushing in to occupy it, awoke the echoes with new uproar. The roofs smoked under the cannonade of hail; the glaciers foamed like torrents with the dancing pellets; the brows of the hills seemed to melt and flow down. Everything would be sudden, stunning, overwhelming for a space; and then—exhaustion, and the drip of wounded trees alone breaking the quiet.
Le Prieuré, weather-hardened, inhabiting under the sky-light of Savoy, thought nothing of all this, sleeping with its face to the clouds. What made this night of many nights notable to it was the period it marked in the course of a human tragedy, which had certainly seemed to cry to heaven for some such solution of its riddle. For, so it appeared, out of all the dogs of storm unleashed to hunt the hills, one had found the quarry sought by many; and had dragged him down, and torn and devoured him, so that not a bone remained to mark the spot of his undoing—di Rocco’s.
The morning succeeding opened chill and austere—a brave day for a journey. Monsignore’s equipage, ordered overnight, was ready betimes to convey him to Turin, whither urgencies State had called him. The lean horses champed their rusty bits; the lean postillions whoa’d, and cursed their cattle sympathetically for their ill-lined stomachs. When mid-day came and with it no di Rocco, they dared the devil for the sake of a toothful of oats and polenta, and drove back grumbling to the stables.
Monsignore did not come, then or thereafter. Monsignore was never to be seen in life again. At first the story of his disappearance was received with utter incredulity. One could not conceive a figure so potent, so absorbing, the sport of any such casualty as might overtake a little soul in its little pride of doing. He must be keeping out of the way intentionally—watching, from some cunning eyrie, to pounce upon the first self-committing wretch who should venture to presume upon his supposed removal from the board.
A hope, in that case, predoomed to unfulfilment. For, even when curiosity woke on surprise, and gossip on curiosity, and emphasis on gossip, his name was never bandied about but with decency. Le Prieuré, rough as its rocks, was too manly to flog a dead lion, or even a dead boar. There were no unworthy comments on the snatching of that terrific presence from its midst—not in the first surmise, nor in the last moral certainty. For so at length it came to be.
How the whisper grew, the shadow thickened, one might scarcely tell. It took form, no doubt, in the winks and becks and exaggerated secrecies of a sot, too brain-sodden himself at first to grasp the full significance of his innuendoes. But as a word or two, caught from the blabbings of sleep, may linger suggestively in ears that listen, so Nicholas Target’s tavern maunderings came presently to be suspected of embodying in their text a very momentous cypher.
The fellow, bewildered between apprehension and vanity, was unable, nevertheless, to forego that hint of his marketable values, nor his intention to negotiate them when his way became clear to him. It became clear, brilliantly clear, all in a moment, when he felt himself nipped by the scruff, and, twisting about, saw that the law had got hold of him. With whine and collapse, then, he let full daylight into so much of the mystery as it was in his power to resolve.
On that night of rapid storm, ran his confession, he had been engaged by Monsignore to bring him secretly into the presence of the Marchesa, where she had sought refuge in his little auberge on the Montverd. The lady was to be taken by surprise; for which reason his daughter Margot had been despatched into Le Prieuré on the pretext of some business which would detain her. For the same reason of privacy, Monsignore had elected to avoid the popular route up the hill. He, Target, was to meet him at the place called the mauvais pas opposite, and conduct him thence across the glacier to his own side. He had known nothing of any engagement on Monsignore’s part to hold himself aloof from the Marchesa; or, if he had, it was none of his business to cross the caprices of his over-lord; nor could there be any real sin in procuring a wife for her husband. His conscience was as clear on that matter as on the question of his sobriety, which at the time was absolute.