“I have withheld my friendship all these years, that I might be able to give you my esteem and my admiration. You have been tried by me as no friend was ever yet tried, tested to the utmost, and proved as none has ever been proved before you.... Was it not worth while to bear something to earn such praise from me?”
And now Dunoisse saw the god of his old boyish, innocent idolatry stripped of the false jewels and tawdry robes that had adorned him, his nimbus of gilt plaster knocked away. He began to understand how he, Hector Dunoisse, had been his whole life long the slave, and tool, and puppet, and victim of this cold, arrogant, dominating nature; and resentment glowed in him, scorching up the last green blade of lingering kindness; and hatred leaped up in a little flickering tongue of greenish flame, soon to become a raging prairie-fire of vengeance, traveling with the speed of the wind that urged it on.
He clenched his hands and set his teeth, remembering his long arrears of injuries. He saw himself economizing uniforms, doing without necessaries and comforts, slaving in spare hours to earn the money to buy books and instruments—bound and fettered always by that egregious vow.... Then a conviction started through him like the discharge from an electric battery. Malice was the missing key-word of the cipher that had been so difficult to read.
Revenge for the spoiled career had prompted everything. No pleasure foregone, luxury denied, but had paid off some item of the old score that had been carved with the end of the broken fencing-foil. That the false step had been deliberately planned, de Moulny must have always believed. He had told the story everywhere. And the taint of that supposed treachery had always clung about Dunoisse’s footsteps. It had followed him through life.
Now he lifted up those glittering black eyes of his to the balcony where bonnet-plumes were nodding as their wearers whispered of him.... And he met the eyes of Henriette de Roux.
Those beautiful eyes!... Their owner had seemed to him upon that first night of their meeting a star and a goddess—something to dream of and worship from a long way off.
But before gray dawn had peeped in between the window-curtains upon the whirling crowd of weary, hot-eyed dancers, he had learned to know her better. The star was no celestial sphere, but an earthly planet, glowing with fierce volcanic fires; the dazzling robe of the divinity, now that she had descended from her pedestal, was seen to be stained with frailties of the human kind. But brought within reach, she was not less desirable. He thrilled at the recollection of that night in the gray boudoir.
Ah! those sweet lips that mingled Truth and Falsehood in such maddening philters! Ah! those bewitching eyes, how they promised, and coaxed, and cajoled! A shudder went through the man. For he saw again, more clearly by their light, the pleasant pathway that went winding downwards between banks of gorgeous, poison-breathing flowers. And a soft, insinuating voice seemed whispering, prompting; telling him that with a tithe of the great sum of money that had lain growing for so many years at Rothschild’s, could be purchased the sweet, heady vengeance that is wreaked in the satisfaction of desire.
And then ... he became aware that the labyrinthine verbosities of the Charge had reached a final period, and that Monsieur the Judge-Advocate had a question to ask.
“Are you, Lieutenant Hector-Marie-Aymon von Widinitz-Dunoisse, Certificated of the General Staff, and Attached as Assistant-Adjutant to the 999th Regiment of the Line, Guilty or Not Guilty of the Charge brought against you, and which I have now read in the hearing of this Court?”