He stroked her hair rapturously. Murder would out at last.
“You put new life into me,” he murmured. “You shall live on what you like. Only, for appearance’s sake, my child, make yourself the nominal minister of that atonement.”
And on these terms he carried her off to the Château.
CHAPTER V
The Royal Palace of Turin, situated off the Piazza Castello, in the east, or distinguished quarter of the city, epitomised in itself the policy of the Savoyard rule. Externally it was as unpretentious a pile as any brick-built factory—or, shall we say, for the sake of apt analogy, as our own original South Kensington Museum. For, in like manner with that illustrious emporium, did the utilitarian face which it turned to the street afford no clue whatever to its inner meaning. It was just a countenance dressed for the demos—a sop of unostentation offered to that triple-headed sleuth-hound.
It was certainly unelating as an architectural composition; but then we know, by the story, that the plain pear is often the most luscious. Beauty, saith the sage (a plain fellow himself, no doubt), is but skin-deep. That is an aphorism as untrue as many another. But, take it for what it is worth, and ugliness, by the like measure, is also skin-deep.
The Palazzo Reale, at least, was, like its later South Kensington parallel, a very museum of treasures contained within a mean casket. They were of all sorts, from a Benvenuto salver, or a suit of mail worn by an enormous armiger at the battle of Pavia, to the individual “kit” of M. Dupré, who had been “le Dieu de la danse” in the supreme days of Turin’s gaiety. Those, perhaps, were fled for ever, as a characteristic and prerogative of “privilege”; but their reactionary spirit lingered on, awaiting revitalisation in the dumb strings of the great dancer’s fiddle.
I am not sure but that the present representative of the house did not hold this instrument among the first of his treasures. It symbolised for him his beautiful ideal of humanity frolicking in an Arcadian estate. Watteau, Gillot, and the fête galante were always figured in the dim backgrounds of his policy. He yearned to educate democracy with a harpsichord, and pelt it into silence with roses. He was not altogether a bad little fellow, for his fifty-seven years, only his ideals were expensive, and of course supremely unpractical. While seeing very clearly that Arcadia was only to be reached through education (he endowed and encouraged learning quite handsomely), he stultified all the effects of his liberality by conceding to hereditary prejudice the whole conduct of his government. He did not walk with the world, in fact, and so it walked into him.
The Palace, in the meanwhile, was as sumptuous within as it was bare without. Mr Trix, entering towards it, one fine September morning, by the gates opening from the Piazzo Castello, tasted, in some curious anticipation, the possible flavour of the fruit hidden behind that uncompromising rind. He was “waiting,” by private “command,” on his sovereign, and the occasion (the first of its kind to him) found him by no means so possessed by its importance as that his self-possession was moved thereby to yield an iota of its serenity. He was received, with consideration, at a private door to which he was directed, and, after the slightest delay, ushered straight into the presence of Victor-Amadeus.
The monarch was seated at a secretaire, heavily gilt and with painted panels, talking or dictating to a little fat, bedizened aide-de-camp, who wrote apart at a littered table, and who was so buried in bullion that he might have been taken for the First Lord of the Treasury just emerged from a dip into one of its coffers. The royal toilet itself was a négligé—dressing-gown, embroidered slippers, and bare close-cropped head—all very gimp and finical. Shrewd, wizened, narrow, Victor-Amadeus’s face—a dough-white, flexuous-nosed, long-chinned, under-jawed little affair—perked up from its collar of white ermine like a beedy-eyed condor’s. Thought was engraved on it in a number of thready wrinkles, like cracks in parchment. The deepest owed themselves to profound self-searchings on such questions as the conduct of Court precedents, of royal hunts, of ceremonial and pageantry. The slightest might record some difficult moments accorded to the size of a button, or the claims of the subversive shoe-tie over the constitutional buckle, To find the royal countenance simply vacant was to know the royal mind concentrated on affairs of State.