The thin white face of M. de France pinked as he stepped back. His hollow eyes glared, his stern lips trembled, every fold of his threadbare dressing-gown seemed to flatten, as if the wind had been taken out of it. But an habitual self-discipline came to his aid with an acid smile.
“Pardon me,” he said. “You take me by surprise. The term is premature. You young men are so impulsive.”
The enormous sarcasm was in itself a confession of surrender. He would never have essayed it, save in the knowledge of the price he had at hand for acquitting himself of any and all such debts. For di Rocco was, as a matter of fact, old as times went, a scarred and puffed ex-libertine of sixty—a monster of unloveliness, moreover.
He was hideous as Dagon, in truth, half man, half fish, with strained cod eyes, a great wobbling jaw, and lips which had shaken themselves pendulous on naughtiness and laughter. Sordid, slovenly, unclean in mind and body, inordinate as a drayman in bulk and physical strength, a voluptuary, miser, and a fecund raconteur, his rank and wits had, through a well-filled life, been procurers to his inclinations at a nominal cost to himself. His parsimony, not his vices, had alone debarred him from taking that position in the State to which his wealth and social talents had else easily exalted him. At the same time it had always made of him a slumbering force, full of interest and potentialities.
The real power of wealth lies, indeed, not in expenditure but in possession. There is a sacredness about the crowded granary which affects even the starving. There is no fool so despised of the democracy as the spendthrift fool; and, when its time comes, it is the plutocrat it bleeds with an apology.
The Conte di Rocco possessed the tastes of a sybarite with the soul of a usurer. He lit his debauches with candle-ends, and could singe the paws of his tame cats with a most engaging humour whenever he desired chestnuts for nothing. The army of pimps, followers, led-captains and parasites which had always attended his ignoble career, cursed him eternally through jaws as lank as those of Falstaff’s ragged company. But it served him, nevertheless—on the security, it would appear, of phantom post-obits. Everyone hoped some day to have his picking from the carrion of that great carcase—even, it may be supposed, his physician Bonito, whose face in the meanwhile was like a cheese-paring.
And it was this paragon, grandissimo for all his imperfections, who had nominated himself to be the husband of Yolande, the loveliest young lily of Savoy.
How it came about was thus.
Sated, or merely whimsical, or, perhaps, as some said, in a sudden mood to withdraw himself timely from the world in order to “patch up his old body for heaven,” the Count had, about the end of 1782, retired upon his estate and grand Château di Rocco on the Flegère, with the intent, it seemed, to make it thenceforth his permanent abode. Here, having cashiered, or temporised or compromised with, or anything but paid off, the bulk of his disreputable valetaille, he resolved upon the simple life—of candle-ends. And here he made the acquaintance of M. de France and his lovely child, with the former of whom he was able, moreover, in some fits of moral reactionism, to play the effective usurer.
The Chevalier was a creature of enormous pride, though of fortunes fallen to the lowest ebb. But he could never forget that his ancestors had lost Chambéry to the Dukes of Savoy, nor his present despicable position in a State whose highest attentions to him might hardly have compensated for the dignities of which it had deprived his family. He had served with credit, under the reigning King’s predecessor, in the wars of the Austrian succession, yet not with such compelling brilliancy as to enforce recognition from Victor-Amadeus, when that prince came to succeed his father. Neglected, impoverished, De France had withdrawn from a Court whose master was always more concerned with problems of ceremonial than of statecraft, and had retired into necessitous oblivion. Debts, contracted in the days of promise, came winging paper billets after him, and his situation was soon fairly desperate. His wife died, and he gave her grand-ducal obsequies. His child must always go attired in the right trappings of her rank. He called his villa an hôtel, and his parlour an audience-room. Through everything he was gnawed with an eternal hunger for the recognition which would not come his way. He loved his daughter as vain men love their rank, holding it supreme above emotion, humanity, a thing untarnishable but by contact with the base. The possibility of a consort for her in Le Prieuré was a thing not to be thought of. The fact that she was only fifteen and dowerless was inessential. She was Yolande de France.