The Gilded Chair: A Novel

by Melville Davisson Post

The sudden, big, dominating laugh of the old man beside her aroused her like a blow.

"I know," he said, "we are all of us alike. Once past the blossom of youth, we, all of us, men and women alike, are after the same thing. Until then we pursue illusions, will-o'-the-wisps, shining destinies that do not, and cannot arrive; but when we have hardened into life we understand that power is the only source of happiness. We desire to rule, to dominate, to control. We wish to lay hold of the baton of authority; and, look, I have it ready to your hand. I have everything that the Fourteenth Louis had at Versailles, except the name, and what woman past the foolish springtime of life would deny herself such authority as that?"

The Marchesa drew herself up. The muscles in her body stiffened. Her fingers tightened on the rail. With a stroke he had laid her ulterior motives open to the bone. He had made plain what she was endeavoring to conceal, and the bald frankness shocked her. He had stripped the thing naked and it shamed her. But there it was, though naked, the greatest shining lure in the world. Wealth past any European conception, outside the revenues of a state, with the power that attended it. And how poor she was! She had been forced to borrow five hundred pounds to pay tradesmen at her heels. She had sent the money back this very morning in order to loosen their fingers on her skirts that she might go forward to this last adventure. What had she out of all the promise of her life? What had she got ashore with from her sinking galleon but her naked body? How could she, stripped, bruised, empty handed, stand out against the offer of a kingdom?

For a little while the old man watched the tense figure of the woman, then he added: "Do you think that I did not know how your life was running? That I was overlooking this thing while I was getting the other things that I was wanting? Do you think I came to Biarritz, over the sea, here, merely to please Caroline? Look, how I came within the very hour—on the tick of the clock!"

Again the Marchesa Soderrelli was astonished. She had believed herself like one who sat in darkness, on the deck of a ship that drifted, and now, as by the flash of a lantern, she saw another toiling at the helm. She had believed this meeting at Biarritz to be the work of fate, chance, fortune, and instead it was the hand of this old man, moving what he called the levers of the great engine. The fear of him deepened.

"Look, Marchesa," he was saying, "I do not ask you to decide. Come first and see the garden that I have made in a wilderness—the Versailles that I have concealed in a forest."

He began once more to move, to extend his arms, to spread his hands.

"Remember, Marchesa, you decide nothing; you only say 'I will come,' and when you say that, I will prove on the instant that my coming here was for no whim of Caroline, for within the hour, day or night, that you say it, this yacht will go to sea."

The Marchesa, disturbed, caught at the name and repeated it. "But what of Caroline?" she said.

She pronounced the question without regarding the answer to it. Perhaps it was because the old man did not reply directly and to the point. Perhaps because another and more obtruding idea occupied her mind. At any rate his words did not remain in her memory. From what he said, out of the labyrinth of his indirections, the man's plan emerged—the plan of Tiberius withdrawing to Capri, but holding to the empire through the hand of another, a creature to be bound to him with the white body of this girl.