Giusko had been found starving in a Montmartre garret; the Barbary Jew Dunoisse had accidentally encountered upon one of his periodical visits to Paris, to treat with the paper-merchants for the sale of rags from Tunis and the Levant. Both men were bound to their junior by ties of gratitude; the Israelite because his wife Miriam, now dead, had been saved by Dunoisse, when a young officer of Chasseurs d’Afrique, from robbery and outrage at the hands of some drunken Zouaves at Blidah; the Slav because all hope had left him, and he had been upon the point of suicide, when his old pupil had appeared before his gaunt and desperate eyes. But though both were trustworthy, neither of these men was to be trusted completely, according to the secret instructions of Monseigneur.
Nor had Dunoisse, who day and night sat spinning at the colossal web of Monseigneur’s private purpose, and hatching out the egg of that potentate’s secret plan, any definite knowledge of the breed of basilisk that would presently chip the shell.
LXII
Balls, dinners, concerts, receptions, and hunting-parties at the Tuileries and at Versailles, St. Cloud, and Compiègne, succeeded in dazzling rotation. Round the little study where Dunoisse wrought and planned and labored, driven on by a very demon of work, the active, busy, vari-colored life of the palace hummed and buzzed and swirled. Strains of music, gay or voluptuous, and sounds of fast and furious revelry came, midnight after midnight, to the ears of the solitary toiler—sometimes sounds more sinister than these.
The screams of a woman.... “Help! Mercy, for the love of Heaven!...” dying away into incoherent prayers and moans. The noise of a scuffle—the scraping of feet—the hoarse panting and muffled ejaculations of men engaged in desperate struggle—the thud of blows falling on something soft. Desperate outcries of “Murder! Treachery!... Monseigneur promised!... Monseigneur swore that I should be set free!” The revolver shots in the leafy palace garden, followed by a heavy silence not even broken by a groan. The man who heard never interrupted his labors for a moment. If the Prince-President chose to make the Élysée a place of execution, why,—stranger things had been done at the time of the coup d’État. And the vices of potentates are privileged.... That woman’s voice crying for help was not the voice of Henriette.
She was as beautiful as ever. At the most splendid State functions, in the vicinity of her most brilliant rivals, her charms shone with undiminished fire. Men paid her court as ardently as ever, and her accredited lover was still a man keenly-envied. But in despite of this, and although his pressing duties at the Élysée debarred him from his place at her side in Society, Dunoisse had ceased to be jealous. So powerful an anodyne is absorbing mental labor, the shrill rattle of warning that used to sound from under every tuft of flowers or clump of grasses brushed by her draperies in passing, had fallen silent. Her paramour no longer dreaded a possible successor in every young and handsome man on whom she shed her smiles.
The green-eyed demon even left off taunting Dunoisse with de Moulny, still Representative of the Right for Moulny upon Upper Drame, and Secretary-Chancellor at the Ministry of the Interior; where the Count de Morny had been succeeded by M. de Persigny—less affected than his predecessor with scruples, you will remember, regarding the contents of a certain stately row of steel deed boxes that were crammed to bursting with palaces, cities, forests, villages, and farmsteads, and emblazoned with the arms of the House of Bourbon.
Rivers of plundered gold, derived from the sale of these great family estates, flowed away between Dunoisse’s fingers. None of it stuck to them, much to the surprise of Monseigneur. For Dunoisse wanted money; and the chief reason at length become known to his patron, who had a peculiar knack of getting at the secrets of men.
To repay the three hundred thousand thalers that had been the dowry of Sister Térèse de Saint François had been, ever since the hour of their meeting, the abiding steadfast purpose of her son.... He saw her sometimes in dreams, when he went home in the gray dawn from the palace, and threw himself down, half dressed, upon his bed to snatch a little fevered sleep. And he would seem to hear the tear-soaked, toneless voice saying that the only road to Peace was the thorny Way of Expiation.... He would feel again the light, thin touch upon his forehead, and would wake, crying “Mother!” as the black curtain blotted her from his sight. And at other times, when the man was bound to the revolving wheel of his endless labors, the diligent pen would be arrested as her dim wistful eyes came hovering between his vision and the page. Then he would drive her away, and fall to his work with desperate assiduity. For never, Dunoisse knew, would he be happy until he had earned and repaid every centime of that accursed dowry. That debt discharged, there would be a turn of the tide. De Roux would die; his widow would become the wife of her lover; there would be happiness, children, a home.... For these he spent himself, allured by the glitter of Monseigneur’s golden promises as other victims had been—would be until the end.
And in the fever of toil that consumed him, the man aged and wasted visibly. His black eyes lost their fire, his vivid coloring faded, his hair, no longer thick and glossy, showed broad streaks of gray. Lines graved themselves between his eyebrows, crow’s feet appeared upon his temples. The wings of the nostrils were pulled downwards by the unrelaxing, constant tension of the muscles of the mouth, as month after month Dunoisse sat diligently incubating the egg of Monseigneur.